Kenneth Falck (@kennu) • Hey
Kenneth Falck (@kennu) • Hey
Publications
- Still here. I'm a little inactive on both Mastodon and Hey nowadays but keeping my accounts alive anyway.
- I like this secure phone concept. "Optional: Removed microphones, sensors and cameras make eavesdropping on the environment physically impossible. Phone calls are made with optional headset." https://shop.nitrokey.com/shop/product/nitrophone-4-577
- Seems that Lenster integration with Brave Wallet broke a while back. Haven't been around here for a while. Had to switch to MetaMask now.
- Movie studios would like to pay actors for one day of work to scan them and then use the scanned model for free to eternity. I guess this is the first actual case of AI replacing someone's work completely. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794224/sag-aftra-actors-strike-ai-image-rights
- Testing the Orb app for mobile Lens use..
- Spent a few hours debugging why a new PC worked in another room but not in another. Turns out it was a faulty HDMI cable..
- I've been a fan and a user of Intel NUCs for a long time, and now they're dying. https://www.pcworld.com/article/1989175
- Bruce Schneier's AI Dividend proposal to pay every US citizen a small dividend from AI profits: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/the-ai-dividend.html
- Slightly empty feeling when you've finished all your outstanding project tasks, read all your email, read all of Hacker News, and should now start to vacation without doing anything.
- TIL: Norwegians like to cook actual witches on midsummer bonfires, although open fires might be forbidden during the upcoming weekend.
- If you buy Google Nest fire/CO alarms, be mindful of the device expiry date. I just noticed I recently bought a device with 6 years lifetime left, although they have 10 years initially.
- This blog post about Agentized LLMs summarizes my own worries about a next generation GPT that would break down its goals and work recursively to reach them, possibly accessing the Internet while doing so. This statefulness is where I see trouble ahead. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dcoxvEhAfYcov2LA6/agentized-llms-will-change-the-alignment-landscape
- I think Visual Studio Code should have a higher level navigation for switching between multiple workspaces related to one project.. Now they are all separate isolated windows, and when you have many projects, each with many windows, they get a bit messed up.
- Today I concluded that Visual Studio Code just can't handle a large monorepo project in one workspace. It stubbornly tries to watch all the files and WSL2 runs out of watch handles every time. I now need to create separate workspaces for all the subprojects, which is suboptimal.
- Trying out Erigon to sync an Ethereum node on old/limited hardware. It appears to work, but slowly (now at 5M of 16M blocks)... Executed blocks number=4980077 blk/s=22.8 tx/s=3437.6 Mgas/s=135.6 gasState=0.17 batch=189.9MB alloc=4.8GB sys=7.8GB
- I realized today that LLMs (like ChatGPT) are much closer to human behavior if you don't use them only as "snapshots" but also attach a continuous learning process. A frozen human brain works as a simple "autocomplete" based on its current knowledge, but a learning brain evolves.
- The Most Dangerous Codec in the World:
Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders https://wrv.github.io/h26forge.pdf
- I'm still annoyed that Ethereum separated beacon nodes and execution nodes, when they have to exist 1:1 anyway. It's good that you can spread the load on several computers, but the default config should include both, as an easy to run executable or at least Docker image.
- Prediction: During this year there will be a fierce competition between Microsoft Office and Google Workspace on who auto-generates the coolest presentations based on your project emails, discussions and documents.
- GPT-4 is doing pretty well in all kinds of simulated school exams. https://openai.com/research/gpt-4
- Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill is approved https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/25/signal_uk_online_safety_bill/
- Installed my first WiFi 6 (802.11ax) base station today. Have to admit I lost count of the versions somewhere around 802.11n.
- I can have several computers, TVs, home assistants ready and waiting in every room, but I still have to carry the same physical phone around everywhere. When is that going to change?
- 1990s: Home studios
2000s: Ableton Live style DAWs
2010s: Semi-automatic mixing/mastering plugins to get good sound
2020s: AI handles mixing/mastering and adds lyrics and new tracks to achieve desired style
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64624525
- Switched rooms at home today so that I'm now working downstairs. Nice to have a new perspective and see the evening sun.
- Some interesting info on the upcoming Godot 4.0 game engine. E.g. new GDScript, custom physics engines, editor improvements. I like to make hobby games with it. Visual scripting is still not a thing. https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/
- Public APIs with source IP address restrictions make it really difficult to use serverless cloud services to call them. You end up having to run proxy servers with fixed IP addresses, which makes the overall security worse than having no IP address restriction.
- I'm quite fascinated by IPVM (InterPlanetary Virtual Machine), which aims to extend IPFS (InterPlanetary FileSystem) with WebAssembly code execution. Basically decentralized Lambda functions that can execute your code anywhere on Web3 without cloud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJWk1nlYvs
- You know you're on vacation when you try to debug some application source code and it takes over 30 seconds to realize you've got the wrong project open in VSCode.
- Pretty cool: David Letterman interviews Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on Netflix) https://www.netflix.com/watch/81644272
- Web3 wallet plugins and IPFS gateways remind me of the times you had to install a separate Trumpet Winsock stack to access the Internet. Those days progress was fast, when a year later they integrated it to Windows 95.
- Today I learned the word Logorrhea.
- Muting your microwave is an unexpected luxury. I hadn't realized how annoying all those unnecessary beeps are.
- The most googled word in 2022: "Wordle". https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63895493
- Leisure time problems solved for the next couple of months.
- Vitalik's view of what are the most interesting Ethereum apps right now: 1. Money 2. Decentralized finance 3. Identity platforms 4. DAOs 5. Hybrid apps that run partially on the blockchain (e.g. proof of solvency for centralized exhanges). https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html
- Playing Amazon CodeCatalyst. It seems fairly polished, but I'm not sure what I would use it for, when I already have pretty well working development environments like WSL2 and Docker.
- This makes me understand AWS Lambda SnapStart and Firecracker microVM snapshotting better. Once your Lambda application has initialized once, Firecracker can snapshot the state, including all the CPU registers etc, and clone it for future invocations. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/29/snapstart.html
- The AWS re:Invent 2022 keynotes are on YouTube! They're not (yet) available on the official re:Invent website. This one should be interesting, with Lambda SnapStart etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R11YgBEZzqE
- Thinking about creating some kind of multi-post app that would send the same posts to Twitter, Lens and Mastodon...
- I've been a bit quiet here. Need to keep this active in case Twitter becomes completely unusable. :-)
- Finally got a full Polygon node synced at home.
- TIL: Ethereum (and Polygon, which is based on geth) support splitting blockchain data on several SSD/hard disks, because the less-frequently accessed data is stored in a separate "ancient" directory. Polygon chain is already 1TB, so this is quite helpful. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/84469/can-chaindata-be-split-across-two-or-more-locations
- This comparison from https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ illustrates where Ethereum total energy consumption is right now (112 TWh/year, a bit more than Netflix consumes) and where it will be after transitioning to Proof-of-Stake (0.01 TWh/year). Interesting how much more YouTube consumes.
- Started my vacation! Now having some free time to focus on Web3 stuff and other fun things :-)
- Learning to make ice coffee. Apparently you're supposed to put a mug full of ice directly under the espresso machine.
- How do you read the default Lens Profile ID of a wallet address from the blockchain? I'm playing with https://docs.lens.xyz/docs/view-functions and I can read the profile data if I know the profile ID, but I don't know how to get the profile ID from a smart contract.
- Testing alternative interface to Lens (irisapp.xyz) :-)
- The easiest way become an NFT collector is just collect content on Lens, most of it is free. Including this post.