From the Burlington, Vermont area, it’s only about a 45 minute drive to the Canadian border. (Yes, we are *that*close!🙂) As you get close to the border on Interstate 89, there is a sign on the right side that says: Latitude 45° North Midpoint Equator to North Pole Yes, indeed, once you drive past that point you are now getting closer to the North Pole than the Equator from a latitude perspective! Wikipedia of course has some interesting info about the 45th parallel, including that it has formed part of the US / Canada border at times. In fact, when…
Jan 04
Russ White On The Process Around Creating RFCs in the IETF
Have you ever been curious about the process of creating a Request For Comments (RFC) document within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)? These are the standards like, oh, “HTTP”, that power the Internet. Have you been interested in understanding…
Jan 03
20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web
This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today. My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier…
Jan 02
The Rise of AI-driven “Virtual Influencers” (to no surprise)
Visit “Aitana Lopez” on Instagram. As you scroll down, the account looks like that of any of the hundreds (or thousands) of “influencer” accounts on Instagram. “Aitana” post photos from her travels, of her wearing various clothes, and making references…
Jan 01
AVFTCN 032 – Finding Hope Amidst the Chaos
Happy New Year! Climbing up into the proverbial crow’s nest as 2024 begins, it looks a bit bleak up ahead. LOTS of icebergs! Of course here in the USA we have the US presidential election, that is sure to bring out an added level of nastiness. We are not alone in this… a colleague of mine […]
Jan 01
My Themes for 2024
As I have been doing for the past 15 years (see list), my first post of 2024 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles. This year I decided on 3 H’s: Hope, Health, and Habits. Hope We live in challenging times… and 2024 looks to present even greater challenges. A colleague of mine noted that there will be over 100 elections in 67 countries in 2024 – all of which will undoubtedly create communication and societal challenges in…
Dec 07
Can You Kick the Trolls Out Of Your Online Forum? U.S. Supreme Court to Decide
Should the governments of Texas and Florida decide whether and how online discussion sites can moderate their posts? Let’s say you have an online community about the town you live in, and someone starts posting off-topic messages about some other town…
Dec 02
AVFTCN 030 – Want to run an AI on your laptop? Just download one file…
5:42 am Mind = 🤯 Would you like to run a large language model (LLM) on your own local computer? So that all your data and requests stay local? Would you like your own private “ChatGPT”-like thing that you could ask questions of? I happened to be looking at my personal email the other afternoon […]
Nov 26
AVFTCN 029 – Sunday Smorgasbord: Humane AI Pin, LEOs, Livestreaming Wikipedia editing
5:03 am Greetings from basement isolation. The dog has been let out and I’m back here in the dark. Instead of a specific topic, I want to catch up on some updates to past newsletters. So today’s note is a collection of smaller updates of different flavors. I’ll call it a smorgasboard, which of course […]
