I have been using remarkable_news to have a fresh XKCD comic on my reMarkable’s sleep screen since I got it and have been really happy with it. The other day a co-worker asked how I was doing it and I pointed him to remarkable_news and had forgotten that it had all sorts of options for the sleep screen in addition to XKCD. I tried to set it up for Calvin and Hobbes but found it did not work and that led me down a rabbit hole leading to a fully customized sleep screen with a daily quote, Calvin and Hobbes, the Peanuts, and Bloom County! Read on for the details!

Read More

October’s pick for my work book club was Halloween themed with Dracula or Frankenstein as candidates and I voted for Frankenstein and was pleased it won as I see it as a perfectly timely story given the hype around AGI and P(doom) and was interested in insights that could be gleamed from a 200+ year old novel and it did not disappoint!

I think this quote said by the monster to Victor pretty much captures the potential danger AGI presents and what I saw over in over in the movies I watched preparing for the AI apocalypse:

“You are my creator, but i am your master; obey!”

Read More

I love when these big companies talk about how green and environmentally responsible they are, but then their actions just demonstrate the opposite. Microsoft did that on October 14th when they ended support of Windows 10 requiring an upgrade to Windows 11 to ensure you keep getting security updates (something that is a must given the current security landscape). The only problem is that there was an estimated 160 million to 200 million PCs running Windows 10 on October 14th that are not compatible with Windows 11. Sadly lots of those devices will end up contributing to the already existing enormous e-waste bin. Or will this be a making lemonade moment and finally give the linux desktop movement the bump we have been waiting for the last 10 years? One of the 200 million PCs is my Surface Go (o the sweet irony, a Microsoft device that they have turned their back on) so I decided give the Linux route a chance!

Read More

Read More

It arrived!!!!!!

Read More

Thanks to those pesky spammers I can no longer use email for notifications from my different systems because they no longer allow basic authentication (ie user and password) for sending emails so this morning I had to find an alternative. I let Google’s Gemini know my problem and it provided me with multiple alternatives and I was able to implement a solution in less than an hour giving me time to make cinnamon rolls for child number 2!
Who said AI is not making us more productive¿?¿?
Read on for the details!

Read More

Shiver me timbers! I have been listening to multiple podcast interviews with AI pioneers and finally decided how to repurpose an end of life out of support server from work: setup my own little LLM! Little did I know how easy it is, and you do not even need an end of life out of support server from work to do this! I already have multiple LLM models on my laptop as well!
Read on for how you can do this as well!

Read More

Not so sure the fall edition of this field notes will have as many flowers to reference as the spring edition, but read on to see if I discover more than one!

Read More

New word of the day: P(doom) is the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (so-called “doomsday scenarios”) as a result of artificial intelligence

I leaned this word from a very interesting deep dive podcast by NPR Explains… titled AI and the Probability of Doom. Take a minute to listen to it and then come back and let’s discus P(doom)!

Read More

This morning I was cleaning my computer’s desktop and stumbled across this family tree of languages that I had downloaded from Wikipedia after listening to an interview of David Reich by Dwarkesh Patel. I could not just throw it away as it really is mind blowing and wanted to keep it handy for reference so here it is:

Read More