We see with our own eyes

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The original Dewey Decimal System classifications for religion included a section on “Mohammedism”. The term was used by Christians until at least the middle of the 20th century to describe Islam, the assumption being that Muslims worshipped Mohammed in the same way that Christians worshiped Jesus. It was, to say the least, a profound misunderstanding of Islam.

Ethnographic map of the Missouri ValleyIn a similar manner, Europeans regarded the topics of land ownership and community leadership in a manner that differed quite significantly from the people who inhabited the land that the Europeans wanted for themselves. Mapping “Indian Country” provides a glimpse into this tragic misperception. The map displays the complexity of a community connected to land, water, and people, but the leaders did not govern or control in the European sense. It wasn’t until much later that an individual in a tribe had the authority to sign a treaty and that the people affected by those treaties would live within designated geographical limits.

The day starts

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So I open my Mac in the morning to a terminal window that shows a failed installation. I start work on it, picking at pieces of the failure. Before long, I can no longer remember the product that I was trying to install and why I was doing it. That's a task reserved for the time after I get it to install.

Update: still couldn't get the product (gensim) to install. Giving up

As we get older and stop making sense

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A lawyer friend told me that one of the key things he learned in law school is that his first jobs would entail cleaning up mistakes that old lawyers had made. It meant that old lawyers often made mistakes in basic things and, further, that he had to understand what they were trying to do. He wasn't necessarily applying new law. Rather, he was applying old law correctly.  New law would come later.

So, this article, Beware tech career advice from old heads, make sense at first, until you remember that most people coming into jobs, tech or otherwise, will be working with legacy stuff. You have to understand the old stuff, such as the default date in COBOL, but do it better.

Arguments with a chatbot

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I've been using Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash to analyze some of the documents regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Mostly, it's gone well, but we've gotten into a bit of a tussle. 

I've uploaded about 20 PDF documents, each 600 pages. (Thank you, ChatGPT, for writing a Python script that splits a humungous 36,000 page document into separate 600-page files.) 

Using Gemini  2.0 Flash, I uploaded several of the 600-page docs, eventually getting about 20 in place. I asked a series of questions about the information in the set, such as "Was any of the information unverified?" The answers led to more questions, including names of people. For clarity, I also checked a couple of the docs and asked questions about what I saw. 

It went well, and then, it didn't. Gemini would provide an answer to a question that I'd asked in earlier prompt, completely ignoring the question I just asked. When I mentioned such, it'd try to come back, but the responses indicated that it was getting tired and confused. I asked about a Prof. Luria from MIT who'd been at an anti-war demonstration with Noam Chomsky and others; Gemini told me instead about Maurice Halperin. 

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking has a limit of 10 documents per prompt.  Flash Thinking reached the same tiredness. 

Finally, I explained to ChatGPT o3-mini-high what I was trying to do. It wrote some semantic search Python code that has had some problems.

Categories AI

Passwords, bloody passwords

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When people learn that I do tech support for family and friends, they'll often ask, "What's the most common problem?" In brief, all problems start with, pass through, or end up as issues of password management. People use password managers, let their browsers manage the passwords, use memorable passwords, or keep a recipe box full of index cards. 

It's not surprising that, as shown in a report from Forbes, people reuse their passwords across multiple sites. Multi-factor authentication is both better and worse: better because it's more secure and worse because it adds to the demand of having another device handy. 

To be continued …