As with my last post on AI, let me open with a statement: Just because most people hold AI a certain way, doesn’t mean that we always must, either now or in the future. As I noted in that piece, and my shades of gray post, I am well aware — and agree with — … Continue reading Must we always use LLMs this way? →

1981 was a different time for computing. It was expensive (both hardware and software), and it was far from a given that machines from one vendor would be able to talk to those from another. In fact, Columbia University had just such a problem, so in 1981, Frank da Cruz and Bill Catchings designed a … Continue reading Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years (and working with a decades-old C codebase) →

AI sure is a hot topic right now, and I see a lot of people arguing about it. To a lot of people around here, I’m the “computer person” they know and I get asked a lot about AI. I’m going to suggest a lot of things can be true at once. For instance: LLMs … Continue reading Artificial Intelligence: Shades of Gray →

Like many, bot traffic has been causing significant issues for my hosted server recently. I’ve been noticing a dramatic increase in bots that do not respect robots.txt, especially the crawl-delay I have set there. Not only that, but many of them are sending user-agent strings that are quite precisely matching what desktop browsers send. That … Continue reading A Twisty Maze of Ill-Behaved Bots →