Zagaja.com

Last night I watched Tetris on TV+. If you are a fan of the game or enjoy a dramatic retelling of history, it is worth the watch. The earnest and naive Henk Rogers navigates the politics of licensing a game from Russia and goes head to head with the KGB and a much larger software company.

• Pete Buttigieg Still Believes in Smart Cities is an interesting look at where what seemed like a Civic Tech fad is landing now.
• Red Tape Threatens U.S. Efforts to Revive Chipmaking is an op-ed decrying the classic “Christmas Tree” approach to legislation. It’s always annoying but sometimes to get major legislation to pass you have to let others decorate it with their ornaments.
• Nintendo released a PDF of the Zelda Breathe of the Wild Explorer’s Guide.
• Cong. Ayanna Presley filed legislation, now law, that requires FEMA to cover mental health resources. Little things like this make a big difference.
• Some criticism of GPT-4 and its testing against professional benchmarks. It is easy to pass an exam if you already know the answers.
• Store.app is a directory of Progressive Web Applications you can add to the home screen of your phone.
• GPT4All is a version of GPT4 you can run on your local machine if it’s powerful enough.
• LocalView is a database of government meetings across the United States.

Like many folks we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) at Code for Boston for our projects. AWS is a powerful platform with lots of products that can meet almost any need you have for cloud. The downside to this is operations that seem simple can become confusing.

We have all had the opportunity to try ChatGPT and its competitors Bing and Bard. Spooked by their progress Elon Musk and a group of folks released a letter imploring OpenAI to halt development of artificial intelligence more powerful than GPT-4. I am more skeptical, but still optimistic on the promise of AI and LLMs.

I previously wrote about Kagi, a fast paid alternative to Google that searches more independent websites and does not have ads. I started paying for it, and boy have I learned a few things.