So climbing world seems pretty stoked that Shawn has recently been projecting the infamous Burden of Dreams, 9A/V17, in Finland. Boulder is famous for being the first 9A boulder first ascent made by Nalle Hukkataival in 2016 after three years of projecting.
Lately, Shawn has also uploaded his projecting videos of the boulder to his YouTube channel, so check those out!
MIT study finds huge carbon cost to self-driving cars
The study found that with a mass global takeup of autonomous vehicles, the powerful onboard computers needed to run them could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centres in operation today.
These data centres currently produce around 0.14 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to the entire output of Argentina or around 0.3 per cent of global emissions, according to the researchers. […]
The high emissions are the result of the huge computing workload placed on each self-driving vehicle. The researchers’ modelling assumes that the vehicles use a similar algorithm to what is popular today – a multi-task learning deep neural network, so called because it can perform many tasks at once.
These neural networks have to process an onslaught of data, simultaneously analysing the inputs provided by several onboard cameras with high frame rates to allow the car to drive on its own.
Despite not using Twitter, I stumble upon some Twitter threads every once in a while, and I have to read them through. This time, it was one of the tweets that John Carmack, for whom I have tremendous respect, wrote:
Programmers are also users, and “funnel drop offs” apply. “Show source” was pivotal for the web, and I wish native code behaved similarly — ctrl-break any application and be in a debugger with full source and the ability to make changes.
Precisely this kind of control-break behaviour where you can immediately after failure get into full-fledged debugging, inspectability with complete source available but also where you can evaluate any expression in any stack frame is available in Common Lisp. Today! Similar behaviour is basically impossible to implement in any modern language that requires compiling and running to do anything, meaning C, C++, Rust, Haskell, Go and so on.
Actually, just recently, Jack Rusher had a great talk in Strange Loop, called “Stop Writing Dead Programs”, which revolved around this exact topic, why we keep using technologies that were meant for batch-processing days and punch cards, and one of the topics in this was the previously mentioned ability to debug from Lisp. Check it out:
So naturally, in the Twitter thread, someone raised Lisp, and Carmack responded to that with:
Unfortunately, heavily customizable languages like lisp are their own barrier to entry, even for those that already know the language. There is a lot to be said for boring languages making it easier to contribute.
Which is fair. But, at the same time, every language can be abused; the same applies to Lisp. Of course, you can go full-on wild west with various macros, which only you can understand, but when it comes to good code (whatever that means), even in Lisp, it should be pretty straightforward and easily understandable. Functions, classes, nothing too fancy. If you need to use something fancy, the problem should REALLY require it. Great example would be reader macros from Common Lisp. Great feature, rarely needed.
It truly saddens me that we live in a world where something that Carmack talks about would be easily achievable, and you could argue when looking at the industries where Lisp used to be heavily used, we had this world, but we just decided to give it away.
Common Lisp would definitely be a fine choice for many problems that we face today, but we just decided to go elsewhere, and now we have to live with it. But maybe it’s not too late. Start using Common Lisp more!
Some time ago, I decided to start keeping a book list and wanted to start writing some notes about them . But, unfortunately, life happened, and I forgot that I was supposed to make these notes. Of course, I don’t have anything or anyone enforcing me to do these, but I still want to keep my own promises. So, now when I found some time, I decided to do this small overview of the months that I missed. Hopefully, in the future, I could continue this habit monthly. So here are the books I read between November 2022 and January 2023.
Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost by Osmon, Erin, ISBN: 9781538112182
Jason Molina has been one of my favourite songwriters for a very long time. Still, I never knew too much about him, so I wanted to pick this book up as a desperate fanboy.
Rautatie by Aho, Juhani
I mainly use Kindle for my reading, which naturally depends on Amazon itself, sadly. Since moving to Berlin, I’ve missed Finnish literature since, naturally, those books are pretty hard to come by here. At the same time, Amazon doesn’t really have too many of these. Then I found out that Project Gutenberg provides lots of books not only in English, but in other languages, too, such as Finnish. For which I wrote a little appreciation post a while ago .
Juhani Aho is one of the first novelists coming from Finland during the time of late 1800s and early 1900s, Rautatie (engl. Railway) being one of his most notable novels. A culturally important book about a man and woman living in the countryside in the late 1800s, where they start hearing rumours about trains without seeing them.
To Live’s to Fly: The Ballad of Late, Great Townes Van Zandt by Kruth, John, ISBN: 9780306816048
In the same category as Jason Molina’s biography, Townes Van Zandt is also one of my favourite songwriters, and I was interested in learning more about him.
The Prophet by Gibran, Kahlil, public domain
Another classic. An excellent and short book with lots of profound teaching and philosophies about life. Inspirational.
Be Here Now by Dass, Ram
When moving to Berlin, I sold everything I owned and moved only with the clothes I had. The sad part is that I had to sell all the vinyls I owned and all the books I owned. The only physical book that I brought with me was this one. Very hippy-dippy book to some, but I love it. I’ve read it multiple times before this and will most likely reread it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Márquez, Gabriel García, ISBN: 9780060883287
For some reason, when I started to keep this reading list, I filled it up with classics that I, for some reason, hadn’t read earlier. This is one of them. A fascinating book filled with symbolism, some could say a little bit too much of it even, telling the story of one family living in a small town and their problems with the world and how history keeps repeating itself. Classic for a reason, definitely a great read.
Juoksuhaudantie by Hotakainen, Kari
Despite not being too old book (coming from 2002), many would call it already a classic in Finnish literature. It was awarded the prize for literacy excellence (Finlandia award). When I started reading this book, it really didn’t hit me too much, but despite this, I decided to continue reading, and in the end, I feel that I was rewarded. The story of a delusional man who tries to get his family back, whom he lost due to his own mistakes.
Hävitys by Rauma, Iida
Last year’s Finlandia award winner. Tells the grim and dark story about the effects of bullying in school.
Juha by Aho, Juhani
Another classic by Juhani Aho which many would consider his most important work. Tells the story of a “love” triangle in Sweden occupied Finland.
All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically.
If an algorithms classifies the content of a message as suspicious, your private or intimate photos may be viewed by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities. Also your private nude photos may be looked at by people not known to you, in whose hands your photos are not safe.
Flirts and sexting may be read by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities, because text recognition filters looking for “child grooming” frequently falsely flag intimate chats.
You can falsely be reported and investigated for allegedly disseminating child sexual exploitation material. Messaging and chat control algorithms are known to flag completely legal vacation photos of children on a beach, for example. According to Swiss federal police authorities, 80% of all machine-generated reports turn out to be without merit. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual “child abuse material”. 40% of all criminal investigation procedures initiated in Germany for “child pornography” target minors.
On your next trip overseas, you can expect big problems. Machine-generated reports on your communications may have been passed on to other countries, such as the USA, where there is no data privacy – with incalculable results.
Intelligence services and hackers may be able to spy on your private chats and emails. The door will be open for anyone with the technical means to read your messages if secure encryption is removed in order to be able to screen messages.
This is only the beginning. Once the technology for messaging and chat control has been established, it becomes very easy to use them for other purposes. And who guarantees that these incrimination machines will not be used in the future on our smart phones and laptops?