They could organize protests, they could help workers unionize, they could put their necks out and disrupt things, they could do anything besides stand by and say “oh no, this is so bad.” They have a gigantic megaphone and the ears of almost half the country, their power isn’t limited to the votes they have or don’t have. I want them to be making plans that are bold, plans where they feel a need to account for “how do we make sure this doesn’t turn into an outright riot though,” the things you’d do if you actually believed the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy.

I’m bitterly clinging to my iPhone 13 mini, because I suspect it’s the last phone I’ll ever actively enjoy. I went along with bigger phones when that became the trend and decided I didn’t like them, and the mini line was such a relief to go back to. Once it’s no longer tenable, I’ll probably just buy a series of “the least bad used phone I can find” because I know I’ll be mildly frustrated every time I use it.

I’m still using an iPhone mini and I haven’t experienced any bad layouts, broken websites, or any difficulty like that. It has the same resolution of the biggest iPhone I’ve ever had (iPhone X) so things are smaller, which would make it a poor fit for someone with poor vision, but for me it’s an absolutely perfect phone. It’s frustrating to know that the perfect phone for me could easily exist, and yet Apple will refuse to make it for me. I’ll be stuck with phones I don’t like for the rest of my life, it seems.

Back in the olden days, if you wrote a program, you were punching machine codes into a punch card and they were being fed into the computer and sent directly to the CPU. The machine was effectively yours while your program ran, then you (or more likely, someone who worked for your company or university) noted your final results, things would be reset, and the next stack of cards would go in.

Once computers got fast enough, though, it was possible to have a program replace the computer operator, an “operating system”, and it could even interleave execution of programs to basically run more than one at the same time. However, now the programs had to share resources, they couldn’t just have the whole computer to themselves. The OS helped manage that, a program now had to ask for memory and the OS would track what was free and what was in use, as well as interleaving programs to take turns running on the CPU. But if a program messed up and wrote to memory that didn’t belong to it, it could screw up someone else’s execution and bring the whole thing crashing down. And in some systems, programs were given a turn to run and then were supposed to return control to the OS after a bit, but it was basically an honor system, and the problem with that is likely clear.

Hardware and OS software added features to enforce more order. OSes got more power, and help from the hardware to wield it. Now instead of asking politely to give back control, the hardware would enforce limits, forcing control back to the OS periodically. And when it came to memory, the OS no longer handed out addresses matching the RAM for the program to use directly, instead it could hand out virtual addresses, with the OS tracking every relationship between the virtual address and the real location of the data, and the hardware providing Memory Management Units that can do things like store tables and do the translation from virtual to physical on its own, and return control to the OS if it doesn’t know.

This allows things like swapping, where a part of memory that isn’t being used can be taken out of RAM and written to disk instead. If the program tries to read an address that was swapped out, the hardware catches that it’s a virtual address that it doesn’t have a mapping for, wrenches control from the program, and instead runs the code that the OS registered for handling memory. The OS can see that this address has been swapped out, swap it back in to real RAM, tell the hardware where it now is, and then control returns to the program. The program’s none the wiser that its data wasn’t there a moment ago, and it all works. If a program messes up and tries to write to an address it doesn’t have, it doesn’t go through because there’s no mapping to a physical address, and the OS can instead tell the program “you have done very bad and unless you were prepared for this, you should probably end yourself” without any harm to others.

Memory is handed out to programs in chunks called “pages”, and the hardware has support for certain page size(s). How big they should be is a matter of tradeoffs; since pages are indivisible, pages that are too big will result in a lot of wasted space (if a program needs 1025 bytes on a 1024-byte page size system, it’ll need 2 pages even though that second page is going to be almost entirely empty), but lots of small pages mean the translation tables have to be bigger to track where everything is, resulting in more overhead.

This is starting to reach the edges of my knowledge, but I believe what this is describing is that RISC-V chips and ARM chips have the ability for the OS to say to the hardware “let’s use bigger pages than normal, up to 64k”, and the Linux kernel is getting enhancements to actually use this functionality, which can come with performance improvements. The MMU can store fewer entries and rely on the OS less, doing more work directly, for example.

A VPN is just a way to say “wrap up my normal internet packets and ship them somewhere specific before they continue the normal way.” The normal way is you want to get a message to some other server, and as a part of setting up the network you’re on, your machine should already have a list of other devices it’s physically connected to (“physically” could be “via radio waves” so not just wired) and they should have already advertised “hey, I’ve got access to these places too” for your information. Your router is likely the only one in your home network advertising anything that is on the larger internet, so all your outgoing messages will have to go that way to get to their destination. For example, I’ve got a phone, a wifi access point, a router, and my ISP’s box; my phone knows the WiFi access point is two hops away from internet because the access point said so, that’s the best one it can see, so it sends it that way and hopes it makes it. Each machine in between does the same thing until hopefully it gets where it is supposed to.

With a VPN, the same messages are wrapped in a second message that is addressed to the other end of the VPN. When it gets to the VPN provider, it’s unwrapped, then the inside message is sent off to wherever it’s supposed to go. If a message comes back to the VPN provider addressed to you (ish, this is simplifying a bit), it’s wrapped up the same way and sent back to you.

