prime’s posts

Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, April 2001 | Christie’s

In 1990, the American network engineer David Waitzman authored RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, on April Fools' Day. It describes, in deadpan technical language, the transmission of Internet packets by carrier pigeon. Although written as a joke, RFC 1149 became one of the best-known pieces of Internet folklore and remains widely cited more than three decades later.

On 28 April 2001, members of the Bergen Linux User Group in Norway (BLUG) carried out a full-scale implementation of the protocol. Using printers, scanners, and racing pigeons, they printed individual IP packets as hexadecimal strings, attached them to birds' legs, and transmitted them between two lofts separated by approximately three miles. Nine packets were dispatched and four successful replies were returned.

It’s currently at $2,600 USD which seems like an absolute steal.

Hulagirl.txt

When I say I was losing my mind, that I was blowing up people’s inboxes, when I was literally welling up with tears at this discovery, I mean it. It was so exciting that I was spurred into writing this very document in a mania fueled week and a half of frantic research which of course ended with me acquiring a handful of Hulagirls to hold my my hulahands.

Such an interesting story and great reporting. We exist in a context.

System Design Atlas

Would be useful for a system design interview.

Curing cancer won’t redeem AI - by Ruxandra Teslo

But almost two centuries after Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s anthropology has seeped into the background assumptions of our age. Human beings are increasingly imagined as creatures principally of material need: they want food, comfort, health and, above all, convenience. Give them enough of these things and surely they will consent to almost any rearrangement of the world around them.

The 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness — A Developmental Map of Human Awareness - The Sacred Spiral Co.

The roots of the model also draw from broader currents in mid-20th-century thought. Cybernetics and systems theory were teaching people to think of organisms as feedback machines, wired with inputs and outputs. Evolutionary biology framed the brain as layered, from reptilian survival mechanisms to mammalian emotional systems to human symbolic reasoning. Psychedelic research opened doors to altered states that felt like entirely new dimensions of mind. Eastern mysticism, flooding into the West through yoga, Zen, and tantra, provided experiential descriptions of bliss, cosmic unity, and ego death. The 8-Circuit Model wove all these strands into one tapestry.

Kooky and New Agey but mildly interesting.

Ordinary Abundance

A walk through a modern day apartment with historical reactions from people who experienced each convenience for the first time.

How GitHub Copilot Works: Context, Memory and Network Traffic

Models and SOTA benchmark results matter, of course. But the real differentiation between AI coding tools - and AI tools in general, for that matter - seems to be shifting toward how well they assemble the right context: your code, recent changes, actions, conversations, tools, history, and whatever else might help solving the task at hand.

Forged by Devotion – A Dutch Flow Academy documentary

Throughout his journeys, Harbert met inspiring teachers, gurus, wrestlers, martial artists, historians, and craftsmen who dedicated their lives to preserving India’s ancient movement traditions.

Trailer looks interesting. I didn’t know there was a traditional strength training culture like this in India.

The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired

So accurate to my experience working in this field.

The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms » Design You Trust — Design Daily Since 2007

The Bra-and-Girdle Maker That Fashioned the Impossible for NASA | The MIT Press Reader

The tolerances allowed — less than a 64th of an inch in only one direction from the seam — meant that yard after yard of fabric was sewn to an accuracy smaller than the sewing needle’s eye. To achieve such precision, many women used a modified treadle that, instead of starting and stopping a Singer sewing machine’s operation, fired one stitch per footfall through the multiple layers of a suit’s surface.

I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine

I no longer feel like I’m part of a bigger movement to make things better. Instead, I feel like I’m part of building the Machine.

I enjoyed this piece by @tarakiyee@mastodon.online

Fintech Engineering Handbook

This resource aims to describe the most important patterns used in software engineering, where money is the primary focus of the system. It can be read in full to get a comprehensive understanding or in parts when dealing with a particular problem.

Really high-level with almost no details or examples. But I’m brand new to this domain so it’s still interesting to me.

Religious exemption from using the AI at work – Pivot to AI

Maus’ exemption claim cited “environmental and ethical  objections to AI that don’t align with her religious beliefs.”

You don’t just say this sort of thing casually. Maus did all this properly with paperwork. and help from an employment lawyer and her church minister. The workplace accommodation went through in May.

Mechanical Watch – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Beautiful visualization of the movement of an automatic watch.

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II on arxiv.org (PDF link)

We argue that many anthropomorphic measurements in AI are measurements of presentation, rather than of an actual system’s behaviour. Moreover, these measurements are irrespective of their quality of being real. Indeed, attributes such as persuasiveness and self-consistency are objectively measurable, but from our work it follows that these cannot imply real (or simulative) behaviour under this setup.

Queering the Map

Queering the Map is a community generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.

Spell Your Name with NASA’s Earthly Alphabet of Aerial Images

I’m glad fun little toys are still being made on the internet.

Portraits by Irving Penn

Incredibly good portraits. They feel so modern. Makes the subjects feel absolutely present.

Typography on Pencils, 1-5. – Present & Correct

The Kizaemon Tea-bowl’s meaning was “discovered.” And this discovery was imposed suddenly upon an existing object that was previously understood to be something completely different—an ordinary food bowl.

Richard Roth - Collecting Myself, Slide 19

Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die – Hmm Daily

In a chair, at a computer screen, 47 doesn’t feel that far from 37.

h/t @nomand@merveilles.town

But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper. I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction. So when I came to write a utopia of course I wrote a novel.

• Ursula K. Le Guin (h/t A Working Library)

Why Does AI Wrie Like… That?

I love Sam Kriss’s newsletter. This article he wrote for NYT is so lucid and the issue needed to be called out.

Reddit, r/vinyl: All my advices

I bought a record player because we inherited a small collection of vintage records. I’m trying not to fall too deep into the rabbithole. I can tell I’ll be spending a ton of time on this hobby in the near future.