Watch this video for 20 seconds starting at the two-minute mark. 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. CNN then picked up…
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. Prior to 1947, the Secretaries of the Army and the Navy were cabinet-level positions that oversaw the Department of War and the…
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 the state of the observed system. This has given rise to people misinterpreting human observation as having a supernatural effect on a quantum system.…
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…
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 Internet access. It turns out the problem was simply related to my DNS settings for that WiFi network. Cox's default DNS…
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. The tradeoff is that retrieval of my data from Glacier Deep Archive takes either 9 – 12 hours or up to 48 hours depending how much I'm…
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 at the start of his Plebe year at the U.S. Naval Academy). I, myself, clearly remember that day. I had just finished MOS school and…
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 with the origins of Facebook, but foreign governments do use it for gathering intelligence, especially through government…
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 lifestyle? 2. How will it affect my daily activities? 3. How will it change my mind in the voting booth? For you, i f the answer to all…
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 organizational AI agents to do that work while putting a human in the loop to supervise and review the final work product. AI is…
It looks like we've settled on a name... 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 Claude Code out myself to modernize my personal website, joemoreno.com , which I originally made with iWeb nearly 20 years ago. Its design, look, and feel were long in the…
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…
Know someone whose code is a bit sloppy or too vibey? This video might be just what they need.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 the most amount of money that these 10,978 parking meters could generate if they were in use continuously for the times they're in…
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…
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 individual tracks. I used to belong to 3rdSpace, which was a coworking space for creative people. They had monthly Jazz Jams along…
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 electromotive force is transmitted by photons. The strong nuclear force is transmitted by gluons. These two forces, photons and…
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. Now, the consultants are sometimes seeing VA benefits finalized within days to a couple of weeks thanks to AI. I asked AI to…
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 tickets to NBC programs like Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live . Although I didn't get a chance to see a live…