Big companies often put resources “behind” the VPN, so you can’t send messages from the outside addresses to the office printer, they’ll get blocked, but you can request a connection to the VPN, and messages that come in through that path do get allowed. The VPN can be one central place where you make sure everything coming in is allowed, then on the other side the security can be a little less tight.

VPNs also encrypt the internal message as a part of wrapping them up, which means that if you’re torrenting via a VPN, all anyone else can see is a message addressed to your VPN provider and then an encrypted message inside. And anyone you were exchanging messages with only ever saw traffic to and from the VPN provider, they never saw where it was going after your VPN provider got it. Only you and the VPN provider know what was happening on both ends, and hopefully they don’t look too closely or keep records.

Hopefully now it’s clear that Mullvad and similar won’t help you access your own things from outside, they’re only good for routing your stuff through them and then out into the rest of the internet. However, this isn’t secret magic tech: you can run your own VPN that goes in the other direction, allowing you into your own home network and then able to connect to things as if you were physically there. Tailscale is probably the easiest thing for things like that nowadays, it’ll set up a whole system where your devices can find each other and set up a mesh of secure, direct connections no matter where they are physically located. By default, just the direct device-to-device connections are re-routed, but you can also make a device an “exit node” that can route all your traffic like a traditional VPN.

Of course, that will be the exact opposite of what you want for privacy while torrenting, as it’s all devices that you clearly own and not hiding their identities whatsoever. But it’s very cool for home networking and self-hosting stuff.

Bluesky’s more like an aspirationally decentralized platform, you can keep your own data on your own server and use your own domain name as a user name, but most of the rest of it is “centralized, but we’re designing it in such a way that we can open it up later.” Even then, though, it’s heavily influenced by the original idea of “let’s make something decentralized that Twitter can switch to once it’s worked out” which means that even when they do open things up, it’s likely that a lot of Bluesky will only be practical at “big tech company scale” to run yourself, whereas Mastodon or Lemmy you can just spin up on a server and it’ll be fine until you get a lot of users.

I as a human being have grown up and learned from experience and the experiences of previous humans that were documented or directly communicated to me. I can see no inherent difference with an artificial intelligence learning on the same data.

It’s a massive difference in scale. For one, before you even leave the womb you have millions of years of evolution shaping the initial structure of your brain. Then your “training” begins, but it’s infinitely richer than anything we’re giving to these LLMs. Sights, sounds, smells, feelings, so many that part of what your brain is learning is what it must ignore. You’re also benefitting from the interactivity of your environment, you can experiment with things and get feedback for what happens. As you get older and develop more skills, you can start integrating them together to do even more complex things, and the people around you will use their own incredible intelligence to specifically tailor your training to what you need as you learn and grow.

Meanwhile, an LLM is getting fed words, and learning how to predict the next word. It’s a pale shadow of the complex lives humans live. Words are one of the more powerful things we have for thinking and reasoning, so if you’re going to go all in on one skill, it’s a rich environment for learning and in theory the contents of all of humanity’s writing probably contains all the information necessary to recreate human intelligence, but our current technology doesn’t even come close to wringing every ounce of knowledge from the training sets.

I use TiddlyWiki for, well, a bunch of my projects, but primarily for my task management. You can use it as a single HTML file, which contains the entire wiki, your data, its own code, all of it, and of course use it in any browser you like. Saving changes is a bit of a pain until you find a browser extension or some other way of enabling more seamless editing than re-saving the edited wiki as another single HTML file, but there are many solutions to that as described on their site above.

The way I use it, which is more technical but also logistically simpler, is by running their very minimal Node.JS server which you can just visit and use in any browser which takes care of saving and syncing entirely.

The thing I like about TiddlyWiki is that although on its surface it’s a quirky little wiki with a fun party trick of fitting into an HTML file, what it actually is is a self-contained lightweight object database with a simple yet powerful query language and miniature front-end web development environment which they have used to implement a quirky little wiki. Each “article” is an object that is taggable and has key/value data, and “widgets” can be used in the text to edit and display that data, pulling from the “database” using filters. You can use it to make simple web apps for yourself and they come together very quickly once you know what you’re doing, and the entire thing is a demonstration of a complex web app that is also possible. The wiki’s implemented entirely using those same tools, and everything is open for you to tweak and edit to your liking.

I moved a Super Bowl guessing/fake gambling game that I run from a form and spreadsheet to a TiddlyWiki and now I can share an online dashboard that live updates for everyone and it was decently easy to make and works really well. With my task manager, I recently decided to add a feature where I can set an “agenda” value on any task, and they all show up in one place, so I could set it as “Boss” and then quickly see everything I wanted to bring up in our next 1 on 1 meeting. It took just a few minutes to add the text box to anything that gets tagged “Task” and then make another page that collected them all and displayed them in sections.

The phone slowdowns were intended to prolong the lives of phones, not shorten them. The underclocking only happened after your phone had been forced to shut down because the battery wasn’t delivering sufficient power. I had a phone with this problem, and opening the camera would sometimes just immediately shut down the phone instead. I got a free new battery for it, but the general fix was slowdowns instead. They should’ve disclosed it and they also should’ve given users control, but if they wanted people buying new phones, I know from experience that the random shutdowns were worse than a slower phone.