Category: Technology

All things geeky.

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How are you using AI?

Artificial intelligence is here. It is not what Hollywood promised but it has moved beyond a marketing buzzword, in come cases. Are you using AI first? That is, do you try to use AI before a search engine? Do you use AI before looking to the forums or traditional documentation to solve a problem?

How do you use AI daily? Today, I used my current favorite AI, https://claude.ai, to narrow down which hotel I want to book over Labor Day weekend. I also use Claude.ai to help me be more efficient in my job.

If you have not begun exploring AI, you should. It will not displace you as an employee, yet. Not adopting AI into your work life is what will get you replaced because those who adopt AI will outperform you making you irrelevant.

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So you want to be a programmer?

It’s a lot like building a car for someone. You get it working. Spend a bunch of time tuning that engine and just making it purr. You put your heart into painting it perfectly maybe even giving a little extra love. Then the customer takes it and says, “everything is great except the horn doesn’t work at 19mph. Works below 19 mph and above 19 mph but not at 19 mph.” You are left staring at 2 wires and a switch having to figure out how something couldn’t be any more basic has this odd quirk. That’s programming.

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Were there any children or elderly in the movie idiocracy?

The wife asked this question so I posed it to claude.ai and this was the amazing answer:

No, there were no children or elderly shown in the 2006 satirical sci-fi movie Idiocracy.

The movie depicts a dystopian future society populated entirely by young and middle-aged adults who behave in crude, anti-intellectual, and hyper-commercialized ways.

In the beginning of Idiocracy, the main character Corporal Joe Bauers (played by Luke Wilson) takes part in a military hibernation experiment along with a prostitute named Rita (played by Maya Rudolph). They wake up 500 years later to find that society has become incredibly lazy and stupid.

The movie shows Bauers and Rita exploring this world of the future where commercialism and instant gratification reign supreme. All the people they encounter appear to be under age 50 or so. No children or elderly people are ever shown or mentioned.

The underlying message of the film is that higher birth rates among less intelligent people combined with a lack of intellectualism has resulted in this youth-obsessed, crass culture. So the total absence of young kids and senior citizens emphasizes how extreme and monolithic this future society portrayed in Idiocracy has become.

So in short – no, there is no sign or mention of children or the elderly in the over-the-top fictional world depicted in Mike Judge’s movie. Just an overly consumeristic youth culture run amok.

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So you want to be a programmer?

In programming, you do a lot a writing. Probably as much writing as some best selling book authors but your books will never be read per se. Let’s use books as an analogy.

If you write a program from scratch, you are the author much like Stephen King. You plot and plan the story. You define the characters and their backstories. You write biographies of these characters that will never make it into the book but these details are important. In programming you do much of this same detail of work in project planning, database architecting, creating or choosing a programming framework, meetings and discussions with clients (book publishers) as well as your team, deciding what external resources will be used and so forth. You are Stephen King.

If you don’t write a program from scratch but instead work to modify a program that someone else wrote, you have to get into the head of that person. Much like if you were going to modify or edit one of Stephen King’s works, you’d have to get into his head, figure out the back stories, and really analyze the writing. With code, you have to figure out what the other programmer was thinking all without the documentation and backstories that were created during their process. You have to become Stephen King.

The people who use your program or the modified version of someone else’s program do not have to get as intimate with the works. They use it. Or in Stephen King’s case, they read it.

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Morserino

The Morserino is a Morse code (CW) trainer. It comes with paddles for training. You can plug in your own straight key or your own paddles. It teaches you cw (morse code) interactively. It has Lora (unlicensed radio frequency) so you can have one Morserino talk to another Morserino if you want to have one person in one room and the training buddy in another room. It connects to the Internet. And it acts as a keyer for radios that do not have a built-in keyer (like most HTs. Technicians can us CW but generally are not equipped for it).

My Morserino arrives at the end of May and I’m absolutely giddy over it. I began this journey in 1980.

http://www.morserino.info/

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So you want to be a programmer?

Practice the art of coffeeing. Put the creamer down. Never touch “mild” again. Fire up that dark roast. And here is the tricky part. Like a surfer seeking the perfect wave, you MUST learn to find that fine line between the brain fog of too little coffee and the jittery distraction of too much coffee. There is a magical flow state where too much and too little collide. It is up to your disciplined practice to find just how much coffee must be consumed throughout the day to ride that wave for maximum productivity.