I am kind of glad that I grew up in an era before modern technology. While it’s kind of neat that my two and a half years old niece can figure out how to call me over Duo (even though I lack the app), I’m kind of glad I’m not dependent on such technology.📵 It’s kind of nice not feeling like I have to have internet or television 📺 where I live but are quite happy with the solitude and doing what I need on the internet or bandwidth intensively either down at the public library or other public hotspot.📚
Technology 📍
Artificial intelligence and licensing 🤖
I am very concerned about proposals to require licensing and regulations on artificial intelligence and all that might fall under that umbrella – machine learning, natural language models. Look who is putting forward proposals to regulate artificial intelligence – it’s the big incumbent players like Chat GPT and Facebook.
Maybe commercial products for sale should be regulated but free, open source projects should not be. Frameworks should be widely available to the public for any purpose they want, good or bad. Let the people play and innovate. If harm exists, go after the harmful commercial users, not the everyday people experimenting with the technology for non profit purposes to see how they can innovate.
Stopping bad actors seems like a good idea but you can’t stop a technology from moving forward in a global internet. If the US bans innovation, another less regulated country is likely to move it forward – China, Switzerland or some other place. I’m okay with regulating Meta and Open AI but not what goes on inside people’s basements.
Area Codes In NY State
This interactive map shows area codes in New York State. In most of the state now you have to dial the full ten digit number, as there are multiple area codes overlaying the area.
Data Sources: USGS Area Code Base Map (updated with new area code overlays) and Wikipedia: List of Area Codes.
Extension (Mac OS) – Wikipedia
If you are a certain age, you might remember Macintosh System 7 extensions. But do you know how they worked? They were a giant hack of the Macintosh Toolkit private patching mechanism (INIT code) to get them work and faceless background application, but they did generally work pretty good except when they didn't.

