Officially disguised as a Canadian
(Originally posted on LinkedIn.) OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not intelligent. It is distilling knowledge fed into it by humans mining billions of data points. It’s a glorified chess computer. I am deeply concerned that this will increase the amount of misinformation floating around, because it has the confidence programmed into it by the very people whoContinue reading On the real meaning of intelligence
I purchased a Synology 1813+ in … 2013 (it took me a while to figure out that the last two digits in a Synology model number refers to the year), and in the last week or so I kept getting warnings about imminent failure of at least one hard drive. We’re currently undergoing a smallContinue reading PSA: Check your hard drive health with SMART
Recently I was able to install a new application on macOS that monitors network traffic. Useful for limiting bandwidth usage on the data bundle of your mobile device when travelling, you can limit all or a subset of your apps. It’s neat. A few months ago I was using my mobile data on my laptopContinue reading Surprising data usage in macOS with Apple News+
Via Washington Post: Elliot Page, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for the 2008 film “Juno,” came out as transgender on Tuesday, sharing the news in a long social media post. “Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky toContinue reading Hello, Elliot
I wrote three tweets last week which I’d like to summarise here: #BlackLivesMatter #TransRightsAreHumanRights #StayHome The last one — about COVID-19 — is difficult to do if you’re protesting, so stay safe and wear a mask. Remember that the mask must cover both your mouth and your nose. I also wrote on this website aContinue reading Change by a thousand choices
I will be stepping back from a number of things in 2020, for personal reasons. I am still attending SQL Saturday Victoria, the MVP Summit, and SQLBits, plus I have the Calgary PASS user group to run, but I have yet to decide on PASS Summit. I love the SQL Server community and I’ve lovedContinue reading Some personal news
When I was born, the doctors, nurses, even my own family, assigned me as male. As I grew older, I came to realise (at around 18 years old) that I was not in fact a man. It took another couple decades to understand what this meant because I’m also slow. Here’s a list which mayContinue reading Gender-neutral terminology
The Twitter account known as SwiftOnSecurity deleted a short thread of tweets today stating that the vast majority of 4K resolution laptop screens could be scaled down to 1080p. This would improve performance owing to the reduction in pixels being refreshed, and those users would scarcely notice the difference. Swift was referring to a display’sContinue reading Enhance
This is mostly for my own sanity, because I keep losing the Parallels KB page link. On a Windows 10 virtual machine running inside Parallels, some random touch pad or mouse movement opens up what is variously called the Task View or Timeline, depending on the version of Windows 10. Either way, it’s annoying andContinue reading Disable Windows 10 task view or timeline on a Parallels virtual machine
Did you know that computer memory used to be stored in cores linked by hand-woven nets of copper wire? The core was a small ferrite ring (iron because magnetic), and wires were woven between them to read or set the electrical current in that magnetic ring (which ran clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on the value).Continue reading Core memory in IBM mainframes from 55 years ago