Recent content in Posts on Tom Burkert
Several months ago, a good friend of mine, who knows I’m into birdwatching, suggested I watch a YouTube documentary called LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching . Little did I know at the time that it would consume much of my free time and prevent me from blogging with my usual cadence! I’ll say it right away: the documentary is one of the best I’ve seen. I was blown away…
I remember back in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released and everyone was going crazy about how smart and humanlike it was. I sat down and started talking to it in Czech. After reading so many raving reviews and hyperbolic predictions, I was shocked by how quickly I ran into the model’s limits in Czech. Now don’t get me wrong: I know my native tongue is not a top-tier language,…
A few days ago, I opened the window and heard a familiar sound I have not heard in a while: it was a fieldfare’s call , probably one of the first who migrated back to my town this year. And just today, I saw my first chaffinch of the year perched on top of a branch. These birds are very common where I live, so this is not too surprising, but what struck me is how much I have grown in terms…
I love e-readers. I was an early adopter of the good old dorky-looking Kindle 3 (aka Kindle Keyboard), some 15 years ago, and I read many a book on it or its successors. A few years later, I upgraded to Kindle Paperwhite 3 (a 2015 model), and got stuck with it for a while. I had a phase where I shunned ebooks and started buying everything in paper, and then waffled back and forth a few more times.…
In the last few months, various prominent figures in big tech have claimed that voice is the user interface of the future. It’s an interesting revival of voice interaction, which already fell flat on its face in the late 2010s during the era of voice assistants. Despite that failure, the idea is back, and I’m here to tell you why voice is not the user interface of the future.…
This is going to be a fairly niche post, so I will make it clear right away: If you are not using Hyprland on Fedora 43, you can close this post and move on with your day. Now, those of you who are using Hyprland on Fedora 43 are likely doing so via the widely linked and recommended solopasha/hyprland COPR . However, that COPR is no longer maintained, and when running updates, you might have seen…
It started with a broken hinge in our kitchen cabinet. I am no handyman, but I like to do as much as I can around the house and I dare say I’ve gotten pretty okay at it. The one thing that can set me back, though, is not knowing the correct terminology. What type of hinge do I need? Concealed? Inset? Overlay? Clip-On? Soft-close? Sprung? An avalanche of terms that I only barely understand…
The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone. I’ve made several adjustments to my information diet and to how I consume content online , but many of these changes made me even more tethered to my phone. So I set out to read more on my e-reader instead of constantly staring at my phone. Put the phone down First, a brief detour into my browsing and reading habits. I subscribe to…
I spent the majority of this week at a conference and in dinners and networking events, and as a result, I have fallen woefully behind my regular catching up on news and reading. Opening my RSS reader to see 400 unread articles was a little overwhelming, but it gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I do really need to know. I’m insatiably curious, meaning I constantly seek new…
In one of my recent blog posts , I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box algorithms deciding what to show you (which inevitably ends up focusing on ads or engagement bait at some point). However, no system is perfect, and building…
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of tasks, unlike previous generations of LLMs. Character manipulation LLMs handle…
The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a…
Our old friend Pygmalion Humans have always anthropomorphized 1 non-human entities, from ancient gods and natural forces to modern cars and ships. But our tendency to see machines as human-like has dramatically intensified with the advent of conversational AI. This isn’t entirely new - the word “robot,” coined and popularized by Čapek brothers in 1920, originally described…
Whenever I get to travel, especially on business trips, I usually seek out two types of entertainment: botanical gardens and art galleries. Botanical gardens offer a soothing combination of being surrounded by vegetation (which is proven to be beneficial for mental and physical health ), a low density of people (anecdotally, with similar benefits on yours truly :)), and in general a calm…
Recently, I have been re-reading one of the classic books of Czech literature, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, and I have been intrigued by some of the parallels between Čapek’s newts and LLMs. Mind you, I am probably highly primed to associate and connect random things to LLMs given how much I read and talk about AI these days (a case of apophenia?). But hear me out! I think…
The problem Window management for GUI operating systems has been with us for decades, but it still feels a bit broken to me. Yes, everyone has their preferences and not everyone needs to run as many programs as I do at times, but there is something principally broken about having a bunch of windows stacked on top of each other and trying to Alt-Tab to the right one at all times. And I’m not…
Many moons ago (in fact long ago so that contemporary sources are beginning to be difficult to find), iPhone users were told they’re holding their phones wrong . This was one of the more memeworthy communication blunders of Apple and something we’re unlikely to see from them, but the reason I mention it here is that asking ourselves whether we’re holding the thing wrong is…
The Problem Recently, my Keychron K8 keyboard has died (PCB 💀), so I started hunting for a new keyboard. Another Keychron was out of the question, so I decided to give Epomaker a try. I stumbled into a B-stock Epomaker Galaxy80 and decided to give it a shot. I am very happy with the feel of the keyboard, typing feels much better than the K8, at least to me. However, I ran into a problem in linux…
Intro As part of my journey towards higher privacy while using internet, I decided to set up Pi-hole on my Synology NAS DS218play . If you are reading this article, you probably don’t need the following explanation, but just in case: Pi-hole is perhaps the most popular DNS sinkhole, which aims to block ads, trackers and malicious sites for all devices on your local network. Now, your NAS is…