The days ahead were bright but vexxing.
People I knew at IBM, just up the road a few miles in Armonk or at the Watson lab a little farther away in Yorktown Heights, had all moved around. The famous “Blue Ninja,” Lee Reiswig (whom I just found out died a few months ago; RIP) was nowhere to be found. The IBM people I could get on the phone, young, enthusiastic, soulless IBM drones, were now saying to use Windows of all things.
Many people own “smart” televisions, which is to say sets or boxes connected to the internet. Practically none of those people have read their televisions’ privacy policies. If they had, they would be horrified.
Two esoteric programming events bubbled up this past week. If you’re not into computer science, they may appear irrelevant to you. They’re not. The arcane managed to bring to life our pressing questions about whether AI can create or is a regurgitation machine.
The time has come. The inevitable can be postponed no more. I’m switching my desktop computer to Debian Linux. I should have embraced Debian from the beginning. Please allow me to offer my excuse for not having done so 26 years ago.
The Linux operating system for Intel-architecture personal computers wasn’t exactly new when I switched to it. There were already a number of publishers — I choose the word carefully; you’ll see why — who were offering their own versions, which were similar in some ways yet mostly incompatible with each other.