Thought Bricks

On my winter break reading list, I had Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick. If I were really following the advice of the book, I would have AI take a first cut at this review which I could then finalize. That would be a pretty good way to do it. As Mr. Mollick points out, current LLMs are excellent at creating summaries. However, as befits the logo at the bottom of this page, I’ll do it the old fashioned way.

I completed my 2024 goal of 3600 miles of combined running and cycling today. I’ll probably get a few more miles in, but the target has been reached. I envisioned doing about 500 miles of running plus 3100 of cycling but some injuries slowed me down on the running part and ended up with 347 miles of running and 3256 of riding as of today. You can really tell when I got hurt as my running miles plummeted in August.

I migrated most of my internet search to DuckDuckGo years ago when I switched to Firefox as my main browser and only rarely use Google search so I haven’t noticed the steady decline in utility reported by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in The Register. DuckDuckGo works well for me, but I was intrigued by Mr. Vaughan-Nichols description of Perplexity so I thought I’d give it a try and see if AI is really a killer app for search.

I’ve been reading a few heady books recently. One of those books is Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. by Kelly Clancy. The Economist has a comprehensive review of the book with a lot of details. Playing with Reality was very interesting and I learned great deal. Initially, I had thought it was going to be about the history of games and how they had impacted thought. That is definitely in there, but there is so much more to it than that.

I’ve usually had good luck with the books from the best books list on The Economist. This year is no exception. I’ve recently read two of the books on the list: Playing with Reality and Slow Productivity and have started another, Co-Intelligence. So far, I’ve not been disappointed. I’ll start with Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and cover the others in future posts. I found it to be quite interesting. I see so much silly faux productivity out there; meetings just for sake of meetings, people answering IMs and emails at all hours but adding little clarity or insight to the discussion at hand, lack of time and space for focused effort, etc.

It had been a while since I did a fresh install of Ubuntu on my main desktop. I started on that one with 16.04 Xenial and had upgraded to each new LTS since then. Over time, things had gotten very crufty. Many installed programs that I wasn’t using. Sort of a messy configuration all around. After eight years, it seemed like time for a new start. I did a couple of backups of my /home partition to the cloud and to a local drive that I had around.

This was a great outline of how to work with OCI containers on FreeBSD 14.2. I mentioned this the other day as an interesting new feature and this write-up covers how it all works. Podman has to run as root which seems risky, but FreeBSD takes security seriously and I’m sure that will change over time. I’ve not used Podman and want to give this a shot on BSD. I’ve used Docker quite a bit, but Podman seems to have some architectural differences that make it interesting.

FreeBSD 14.2 is out. The Register has a overview of the release. It’s very interesting that FreeBSD has adopted OCI containers. It’s a nice addition to jails and will be great for people (like me) coming from Linux. Since I don’t use a laptop, I haven’t had the upgrade troubles described in the article, but they sound quite annoying. I’ll update my BSD server as soon as I figure out some weird power issues that are occurring in my office.

Based on some solid reviews and excellent word of mouth, I bought a set of Industry Nine Hydra Enduro S wheels. I got the black spokes which were on a nice sale for a little less than $800 all in. I’ve put maybe 60 miles on them so far and they are excellent. I’d heard that the near zero freehub engagement makes a difference and it really does feel much better when you are trying to keep from striking pedals on a technical climb.

I’ve had problems with the security practices (or lack thereof) by T-Mobile in the past. They might have learned something from the ridiculous hack that happened to them a few years ago. They seem to be the only major carrier in our mobile oligopoly that apparently wasn’t compromised by China in their recent assault on US telecoms infrastructure. They had to be forced by court order to improve their security so I’m not going to give T-Mobile too much credit but at least the money seems to have been well spent.