My giant #VCFSW thread. I was in Dallas to attend the Vintage Computer Festival 2024. Last year was great. This year was even better.

Here I am with David Murray, Youtube’s 8-bit guy. Last year, I was pleased to fund the production of the first 1,000 #CommanderX16 computers. /1 The #CommanderX16 project is coming along. David and Kevin gave a presentation about the development of the new audio hardware and a network card that now allows the machine to connect to BBSs. /2 #VCfSW

1/12: I write about #Hyperwar often. But what is it? General Allen and I defined the concept of "hyperwar," a form of war in which AI revolutionizes the tempo and nature of future warfare; an environment where autonomous systems, AI, swarms, and cyberattacks play pivotal roles. 2/12: We envision future battles where the traditional OODA loop is compressed, as AI-driven systems enable responses in nearly real-time, overshadowing the speed of human decision-making.

I'm grateful that Texas' public school leadership is here at #HyperWerx today and we will discuss ways in which to use AI to protect our children against school shootings. Our @sgold1b CMO is on stage right now!

🧵 Wu Dao 2.0 is a massive multi-modal neural network that uses about 1.75 trillion parameters.

This makes it about 10X larger than GPT-3.

It was developed in China by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.

And now it has a "child." /1 "Hua Zhibing, Wu Dao 2.0’s child, is the first Chinese virtual student. She can learn continuously, compose poetry, draw pictures, and will learn to code in the future." /2

"Should I launch my own startup?" I'm often asked this question. On the one hand, the answer is simple; it's what I've chosen to do my entire career and isn't building a business the coolest thing ever?! But on the other hand, I've also experienced sufficient doses of both /1 the +ves & -ves of entrepreneurship to not be flippant in my response. The answer is very individual and situation dependent and there is no panacea. In many ways, whether to launch a startup could be amongst the most crucial decisions /2

Let me take you on a trip to Murree, Pakistan, a charming hill station at an altitude of 7,500 feet, located in the Himalayan foothills. The town is named after the Virgin Mary. (1/x) Local legend suggests that Murree is the last resting place of Mary, mother of Jesus. There is a significant and old Church presence here; The Church of the Holy Trinity, established in 1857, and The Convent of Jesus and Mary. (2/x)

Where does “Himalayan salt” come from? A photo thread. Enroute to Islamabad, Pakistan, I stopped to visit the mines in the Khewra salt range; the second largest salt mine in the world. It was discovered when Alexander the Great came through this region in ~330 BC. (1/x) At that time, salt was highly valued and was even used as currency by the Phoenicians. Interestingly, Alexander’s favorite warhorse, Bucephalus, is buried a few miles from here. (2/x)

What happened to UX evolution? This is the @Xerox STAR, an evolution of the Alto, released 40 yrs ago in 1981. Windows, icons, menus, pointer (WIMP), cut/paste, move, drag, resize. It’s all there, just as in #Windows11. Did we merely change icons & aesthetics for 40 yrs? (1) UX evolution seems a great example of a search for something better getting stuck in a “local minima”; GUIs are great, but is this paradigm “optimal”? What is the text->GUI-like shift that comes next? Some say VR. But that’s not precise enough. Not universal enough. (2)

I am a huge believer in the Unix philosophy. Small, composable modules, loosely coupled. If you know your way around a Un*x system, you need little else. Here’s an example. I’ve got an NFS volume on a server and I wanted to backup (1) all the content to USB drives automatically, every hour. I decided to use the rsync program to do differential backups, but ran into an issue. My server is on a UPS, but the USB enclosure is not. So at times, after a power failure, the USB drives aren’t available and rsync (2)

I’m bullish on Bitcoin but my reasons are very different from what you might have heard elsewhere. My conviction has to do with what I’ve learned as a student of technology history and my discovery of a class of “resonant ideas” that are eventually guaranteed to succeed. (1) You see, there are certain persistent desires & dreams we humans have; things we need technology to do for us. And we don’t give up until we get them, even across generations. Why? Perhaps, as a species we have some deep seated urges we can only achieve through technology? (2)

A couple of weeks ago, I started reading @stephen_wolfram's new book, "A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics". I have enjoyed it. But, my enjoyment of the book has nothing at all to do (1/6) with whether or not it indeed points us to a fundamental (or any) theory of physics*. Instead, the pleasure I derived comes from seeing visual manifestations of the ideas of emergence; complexity from simplicity, the power of computation and of generative construction ... (2/6)