LinkedIn May-Sep 2023 Posts on Tech
I posted several thoughts about tech on LinkedIN about arab-related throughout 2023. The main ones are shown below.
2023-05-25 1st bug
the first reported computer bug dates back to the early 1900s when Charles Babbage son, Henry Prevost Babbage, carried his father’s work on the Analytical Engine. He made the machine calculate the value of pi to 20 decimal points. Unfortunately, the calculations were later found to contain errors. That was the earliest documented computer bug officially recorded. Well… computer bugs are always with us, some are our own doing, and some are by others; but we then exasperatingly fix them. If you happen to be checking my INFOCOM AI homepage (https://infocom.ai) and noticed it is looking weird, please note that I am squashing a bug at this point. Cheers. #work #startup
2025-05-25 Making Something Beautiful Book
“Make Something Beautiful” - a free book released last April 2023 by Steve Jobs Archives that includes photos and speeches by the legendary man himself. Online access: https://lnkd.in/eee-V8dx or via Apple Books https://lnkd.in/eTh8GVE9 #tech #design
2023-05-25 Talking Computer
Before computers started talking and kids stopped talking while texting, did you know that there were 3 to 5 years old kids talking and talking back to typewriters in the 60s? They learned to type while the typewriter voiced each key back to them. Those kids, per the article below, went ahead and published their weekly newspapers: the 3yr old kids gathered the news, the 4yr old wrote the stories, and the 5yr old did the editing and layout. Pretty cool for #information and #communication between machines and children as early as the 60s. #vintageAI #retrocomputing #education #infocomai The article is from Creative Computing magazine, dated August 1983.
2023-06-04 40th Anniversary War Games
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the computer hackers movie, War Games. Many of us watched it a million times and continue to do so because it was awesome. A great quote from the movie “ “What he did was great! He designed his computer so that it could learn from its own mistakes. So, they’d be better the next time they played. The system actually learned how to learn. It could teach itself!” Reminds you of anything recent ? #ai #tech
2023-06-04 Konrad Zuse
If computer pioneers in the past stopped at first “NO!” or “WHAT?!” or “WTF?” or “HUH?” or “WHO NEEDS THIS?” then many of the technological inventions would not have existed. History has not always credited contributors to the technology world due to politics, ignorance, media, luck, misinformation, and miscommunication. For example, the whole world knows how the US and the English technology pioneers, including IBM, helped the Allies defeat Nazi Germany in World War. Yet, the course of the war could have changed if Germany had not rejected the prototype of the high-speed computer by Konrad Zuse, a lone German computer scientist who invented the first binary digital computer, the Z1, and, the later, the first high-level programming language, Plankalkul, in isolation from the rest of the world. His inventions were remarkable but went unnoticed until post-World War when IBM needed some of his patents in 1946. Computing history awards the first modern computer invention to the US and English inventors at that time (I will discuss them in a later post), but Zuse’s pioneering work, while it was mainly done home alone in his apartment, is arguably the first recognizable modern-day computer if only others have said to him “YES!”, WE NEED IT.” #information and #communication, more than the product, is critical to the success of any innovator.
2023-06-11 Time Magazine Covers
Computers between the covers of Time Magazines. 73 years captured in 46 seconds. #computers #ai #tech
2023-06-11 Apple Developers Conference 2023
Tomorrow is an important developers event: Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2023. I believe this one will be more exciting, impactful, and dominating than that of Google or Microsoft. Not to be missed. #coders #tech #startup #wwdc2023
2023-06-11 TV in a Window
Breaking news in 1993! Some company launched a TV in a limited PC window. Cost $349 (expensive at the time). Breaking news in 2023! (30 years later). A great company launched a TV in an unlimited PC window. Cost - add an extra zero (still expensive). Did people use the TV in a computer in the 90s? Not much. Will people use TV in Vision Pro mask today? TBD. #applevisionpro INFOCOM AI
2023-06-11 honeybee
#startups, #opensource businesses, and #developers should watch out for the dependency trap of popular 3rd party #api. A systematic pattern exists. Unicorns, such as Reddit or Twitter, Docker, and even ChatGPT-powered Bing, start as free and open their arms to the community by offering paid or unpaid API services. Developers build their products around the unicorns’ APIs, saving money and demonstrating agility by avoiding the “reinventing the wheel” scheme. The unicorns raise their prices for more revenue or in an attempt to shut down alternative solutions. Developer-consumers of the unicorn products call it unfair and can hardly do anything but quit. The unicorns would say it is unfair not to get paid for their services and innovation. Everything becomes chaotic - legal battles, breaking media news, and uproars in social media. Some turn it into political battles between David and Goliath, the copy-right versus the copy-left movements, or even the capitalists versus the socialists. There is no right or wrong, but there can be losses for those that depend on 3rd party APIs even if they paid for them. If you are a product developer, consider the opportunity cost of 3rd APIs at the START of the product development rather than as a backlog item that will surely backfire right after you celebrate a successful product launch. Don’t let APis sting you like the Western honey bee (also known as APIs Mellifera).
