link dump #14

I follow a lot of RSS feeds to make it easier to find interesting articles without having to regularly visit my entire list of interesting blogs which aren't updated often.  As you can see, I find a dizzying array of topics interesting.  For example today while taking the dog outside over my lunch break, looking up treated me to this interesting halo around the sun.  Apparently it's caused by ice crystals interacting with the sun's rays.

Ronny Chieng, who you might know from The Daily Show or movies, gave one of the more amusing commencement speeches I've seen recently.  It was better received than the speech Eric Schmidt gave where he got booed for his comments about AI.  There have been a number of other recent commencement speakers telling graduates that they'll have a hard time finding employment thanks to so many CEO's obsession with AI.  I think that shows how out of touch these speakers, often members of upper management of various companies, are with their workers or potential employees.
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/tracewilliamcowen/ronny-chieng-ai-speech-harvard

Apparently some of the Tesla staff members charged with reviewing video footage of their "Full Self Driving" feature in order to improve its performance don't trust Tesla's self driving technology.  I can't say I blame them.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/why-teslas-ai-trainers-dont-trust-its-self-driving-tech-or-its-safety-stats-2026-05-28/

I love cool cars so I found this story about how hot rodders are using 3-D printing to help build parts for their cars interesting.  I've heard people are doing the same thing to restore old computers.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/old-school-hot-rodders-are-using-high-tech-3d-scanners-to-make-custom-parts

This proposed Lego kit for building a model of the CROCUS reactor looks very cool.  The instructions and parts are already available if you'd like to build it yourself.
https://beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/e235fbd0-8ab8-4575-bd1c-37a25625f118

I found this article about the history of Digital Research's DR DOS interesting.  I used DR DOS in the late late 1980s when it was first released.  I even submitted a bug report to Digital Research when I found a program which didn't behave properly under DR DOS.  The bug was caused by a system call which behaved differently than the same system call on MS-DOS did when passed a string containing wildcards instead of an actual filename.  I even included a TSR (terminate and stay resident) program to work around the bug.
https://dfarq.homeip.net/dr-dos-revenge-of-cp-m/

This article about how people discovered someone they knew was super intelligent was interesting.  I used to work for a boss down at the Washington Navy Yard who would type long assembly language source files on the old CRT terminals we were stuck with on mainframes back in the late 1980s.  You could even ask him questions while he was typing and he would answer you with only a minor slowdown in his typing.  After typing these long programs, he would use the assemble and run option and his programs worked.  I was amazed that he could remember variable names he had used several pages of source code ago.  He was also amazingly effective with his explanations.  He's start out explaining at his level of understanding and if he saw you weren't understanding him, he'd adjust his explanation until you understood him and did it so you didn't feel insulted by the simpler explanation.
https://pleated-jeans.com/2026/05/22/people-share-the-moment-they-knew-they-were-in-the-presence-of-a-truly-massive-intellect/

Some of you may have build kits from Heathkit in the past.  I built two computer kits, an H-89 which ran CP/M and an H-151 which ran MS-DOS.  I also built one of their dot matrix printer kits.  Here's a video tour of their factory back in the day.
https://hackaday.com/2026/05/15/inside-the-heathkit-factory/

I found the news that plants react to anesthetics in a similar fashion to humans both fascinating and a little disturbing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11586303/

If you've never seen the TV series Halt and Catch Fire, it's definitely worth watching.  It focuses on the early days of personal computing which sounds as if it would be boring but this show manages to keep it entertaining.  The title refers to the mythical HCF op code which causes the CPU to catch fire.
https://unstack.io/halt-and-catch-fire

Reading about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon reminds me of how much I enjoyed watching it the couple times I've seen it.  I think I may be due to watch it again.
https://yusufaytas.com/why-crouching-tiger-hidden-dragon-is-a-masterpiece

If you've heard this story which Kurt Vonnegut told a few times, it illustrates why I like him so much as an author.  I think I would have enjoyed meeting him as well.  His books will both entertain you and lead you in directions you would have never expected when you started reading it.
https://chrisglass.com/2024/11/01/kurt-vonnegut-buys-an-envleope/ 

Before I became a father, I would have been skeptical about how much the experience changes someone.  When I held my daughter for the first time, it completely changed me.  Those changes were for the better although I would have doubted that a few years before.
https://www.sciencealert.com/fatherhood-dramatically-rewires-your-brain-scans-reveal

I've managed to clear out some of my backlog of interesting links with this link dump.  I hope you find something in here to inform or entertain you. 

