Posts | Tom Burkert
Tom Burkert's blog on technology, privacy, AI and other stuff.| Tom Burkert
Our old friend Pygmalion Humans have always anthropomorphized1 non-human entities, from ancient gods and natural forces to modern cars and ships. But our tendency to see machines as human-like has dramatically intensified with the advent of conversational AI. This isn’t entirely new - the word “robot,” coined and popularized by Čapek brothers in 1920, originally described artificial beings indistinguishable from humans. Our drive to find and create humanness in artificial entities runs...| Posts on Tom Burkert
Whenever I get to travel, especially on business trips, I usually seek out two types of entertainment: botanical gardens and art galleries. Botanical gardens offer a soothing combination of being surrounded by vegetation (which is proven to be beneficial for mental and physical health), a low density of people (anecdotally, with similar benefits on yours truly :)), and in general a calm environment that helps recharging your batteries. In Japan, the term “shinrin-yoku” (~ forest-bathing) ...| Posts on Tom Burkert
Recently, I have been re-reading one of the classic books of Czech literature, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, and I have been intrigued by some of the parallels between Čapek’s newts and LLMs. Mind you, I am probably highly primed to associate and connect random things to LLMs given how much I read and talk about AI these days (a case of apophenia?). But hear me out! I think we’re on to something.| Posts on Tom Burkert
The problem Window management for GUI operating systems has been with us for decades, but it still feels a bit broken to me. Yes, everyone has their preferences and not everyone needs to run as many programs as I do at times, but there is something principally broken about having a bunch of windows stacked on top of each other and trying to Alt-Tab to the right one at all times. And I’m not the only one to think that.| Posts on Tom Burkert
Many moons ago (in fact long ago so that contemporary sources are beginning to be difficult to find), iPhone users were told they’re holding their phones wrong. This was one of the more memeworthy communication blunders of Apple and something we’re unlikely to see from them, but the reason I mention it here is that asking ourselves whether we’re holding the thing wrong is actually a good strategy for exploring novel use cases.| Posts on Tom Burkert
The Problem Recently, my Keychron K8 keyboard has died (PCB 💀), so I started hunting for a new keyboard. Another Keychron was out of the question, so I decided to give Epomaker a try. I stumbled into a B-stock Epomaker Galaxy80 and decided to give it a shot. I am very happy with the feel of the keyboard, typing feels much better than the K8, at least to me. However, I ran into a problem in linux (Fedora Workstation, although this is not distro-specific): I was unable to use the F-row (F1 -...| Posts on Tom Burkert
The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a sta...| Tom Burkert
