Ideology

iPhone Talks There are a many cellphones that make me feel nostalgic. None of them is Android nor iPhone. Some of them are QWERTY, some are flip phones. Phones were much interesting back in the days when Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Sharp, Blackberry and more are still competitive in the market. Today’s smartphones are indifferent and rather being “boredphones”. And all of these boredness are rooted in the “iPhone Moment”. Despite how much I dislike iPhone’s disruptive innovation and its market breakthrough as well as Apple’s philosophy behind it. There is one thing true about the spirit of Steve Jobs, that is, a phone should be comfortably used in one hand. Although this was his defense of iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen size, I strongly agree with his ergonomics minded UX design. ...

Days before mini-PC become a thing, there was no NUC, MinisForum or Beelink. It was the time of thin client and SFF (small-form-factor), manufacturers such as Shuttle, Dell and Lenovo were made a lot of these. Back then, the performance of SoC was too weak so that even laptops wouldn’t use them. But my first dedicated home lab machine was an Atom D525, which was called embedded industrial computer. It served as a router rather than server due to its performance and heat. That was also the time when I got into the world of m0n0wall derivatives (pfSense/FreeNAS). ...

Windows Nostalgia A recent video on Windows 7 as daily driver OS by Brodie Robertson was hilarious but also arguable. For me, XP is the best OS ever made by M$. However, it has became not so useful nowadays neither for retro gaming (which 98SE is the king) nor for day-to-day usage, due to both hardware and software incompatibility. The compromise would be Windows 7. I agree there are too much of accumulated unpatched security vulnerabilities, but there are tricks to mitigate most of those either technically or strategically. ...

the “Open Source AI Manifesto” Mark Zuckerberg has been hated by Richard Stallman for decades and he is the only person who appears on both cover image of the video essays: How the Internet was Stolen and How AI was Stolen by Then & Now. However, things has changed recently after his adoption of the Fediverse and open-sourcing of Llama continuously. In Zuckerberg’s latest “Open Source AI Manifesto”, he stated 5 needs of open-source: We need to train, fine-tune, and distill our own models. We need to control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor. We need to protect our data. We need a model that is efficient and affordable to run. We want to invest in the ecosystem that’s going to be the standard for the long term. That describes the needs of tech individuals and small businesses accurately. ...

This is the text for a lecture I’m going to give recently. Thanks for Daniela Baron’s guide which helped me tremendously for creating the slides with RevealJS. Hey everyone. Well, first, I have to confess and apologize that I could not prepare this enough. Because I have to working on my dissertation, which also discusses about AI augmented APT attack such as using ChatGPT to create phishing email and ransomware code. I don’t know if anyone is interested in that direction, but I digressed, let’s get to start. ...