Tech Trends Articles
Reading Time: 5 minutesIs AI Conscious? Podcast version ario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that he was open to the idea that his Claude AI model could be conscious. “We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be…
Reading Time: 10 minutesAI: Noise and Confusion Podcast ecent news has been filled with stories about the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the potential existential threat it poses to humanity, voiced by smart people in the AI industry and echoed across the press and government. Last Thursday (Sept. 17), the New York Times front page ran…
Reading Time: 4 minutesHISTORY OF WORLD BACKUP DAY There isn’t much history behind it, as the first celebration of this geek holiday was in 2011. World Backup Day is a decade and a half old. It started when a Reddit user wrote about losing their hard drive and wished someone had reminded them how important backups are. Ismail…
Reading Time: 6 minutesHow 40 years ago the Apple Macintosh iconic personal computer forever changed how we think about computing.
Reading Time: 3 minutesHedy Lamarr, the Austrian-American actress and Hollywood legend known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” is remembered today, November 9, on the anniversary of her birthday for her pioneering work on the technology that would become the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communications systems.
Reading Time: 3 minutesInformation Reformation: 5 Ways Martin Luther and the Gutenberg movable type printing press presaged the Internet explosion of information.
Reading Time: 7 minutesHISTORY OF THE INTERNET: OVER 50 YEARS AGO On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 PM, a computer grad student at UCLA named Charley Kline sent a message to SRI. (Stanford Research Institute.) It was the first connection between computer networks. The Internet began! We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys…
Reading Time: 5 minutesHISTORY OF THE IBM PC: 44 YEARS AGO 44 years ago this week, the IBM PC was released. On August 12, 1981, IBM announced its first “personal computer,” though it had previously been renowned for its IBM System/370 mainframe computer. I operated one of these mainframes in a raised-floor data center back in the early…
Reading Time: 4 minutesOBSIDIAN AND AI Imagine using OpenAI to summarize a note’s content in your Personal Knowledge Management (PMK) System. It is possible, if you build your PKM using Obsidian! What would it be like to summarize the content of that note? Better yet, what if you could chat with the AI about the content? You can do…
Reading Time: 5 minutesHISTORY OF GMAIL Twenty years ago, on April 1, 2004, Google released Gmail to limited beta testing for only 1,000 users outside Google. Here’s the original press release. A few months later, I got an invitation to the beta, which was not opened to the general public until 2007. What follows is the story of…
Reading Time: 2 minutesHISTORY OF WALTZ DAY: 123, 123 December 31, 2023, or 12/31/23, is Waltz Day. A day like this is unique, occurring only once a century. For many, this will be the only time in their life they see this kind of date. Waltz Day? Though it has nothing to do with the annual National…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSIX BLADES Today, while I was at the pharmacy waiting for a script to be filled, I thought I’d wander down the Shave Needs aisle and see the latest. Five Blades Years ago, scientists realized that a single blade was not enough for a clean shave and added a second, and then a third,…