AWS vs GCP
Vibe coding is a great way to create web apps if you know what you're doing. But how do you figure out where to deploy your app? AWS or GCP or somewhere else? To make this decision more complicated, each of these cloud providers has many different web services ...
General of the Armies("six-star" general)
What is the highest U.S. military rank, ever?
At first glance, a civilian might say, "Four-star general or admiral."
But they'd be wrong.
A Veteran might answer with, "Five-star general or admiral," but they'd be w...
Watch this video for 20 seconds starting at the two-minute mark.
That's me! This was an unexpected surprise that made my morning.
Backstory
Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post explaining why the Apple logo once appeared upside down on their laptops. John Gruber, the technology blogger for Daring Fireball, UI designer, and co-creator of the Markdown markup language, wrote about my blog post.
If you've ever watched Band of Brothers, you'll hear the term "War Department" mentioned several times.
You might think this is referring to what was later named the Department of Defense, but you'd be wrong. The War Department did not become the Defense Department. &...
In quantum physics, there's the concept of the Measurement Problem. This basically states that measuring a quantum system which is in a state of superposition will collapse the wave function. Collapsing the wave function has the effect of altering th...
On Friday afternoon, a longtime local friend of 25 years, Ron, told me that he would be ending his life on Sunday through "assisted suicide" (End of Life Option Act). I had known for months that this was his plan due to his terminal cancer, but we didn’t know when it would happen; it all depended on how quickly the disease progressed.
Last night, Ron’s widow told me that he passed away very peacefully yesterday morning. This is the first time that someone I've known personally has opted for assisted suicide.
For years, I’ve had trouble connecting my MacBook Pro to Cox’s complimentary public Wi-Fi hotspots (CoxWiFi). Today, I finally set out to solve the problem after noticing that my iPhone and iPad connected to CoxWiFi without issue, while my MacBook Pro connected but had no ...
I've been meaning to use AWS Glacier Deep Archive for years because it's so inexpensive. I just uploaded 780.7 GB of data into S3 using Glacier Deep Archive, which will cost me 77¢/month compared to $17.96 if I had stored this data as typical S3 Standard storage.
T...
A close friend texted this me:
The most recent time when the Knicks led in the NBA Finals was June 17, 1994 (they would lose the series), and this occurred on that same day. That was exactly 2 weeks before my I-Day. (Induction Day is when he was sworn into active duty...
There’s an old joke that the CIA set up Facebook for human intelligence gathering since it’s far easier to have people willingly share the details of their lives rather than expend the energy themselves to collect it through surveillance.
Obviously, the CIA has nothing to do...
Most national and international news isn't actionable by us as individuals, so do we really need to watch it?
In 2018, I wrote about how to deal with the effects of the continuous flow of bad news.
I have three rules for filtering news:
1. How will it affect my ...
In a very near future, corporations will emerge with cultivated AI agents that a person or company could buy, license, or subscribe to in order to do specific tasks. Instead of hiring employees, especially at the junior level, a company could instead use HR, payroll, or or...
What was called Clawdbot, and renamed to Moltbot, is finally called OpenClaw; and it's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.
It's doxed people and scammed them out of money very quickly. This video explains the details that moved markets, today, such as Apple and Cloudflare stock.
I was listening to last Friday's
Hard Fork
tech podcast where the two hosts were discussing how they're saving $89/year by no longer hosting their personal websites on Squarespace; instead they using
Claude Code.
Today, I tried C...
Left: What I got. Right:What it should look like
I’ve had two personal tests that I’ve applied to every new AI model, and for years none of them passed.
One test was to generate an image of an absinthe fountain with glasses and absinthe spoons. Last year, AI got this right.
The other test was to take a multi-hours MP3 that I recorded at monthly jazz jam sessions and break it into individual tracks based on either silence between the songs or applause. This week, ChatGPT finally got it right, but I have yet to see success with other AI models.
Yesterday, ChatGPT released a standalone Web browser, called Atlas, with ChatGPT integrated into it. You can download it here for macOS only. Other operating systems are coming soon.
As a web browser, it seems OK. But it really shines when you're on a web page, like a specific restaurant on Yelp, and ask it how long it'll take you to drive there. "What time should I leave to arrive here by 6:15 today, accounting for live traffic updates?"
Also, since you're logged into your own ChatGPT account, your Atlas website queries are saved in ChatGPT.
Perhaps, one day, Apple will integrate AI into their operating systems so it can answer questions like this based on what you're looking at on your screen.
