September 27 ** 3 just tried something
else-pasted a picture into ChatGPT and asked it "what is this?"?
Response was pretty good......https://chatgpt.com/share/68d84744-9994-800f-8b25-78e5ba185b8c
September 27 ** 2 The ChatGPT log of my game
of War stuff:
https://chatgpt.com/c/68d4f953-b0b0-8332-82f6-d77b87f2bd85
September 27 Been thinking about/talking about
with friends/trying some AI stuff this week.
A friend from Zen
shared some logs of discussions with ChatGPT and they were impressive.
Sort of asking it about how AI works, how models/algorithms/theories
differ and relate, and some Zen-related questions. So I thought I'd look
at it again. I had a 10$/month account with OpenAI for a while, like a
couple years ago. I turned off the money but I can still log in and
access whatever they give you for free. I'm also interested in the idea
that you can run smaller models locally, so it feels like less of a hit
on the environment.
When I was volunteering at the school, we had as an exercise how to
simulate the card game "War" in python. It's not rocket science, but
it's an OK exercise. At that time, I worked one-on-one with each kid and
got very familiar with the problem. The game is:
1. shuffle a deck of cards.
2. two players - each one gets one card face up.
3. player with high card gets the two cards. (compare ranks,ignore
suits)
4. If they're equal, it's "war" and you deal two more cards.
5. Although unlikely, "war" could continue as long as you dealt equal
pairs.
6. When the deck runs out, the game is over. If you're in a "war",
ignore the cards in the middle.
7. Player who got more cards (by having the higher ones) wins the
game.
So, it's a pretty simple program, we did it in Python. But the war part
gets messy in the code. There are these remote possibilities. What if
there's "war"? what if it continues? do you need a loop inside the loop?
I wanted the kids to think about handling those, like "edge cases" in
programming in the real world.
After a bit (several times through the process), I realized that there
was a way to make the code very clean. You only need to keep count of
the cards after you compare them, and you are adding 2 to a player's
score when they win a round. But if it's war, you might add 4 or even 6
or 0. So, if you use a variable for the number of cards in the middle,
the code becomes really simple - no big "if war..." block, no inner loop
when it's war, etc..
I described the game to ChatGPT by spelling out the rules and asked it
to write a python program. It said it recognized the game as "War" - I
hadn't said so - and generated some code for it. The code ran right away
and was pretty good. I explained the simplification strategy and it
seemed to understand, and modified the code correctly. I was pretty
impressed. If it recognized the game, that's pretty good in terms of
understanding language. And it got the idea of the simpler solution. Its
code samples all ran fine.
I have a PC Cory built about 7 years ago which is kind of beefy. I have
it running Linux most of the time. I installed "ollama", which allows
running AI locally, and tried a couple models that are supposed to be
good for coding. I gave it the same problem. It ran rather slowly, maybe
that could be improved by throwing hardware at it. Most of the time I
was working with a "DeepSeek" coding model.
It was a lot less fun than the ChatGPT session. It didn't understand
some of the things I asked it to do, and then when I went to another
issue, it sometimes reverted the progress it had made previously. It
sometimes completely failed to get what I was asking for. I wasn't
really able to get a completely working result. ChatGPT via a browser
was really fast, and this local model got to be really painful as I
waited to watch each word pop out.
Today I watched a zoom presentation of Apple's new OS's. There is some
AI stuff that is new. Supposedly it can translate voice in real time.
That's amazing! Since I was in college 40+ years ago, that is like a
Holy Grail. Remember the "universal translator" in Star Trek? It could
be almost like that. Some other AI stuff seemed neat, categorizing
images and stuff. I don't remember it all.
Then I read Cory Doctorow's latest piece which is about as negative on
AI as it could be. I'm realizing that I am very persuadable, and have
been consuming a lot of anti-AI stuff. So, I'm just trying to make sense
of the world as I see it. I don't know what the vision is of the future
of this stuff. ("Spandex jackets, one for everyone"?) . Are we all going
to exchange little AI-generated videos to tell each other jokes? While
some miserable folks build and tend to these machines? I guess the "all"
of us only would include those with some $. What about the environment?
All these tech companies abandoned their pledges to be "carbon-neutral"
and are now saying things like "Let's reopen Three Mile Island".
