tech related

Many decades ago, when computing was still in its infancy punch cards were used for looms, to design patterns in English mills. They were then modified to store census data and to help measure the US population. In the process they saved the US government weeks of work and five million dollars at the time. This is according to my memory of reading The Big Switch and coming across this information two or three days ago.

The idea of punch cards was that you design cards with holes. Each hole gives a true or false value. Instead of writing “Billy Bob lives in a house with five children, two cats, three geese with an income of 500 USD per month you could punch the relevant hole on a tabulating machine. “Two contestants required 44.5 hours and 55.5 hours. Hollerith astounded Census Bureau officials by completing the task in just 5.5 hours!”

Fast forward to last year or the year before and you see that the world become super-excited about AI and how it could process big data, but also how it could intuite what we wanted to write by hoovering petabytes of data. Plenty of people are saying “This isn’t AI, this is machine learning”.

I am currently reading I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and we see that even today the same problems are occuring. (spoiler alert coming up). They fed info to one supercomputer and it broke, so another company fed the same information to another system but told it “if you find that this would kill people ignore it and return the document”. To this day AI is being taught this. “I am only an AI and I cannot answer this question” for Gemini and “I am not able to answer any questions related to events after September 2021 by ChatGPT.

If The Big Switch was written today it would be extended from “Rewiring the world from Edison to Google” to “Rewiring the World From Edison to OpenAI”. The book was published in 2008 and I’m reading it in 2024 so it will stop way before current information.

I bought the book over a decade ago, but didn’t get around to reading it until now. We are told that AI and other technology is revolutionary. Books such as the Big Switch show that in the grand scheme of things AI is evolutionary and itterative, rather than a brand new paradigm. Punch cards were as revolutionary in their day, as AI is today.

If we want to jump forward a few decades is another good example of “evolutionary progress”. We see that the technology that Google uses to help us look for flights is decades old and that Google is just a user interface built upon old code and interactions. The video I link to demonstrates how old tech needs to be modernised to help cope with crewing requirements. In the video they speak about how when everything is working it’s easy to manage. It’s once flights are cancelled and flight crews are scattered in the wrong place that chaos ensues.

During a big storm you need one system to track flights, but you need a second one to track aircrafts, and a third to track crews. You then need that system to route new routes until everything is brought back to the normal schedules. With time you could combine these three requirements to provide a flexible and optimal flight re-booking system to minimise bad weather disruptions.

And Finally

It’s easy to call something revolutionary, if you don’t look far enough back in time. If we look only at our own lifetime then plenty of things seem revolutionary because the change is new to our generation but if you expand beyond our own lives, and look back a century or two you will find that almost everything is itterative. If anything is “revolutionary” it’s that we now have enough processing power for AI to make reading “punch cards” that are petabytes of data faster than in the past.

Just search for a file on a mac with easyfind or finder and you’ll see how slow searching on a local machine is, compared the the AI optimised systems that people are playing with today. LLM runs slow on Pi and 2016 mac book pro but it runs fast on newer machines. That’s where the new opportunities lie. Machine learning, masquerading as AI is enabled by technological advancements. Just look at the rivers, lakes, and gigawatts of power that are required for “AI” to be of any use.

A few weeks ago I chose to replace my apple watch series 4 with an apple watch SE because the battery was dying two to three times a day. Recently I had the same with the mobile phone. I would charge it in the morning, charge it the first time by eleven, and then use it, and have to charge it a second time by dinner, and then a third time overnight.

When batteries die that fast you have two options. Get a new phone, or replace the battery. I chose option two. I was able to get the battery replaced for 45 Euros rather than 70 CHF as I had expected and now the phone battery lasts two to three times longer. The battery isn’t able to last a full day but I use it reguarly, and I’m roaming.

When roaming phones look either for the home network or wifi, and when they find neither they burn through a lot of power. That’s why you need healthy batteries on phones, when travelling.

I’m happy to walk with an external battery, to charge the phone when needed. Recently though I encountered a serious problem. When I was driving from Switzerland to Spain I noticed that the battery was down to 28 percent, despite being plugged in to the car to charge. I was using TomTom go, Apple Maps and sharing my location. Usually those apps don’t bother the phone’s charging ability.

I don’t want to drive 11+ hours, especially if the phone dies half way through. It’s not that I don’t know the way, it’s that with podcasts, audiobooks and gps the trip is easier. By changing the battery the phone will charge properly. If I wasn’t going home by long road trip I wouldn’t have bothered, but there are cases where a healthy phone battery are needed. Road trips are one of them.

With Tailscale you can easily use a Pi-Hole from wherever you are., as long as Tailscale is connected. It’s easier than travelling with a Pi-Hole and setting it up wherever you are. I’m using it now, on my laptop. The pi-hole is in Switzerland but my laptop is in Switzerland.

The advantage of Tailscale is that it allows you to use self-hosted cloud services while you travel. It allows you to backup your photos, videos and other material to the self-hosted web but it also allows you to use services that you would not be able to use. I can use Audiobookshelf too, although for this service I have it available via No-Ip.

If we’re shifting to a culture of mobile phones and tablets then self-hosting become more relevant, because with self-hosting solutions we have functionalities that were in an app on a laptop or desktop now being available on a server via a web interface.

I can block adverts on my devices without getting in the way of people using their own devices. If you’re shopping for devices if you click on Google Recommendations at the top of a page you get an error with Pi-Holes. This doesn’t bother me but others may say that “the web is broken”.

More experiments to come. My Pi-Hole has been up for 49 days. I just updated it while writing this blog post.

Usually if I forget my phone I realise quite fast. Not today. Today I went for half a day without my phone. It was at home and I wasn’t. I used the watch’s LTE connection but a watch can’t do much. People speak of leaving phones at home for runs, and more.

If I leave my phone at home I can’t take photos, so the day is invisible, three years down the line when I am reminded of what I did a year ago, a month ago, etc.