I live near an event facility and they recently left a door hanger on my front door to let me know about upcoming events that will create parking issues in my residential neighborhood.
I uploaded a photo of the door hanger to ChatGPT and asked it to create a ZIP file of calendar invites for each event.
Boom! It worked perfectly. I downloaded a ZIP file with more than two dozen calendar invites that I added to my calendar.
I just came across this old screenshot of a 10-hour conference call from 2012, when I worked at Wyndham Hotel Group in corporate IT. (Wyndham owns about two dozen brands like Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, etc.)
Every website deployment was a major endeavor requiring a separate deployment for each brand throughout the night, followed by a quick "smoke test" by QA before moving on to the next brand.
This painful process took many hours. In this case, we began the conference call at 10 PM on a Sunday night and we were on the phone for ten hours straight.
Would you ever believe that AT&T could keep a call connected, without dropping, for ten hours?
This afternoon, I took a one-mile walking tour of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse that’s mostly run by robots, here in San Diego. This facility spans 3,330,000² feet, employs 4,500 people, and operates 23/7 in three shifts with one hour of daily downtime.
I highly recommend taking one of these tours which are free and open to the public in nearly 20 states: Amazon Tours.
The most fascinating part was watching the robots disappear into the darkness as they moved shelves of Amazon products since they don’t need light to see where they’re going.
Last night, I was at an Italian restaurant and I wanted to know how these two sauces would look on my cheese stuffed gnocchi.
These photos the are AI-generated images I received after uploading the menu photo above and asking what both dishes would look like.
AI-generated Images
I ordered the second option, the Gnocchi Ragu della Nonna, and what I received matched the image perfectly.
My dinner was spot on
I asked some popular AI chatbots to analyze the open source data that San Diego provides.
I started off analyzing the data for parking meters, since that's a hot button issue for the city, recently. Two separate chatbots gave me similar answers when I asked what's...
I enjoy learning new things, especially if it involves a paradigm shift that changes my perspective. But what's a trusted rule that yields objective truth?
Objective truth is a fact or reality that exists independently of individual beliefs, feelings, or perceptions. It’s considered true regardless of who observes or thinks about it.
So, how do I evaluate and arrive at objective truth? I've adopted the following as my own personal philosophy:
If something can’t be shared, measured, or observed, then it’s subjective; it becomes very difficult to prove to others.
In other words, if an experience is accessible only to a single individual, it is subjective; but if it can be seen, tested, or agreed upon by others, it is objective.
We connect through an objective shared reality, while it is the inner, unseen truths that give our connections depth and meaning.
AI is great at manipulating text and documents, and it does a very nice job at examining photos and transcribing text from images. But today AI let me down with what seemed like a simple task: to take a single, three-and-a-half-hour MP3 recording and break it down into ind...
Gravity is not a a fundamental force in the universe.
Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions in the universe, but it’s not a force since it has no messenger (carrier) particle that transmits it. (Gravitons are similar to tachyons: they don’t exist.)
The electrom...
I was recently speaking to some Veterans Administration (VA) consultants who told me that they're seeing a big shift in the time it takes to review a veteran's disability benefits.
In the past, VA benefits could take many months of review following medical appointments. No...
Last week I watched some clips from the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. As a kid, growing up in New York, I used to stay up late to watch it, like many of my fellow New Yorkers.
My uncle used to work at 30 Rockefeller Center, so he would occasionally get me ticket...
Without a doubt, the entire world has seen the shakeup in the U.S. federal government led by the President and DOGE.
In a nutshell, the fundamental culture of the federal government has been impacted by a shift from a traditional bureaucracy to an entrepreneurial, cost-cutting mindset.
Each type of organization has one keyword that's a driving force in its organization. For the federal government, that word is "risk." What's the risk of doing this or what's the risk of doing that?
For entrepreneurial organizations, the key driving force is "opportunity." How can I turn this challenge or setback into an opportunity?
Opportunity prioritizes speed of change over security, whereas risk prioritizes security over speed. Each has its appropriate place and time.
I came across this Lego diorama of a head (bathroom) in boot camp. It's a reproduction of the final boot camp scene from the movie, Full Metal Jacket.
When I shared this image with friends, they were amazed that the heads were actually arranged like this. Yes, we...
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
– Grace Hopper
Before solid-state electronics, like the transistor, there were vacuum tube electronics like the triode. Vacuum tubes consume a lot of power and are fragile, similar to an incandescent light bul...
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