The interaction with ChatGPT was pretty impressive, though. I also was
looking at some Wikipedia stuff on how these things work (it's way too
complex for me). I just don't know........Also (since Wikipedia is right
there) I was trying to remember - a PDP-11 had 8 16-bit registers. In
its one CPU. And they made UNIX work on it. That was only about 55 years
ago.
Oh yeah - another thing - I'm really not very smart. But I want to
understand things.
September 21 ** 3
DMVSept20.mp4
September 21 ** 2
Preciosa.mp4 Bad Bunny
and Marc Anthony at the Coliseo.
September 21
CharlieKirk.mp4
September 19 ** 4 Putting out a lot today.
ResistanceRadio091825.mp4
Trying to be brief. he's a Haudenosaunee who has a podcast/radio show I
like. I found him while channel surfing in my car, he is on WPFW. This
is, I think, one of his best shows. It seems not to have any cuts, he
just turns the camera on and delivers. I hope to see his movie "The Long
Hope" if and when I can. Honestly, it's scary to me how much I think
he's spot on, because I've been "out there" in the past, and don't want
to be. Anyway, recommend giving it a listen/look.
Article on Open Source Software Security
https://cacm.acm.org/practice/fifty-years-of-open-source-software-supply-chain-security/
This is a pretty awesome article on open-source software security. A
quick search doesn't find much about the author, Russ Cox. He seems to
keep a somewhat low profile but there are signs he is quite the wizard.
Reading this makes me lean back towards Go as a good language - I had
attempted to learn about Rust, I think Go's "batteries included"
approach to some common functionality seems like a good idea. I posted
before about compiling Zed from source, which has >1900 packages to pull
in (and compile) in Rust. All of this is beyond my own limited brain
power though.
September 19 ** 2 Jewish Insider reports on
seven Senate Democrats backing a resolution "Calling on the President to
recognize a demilitarized State of Palestine, ". I extracted the Jewish
Insider article; you can get it from them for free by signing up for
free at their website, but I hate DRM and paywalls, so I "liberated" it.
JewishInsider091925.pdf. The
resolution itself is at
https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/25.09.18-Palestinian-Statehood-Resolution.pdf; in case that changes, I've also downloaded it and here it is:
25.09.18-Palestinian-Statehood-Resolution.pdf. If you think this is a good idea, you should call your Senator(s) at
(202) 224-3121 - just say their name, and you'll be connected to their
office. I think this resolution does not yet have a number.
September 19 Here's last night's opening
segment of The Daily Show, hosted by Jon Stewart, even though it's not a
Monday. "The revolution will not be televised"....🤷♂️
JonStewart091925.mp4
September 18 ** 2 Video about Bill Gates'
climate-related activity. Hint: It's critical of him.
BillGatesClimate.mp4
September 18 Channel 4 in the UK, possibly in
honor of him being there, has put up this program ("programme"):
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/trump-v-the-truth/on-demand/78421-001
I got myself a login, pretty sure it's free of charge if you tolerate
ads. It seems to be locked in by DRM (IYKYK) but is a wonderful bit of
work. A lot of work!
I'm using NordVPN to pretend I'm in the UK (sssh!) in order to watch it.
I'd like to extract it and have my own copy but.....DRM......
./yt-dlp.sh -F https://www.channel4.com/programmes/trump-v-the-truth/on-demand/78421-001
[DRM] Extracting URL: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/trump-v-the-truth/on-demand/78421-001
ERROR: [DRM] The requested site is known to use DRM protection. It will NOT be supported.
Please DO NOT open an issue, unless you have evidence that the video is not DRM protect
September 17 Supposedly this
domesticTerrorism.pdf is the report
the DOJ just removed, that shows that " far-right extremists have killed
far more Americans than any other domestic terrorist group" (according
to the Guardian). The Ministry of Truth is active. But
archive.org to the rescue!
If you want something on the Internet to be a usable reference, it's
best to get ahold of your own copy. I've posted about this before:
https://vin-dit.org/aug2025.html#2025-08-31
Disk space is very cheap! There are portable disks that can be taken to
safe locations! I don't want to sound paranoid but we're in an
unprecedented moment, it seems, in the USA.
