First of all, if you manage to type something in wrong it can hard lock the calculator, and you may have to pop the batteries, and lose everything on the calculator. So don't try typing assembly language programs unless losing everything on the calculator is acceptable. Some basic facts about the Ti-86. It uses the Z-80 processor. Because it is difficult to write relocatable assembly language…
A way to prevent AGI from taking over or destroying humanity is to strictly limit the computing power used on unknown AI algorithms. My back of the envelope calculations [1] show that restricting the hardware to 64 KiB of total storage is definitely sufficient to prevent an independence gaining AGI, and restricting to 2 MiB of storage is very likely to be sufficient to prevent an indepence gaining…
This sermon is on various thoughts on truth that I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Idaho Falls on October 20th 2024. HTML , PDF , Youtube
I gave a sermon on Moral Questions for the 2nd and 3rd Millennium on Sunday 2023-October-1 on moral questions for the 2nd and 3rd millennium, how new technology like AI, nuclear weapons, and horse drawn combine harvesters lead to new ethical questions. Also available in PDF
30 years ago, Vernor Vinge gave a talk: The Coming Technological Singularity It is surprisingly still good. Also, I support: pausing AI experiments with powerful computers.
Here are two places I have found open source house plans. The first is by Jay Osborne and he has put up three CC 4.0 BY-SA farmhouses: Free Farmhouse The second is an on going project to create various sustainable houses that is open sourcing the plans: One Community Global
I gave a sermon last Sunday on Alpha (Genesis) , Omicron (Evolution) , LaMDA and Omega (The End of Human dominance) . So if we create an AGI and fail to get sufficiently good Ethics in ver, the result is extinction or hell. ... Evolution mindlessly created beings with better Ethics than it. Hopefully, we can mindfully create beings with better Ethics than us.
This is my method of creating a pdf book for uploading to archive.org. First, I scan it into pdfs, usually about 10 scans (10 or 20 pages depending on the size of the page). I use a HP-Laserjet-200-colorMFP-m276nw. These scripts were all done on Fedora 35. Next I split out the images from the pdf: mkdir out for D in t??0; do cd $D mv scan.pdf scan0000.pdf for S in `ls scan0*`; do I=`echo $S | sed…
First of all, I am not a lawyer, and so this is not legal advice. I would recommend that if you are interested in copyright terms in the United States, you read Circular 15a from the US Copyright Office If it is a paper document (book, magazine etc) that was published more than 95 years ago, then it is out of copyright (in 2022, this is 1926, and it goes up every year until 2071, when it gets more…
Fascinating article, If you read one article about American politics this month, I recommend this one: "It’s common these days to hear people talk about sick America, dying America, the end of America. The same kinds of things were said in 1861, in 1893, in 1933, and in 1968. The sickness, the death, is always a moral condition. Maybe this comes from our Puritan heritage. If we are dying, it can’t…
CollapseOS is a project to make an operating system and tools that can help restart technology after a civilization collapse: https://collapseos.org/ Of course, the software is only part restarting computer technology. The other part is building things like transistors or vacuum tubes and turning those into computers. If you only had one book to take back, I would recommend Understanding Digital…
"This way of thinking has some distinct advantages. Right now companies fight intensely to retain their exemption from “intermediary liability,” guaranteed to them by the now-infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This frees them from legal responsibility for nearly all content posted on their platform. Yet striking down Section 230 could mean that the companies will either be…
Polebridge makes the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210215-welcome-to-polebridge-one-of-the-us-last-frontiers
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55656824
Equifax doesn't actually send an annual credit report. What they will send is a credit report if it has been 365 days since the last time they sent an annual credit report, and since they will not send it on a weekend, if you order one on the same day, you will not always get it if you ask for it on the exact same day. So some years you actually have to wait more than one year for their "annual"…
Now with some text as well (and I grant this python code to the public domain as well.) import time import board import displayio import digitalio import vectorio import gamepadshift import terminalio BUTTON_LEFT = 128 BUTTON_UP = 64 BUTTON_DOWN = 32 BUTTON_RIGHT = 16 BUTTON_SELECT = 8 BUTTON_START = 4 BUTTON_A = 2 BUTTON_B = 1 print('About to begin.') for i in range(3,0,-1): print(i)…
I just got a pybadge, and I was trying to find an example that used the display but only used the core libraries. I couldn't find one, so here it is. I grant this code to the public domain. import time import board import displayio import digitalio import vectorio import gamepadshift BUTTON_LEFT = 128 BUTTON_UP = 64 BUTTON_DOWN = 32 BUTTON_RIGHT = 16 BUTTON_SELECT = 8 BUTTON_START = 4 BUTTON_A = 2…
"Seeking to understand rather than be understood requires a suppression of ego that takes practice. Lots of us are out of practice." https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-trump-changed-america/
In 2016 American voters did not know whom they were getting. Now they do. They would be voting for division and lying. They would be endorsing the trampling of norms and the shrinking of national institutions into personal fiefs. They would be ushering in climate change that threatens not only distant lands but Florida, California and America’s heartlands. They would be signalling that the…
I have tried to create an account at MeWe multiple times, on two different ISPs spaced months apart (June and September of 2020), on Firefox, Chromium and Safari on Fedora, Ubuntu and macOS and every single time I get a 400 Bad Request when it tries to access https://mewe.com/api/v3/auth/register Posting because this in not in their support page, and no one else seems to have posted about this…
I request that you do not vote for Donald Trump. Since he became president, he has demonstrated in many ways that he is not qualified to be president. There are three main things that President Trump has done that stand out in my mind. The first was after Mueller testified in congress about Russian attempts to influence the US 2016 elections. On July 24, 2019, Mueller said "Over the course of my…
"People outside the business may not recognize what a step it is, culturally and professionally, for reporters and editors to act on the implications of this reality—the knowledge that what a president or his senior representatives say has exactly zero factual value. If you are trying to inform the public, you’re better off not reporting what this president says, contends, or does, unless there…
I have put up some PDFs of old books that are out of copyright at goldenbeetle mooo Understanding Digital Computers by Paul Siegel (1961) Analog Computer Techniques by Clarence L. Johnson (1956) Semiconductors by N. B. Hannay (1959) There's Adventure in electronics by Julian May (1957) Slide Rule Simplified by Charles O. Harris (1961)
If you are ever trying to run a mono binary program (such as from GOG) on a 64-bit Ubuntu and get the error: bash: ./mono: No such file or directory the cause might be that you are missing the 32 bit libraries. $ ls -l mono -rwxr-xr-x 1 bill bill 3025284 May 22 13:58 mono $ ./mono bash: ./mono: No such file or directory $ strace ./mono execve("./mono", ["./mono"], 0x7ffefde5caa0 /* 21 vars */) =…
That uncomfortable coronavirus feeling: It could be grief: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/15/health/grief-loss-coronavirus-pandemic-wellness/index.html The reason Zoom calls drain your energy: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting How to Stay Calm During a Pandemic:…