Technology

Cycles in the Tech Industry Boy, do we love trends in tech. I mean… we love trends in tech. I’m old enough to remember desktop publishing, and client-server networks. I remember when the LAN was the thing. Then the World Wide Web ushered in a brand new wave of connectivity, and legitimately opened ways for ordinary people to have a public voice they didn’t really have before. With that came a huge wave of startups and the first mega-properties (Yahoo, especially) online. This is the time period where I got started as a youngster in college. ...

The Sky(net) Is Falling! The news broke yesterday that there was a security incident involving OpenAI and Huggingface. If you’re in the AI industry, Huggingface needs no explanation. If you’re NOT in the AI industry, it’s a strange company - they rent very small-time research level access to some servers that are better at running AI software than your computer for really cheap, and most importantly, it’s the coffee shop where AI researchers and nerds share notes and post things on the coffee shop bulletin board like “Giant Copyright-free Mythology Corpus Dataset” AHEM - apologies, that’s a project I’m working on that will be posted there soon. Basically, the tests, benchmarks, metrics, and bragging rights of the open research world of AI development happens through Huggingface. This is important to the story. ...

Programming isn’t really engineering This Ruby project has been very enjoyable. I’ve been getting my hands dirty (figuratively) by writing code, thinking hard about things I haven’t thought about in a long time, and re-familiarizing myself with the Ruby language. It’s delightful. In my previous post, I wrote about being the kind of engineer that drives the train - in my career, I’ve spent quite a bit of time being the one who supervises the machines that keep the business running. Physically and digitally stacking together the pieces, plugging them together, and providing the oil and grease in just the right places to guarantee it keeps running until the next shift. In many cases, I’ve been able to automate a lot of this, too - using tools other people had built to compose a system that does what the company needs it to. This is a complex task that requires lots of knowledge on how these components work under the hood. This is what I call “little e engineering.” Driving the train. ...

Wherein the writer learns how to polish mud There’s an arts and crafts thing in Japan and now the rest of the world that started on children’s playgrounds. At some point in the past, kids in Japan raised the traditional mud pie to a high art form - they rolled their mud into balls and figured out that with water, patience, and time, you can polish them bright and shiny. And actually pretty. It’s called dorodango - literally mud dumpling. ...

The End of the Beginning I wrote the last post as I was getting ready to ship the new design. I ran into a devil of a problem that I would be entirely remiss if I didn’t mention it here. As I was going through the pages in the site with Hugo server running locally, I noticed that there was one slight problem with a couple of pages on the site. In light mode, the background was white. The rest of the site had a nicely warm off-white background that I found lovely. My first blog post, and the “About” page, broke the style - the background was pure white. ‘#FFFFFF’ in HTML/CSS color code. This must not be! ...

Pardon the Mess - Under construction. When I decided to restart my website, I fell back into old design styles and habits. I’m a system administrator, but I do have a history of building websites. I’ve never been a great designer, and the restart of the site that I hand-coded looked ROUGH. It was a late ’90s mess of menus and unnecessary navigation. I laid the base design into a Hugo construct, pushed it to Netlify (thanks, guys, I get to have my site on the free tier!) and there it sat for more than a month, sad and old. ...