September 16 Saw this video on Bluesky and
located it and downloaded it. It came from here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DOelvdGiLQ-/ "bravenewfilms" account on
Instagram.
IsViolenceTheAnswer.mp4. Violence
really scares me. I think this is worth listening to, though.
September 14 ** 3 A nice video of Palmieri
and co. doing "Azucar". That's all! Azucar.mp4.
September 14 ** 2 Cory Doctorow's latest
screed sort of says "don't divide yourself from friends over 'wallet
voting' - for me, meaning friendship can be more important than whether
or not people use products from 'bad' companies. I've done a lot of
posting on Facebook telling people they should leave Facebook and also
agonized over using things from tech oligarchs, etc. He makes the case
that telling people to 'vote with their wallets' makes large problems
the responsibility of individuals, and small-scale actions of theirs -
like buying something from Amazon.
A lot of my identity is wrapped
up in my abstaining from things - alcohol, drugs, meat, Amazon, blah,
blah. Doctorow is saying it's more important to try and band up and make
societal change as part of organizations of people - unions, political
parties, etc. Definitely food for thought for me. This blog is kind of
an act of abstaining from what 'normal' people do to share their
thoughts, likes, etc. on the Internet. Like tapping on a share link on a
youtube video on your smartphone and posting it to Facebook.
There are some real considerations that can be brought up, about whether
you have control over that content - youtube videos can be taken down,
facebook accounts can be deleted - it's all complicated. It's more work
to have your own content on your own devices. I have physical offsite
backups of this stuff. It's in "openly sharable" formats.
I've seen and been involved with people making websites with Wordpress,
Wyx, etc. Sometimes you're losing some control when you do that.
🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷
September 14 rolling August into
Posts from August 2025
September 10 Writing this on the Mac Mini. Sort
of a very cheap Apple. But it's good for my needs. Using Zed....I
learned a little more about Zed from trying to get it running on my old
Intel MacBook running Arch Linux. Seems that at least part of the
problem is aspects of the Vulkan support available from the weird NVIDIA
card in that machine. It's a world of pain, trying to resolve it. I
wasn't familiar with Vulkan, I guess it's a graphics API or something.
Maybe comparable to OpenGL and DirectX.
Zed turns out (I tried building it from source) to be made of 1900+ Rust
dependencies. That seems "sus". I guess VS Code is also ugly under the
hood, being an Electron app I think, and of questionable openness. Emacs
is a beast too. Maybe old school vi is the One True Editor.....
I think (this whole post is full of ideas that I am not _positive_
about) that Rust projects, in general, don't have the behavior of
old-school "make", where dependencies and separate object files are not
rebuilt unless there is reason to do so. Compiling Zed on that machine,
it failed on the _last_ step of the build, and when I started the build
again, it started at the beginning.
I know that modern computing is designed by smart people for smart
reasons. I feel increasingly like the boomer I am though, and long for
"the old days".I have not "rolled over" with the new month, as I think
doing that in the middle of the month will make the RSS access more
reasonable. These links to my posts, which are just text between a
couple "hr" lines, will be wrong once the post is moved out of
index.html. So they can continue to work for a couple weeks into the
month if I do this.
September 07 Got home yesterday from a trip to
Boston for a wedding. Haven't posted for a bit.
Seeing the tech oligarchs sucking up to Trump made me really disgusted
and I again went down the rabbit hole of looking into not using any of
their products. Unfortunately I have money in their companies as my
savings for retirement are in index funds and such. That's actually
probably more important than lifestyle choices.
The only big tech companies whose products I'm really using in my
day-to-day at this point are Apple (a lot) and Meta (some). I can't seem
to divorce myself from those. Especially Apple. Linux phones and even
laptops have some serious shortcomings compared to the "Apple
ecosystem". All kinds of things that I use probably run on cloud
providers, etc. It's really hard and possibly not even that important to
cut yourself off from the companies that provide our modern way of life.
In my case I have to wonder about whether trying to do that is even a
sane goal. Anyway, typing this on an old Macbook running Linux but ssh'd
into a Mac Mini (running whatever they call MacOS now).
It's kind of depressing how much trouble I ran into trying to run
"XBill" on this laptop. I eventually gave up. I guess things change and
old tech becomes "incompatible".....
September 01 Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit....