Recent content on Jacques Mattheij
The Problem There is a problem in the ‘infosphere’. In a nutshell: we now have high quality text that has low, zero or even negative value for the reader. Authorship is no longer something you can trust implicitly, even science is not immune to this and the problems seems to be set to become significantly larger in the near future. You could solve this by mandating authors label their…
I’m impressed For the last couple of years, my colleagues and myself have been playing around with AI. I can’t speak for them but from the perspective of a casual user I am very much impressed by the capabilities on display. If you dedicate some time to it you can get a lot of mileage out of AI, it can help you in the way a highly interactive book would help, with vast amounts of…
tldr: A small i386 32-bit protected mode multi-tasking operating system modeled after QNX – What is Unite? Unite is an operating system in which everything is a process, including the things that you normally would expect to be part of the kernel. The hard disk driver is a user process, so is the file system running on top of it. The namespace manager is a user process. The whole thing (in theory,…
tldr: limit your GPUs to about 2/3rd of maximum power draw for the least Joules consumed per token generated without speed penalty. – Why run an LLM yourself in the first place? The llama.cpp software suite is a very impressive piece of work. It is a key element in some of the stuff that I’m playing around with on my home systems, which for good reasons I will never be able to use in…
CNC Lasers for cutting and engraving Laser cutters can injure or blind you permanently if you do not follow safety procedures! This post is an attempt to collect all of the information that I’ve gathered over the last year or so regarding budget laser cutters. There are no affiliate links on this page, I have no ties to any of the companies mentioned here other than that I’m a…
My children are hopelessly addicted to their gaming devices. This is a problem, but not one that I can directly solve because the school mandates that they have both an Android smartphone and a Windows laptop. Rather than to meet the problem head on I figured the better way to address it is to replace consumption with creation. But creating anything at all on a smartphone or a laptop, where the…
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously. Russia, a major supplier of gas to the EU has been sanctioned heavily, buying natural gas from Russia effectively pays for them to wage war on Ukraine and the price of electricity is tied to the price of natural gas, which has been going up and down like a jo-jo, but far more…
In 1989 I got a call from a friend to come along to visit a studio in Landsmeer, near Amsterdam, where something quite amazing was being constructed, a circus with nothing but eggs, both as the performers and as the audience. I was - and still am - a huge Jim Henson fan and immediately felt an interest to see what was going on. We were received by Jacques Meijer and his wife in their house in…
Dit is een antwoord op de Tweet thread van @Inge_v, die een hele berg redenen aangaf waarom ze vond dat Kernenergie de enige optie is in plaats van zon, wind en andere renewables. Het begon met: Ik ben tegen wind en zonne energie, en voor kernenergie. Dat is duurzamer en ik heb er vertrouwen in dat we een manier vinden om het afval goed te verwerken. De hoofdmotivatie was dat het duurzamer is en…
Electric cars are fantastic compared to ICE vehicles, but E-Bikes are even better. Much lower environmental impact and far more suited to medium range travel such as commuting. Here in NL they sell in huge numbers, far faster than electric cars. But they also have their limitations: a regular e-bike tops out at 25 Kph, and will do a very limited distance on a single charge. What powers your…
More than a year ago already I posted a fictional COVID19 retrospective, reading it back today it is pretty eerie to see how many of the predictions made in it have come true or are about to become true. Because I didn’t actually dare to write it down as predictive I figured I should improve on this, after all, what use is it to predict stuff without attaching the label prediction to it?
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the piano software (or to play piano, for that matter).
I have friends from all walks of life. Most of them are smart and skilled. Some of them believe the most outrageous things. For instance, there is this one couple that I know that refuse to believe in 9⁄11 on odd days and on even days they will go to great lengths to push their theories that it was all make believe, that it never happened and that if it did happen it was all special effects.
I’m pretty sure that the hardest choice in my life to date has been the one between my two loves: music on the hand and computer programming on the other. The programming won out, I figured it would be a much more lucrative field to pursue a career in, besides it was a much better match for my talents. From the age of 5-8 I did violin lessons and hated every moment of it.
If you’ve been following the news you probably are aware that the number of people that test positive for COVID-19 is rapidly rising. As most people that know a bit about historical pandemics have warned about. The ‘second wave’ is a fairly typical thing with respiratory diseases because during the summer month these are usually at a disadvantage. People are at the peak of their…
Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the barrier to install them should be as low as possible and that updating certificates should be automated. It protects this site and many 100’s of millions besides. The advantages are that…
Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of computing hardware to adapt it to different problems. This was soon followed by papertape, then the punched card deck, a stack of paper cards that…
After seeing some of the weirdest stuff ever show up in my Twitter timeline I decided to dig in and see for myself what is going on in the underbelly of the beast. Someone I follow had just re-tweeted a bit of information that at face value seemed too outrageous to even consider and I wondered what made that happen. In short, the original tweet mentioned that COVID-19 is a hoax, that the virus…
A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of sleeping and the damage done by lack of sleep. I don’t necessarily subscribe to each and every bit in the book, there are certain passages that ring as though the data does not support…
As much as I love digital instruments, synthesizers and other electronic gear I also really love the look and feel of instruments made from wood, brass, steel and felt. There is objectively no difference between the best digitally sampled pianos but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel as much alive as an actual instrument. Unfortunately, this limits you to what you can actually play and…
It’s been a couple of years now, since the 2020 Coronavirus disaster. Society is still not completely back to normal, and I doubt it ever will be. For instance, you can clearly see which movies were made before and after. People shake hands and hug complete strangers with abandon, something that today, even with the virus mostly under control still feels extremely un-natural and would…
The Netherlands is one of the wealthiest and most favored countries when it comes to dealing with nature. If it weren’t for our continuous watchful eye on nature this country would - in the most literal sense of the word - simply not exist. A very large part of our land area was won back from the sea over the centuries, and without continous maintenance the sea would reclaim it within a…
There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they really don’t and are just looking for the cash to make a run for it.
