I volunteer at Noisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco. Anyone can walk in off the street and use our 3D printers, sewing machines and electronics lab. No dues are required. Newcomers sometimes ask how to become a member. I’ll tell them “You already are!” but what they’re really asking is how to formalize the relationship: give money, get access. They already have access. So the trick is getting people to pay for something they get for free.

13 years ago I got a Lenovo T430 ThinkPad to use for college. Over the years I’ve upgraded, replaced, and modded many parts of the laptop. At this point my friends joke it’s the “Laptop of Theseus”.

Thanks to the upgrades it’s still a pretty capable machine even running the most up-to-date Debian and Firefox on modern websites like YouTube. I use this machine for programming or any tasks that require a Linux OS as my other laptop is a MacBook.

Here are a few scenes I witnessed or participated in during my time in the Bay Area. They’re mundane, but stick out for one reason or another. At some point I would like to compile every memorable vignette from my life and link them together.

I know what it feels like to make over $1000 per hour. And I’m over it.

I spent much of 2020 traveling. As soon as there were rumblings in California of a lockdown, I started looking for ways to preserve my sanity. I had moved to the Bay Area in late 2018 after graduating college. My life was built around the idea that I would have a short commute to Palo Alto from my apartment in Redwood City. Most of my socialization would come through in-person work. My co-workers were great people and some are still close friends today.

When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app market, native application development had a high barrier to entry, and the most exciting things happening with computers were websites like eBay and Google.

A prevailing sentiment online is that GPT-4 still does not understand what it talks about. We can argue semantics over what “understanding” truly means. I think it’s useful, at least today, to draw the line at whether GPT-4 has succesfully modeled parts of the world. Is it just picking words and connecting them with correct grammar? Or does the token selection actually reflect parts of the physical world?

One of the most remarkable things I’ve heard about GPT-4 comes from an episode of This American Life titled “Greetings, People of Earth”. One of the segments covers the experience of Microsoft researchers that gained access to GPT-4 before its general release.

Update - DayZ now checks mod integrity before putting you in the queue. This is no longer as important as before. But maybe this will help someone with another game some day.

I play a lot of DayZ. The game is amazing but I’ve found out that it has a critical flaw. You can end up waiting in a queue to join a server for 30 minutes, only to learn upon finally entering the server that one of your mods is out of date. This gets you kicked and you’re once again at the back of the line. Most games would check this upon putting you in the queue. I can’t fix DayZ but I can fix Steam.

Last year I was lucky enough to get access to 10 Gb/s home internet for $40/month. Ironically my ISP can not provide me with a router capable of handling more than 1 Gb/s. For $40/month that’s acceptable - I’m paying less than most people do for Gigabit anyway. But I wanted to experience the full power of 10 Gb/s.

Looking around it’s clear there isn’t much consumer networking hardware built for 10 Gb/s. Many of the routers advertised as 10 Gb/s only have 2.5 Gb/s WAN ports combined with WiFi 6E. So from your WiFi 6E capable device to the router there is a theoretical best case bandwidth of 10.8 Gb/s. But from your router to the internet you’ve got a pipe less than a quarter that size.

In Star Trek humans live in a post-scarcity world. Transporter technology allows for instantaneous and cheap movement of humans and objects anywhere on a planet, and into or out of orbit. The same devices that allow for transportation can also re-organize matter into arbitrary configurations. This means that anything that can be designed can be owned for essentially no cost. What do people do in such a world? As Gene Roddenberry imagined, they explore. If we can get anything that’s ever been recorded for free in an instant, then new and undiscovered things are of unparalleled value and interest.

The programmer internet is polarizing over ChatGPT. Some claim that it is nearly AGI, some claim it cannot do anything of value, with plenty of people in between. I’ve worked with GPT-3 professionally, used CoPilot for over a year, and recently started programming side-projects with the assistance of ChatGPT (I pay for GPT-4 access). I’m considering working with LLMs full time again, so I pay close attention to what the GPT models can actually do.