Posts on Tom Burkert

Several months ago, a good friend of mine, who knows I’m into birdwatching, suggested I watch a YouTube documentary called LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching.

I remember back in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released and everyone was going crazy about how smart and humanlike it was.

A few days ago, I opened the window and heard a familiar sound I have not heard in a while: it was a fieldfare’s call, probably one of the first who migrated back to my town this year.

I love e-readers.

In the last few months, various prominent figures in big tech have claimed that voice is the user interface of the future.

This is going to be a fairly niche post, so I will make it clear right away: If you are not using Hyprland on Fedora 43, you can close this post and move on with your day.

It started with a broken hinge in our kitchen cabinet.

The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone.

I spent the majority of this week at a conference and in dinners and networking events, and as a result, I have fallen woefully behind my regular catching up on news and reading.

In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds.

Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers.

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms.

Our old friend Pygmalion Humans have always anthropomorphized1 non-human entities, from ancient gods and natural forces to modern cars and ships.

Whenever I get to travel, especially on business trips, I usually seek out two types of entertainment: botanical gardens and art galleries.

Recently, I have been re-reading one of the classic books of Czech literature, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, and I have been intrigued by some of the parallels between Čapek’s newts and LLMs.

The problem Window management for GUI operating systems has been with us for decades, but it still feels a bit broken to me.

Many moons ago (in fact long ago so that contemporary sources are beginning to be difficult to find), iPhone users were told they’re holding their phones wrong.

The Problem Recently, my Keychron K8 keyboard has died (PCB 💀), so I started hunting for a new keyboard.

Intro As part of my journey towards higher privacy while using internet, I decided to set up Pi-hole on my Synology NAS DS218play.