2023-06-21 Apple Music for Coders
I am selecting some Apple Music playlists that align with the mood while coding, so you don’t have to :). When you are all caffeinated and in the “zone,” put the headset on and listen to the Intense Gaming” playlist (heavy metal music) https://lnkd.in/g_nSbqNi When starring at the code in front of you and have no idea where the bug is, you should pause and listen to the playlist: “New Age Essentials” playlist https://lnkd.in/gVRnnZRx If you are super angry, especially when your computer starts acting weird, and you can’t tell what you did, we need to calm you down with “The Works” classical music playlist https://lnkd.in/gUzbyFJT If your code starts running perfectly fine after you went through the different mental stages listed above, we need to celebrate with the “Ibiza” dance music playlist https://lnkd.in/g_pXmA-X
2023-06-24 Full Stack
It seems many engineers and data scientists want to jump into AI because of all the hype and the fear of missing out. They take some Coursera course or watch someone making a live video on YouTube. They get overwhelmed with the terminology that only gets deeper as more publications and engineering occur. They fear for their jobs. News media and major celebrities talking about AI taking over everything do not make them feel better. If you are one of those that are constantly worried, I have a suggestion for you. Learn to be full-stack using one backend and one front-end language, and make everything work locally on your computer. AI is not going away anytime soon. It can wait, but your skills must get better in coding and computing in general. You will then feel you have the control. From there on, you will lead and not be led by anyone else. That is my advice to you. Have a great weekend. You got this. #career #ai #engineering #coding
2023-07-23 Peanuts
A side post: I had 1980 Peanuts Classics in the background while coding and came across a beautiful musical act when Jason Victor Serinus whistled Peppermint Patty’s ice-skating music, Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” as The Voice of Woodstock. The backstory is that when Peppermint competes in the skating competition, her music tape breaks. The moment where she is about to be disqualified from the competition, Woodstock, the bird, comes to the rescue and whistles the song while she dances. Beautiful music. Worth to listen to. It is one of the finest moments of a human making music with the help of nature and not machines.
2023-07-26 Open Source Skeptical
In today’s tech industry, we need to be more than skeptical when companies use the term “open source”. It is not what you think it is. Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn’t mean it is
2023-08-02 First Video Game Article
Arguably the first publication ever that mentions a video game is the Decuscope newsletter from April 1962 at MIT. The newsletter was for Digital Equipment Computer PDP-1 users at the time. In it, the first mention of Space War, considered the first computer game ever invented, way before Pong. History of the game is at https://lnkd.in/epeD4NKA! A scanned version of the newsletter is at https://lnkd.in/eQA5n2-t You can also play a JavaScript emulator version of the game online at https://lnkd.in/eKgh-4nb
2023-08-02 Space War
Arguably the first publication ever that mentions a video game is the Decuscope newsletter from April 1962 at MIT. The newsletter was for Digital Equipment Computer PDP-1 users at the time. In it, the first mention of Space War, considered the first computer game ever invented, way before Pong. #computerhistory. History of the game is at https://lnkd.in/epeD4NKA! A scanned version of the newsletter is at https://lnkd.in/eQA5n2-t You can also play a JavaScript emulator version of the game online at https://lnkd.in/eKgh-4nb
2023-08-03 Project Mac
Before Jupyter Notebooks for Python came Mathematica, SPSS, and others for data scientists. Such tools remain common among researchers for statistical data analysis to this day. The more techie would code their analysis using languages like Fortran, APL, and others. One particular approach that is nearly lost to time is Project MAC, an MIT research project sponsored by US government agencies in the 1960s. Dubbed “on-line analysis for data scientists”, the project consists of a library of computer routines for testing statistical hypotheses operated using teletype (old-fashioned fax-like machine) using a conversation-style approach. Like your Python-based notebook today, where you receive an immediate response to your statistical queries, the concept existed as early as the 60s. Just wanted to share in case you are wondering about the early days of interactive computing for data scientists before our beloved Python programming language came to existence. #computerhistory
2023-08-03 the TAB key
Random #computerhistory facts: Notice the TAB key on your computer keyboard? You probably use it often to indent or skip spaces. But did you know that it was, in fact, a hardware device that dates back to 1900, roughly 15 years following the invention of the typewriter. The word TAB comes from the word tabulate, which means create a table. In the 19th century, typists had to click a lot of spaces and backspaces to form a table on paper using their typewriter. To make their lives easier, Frederic Hillard filed a patent for a tab rack with adjustable clips that act as a tabular stop. The device is pluggable and is placed inside the typewriter after you adjust the clips according to the spaces you need. After that, pressing the tab key would advance the typewriter carriage to the next tab stop. When computer keyboards replaced typewriters, the TAB key remained.
