A few months ago I talked about online privacy, and how I’d been trying to give up Big Tech software like Facebook and Google products. Here’s a quick update on how that’s going. On Google: I still use one gmail account, though it’s no longer my primary email address. I use Google Drive only for a few files (spreadsheets) that I like to edit from my phone, but that’s it. I still use Android, although I’m considering getting an iPhone later this year. I read that since Apple makes their money from selling (expensive) hardware, they don’t need to exploit your privacy for advertising as much as Google, but I’ll look into that more before making a final decision. I don’t use Google search or Chrome at all. So I don’t think Google is getting much of my online data anymore, which I think is a win! ...

Our AI-Assisted Future We are entering a world where we can create any kind of content we can dream of, just by asking an AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make it for us. This isn’t some distant future either - more like within the next 12 months. AI-generated text is basically here already, and it’s practically indistinguishable from human writing. The main limitation is it can only generate small amounts of text at a time, but that’s just a matter of scaling it up. Image generation, too, is already shockingly good. Take a look at Google’s Imagen or OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 that were both announced recently. It has a similar limitation in that the images are limited to low resolution, but again that won’t be the case for long. ...

I have been having the most troubling dreams lately. I have my doubts as to whether I should share them with you here, as merely recalling their details causes me to question my sanity. But I must tell someone, and you are the only one who will listen. I dream that I am in Singapore, though it is not the Singapore of today. The geometry is wrong in a way that I can see with extreme vividness in my dreams yet cannot describe in adequate terms when awake. The buildings are too tall, too thin, and they tower over the streets like grasping fingers. ...

Introduction I’ve been trying to reduce my reliance on Big Tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.) for some time now. There’s many reasons, but I can summarise it like this: I don’t think they make a positive impact on the world. Part of it is about privacy. Most big tech companies rely on advertising, and advertising means tracking you so they can target you with ‘better’ ads and make more money. All these companies track you as much as they can. For example, take a look at Facebook’s Off Facebook Activity page. If you haven’t already seen it or turned it off, you might be in for a shock. ...

This is the seventh post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. I mentioned that one of the goals of this project was to revive some of my older projects that tend to get neglected and stop working. So, I went through my GitHub and found an old Perl project that would be perfect to host again. Read on for my experience with migrating Perl projects to Kubernetes. The project I chose to migrate is gin-rummy-bot, a web-based Gin rummy game and an AI opponent. I became fascinated with Gin while learning poker after coming across the story of Stu Ungar. He had an eidetic memory and won the World Series of Poker main event a record three times. His last win incredibly came sixteen years after his previous win, a feat that will almost certainly never be replicated. But he was also known for being the best Gin rummy player, which he regarded as a more skillful game than Texas Hold’Em. ...