World Wide Web

Sunday, October 6, 2024

2020 vs 1995❓

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a4_nDYs7Q5U

Friday, July 12, 2024

Daily Doze of Internet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwZXulsJEtc

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Why your internet is in danger

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/anmF2JzYPVo

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Wisdom From the Best Characters in TV Comedy

https://www.inspiringquotes.com/wisdom-from-the-best-tv-comedy-characters/YFNrILQR2wAGlA9V

Thursday, April 11, 2024

This Cured My Boredom

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zHrT4X8FNhI

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Around the year 2000, I was serving on the board of directors for the Utah Chess Association. We were considering abolishing our state chess newsletter and making a website instead. I pointed out that most people didn't have Internet access yet, but we expected that to change. (In fact, someone had set up a chess hotline with an answering machine, where you could call the phone number to get the latest state chess news.)

It was roughly 20 years ago that I switched from using dial-up Internet to the long-anticipated cable Internet. Getting 3 Mbps was a significant improvement over the roughly 100Kbps I had.

In the early days using slow dial-up modems, like 1200 bps, you would sometimes try to load a web page and get up and do something while the page was loading. I did this all the time. It was so bad that there were optional programs that would download pages ahead of time so that you didn't have to wait for them to load.

Twenty years ago, just a few websites had video, but because of the limited bandwidth, those videos would occupy only a tiny part of the screen and be very low resolution. Apple's video format, Quicktime, was invented to help deal with low bandwidth.

YouTube was created in 2005. The first videos were at best "Standard Definition", which means that they were low resolution. I don't remember for sure, but the first videos might have had a resolution half that of Standard Definition, or roughly 240 lines. It would take years for Internet speeds to improve so that YouTube could offer higher-resolution videos.

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Restaurant Meme

Friday, April 7, 2023

Daily Dose of Interenet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9KDOPkg8ok

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Best Of The Internet (2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVH79ehGfY0

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

What It's Like To be a Computer: An Interview with GPT-3

There is this thing called the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing seventy years ago. The idea is to see if a computer could become smart enough to fool a human into thinking he is talking to a real person. We have crossed a threshold where computers have almost reached this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbB07n_uQ4

The AI appears to understand more than it actually does. It has studied human conversation and a mountain of raw information so that it can imitate a human conversation.

However, having a conversational computer isn't the only threshold the machines have crossed recently. Computer AI has become much more useful, performing all kinds of new tasks, such as surgery or writing computer code. By the end of the decade, machines will be performing many more jobs. It is very likely that in the next couple of decades, or even in this one, we will have general-purpose robots that could perform any task that we want them to do.