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

I've started re-reading The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters.  I last read it 13 years ago and wanted to revisit it because I've been on an apocalyptic book kick lately.  I had remembered liking it a lot but I'm finding that the writing is even better than I remembered.  Here's a better review of it than I can write.
https://fantasyliterature.com/reviews/the-last-policeman/

The Last Policeman is an entertaining and slightly depressing (as apocalyptic books tend to be) blend of SciFi and mystery.  It won an Edgar Award when it was published in 2012.  It starts with an apparent suicide that the investigating police office thinks is suspicious.  That coupled with a predicted strike by an asteroid bends the story into science fiction territory.

The focus of this book is how people continue functioning when they know the end of life as we know it is coming.  In that respect, it reminds me of On the Beach by Nevil Shute which is another favorite book of mine in this same category.  Other similar books I've also enjoyed in this genre include The Postman, Earth Abides, Alas, Babylon, and I Am Legend.

It makes me wonder how humanity would really behave under similar circumstances.  Perhaps I'm cynical but I tend to think things would be more chaotic than those portrayed in The Last Policeman and On the Beach.

I enjoyed reading Garth Ennis' comic series The Boys which was adapted into a streaming series.  Call me cynical but to me, it highlights inherent flaws in human psychology which I believe is more realistic than the altruistic service to mankind portrayed in Superman comics.

Fortunately, my cynical beliefs don't prevent me from enjoying the more optimistic tone of The Last Policeman and I am.

A favorite beer

Tonight I'm celebrating the end of the work week with a Firestone Walker Paraboloid.  This beer isn't readily available on the east coast so I have to order it directly from Firestone Walker in California.  This brewer was founded by a couple guys with experience in wine making.  They make some amazing beers with all the complexity of a fine wine.

Sipping on the Paraboloid made me remember the first time I had its little brother, a beer called Parabola, about 11 years ago at a restaurant in Leesburg called Leesburg Public House.  LPH had been opened by a friend and quickly became one of our favorite weekly happy hour venues.  I had been reading about this legendary beer for a few years but had never seen it available nearby.  Jay, one of the servers at LPH, was very knowledgeable about craft beer and had a few connections in the beer world.  He was able to get a few highly rated beers such as Parabola to sell at the restaurant.

When we arrived at LPH that night, Jay told us that they had just received the Parabola.  I managed to convince Dave, a friend I had worked with at 5 different companies, to split a bottle with me.  Jay brought us the Parabola and served it with the flourish fitting such a special beer as you can see in the photo below.  Dave loved the beer as much as I did but he never let me forget that it was me who got him hooked on more expensive beers.  Each year when it was released we'd compare notes on where to find it in nearby stores.

 

This rambling train of thought caused me to remember that it's almost the 1 year anniversary of my buddy Dave's untimely death.  It would be difficult to express how much I miss him.  One of the things I miss most about Dave is how we both enjoyed talking about low level programming.  If he were still around I'd be telling him about the pointer math I had to do in a C program today.   I was doing that to solve the problem of a device at work occasionally misplacing its timestamp from the usual location at the start of a buffer to somewhere in the middle of the buffer.  Knowing where the timestamp ended up could provide clues about what's causing the problem.  This timestamp takes the form of a 64-bit integer.  This wouldn't normally be a problem to find that given the fact that the upper 16 bits of the timestamp contain an easily identifiable value but on ARM CPUs, 64-int integers are stored in little endian format.  So having found the correct 16 bits somewhere within the buffer, it was necessary to back up by 6 bytes to get the entire timestamp before the timestamp could be displayed in all its glory.  Pointer math is always fun.

