I read GEB cover to cover and haven’t stopped thinking about it for years. Not a brag, a nudge that it’s not impenetrable and more people should read it.
It is a popular science book which catches the vibe of mathematical logic in an excellent way. It is not a textbook, nor a piece of research. It's all vibes, but high-quality vibes. If you are in the right headspace it can be really inspiring!
I had my copy signed by Prof Hofstadter; a treasure to this day. Led to a maths degree, years of organ playing classes, a career in software, and a Zen practice going on 20 years. And I'm pescatarian. I even wrote a few haiku when my babies were little. Hmm, time for another listen to a Tocatta and Fugue.
The extraneous stuff is honestly fabulous, IMO of course. Just being able to listen to a four part fugue sensibly is a rare but accessible pleasure. And amusing dialogs as an instantiated dialectic for showing the truth synthesized from apparent opposites, is a great pedagogical learning.
I showed up to first day at university and an older student talked to me for like two minutes before declaring that I needed to read GEB. I dutifully went ahead and bought it, and I still work in logic today.
He wrote a number of follow-up books. I love GEB, but the follow ups were often disappointing in surprising ways.
He has another book about the beauty and challenges of translating poetry, but it’s actually about the sudden death of his wife and it's been too sad for me to finish.
I gave that book to my mathematician grandma, and she found it so boring she couldn’t finish it - “All this stuff was known for decades”. True anecdote.
A large chunk of the book is philosophizing about AI and the nature of the mind and intelligence. And when it's betting on the AI that existed pre-AI winter... yeah, that part is quite dated.
You should see his book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which is entirely about his experiments with AI in The Fluid Analogies Research Group with his grad students. Although I wonder if those techniques could be paired with LLMs somehow.
I'd have thought so too, but when I went looking for a copy in Waterstones and failed to find it under popsci section, or in maths, I tried the enquiry desk.
After a few attempts where I eventually tried "goddle s-chair batch" we found it.
I'm right there with you bud. I just wish it wasn't such a pain to get my hands on a bottle here in Portland so much of the time. So many cocktail nerds to compete with.
Now I want a Last Word, is quarter after two too early for a cocktail?
Is that the case? I see this note focusing on AI reports in the release notes, and I've poked around the OpenSSH project more generally and don't see any indication that they don't accept or welcome other AI inputs.
I'm a terrible typist, so I can't criticize. Lately I've noticed I end up needing to edit what seems to be the majority of my comments because I notice typos shortly after posting them. Hopefully this comment isn't one of them!
I don’t want to split hairs here, but you started it … :)
It was 53-byte “cell” switched, but used virtual circuits as a path through the network. The data plane had no globally routable address in the cell header. I don’t think most people considered it a “packet” network, and being an ITU standard it definitely belonged on that incumbent, connection-oriented, telco side side of the protocol wars.
However when I worked with SDH it was particularly popular because some customers like banks vetoed ATM because they were incredibly worried one of their packets would make its way to a third party. At that time encryption was not yet commonplace. I always thought that risk was a bit overblown but they were adamant.
SDH was more like a software switched multiplexing (where the previous generation PDH had this in hardware). And it was not exposed to the customer, they just got a symmetric feed of 2mbps or a multiple thereof.
Still, technically the same could happen if we configured it wrong. But for some reason the banks were less worried about it.
But yes it was not packet by packet switched no. I have to admit my knowledge of ATM was never the best as I worked exclusively on the SDH network.
Almost 30 years ago, I worked on a corporate campus with several different buildings spread out over about 5 miles. There was a SONET ring linking them. I remember a coworker showing me this add-drop multiplexer thing so he could provision a fractional T1 of bandwidth out of the ring. CSU/DSUs, thick serial cables, cisco 2501 routers... We'd laugh at these speeds today.
I've seen some very old cubicle setups that had two strands of 62.5/125 multimode (OM1) pulled to each desk for a FDDI connection. Very costly in its era.
That rang some bells, working in a communal data-centre, serving all of town, and smaller neighbouring towns. At 100Mb/s. Funny thing was the town still used many terminals in its offices. Serial Siemens terminals, speaking to Siemens RM400, RM600 and something called BS2000, also by Siemens. Of course with baudrates, parity, even/odd, start&stop bits nobody else would have used. Because Siemens...
So how do you connect them? By using adapters not much bigger than a matchbox, somehow powered by the serial port! At insane prices per piece, more than the terminal itself.
Shrug? Vee arr government, vee don't need to care about zat!1!!
(Town is broke by now, btw.)
Similar things in all police stations of that state.
(Many more towns, counties, cities broke there, too.)
Reasoning for using FDDI was that there existed equipment (by Allied Telesis IIRC) which could detect someone messing with the fibre somewhere, out of sight.
Not that much later, in the German HQ of some larger insurance company, I had the privilige of playing with FDDI at 1Gb/s. And witness the oh so unbreakable IBM S390(or was it still 370 at the time?) go down hard, several times...
Hrrm. What else did I witness? Oh, some Compaq thing made for a rack, 4 units high, sitting on a desk without cover, making you feel like you'd be in a vacuumer, or right next to an airport. Whooooouuuuiiiiieeeehissssss!
That thing ran Novell Netware, responsible for every login from any client across all offices in town. Handled by a full-length ISA-Card, full eight bits wide! Not 16. Not using the EISA-slots...(facepalm)
>I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned.
Apparently, WiFi is spotty on OPNsense. I did start looking into home grown options, but WiFi 7 with 10Gbit ethernet is no joke. Most hardware ends up being power-hungry and noisy.
The Omnia NG is fanless, meaning quiet and power-efficient. It's also small and relatively stylish. The small hardware LCD is very handy, and everything Just Works. The whole package is just so well put together.
Fanless is attractive on paper, but often means overheating and unreliable in practice. A large, slow fan in a bigger case is always better if you value reliability and a long service life. The best 10G router that you can buy is a low spec PC with a two-port 10G NIC. Make sure airflow is directed to the NIC (a PCI fan bracket is useful for that). WiFi is best handled by a dedicated access point, ideally the ceiling-mounted commercial type.
In my stress tests, I've not seen any issues with overheating. My 10G ONU connects to the router over an ethernet cable, and the SFP+ module that plugs into does get quite warm, though not hot enough to be uncomfortable.
