A True History of the Internet

its been morr than a decade since the demonstration that purely distributional models of languages could do a surprisingly good job, dispensing with many years clever work building semantics and symbolic approaches to the job. so what has AI done for us r…

Money can be a means of exchange or a store of value. traditionally, we therefore could use money to shift the returns for goods or labour in space and time, instead of having to just immediately exchange (barter) goods for labour or labour for labour or…

the new kid on Hype Block is recursive self-improvement for AI. so of course software tools & die has always been about making tools that can make more refined tools, that can make more refined tools - from stone, to iron/bronze to steel, carbon, and on to

50+ years ago in france, we had no mains water and no electricy - we could fetch water from the well, and light a wood fire to cool. this was what most people had for the previous thousands of years, certain 250 years ago. most people weren't in cities, a…

One of my fave songs of jimi is If six was 9 which I had on vinyl on one of those were 1970s compilations of rock tracks with one band one side, and a different band on the other (usually very good).

As we see the Giant Killer Asteroid of AI plummet towards the Home of the Human Race, it becomes clear that the laws of thermodynamics were incomplete.

People talk about the "Father of the Internet" or the "Grandfather of the Internet", but no-one mentions the strange uncle of the Internet, or the fairy godmother of the Internet.

Lovely idea, the declarations of independence of cyberspace notwithstanding, the vision of a new politics is not standing up well to the greatfirewalls and random total isolation of states (yes, old fashioned states, as defined by geographic boundaries, i…

I was randomly thinking about stories that had no actual computing technology dimension, but illustrated a fundamental idea from Computer Science in some accessible way - so here's a few examples to be getting on with... naming bootstrapping indirection o…

Bits:- I was recently trawling through some bits of my past and recall that I was taken to program a DEC PDP-8 (in an outbuilding of the Royal Free hospital) in the 1960s by an enlightened maths teacher - we had to learn machine code (actual machine code,…

The Internet was dismantled as a space for humanity, first by the loss of community binding through person-to-person trust and group dynamics - blame blockchain/cryptocurrencies, but they are just one symptom of the alienation, that built environments like

I'm reading Apple in China (see), which is interesting at the detail level (basically how they trained up with the help of Taiwan literally millions of skilled people to produce all their tech - it is now hardly surprising that china doesn't need the US's…

M I remember back in the early 1980s Sun Microsystems (old unix workstation maker of fine machines) said that the breakthrough was 3Ms - Megabyte of memory, MegaHz processor speed and Megabits of networking (I seem to recall 4Mb, 4MHz and 3Mbps) - prior to

If you are a director of a company in England, you will recently have received a letter requiring you to register for this: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login to be able to continue to do some things (e.g. mandatory for directors of companies).

With recent Cloudflare and AWS (and previous meta outage) it comes down to one simple tradeoff : On the one side is everyone running an Internet service saves some money by paying a Cloud provider to run the infrastructure for them - So the cloud outfit g…

So the cellular industry is often lauded for its planning and general coherent approach to the world.

humantity is too stupid to build an AI that would threaten its existence (humanity, not AI's existence...we could easily build a self-destructive AI - see below). the main reason is logistical. we are rubbish at supply chains - food comes across the planet

i've had a zero inbox policy since first getting e-mail (late 1970s) - having moved through various systems (roughly once a decade), recently landed on fastmail (which I very very much recommend- extremely fast, but also very easy to migrate to, integrate…

The Reform Club A lot of people have been busy recently writing plans for the Turing Institute most of which revolve around criticising the pace and direction of changes that it has been attempting over the past 2 years, and several culminating in the tri…

History of technology is littered with design mistakes.

Back in the day, the Jesuits used to say that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.

was at a thing in imperial college in their dyson center then went to the new cavendish (3.0) lab in cambridge's new dolby building, and got worried about the idea that these might both be about noise cancellation. obviousdly vacuum cleaners make sure that

Has anyone tried to get GenAI to build Cyberattacks based on fooling humans via cognitive biases etc?

for entities to have autonomy (i.e. be agentic) they must operate in some sort of decision space that is disjoint from the other entities with which they interact - conversely, if their decisions are fully specified by those other entities, then they are…

People use hashes of biometric data embedded in identifier (digital documents) so then the verifier can re-acquire the biometric and (hopefully, in a privacy preserving way) verify the person standing in front of the camera is a) live and b) the same as t…