Stories by Mike Puchol on Medium
OpenAI recently released GPT-4 into the wild , and published a technical report [PDF] . Someone was able to get ChatGPT to write a functioning movie recommendation iOS app in Swift. Media then created the devpocalypse , by publishing statements such as “ Companies will be able to fire 80% of their developers because of this ”. Not. So. Fast. “Dave, I don’t know how else to put this, but it just…
It has been 18 months since I launched starlink.sx , a personal project aimed primarily at increasing my understanding of how SpaceX ’s Starlink constellation worked, and how it could be applied to an environment such as Kenya, where my startup, Poa Internet, offers affordable broadband to underprivileged communities, using Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). Given the general lack of good fiber…
Flammable clouds — part deux: What happened at OVH? Credit: Sapeurs-Pompiers du Bas-Rhin After my recent article about the fire at the OVH data center in Strasbourg, which destroyed an entire building and thousands of servers, and seriously damaged a second building, I tried to find out more information about the design of data centers (DCs) that could explain how the entire structure of SBG2…
Just before 1AM CET on March 10th, thousands of players were busy hacking away at their bases on Rust, dozens of criminals were busy running their malware scams through command & control servers, and a popular radio station in Barcelona was streaming audio to listeners. Without warning, everything went dark. Or bright, depending on where you stood. Cloudy IPOs OVH was founded in 1999 by the Klaba…
You have probably been here before: a product or service you have purchased with your hard-earned cash has failed you. Possibly more than once, sending the item to get repaired, only to receive an almost machine-generated “report” mentioning generic items such as “ changed part X ” or “ cleaned item Y ”. I have been in this spot more than once, at times being on the hook for over $1,000 in repair…
LTE explained… to people like me! — Part 2: modulating the pipes In Part 1 , we examined the fundamentals around how LTE uses increasing amounts of radio bandwidth in order to transmit more data. In this second part, we will dig into how data is modulated on an LTE carrier, how power levels and interference between cells limit service availability, and why this is important in order to understand…
LTE explained… to people like me! — Part 1: radio basics In my first post about Loon , I took at look at the flight control characteristics, but also embarked in a three-part series that also dives into radio & commercial aspects of the platform. When I started writing the second part, I quickly realized I needed to get a much better understanding of how LTE operates, from the physical layer to…
In the world of embedded devices and Arduino-compatible development boards, tradeoffs between cost, functionality, and processing capabilities are common. I have recently been developing a battery-powered, self-contained 5GHz radio coverage survey system for Ubiquiti AirMax sector access points. Without going into this particular project too much, I had settled on the Adafruit Feather 32u4…
Five years ago, while pondering over options for delivering Internet to residents of a large slum in Nairobi, I got interested in Loon, both as an extremely cool project — if I put my geeky scientist hat on, and possibly as a delivery medium for places where fiber is just not going to happen — if I put my CTO hat on. In a series of articles, I’m going to take a look at some interesting details…