Headworx

Musk's acquisition of Twitter started the first wave of exodus (or simply the Xodus) but it was not definitive. People were trying Mastodon or Facebook's Threads , but none of that reached the critical mass. It may be different this time, as the US presidential elections has polarized the audience to the levels previously unseen. I personally tried all those options but also sticked with Twitter. But over the last couple of months it has become clear the platform has clearly become algorithmically  biased and flooded with bots. Nothing in common with the officially claimed "free speech". Even to a casual reader like myself it has become mostly a sewage, in which even funny orange cat videos could not make it to the surface. The recent shift of users from x.com to Bluesky might have been sparked by Taylor Swift fans , but then it has accelerated like an avalanche. The Guardian was next . And now it seems like everybody is moving. Including some old friends of mine w

Santa has visited me early this year. Something a bit unexpected but I love the gadget a lot: the iFixit portable soldering station . Battery (or power bank) powered soldering iron has been in my toolkit for some time. I had been using the TS80P . Which had been good for small field jobs but not really capable to fully replace a professional desktop station. The iFixit station is the best of the both worlds. Designed to sit nicely on a desk, with a specially designed station / controller / power bank (100W output, 2 output ports). And equally handy to take outside / to a car / or wherever there is a need to do some soldering and dragging a power cable would not be easy. They don't say it, but clearly the base has been designed with some additional tools available in future - as it has two independent USB-C power ports. The quality is top-notch: great ergonomic design and top grade materials like the super elastic cable. I'd say I'd recommend this as a Christmas present, but

Technology capabilities have for years been outpacing real life adoption. The gap seems to be widening as on the technology front we are talking now about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) while simple everyday things just don't work. Last week the airline lost my luggage and the recovery started nicely as I got a personalized message indicating they had already found it and it was n its way. The message prompted me to a simple web form to enter my temporary address they should deliver the bag to. This was all on Oct 28. i was staying at the hotel for 2 nights, so I put Oct 30 in the form. Early morning on the next day (Oct 29) I got a notification asking about the baggage delivery, as I was supposedly "about to leave the temporary address". Surprised, I went back to the form which was indeed showing Oct 29. I was sure I entered Oct 30... But OK, I did this again. Picked Oct 30 from a nicely crafted date picker. The form was still showing Oct 29 The regular tricks suc

Bitcoin, and particularly the blockchain technology was supposed to change the world. That was 15 years ago. And the world went crazy indeed. Particularly in the startup / VC world blockchain was the only thing that counted. Fast forward to 2024 and we barely have a trace of that. I mean Bitcoin still exists, mostly as a (very niche) speculative instrument. And also serves very well the dark communities. I complained on that back in 2021 . About half of Bitcoin transactions serve illegal activity. And even if legal - the speculative and mining for money part - it does not do any good either. Investment groups have been reigniting decommissioned power plants. Generating air pollution. And noise - to the extent that people decide to sue Bitcoin "mines" operators . Generally speaking - it is useless. Enter now the 2024 and the Artificial Intelligence craze. Myriads of promises and tons of "cool" demos. Again the startup and VCs have gone crazy about it. But the net ga

    On October 7, 2024, Apple published a research paper that discusses the limitations of mathematical Reasoning in large language models (LLMs). This is yet another proof that LLMs are about language and have very little in common with understanding the underlying meaning. This is by the way quite similar to how human brains work, as we have (at least) two separate neural networks (and probably more) - one responsible for parsing and constructing language statements, and a completely separate one where the actual "thinking" happens. I posted a blog on that back in May. Long story short, the Apple researchers point out that despite the overall heralded progress in LLMs, they are still bound by limits of pattern matching, when they "convert statements to operations without truly understanding their meaning". This "suggests deeper issues in reasoning processes" that can't be helped with fine-tuning or other refinements. In other words there is still t

I posted about my backup Windows setup several months ago when my primary laptop died during a business trip. It came back to life later but then died again and the verdict was - replace the motherboard. This time it died after I returned home, so the overall conditions were more manageable.  It took end-to-end full two weeks to have the computer replaced and reconfigured again (more on that below). After leaving the broken MacBook at an (authorized) Apple repair shop, I blew the dust from the Panda and hooked it up to the giant curved Philips USB-C monitor.  It worked right away and the most beautiful part of the setup was the single cable connecting the monitor with the machine. USB-C, when properly implemented with all its features (high speed data, video lanes and power delivery), does wonders. What was a bit surprising, the Panda-based setup was not that much different from my high-end (albeit ageing) 2018 i9 MacBook Pro. In typical office work it was a tad slower and I also had

My Mother's iPhone has gradually become non functional. It was iPhone 6. The hardware was pretty OK. But one after another the apps were refusing to work. In a pretty bad fashion. The apps typically started complaining about the version being too old and forcing to update. But when redirected to the AppStore, there was a message saying the newest one was not compatible with the iOS version (which could not be upgraded) and offering an older version. Which then complained it was too old. A very confusing dead loop. The reason of course was the old iOS with the newer releases not supporting the "old" hardware. So the question was not so much if we needed a new iPhone, but really which one should we choose. I initially thought the choices would be limited to the main line iPhones: 14 or 15 or 16. And only when I started checking which was the oldest that would support iOS 18, I found about the "SE" line. And to my surprise I realized the 2020 iPhone SE perfectly su