For the last three months I’ve been working on a project that combines my twin passions: music and computer programming. The problem is an interesting one, the formal name for it is ‘automatic music transcription’ and it is much harder than I ever thought it would be. I’m slowly getting a grip on the problem space, after a ton of exploratory programming. It seems so simple,…
Have you ever wondered what causes large teams of search and rescue people including all their gear to magically spring into action within hours of a plane crash, no matter where in the world it has happened? Meet UK company Kenyon, a company that is one of the best in the world when it comes to rapid response to disasters. I came across them while talking to a friend who is partner at a large PE…
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy little aliens all these devices phoning home are…
Long ago, in the mid 80’s I worked for a bank in the IT department on the Western side of Amsterdam. I lived in the east part and moved around town by bicycle, most because it is by far the fastest way of getting around, even if the weather is miserable it is still the nicest form of inner city transportation. Being on a bike you also see a lot more than in some vehicle, including public…
According to Bloomberg Microsoft is said to have agreed to buy GitHub. GitHub which reportedly has been losing money being acquired is a major development because of its central role in the development of many open and closed source projects. For the uninitiated here is what GitHub does in a nutshell: GitHub allows computer programmers from around the world to conveniently collaborate on projects,…
Apologies for the typo in the url… Some dumb lawyer figured it would be fun to give GDPR trolls a form letter to use to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting companies. The reason why this is dumb is simple: the GDPR serves a legitimate need but by decreasing the signal:noise ratio handcrafted requests from users with a legitimate concern can get drowned in these ‘just because we…
Part I of this is here, if you haven’t read it yet please do so before reading this installment, it will help to establish context. So, after geting the most repeated fallacies about the GDPR out of the way let’s take a long look at the real life impact of the GDPR and why it is worded the way it is, after that we’ll look at some of the more important ‘nuts and bolts’…
In another week the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector. This post is an attempt to calm the nerves of those that feel that the(ir) world is about to come to an end, the important first principle when…
I love cycling. Sometimes I think I love it just a little bit too much. Such as the day two years ago that I took my Zephyr Lowracer for a spin and ended up in the hospital with my right leg broken in way too many pieces. It was a pretty harsh experience, one second you’re fine, the next you are flying through the air (speedbumps work on bicycles too…) and before I’d landed I…
A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest. Since we are supposedly required to consent to giving up our privacy there has developed a cottage industry of entities doing everythign they can to obey the letter of the law while at the same time ignoring the spirit of it, or in fact…
Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software. But it isn’t always like that. Plenty of computer software has the capability of causing material damage, bodily harm or even death. Which is why the software industry…
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing to submit to either one of two remaining overlords these…
For part 1, see here. For part 2, see here Reliability The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me to interrupt a run. Many little things contributed to this, I’ve looked at all the mechanics and figured out all the little things that went wrong one by one and have come up with solutions for…
One of my favorite writers of all time, Douglas Adams has a neat little plot device in that wholly remarkable book ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’, called the Babel Fish. Let me quote the master himself to explain the concept of the Babel Fish to you if you’re not already aware of it: “The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the…
If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including ‘safe spaces’ and moratoria on discussing anything political because it has no bearing on the more interesting bits of IT. What bugs me about this is that anything you make or do has a…
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out of sync with what is presently keeping the company afloat. Your job: get…
For part 1, see here. Overview of the software components All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called Anaconda which takes…
One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children and he is the youngest. So, for many years I did nothing but play with lego, build all kinds of machinery and in general had a great time until I discovered electronics and computers.
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of that ever mattered. But being good with computers is something that sooner or…
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Facing a sizable fraction of his own party that wanted to secede from the EU David Cameron made the gambit of the century: Let’s have a referendum and get this behind us once and for all. He never for one second thought that the ‘leave’ faction would be able to win that referendum and the end result would be to cement his own…
About a week ago I bought a really nice solid wooden table for a song in a second hand store. Hauling it home was quite the job, the thing weighs a ton. Fortunately the legs came off otherwise I’d still be standing in front of the staircase with it. After two days of working I noticed that the pinky and ring finger on my left hand felt numb and wouldn’t move the way they normally do.
Ycombinator has decided to move forward on their ‘Basic Income’ experiment. That’s a pretty bold step and I absoltely commend them on doing this, experiments like this are a lot more valuable than hot air. The one thing I really don’t get is why they start off with time-limiting it. If the outcome of a basic income experiment is going to be used then it had better be as…
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days. They’re wicked fast off the mark, they are nearly silent at low speeds and they are perceived as ‘green’, what better way to make yourself feel good than to get an Electric Vehicle as your next car. Now, as much as I like ‘greentech’ I see a whole pile of issues with EVs that won’t be easily wiped off the…
If there is one story of a persistant nature that seems to pervade the start-up world it is that VCs as a rule are evil, they’re out to get you, will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. Some people that are very visible in the start-up world are perpetrating this to the point of being irresponsible. In Three Roads To The Top Of The Mountain I’ve already…
For many years in the beginning of my career I’d been more than happy to work for free or even at a loss as long as the work was interesting. I was so totally in love with computer programming and the feeling I got from making something work and then seeing that creation be used by other people that I completely lost sight of the value that I was creating.
Imagine a contest in which we are going to pit man against machine. But instead of measuring who is best in playing the game of ‘Go’ we are going to measure who is fastest. In the one corner: Human, all of 175 pounds of extremely well trained runner. And in the other corner, a Formula 1 racecar with a remote control running down a straight track. Nonsense, you’d say, that’s…
A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my…