My luggage tracking tag ended up in Portugal

map showing Porto airport in Portugal
click to enlarge

Update:  I switched from nylon ties to steel cable to attach a luggage tracking tag to a suitcase.  See blog article.)

I use luggage tracking tags.  As you can see from the map at right, it looks like my medium-sized suitcase is at Porto Airport in Portugal.  Actually the suitcase is with me right now at home in the mountains of Colorado.  What explains this?  Continue reading “My luggage tracking tag ended up in Portugal”

What to make of the threats from AI that jeopardize software that we all rely upon?

Recent news articles talk about instances where Anthropic’s Mythos AI is said to have found software flaws in pieces of software that have been around for a long time.  The pieces of software in which Mythos has been said to have found flaws were each from the open-source community.

What should we, as readers and users of software, make of this?  What should we do differently?  Should we avoid open-source software?  In this blog article I offer my thoughts.  I do think there are things that we, as readers and users of software, should do and not do.  But avoiding open-source software is not among them.  Continue reading “What to make of the threats from AI that jeopardize software that we all rely upon?”

Sort of a Y2K problem with gasoline pumps

gas pump showing $9.99 price for gasolineMany long-time readers of this blog will recall the anxieties leading up to the year 2000.  The worry was that some software systems, to squeeze more information into less memory, were storing only the last two digits of the year instead of storing all four digits.  The worry was that when January 1, 2000 arrived, some systems would crash or calculate things incorrectly.  This was called “the Y2K problem”.  And now we have an example of a sort of Y2K problem with gasoline pumps.  Continue reading “Sort of a Y2K problem with gasoline pumps”