Well, my celebratory beer is nearly gone now and that low level programming tired me out.  I think I'll sign off for now. 

 

 

link dump #13

 

I follow a lot of RSS feeds which makes it easier for me to discover interesting web pages without having to visit my entire list of interesting blogs which aren't updated often.  As you can see, I find a lot of topics interesting.

It's difficult for experts to fully explain the innate knowledge which makes them so good in their fields.  Experience can be impossible to pass long when trying to create new experts.  I think this may make it impossible to train AI systems to replace experts.
https://cekrem.github.io/posts/the-tacit-dimension/

I'm generally not keen on AI use but if you can hide prompts to force LinkedIn recruiter bots to entertain you with their unwanted spam, it seems like a win to me.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/linkedin-recruitment-spam-becomes-olde-english-prose-after-user-hides-ai-prompt-injection-in-bio-bots-also-also-manipulated-to-address-user-as-my-lord

When I first switched from Windows PCs to Macs 25 years ago, I found that I loved Mac OS X.  It reminded me of the software environment I enjoyed on the Sun 3/80 Workstation I had on my desk while working at Sprint International (the division which developed the computer networking hardware and software for Sprint's packet switching network) in 1990.  That Sun was the machine which caused me to love Unix.  The combination of Unix, X Windows, and that fast Sun hardware was the most productive environment for software development I had seen at that time and I still have fond memories of it.  Lately Apple's software seems much buggier than it used to which frustrates me at time.  It's reassuring to see that I'm not the only one who has noticed this steady decline in software quality.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/05/18/1320

Someone has created an animated version of Vincent van Gogh's painting The Starry Night and I found it entertaining to interact with various parts of the painting.
https://stillnight.joshua-garcia.com/

A study has found that playing the didgeridoo can help counteract the daytime sleepiness caused by sleep apnea.  I can't imagine many offices would be open to this type of therapy to treat affected employees.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1360393/

Finally there's  evidence for why the T-Rex had such tiny arms.  Sometimes evolution plays cruel tricks...
https://nautil.us/we-finally-have-the-answer-for-t-rexs-tiny-arms-1280997

There's no way I would agree to join a mission commanded by a billionaire rather than a fully trained astronaut/pilot.  Making an insane amount of money doesn't imply the ability to solve problems in stressful situations like a long space flight.  I'm curious to see how the radiation affects humans on this longer mission as it will be hard to shield the crew capsule adequately.  Shielding materials are heavy and extra weight is always hard to justify.
https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451

The Super El Niño predicted to form by winter could have devastating effects on both the world economy as well as our ability to keep the world's population fed.
https://respublicamgz.substack.com/p/a-super-el-nino-is-coming-the-last

It strikes me as horribly inefficient to have unique terms for groups of birds of different species.  Things like this make the English language both rich and difficult to master.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/04/brian-wildsmith-birds-company-terms/

Memories of my days as a Field Engineer

I recently read the book Talking About Machines by Julian E. Orr.  I enjoyed the experience as it brought back memories of my first and second jobs in the computer industry which started nearly 50 years ago.  Both those jobs involved computer field engineering (first mainframe and later minicomputers).  Many of the book's reviews seem to focus on ideas in the book which I don't find particularly interesting.  I believe this is largely due to the fact that the author's primary focus is on the sociological aspects of the job such as the ad-hoc methods of skill building required to augment company training. The downside of this perspective is that it overlooks some of the technical reasons for the job being quite difficult such as insufficient training, poor documentation, and inadequate support avenues.  Many of the reviewers seem to lack the technical background required to fully appreciate just how challenging work as a field engineer can be.