2023-08-03 on-line for scientists
Before Jupyter Notebooks for Python came Mathematica, SPSS, and others for data scientists. Such tools remain common among researchers for statistical data analysis to this day. The more techie would code their analysis using languages like Fortran, APL, and others. One particular approach that is nearly lost to time is Project MAC, an MIT research project sponsored by US government agencies in the 1960s. Dubbed “on-line analysis for data scientists”, the project consists of a library of computer routines for testing statistical hypotheses operated using teletype (old-fashioned fax-like machine) using a conversation-style approach. Like your Python-based notebook today, where you receive an immediate response to your statistical queries, the concept existed as early as the 60s. Just wanted to share in case you are wondering about the early days of interactive computing for data scientists before our beloved Python programming language came to existence. #computerhistory
2023-08-06 Bram Moolenar
Rest in peace, Bram Moolenaar, the creator of the most ubiquitous text editor, VIM. He passed away at the age of 62 due to a medical condition. VIM is not dead, however, since Bram’s legacy continues through the work of other of his long-time associates as well as the open-source community with Neovim. Yet, it is sad to lose such a key figure in the computing industry #tech #linux #code https://lnkd.in/gaVTxMWv
2023-08-17 Climate Change
Rather than marvel and build the AI algorithms that would turn chatbots or robots into humans, we should spend more time focusing on nature. Climate change is real. The heatwaves and the fires are real. The storms and hurricanes are real. Those that entrust religion instead of science with saving the planet are real. Those in government that push any changes to the next government are real. Those unicorns racing one another on who ages last, who wins in a caging match, and who has a bigger xxxx are real. Our generation and the ones before them are failing our planet, our children, and their children. Building generative AI or going to Mars is not an answer. We are not getting the basics of universal human survival right. We ignore it because we do not think it impacts us, or we expect someone else to do something about it. What is happening in Hawaii is sad but is not new. Fellow people have died, and more are missing! We all know that, and yet, we move on because we believe that “it does not impact us!” IT DOES! No one will likely disagree with what I said. They will either like the post or ignore it and, subsequently, send me a private message that they love my post. How would that help? None. We need everyone to express their opinions first and foremost. Our feeds should be filled with topics around climate change. Something has to change, and it has to change fast before nothing is left except the useless junk of electronic circuits from our AI revolution. #climatechange #tech
2023-08-25 Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
an awesome demo of computer automation (a.k.a. AI 1.0) can be seen in the 1969 movie clip from “The Computer Wore Tennis Shows) https://lnkd.in/g9XKeCx9. #retrocomputing #ai
2023-09-03 SDF Retro Computing
The SDF retro computing and home brew exhibition is scheduled for September 30 and October 1 in Seattle, WA. Per the site, “the Interim Computer Museum strives to preserve and share the history of computing through interactive exhibits using vintage computer hardware with modern enhancements.” There are no entry fees. The exhibition is held in partnership with Seattle Retro Computing. I hope to see you there. Please message me if you plan to visit. Link to the exhibit https://icm.museum #unix #pdp #timesharing #telex#retrocomputing #bbs
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