I've recently been reading Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence and must admit it stuck with me. It may well seem a tad abstract to us who are new to thinking about such matters, but highly stimulating and thought-provoking.

The main point is driven home thoroughly: We should be talking more about artificial intelligence! Because its arrival might be just around the corner and it has the potential to mark a crossroads for our future, the choices being really really bad or really really fantastically good.

If you havn't read them yet, these two blog posts by Wait But Why are probably the best introdution: Part 1, Part 2.

I am currently half-way through Olle Häggström's Here Be Dragons which covers related but broader toptics of near-future technologies.

It will soon be time to replace my current laptop, a three year old Thinkpad X230; it probably is my fifth X-series over the years. They deservedly had a good reputation for build quality, and to run Linux.

However, I find it unlikey that my next machine will be another Thinkpad. Partly because of Lenovo's Superfish and BIOS Crapware debacles, partly because their latest machines are just not as good anymore. (For example I don't quite like the new-style keyboard of the X230 and onward, plus it broke down twice and needed the mainboard replaced).

Criteria for a new laptop would be the following:

• fan-less
• non-glossy screen, ~ 12-13"
• digital video-out
• good keyboard, Swedish
• 16GB RAM
• decent size SSD
• track-point
• runs Linux without too much hassle.

Things like CPU-power, battery-life, weight and screen resolution are less important. Nevertheless, I am not aware of a machine that fulfills the above. The Dell XPS 13 seems to come close, but it still has a fan and no track-point. A Macbook Air is out of the question.

If you have a suggestion, let me know!

So this is what it looks like when I run my picture through Pikazo, an app that can re-create an image in the style of another. In this case, the "style" is our living room carpet from India and I especially like the red Terminator-eye.

I just made a big overhaul of this site. Although there is a new theme in place as well, the biggest changes are under the hood: no more Wordpress, but static html-files generated with Pelican.

In addition, the webserver Caddy is no longer only responsible for SSL and HTTPS while proxying to Nginx, but now serves the site directly.

New URLs are without dates, but old ones should still work fine. If you happen to see anything broken, feel free to drop me an email.

Good to see that Firehol, my choice of firewall tool for many years, is still actively developed. http://firehol.org/