The book showed me that Xerox suffered from the same problems which both of my first two employers had.  The focus of all three companies seemed to be to reduce support costs by any means possible.    The book devotes much attention to the means by which the field engineers become competent and manage to maintain their productivity.  It attributes this largely to impromptu communications during meals and other social gatherings.  It glosses over the fact that companies scrimp horribly on training and documentation.  They rely on personal dedication from relatively low paid engineers devoting nontrivial amounts of their personal time to improving and maintaining their skills.  Companies seem to expect these levels of self training despite offering poor compensation and inadequate opportunities for advancement.

My first job was as a Field Engineer for Honeywell starting in 1977.  To qualify for that position, I had completed a 6 month full time training program in hardware maintenance at the Control Data Institute facility in Arlington, VA.  My class which was completed in early 1977 was the last at that location to enjoy completely instructor led training.  Subsequent classes used Control Data's PLATO system.  I cannot imagine being trained to diagnose and repair electronic equipment via software alone since it's so different from actual computer diagnosis and repait.  To train us in hardware diagnosis and debugging, we were required to construct computer circuits such as adders by hand wiring small circuit boards containing discrete electronics.  Once we demonstrated the correct operation of the circuit we had constructed to the instructor, we had to leave the room while the instructor inserted a bug of some sort.  This exercise helped teach us how to debug logic problems.

That training proved to be excellent preparation for maintaining computer equipment.  What I hadn't anticipated was the wide variety of equipment I would be expected to repair with no training at my first job.  In my first few months, I learned to rely on computer operators leading me to the problem equipment and either pointing out or reproducing the behavior they thought to be incorrect because I sometimes couldn't identify the equipment on my own having never encountered it before.  For my first year or so, after being shown the equipment, I frequently had to retire to the field engineer's office to peruse the documentation to figure out how to proceed.  Fortunately, Honeywell had excellent documentation with most equipment manuals containing section which offered a detailed theory of operations.  Reading how the designers intended for equipment to work which was key in being able to effectively diagnose problems. Once I eventually transitioned to software engineering, I've often been forced to build mental models of hardware and software systems because detailed documentation seems to be largely a thing of the past.

The field engineering support contracts at my first job specified that customers offer a field engineering office where the documentation, parts, tools, and test equipment required to service computers and peripheral equipment could be stored.  In that respect, I had it easier than Xerox field engineers did as they were required to carry all of the documentation, tools, and an inventory of spare parts with them to be able service trouble calls on whichever type of copier they maintained.  I feel fortunate since with such a wide variety of equipment supported at my first job, the manuals alone would have taken up a sizeable portion of a van and adding spare parts and test equipment necessary to do the job would have made carrying everything with me as I visited customer sites untenable.  I'm a bit jealous that the Xerox engineers could focus on one or two models rather than the 5 different models of mainframe computers and 6 or 7 types of each of the following - magnetic disk drives, magnetic tape drives, line printers, punched card readers and punches, computer terminals (both hard copy and CRT varieties).  I'll leave out the paper tape readers/punches, magnetic drum storage, and core memory units to avoid dating myself.  My second job involved maintaining minicomputers which required far fewer parts and less documentation but which also made it so much less challenging as to be boring.  Often there was only a cabinet in some obscure corner of the computer room devoted to on-site documentation and parts storage. 

I spent 5 years at Honeywell and that experience provide me with debugging skills that I've relied upon during my lengthy career.  As mentioned in the book, there were few opportunities for advancement for field engineers.  On the technical side, one could aspire to be promoted to be a specialist which is essentially a more skilled technician often only called for the most difficult problems.  The other path was management which shared few skills with the technical path.  There were too few positions in both paths to reward anything more than a few lucky engineers.  That was one reason why I elected to make the jump to software engineer after 5.5 years as a field engineer although I did spend a year as a specialist after managing to qualify for a specialist training class in Honeywell's training facility in Phoenix, AZ by working very hard for 3 years.

