I was browsing some web sites about LLMs and found a link to The Cardboard Computer, which turned out to be about circular slide rules. I have no idea why these are are supposed to be related to LLMs or any other modern AI work, since the first slide rule was invented in 1632. I still have the circular slide rule I bought in high school (1964-68):
Mia and I flew to Austin, TX to visit old friends and watch the April 8 eclipse from their back yard. This was the first total solar eclipse either of us had ever seen. Clouds came and went, but the sky was clear enough during the period of totality to give us a great view. We used eclipse glasses before and after totality, but took them off during the main event. It was spectacular. I took a couple pictures with the camera on my cheap Android phone, but they were disappointing: The corona completely washed out the moon’s disk. I knew eclipse photography was hard and was not expecting much, and did not let worrying about the pictures interfere with my experience of the event.
On Good Friday this year, in addition to the evenlng servce at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, I went to the German language Karfreitag Abendmahl Gottesdienst (Good Friday Communion service) at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ. I am not fluent in German, but I know enough to get by at such an event, especially since the general layout of the service was quite similar to the eucharist in the Episcopal Church, which, however, is not celebrated on Good Friday.
A few notes:
feel free to ignore the liturgical minutiae if that is not your thing
The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
From The antitrust case against Apple. See also:
Faoin am seo, bhí an Duinníneach imithe i dtaithí ar thaoide na n-imeachtaí ar an mbaile. Bheadh daoine ag bogadh síos go Teach an Chaidéil Uisce anois, féachaint an mbeadh aithne acu ar éinne den dream úr a bheadh tagtha isteach ar na cóisti. Chruinnigh Burr agus Laetetia chun imeachta. Ní raibh Gobnait fillte ó sheomra na mban. Lig an Duinníneach chun siúil iad agus nuair a bhí an áit socair arís agus an pianódóir ag iarraidh daoine a spreagadh chun válsa a dhéanamh, shuigh sé taobh le hEllie agus an buachaill rua agus lig sé osna.
By this time, Dineen had become accustomed to the tide of events in the town. People would be moving down to the House of the Water Pump now, to see if they knew any of the new people to came in on the coaches. Burr and Laetetia assembled for departure. Gobnait had not returned from the women’s room. Dineen let them go and when the place was calm again and the pianist was trying to encourage people to waltz, he sat beside to Ellie and the red-headced boy and let out a sigh.
| taithí | Frequentation, resort; Habit; practice, experience | |
| taoide | tide; time, spell | f |
| imeacht | Going, departure; … Course, passage | m |
| caidéal | pump | m gs npl caidéil |
| dream | Body of people; group, tribe, set; some | m |
| cóiste | Coach; carriage | m |
| cruinnigh | Gather; Assemble; collect; Draw together | |
| spreagadh | Urging, incitement; incentive, encouragement; excitation, stimulus | m |
In Some of my summer reading (2020), when discussing James Holland’s The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941: The War in the West, Volume One:
…. while Italy was allied with Germany, it was a net liability rather than an asset. The Italians failed in North Africa and the Balkans, and so Germany had to commit substantial forces to bail them out.
Grant Piper makes the same point, arguing that The Real Reason Germany Lost World War II was that Italy was a German ally.
I saw How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes and decided to try it on my Linux desktop system. It took a lot more than 10 minutes but I got it to work.
Looking at the BIOS, the system dates from 2013. Here are the details:
As Mia and I have done on other recent visits to Chicagoland, we left Capricon early on Sunday to go to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, which had been our spiritual home from 1977 until 1997. An unexpected treat was that the preacher that day was the Very Rev. Joy Rogers, retired Dean of St. James Cathedral. She began her ordained ministry at St. Luke’s while we were members and we remember her fondly. We also saw some other friends from our time.
Mia and I enjoyed Capricon 44. It was held at the Sheraton Grand Chicago, February 1-4, as it was when we attended two years ago. We were very happy to be at a con in downtown Chicago again, with an almost infinite supply of places to eat and drink in walking distance of the hotel. It is much more alive than downtown St. Paul or Minneapolis, and the people seemed friendlier. As happened in 2022, some of our Chicagoland fannish friends did not attend, but others did, and we enjoyed seeing them again.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 