Home on the Digital Range
I am subscribed to a lot of sub-reddits. Like, a lot! This morning I was browsing my feed, and discovered a mystery that has just been uncovered in Red Dead Redemption 2. Apparently, user FL4VA-01 noticed a spiderweb with a feather in it, that only appears between 3am and 4am, in a telegraph pole outside St Denis. There is a Google Site that a Reddit user has put together with a timeline of the clues and discoveries
Continue reading “Red Dead Redemption 2 - The Spider Dreams Mystery”
I really liked this talk by Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet. He is arguing that it is the perfect time to dismantle the global dominance of US Big Tech, by getting rid of local "anticircumvention laws". These laws make it a felony to bypass digital locks on products, even if no other law (like copyright) is being broken. This effectively criminalises modifying, repairing, or creating interoperable products for devices you own. This causes a transfer of wealth to the US.
Continue reading “Cory Doctorow on "The Post-American Internet"”
I have been using various LLMs as a helper for coding for a few years now. I was in the Github Copilot beta programme. I have the gptel package set up within my Emacs environment, and use it to connect to Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, as well as some LLMs running locally. I recently decided to try Claude Code from the command line. It has been a revelation!
I just finished my first semester of the Master of Artificial Intelligence degree at UTS. I really enjoyed it! My aim is to continue on and do a PhD. I am interested in LLM reasoning, but the whole reason with doing this degree is to work out what parts of AI interest me the most.
Here are my current thoughts on A.I. - by which I mean, deep neural networks. The more I work with technologies such as transformer networks (such as LLMs), convolutional networks and the like, the more impressed I am with them.
Yesterday we decided to hike the Platypus and Burraga Loop trail at the Bidjigal Reserve near Castle Hill. It was a really lovely walk! It was a little harder than I was expecting, purely in terms of having to cross a creek quite a few times. Sometimes there weren’t great stepping stones to cross on, and it was lucky we were both wearing waterproof hiking boots.
We have an overnight stopover in Japan. Because we flew in to Haneda airport, which is nice and close to central Tokyo, we took the monorail in to the city. We are staying at the Mecure Tokyo Hibiya, which is a lovely hotel with nice big king-sized beds.
About a year and a half ago, in an attempt to keep playing with new technology, I bought myself a DJI Mini 3 Pro drone. The tech was way ahead of the last drone I owned (the Parrot AR).
I just started using WebFlow to level up my website building game. I am really loving it! It seems to generate clean HTML / CSS and is fairly easy to use if you know HTML and CSS. I recommend doing the WebFlow 101 YouTube tutorial to get up and running quickly.
Every so often I need to open up access to an AWS service to my home IP address. Unfortunately, my IP address is liable to change when my broadband router reconnects, so I wanted to automate the process of adding my local IP to the AWS security group. I created the following shell script to do this. It will retrieve your externally presenting IP address, and then add a new rule to the security group opening inbound connections to the specified port range. If the script has been run previously, the script will first delete the previously added rule.