My second job involved maintaining minicomputers which were so much simpler than the mainframe computers I had spent 5 years maintaining that I found myself bored while easily being the best debugger in the district.  I say this not to boast but because during the 7 weeks of training I was sent to in Boston, every engineer in my district had tried to fix a customer's tape drive which had initially had a simple data read problem.  By the time I got back for my mid-training break, I had to first remove the 8 or 9 problems my fellow engineers had installed in the tape drive trying unsuccessfully to fix it.  When I got to it, the fusible diodes in the power supply would melt their solder and drop to the bottom of the chassis each time it was powered on.  It was not terribly difficult being the best engineer in a district filled with such poor engineers.  It was no wonder that I was offered a job in training while in Boston because I wrote a machine language program that none of my instructors could figure out.  I didn't accept because the training instructors were not terribly competent and I didn't want to move to Boston.

Instead of a CPU made of 80 wire wrap boards, the DEC PDP-11 managed to fit the entire CPU on just a board or two.  That reduces the task of debugging a system problem from putting boards on board extenders and using an oscilloscope to trace signals from board to board while running some software keyed in from the maintenance panel switches, to being able to swap the entire CPU in a matter of minutes which field engineers at the time derisively referred to as shotgun debugging.  I got so bored that I took the job of installing and maintaining the 12 DEC PDP-11 minicomputers at USA Today when they launched in 1982.  Taking that position freed me from the need to travel to a variety of computer sites located within a 120 mile radius of my office in Rosslyn, VA but left me working an unpleasant 8 pm - 4 am shift at USA Today's headquarters which was also in Rosslyn.  Walking the two blocks back to the parking garage at my company's office each morning at 4 am was definitely a weird experience.  The only entertainment I had was seeing how vandals had rearranged the letters on the Chinese Cinema, which depending on the movie being shown sometimes read Chinese Enema.  The 4 or 5 months I spent on that weird shift made me feel isolated since I was heading to work about the time that most normal people were getting home from work.

Since the DEC PDP-11 minicomputers at USA Today were all new, most of the problems I dealt with each night were with the computer terminals used by the newspaper staff.  My company had determined that the most common FRU (field replaceable unit) for the CRT terminal devices consisted of a board which took me about 20 minutes to replace thanks to all the screws and cables which needed to be removed.  After my first couple weeks of working on terminals, I learned to associate symptoms with one of four chips which were the most common failures.  An example was the vertical deflection chip which gave the symptom of a single horizontal line across the CRT when it failed.  I could replace the chip in less than 5 minutes.  So I removed the chips from all of the terminal boards which I sent back for repair to build myself a stock of the chips which my company would not allow me to order as individual chips.  And I started a letter writing campaign to the design group trying to make the case for stocking the chips.  I never heard back from them before I left a few months later.

I occasionally get a bit nostalgic for my first field engineering job.  I don't miss working on peripherals such as line printers (which are incredibly messy) and card punches (which are mechanical monstrosities) at all.  On the other hand, a huge computer system (which would easily consume all floor space of most convenience stores) which fails to boot or which misbehaves when a particular piece of software is run is like an incredibly challenging puzzle.  Being paid to solve puzzles made my first job feel like play at times.  The beauty of having made the move to software is I get to debug problems every bit as challenging but I don't have to worry about ruining clothes because I got stuck working on a line printer. 

 

link dump #12

I follow a lot of RSS feeds which makes it easier for me to discover interesting web pages without having to visit my list of interesting blogs which aren't updated often.  I hate to send these interesting links via email since it feels too much like a teacher giving homework... here, go read all of these web pages and report back to me.  Instead I think collecting them in a blog post is a friendlier way to pass links along.

