March 2026 – Spinor Info

Chatting with a plush tiger

Cybernetics, Internet, Personal, Programming 2 Responses »

Mar 282026

Very well, I was not really chatting or conferencing with a toy animal. My wife’s little tiger just served as a prop, since he was far more likely to stay put than any of our actual miniature tigers, I mean cats.

In any case, the point was not so much who I was chatting with but how: I was doing so using my very own little conferencing service, implemented in half an afternoon with prodigious coding help from Claude.

No, not “vibe coding”. I tried “vibe coding” and it’s not my cup of tea. Not because I am a control freak but because I like to know what my applications do and why, and how to fix and debug them. Moreover, I don’t mind owning the concept. That’s not the time-consuming part. The time-consuming part is implementation and this is where coding assistants, Claude in particular, excel. Don’t outsource combinatorial reasoning, like navigating the excessive landscape of design options. Nor do I need a coding agent type commands for me (and, on a bad day, wipe out my code base.) What I need the AI for is to write the routine stuff once the design is settled.

That is exactly what we did here, and the result… well, works. The concept is simple: Keep everything TCP. Of course TCP is the worst choice for real-time media streaming, except for the alternative: UDP works until it doesn’t, because it is blocked by a NAT-firewall, a mobile network policy, or something else. In fact, it was my struggle to get things run well in these post-Skype days that led me to my simple (but not simplistic) implementation: sending compressed, differenced video and audio at a bandwidth that remains manageable even with my self-hosted relay host for up to maybe half a dozen users.

The thing works. Granted, so far I only tested it with two users (me and me) but it works robustly and reliably even over a cellular connection. I might soon get a chance to test it with real users, some friends. Until then, I have my plush tiger to talk to.

All in all, 2000+ lines of good quality, working code in half an afternoon. That’s what a good AI assistant can do under competent supervision.

Being judged

Cats, Humor, Personal, Television 2 Responses »

Mar 252026

In case anyone is under the illusion (or is that a delusion?) that cats are not judging us, I have proof that they do.

Yes, that’s our cat Marcel and his mother Luisa. The resemblance to Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show is… revealing.

Ghost in the Matrix

Cybernetics 2 Responses »

Mar 172026

I admit I find this… fascinating but more than a bit unsettling.

Imagine the brain of a fly, fully mapped, and then placed in a simulation in charge of a virtual fly body.

Yes. That’s precisely what these folks claim to have been able to do.

Granted, it’s just a fly. Not a mouse, not a cat, not a human. But what is possible in principle with the brain of a fly is certainly possible in principle with larger brains, too.

What it means, however… They speak of ghosts in the machine and the Matrix, but I admit I am left wondering if genie in a bottle may be a more appropriate metaphor.

My old radio

Cybernetics, Electronics, Personal, Programming, Radio 2 Responses »

Mar 132026

I have an old radio: an ICOM IC-PCR1000. It’s a nondescript little black box, with no controls other than a power switch. It is controlled by a computer.

Its age is perfectly characterized by this simple fact: It is controlled through a serial port, good old RS-232. Not even USB.

It works perfectly well. Or rather, it did, under Windows, with its 25-year old control software. But that same software cannot reliable connect to the radio under Linux, via Wine. It runs, it connects, but every few seconds it reports an error despite the fact that it seems to read and control the radio just fine.

Well, I solved the problem now, with the help of Claude. No, not “vibe” programming: the concept is mine, in fact it is based on software I myself wrote some 12 years ago. At that time, I was experimenting with a C-sharp back end connecting to the radio. This time around? A plain C back-end (a translation done by ChatGPT) and a front-end and midware in HTML+JS and PHP.

So the code logic is mine, even as Claude saved me a lot of time. The layout and visual appearance, however, are entirely Claude’s doing, Claude 4.6 Opus in particular, running on my WISPL Web site. I only introduced some very minor tweaks to refine the appearance.

And yes, I am using it right now, listening to CBC Radio 2.

Places

History, Personal No Responses »

Mar 092026

Though I lived in three different countries and worked in several more, I am not terribly well-traveled. Most of the travel I’ve done in my life was within Europe or North America.

Even so, I now realize that there’s a growing list of places I visited that have since become targets of military action:

Lviv, in Western Ukraine, known from Austro-Hungarian times as Lemberg: I visited in 1983 or 1984 I believe. Since 2022, it’s been attacked several times by Russian drones or missiles;
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, which I also visited back then, was briefly the target of military action in 1991, during Lithuania’s less-than-fully-peaceful divorce from the former USSR;
Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where I briefly did some consulting work back in the mid 2010s, has been targeted by Iran in the most recent war between Iran and the combined US-Israeli force;
Dubai, the same, targets even including civilian locations like a hotel or the international airport.

I suppose I could also add to this some cities in Romania that I visited often, including Timisoara and Bucharest, which saw brief bursts of regime violence during the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.

Then again, I should count myself as one of the lucky ones. For me, these remain relatively distant places, distant memories. For others, it’s home.

Hyperscale disruption

History, Internet 2 Responses »

Mar 052026

Here’s a sentence that I find bone-chilling, to be honest:

“This is reportedly the first known wartime strike on a major hyperscale cloud provider’s infrastructure.”

This sentence was written by ChatGPT, in response to my request to summarize recent events in the Gulf region, specifically the disruption to cloud services due to Iranian attacks on cloud infrastructure in the Gulf region.

And there is a lot of such infrastructure in the region. Billions of dollars worth. And these data centers are uniquely vulnerable. Just take a look at this map by Reuters.

To quote, from Amazon’s continuously updated status page:

Mar 02 4:22 PM PST We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruptions affecting the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1). Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure. These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.

Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose. Our technology is amazing, but we are still the same violent, stupid monkeys as before. “War,” goes the motto of the Fallout family of computer games, “War never changes.”