Thought Bricks

Ray Kurzweil has been notably prescient with his predictions on how fast AI will come. Genius is a term thrown around often, but he really fits the bill. He’s invented some really cool stuff over a long period of time. His editorial in The Econonomist outlines his nicely bullish predictions about the impact of AI on humanity. The areas he believes will be most impacted are energy, manufacturing and medicine.

The other day, Apple had their WWDC show and tell. Par for the course of any tech company announcement these days, it was focused on AI (but interestingly led off with an overview of all of the content on Apple TV). Apple was a bit late to the AI party, but since they have a device in nearly everyone’s pocket, they will probably be the most impactful on bringing AI to the masses.

I wrote a post last year about wood buildings which are very interesting. Just recently, I read about a wood satellite. That is just way too cool. Especially intriguing is that it “was assembled using a traditional Japanese technique that doesn’t require any screws or glue”. Plus it just looks cool. Maybe we need to give some serious consideration to bringing back the Woodie? To make it more modern it would have be the Lignite or something like that to make it sound more high tech.

I bought a new MacBook Air to replace my very old 2015 MacBook. I didn’t want to break the bank and M2 model was very reasonably priced at Best Buy so I picked one up. I’ve had it for a couple of days and it’s been great. One of the reasons I replaced my old MacBook was that the battery was very weak and would only last an hour or so.

This was an interesting take on how AI will impact programmers that resonated with me. It was written by Chelsea Troy who is a staff engineer at Mozilla and CS teacher at the University of Chicago. The post is definitely worth a read. In a nutshell, programming back in the old days used to be building code out of basic logical and data building blocks. Indeed, programmers are still taught these things in academic environments (and sometimes tested on them in job interviews).

The description of the BSL license as “faux-source” I ran across in this article about the saga of Terraform is perfect. It also speaks well about the the capability of OpenTofu as a replacement for Terraform. I haven’t done much with it recently, but early signs were very encouraging. It’s very unclear what IBM’s intention is with the aquisition of Terraform. Maybe they will even change the license back and remerge with OpenTofu?

I upgraded my ancient but still working Lenovo X1 Carbon yesterday to the latest version of Linux Mint 21.3 from 20.3 yesterday. The name of the release, Virginia, is particularly appropriate here in the Old Dominion. It went well but took quite a while to get everything downloaded from my local mirror. The only hiccup was some confusion about what version was actually installed from the instructions. It seemed like the base 21, but on reboot was 21.

At the beginning of the year, I bought a uke and started to learn how to play it. I just completed the 30-day Uke Challenge by Bernadette Teaches Music and it was really good. She’s got a nice teaching style and goes through things at a good pace - not too fast, not too slow. Highly recommended. It’s interesting learning how to play an instrument as an adult. I took a few years of piano lessons as a child but don’t remember anything.

I usually try to learn a new thing every year. Last year, it was rowing. This year, it’s ukulele. I know I’m a couple of years late to the trend as learning an instrument was very de rigeur during the pandemic, but it looks fun and I have some nice memories of my Dad playing ukulele. I ordered an inexpensive Kala Concert Ukulele and it looks nice. I don’t really know how to play it yet, but I’m going to do a 30-day uke challenge and then see if I can take some inperson classes later in the year.

An article in The New Yorker about feeling a little sad about the inevitable replacement of coding with AI really hit home for me. I’ve not used AI for coding yet professionally, but I’ve done a couple of experiments that indicate how useful it might be in replacing not only the boilerplate and drudgery but also some of the thinking that goes into it. I don’t think it will eliminate the role of people in creating software, but it will change it dramatically by potentially devaluing all of the deep techy things it was really fun to learn (e.