I started in the computer industry as a field engineer.  When I got stuck on night shift, there was often little to keep me occupied between trouble calls.  I used to play early computer games like Star Trek and Adventure (aka Colossal Cave Adventure on a TI Silent 700 terminal with an acoustic modem.  Here's a history of the game which brought back memories for me.
https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html

I assumed that Lithium Ion batteries caused a fair number of fires but I had no idea it was this bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/11/uk-firefighters-lithium-ion-battery-fires-ebikes

I worked for an optical networking startup company called Ocular Networks for a while.  The news that fiber optic cables can be used to eavesdrop on people came as a surprise to me.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fiber-optic-cables-can-eavesdrop-nearby-conversations

Apparently cats react differently to falling in space.  The video is fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MBzDfmynaAQ 

Apparently volcanoes can create lightning while erupting.  As if lava wasn't scary enough on its own...
https://nautil.us/why-volcanoes-sometimes-shoot-out-lightning-1280235

The classic story of Mel, a programmer who hand optimized accesses on a magnetic drum storage device entertains me each time it surfaces.  I've known programmers who had this level of hardware knowledge.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Creating a permanent settlement on the Moon presents lots of challenges to overcome.
https://theconversation.com/the-unseen-challenges-of-life-on-the-moon-273370 

link dump #11

 

I follow a lot of RSS feeds which makes it easier for me to discover interesting web pages without having to visit my list of interesting blogs which aren't updated often.  I hate to send these interesting links via email since it feels too much like a teacher giving homework... here, go read all of these web pages and report back to me.  Instead I think collecting them in a blog post is a friendlier way to pass links along.

In case you're curious about why I'm posting on my blog more often recently, it's because I'm counting down to starting my retirement.  According to my spreadsheet, today I'm down to 158 more days of work.

I have fond memories of playing some of the old Infocom games.  There's a new web based version of Zork which actually shows you the code which is running as you play the game.  That appeals to both the techie and gamer in me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom

NASA has shut down an instrument on the 49 year old Voyager 1 probe to extend its mission even longer.  This adds more evidence for my opinion that NASA does some of the finest engineering ever done.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260504023835.htm

There's a new theory about a possible way to cut travel time to Mars.  This will be critical for continued missions.
https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/i-was-not-looking-for-this-scientist-accidentally-finds-shortcut-to-mars-that-could-slash-travel-time-in-half

This new brake by wire system sounds interesting but I'll avoid cars which feature it until it has much more testing.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-first-modern-car-without-hydraulic-brakes-is-headed-to-production

Richard Dawkins is being mocked for his questioning of whether LLM systems such as Claude pass all current tests for consciousness.  Since a few people working on AI systems have made similar claims, it seems ridiculous to mock a well respected scientist who has no special expertise in the subject.  Since these systems have been trained on massive amounts of output from talented authors, it doesn't surprise me that they can string together sentences which sound convincing.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion

If you got the idea that I'm an AI skeptic, you'd be right.  Here's one of the many reasons I avoid them at every opportunity.  I wonder whether the engineer who was working with the AI agent which did this got reprimanded or fired.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ai-agent-deletes-company-s-entire-database-in-seconds/ar-AA21UbLU 

Even though I have strong doubts about whether we'll create actual conscious machine models anytime soon, I do believe that octopuses are intelligent despite having brains which are very different from ours.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01302-4

Denis Leary has long been one of my favorite comedians and he seems to be a great human being as well.  I know he's been doing fund raising for firefighters since he starred in Rescue Me and he's managed to step up the support through this innovative plan.
https://abcnews.com/Business/wireStory/denis-learys-crazy-idea-puts-civilians-fdny-training-132625577

I'm happy to hear that there are more bookstores now than there were six years ago.  Literate people would probably help prevent many of the problems we currently have.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/27/052242/america-now-has-70-more-bookstores-than-in-2020-says-bookshoporg-founder

The mention of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle is initially what caught my eye about this story but it's interesting on its own merit.  Who knew there were 20 crystalline forms of ice?
https://boingboing.net/2026/04/29/scientists-found-ice-with-a-304-molecule-repeating-pattern.html

Hopefully you don't drive one of these cars with soy-based wiring since they attract rodents which can lead to expensive repairs.
https://www.box-kat.com/blogs/box-kat-blog/full-list-of-cars-with-soy-based-wiring-2025-update