mahiwaga

It’s been five months give or take since I decided to move my blog to a new domain and to migrate all my entries to Jekyll.

(Incidentally, Jekyll was used as the front-end for healthcare.gov. But it wasn’t the front-end where all the major problems lay….)

I’d initially decided to try and use Ghost (you’ll notice that my current Jekyll theme is essentially a clone of the default Ghost theme) and I even went as far as to subscribe to DreamHost’s VPS service just so I could run node.js apps, but I was daunted given my complete lack of familiarity with node.js and I didn’t really find an easy way to migrate all of my old blog entries.

So I decided to go with Jekyll because it’s written in Ruby and because it tickles my nostalgia, reminding me exactly of those days when I published blog posts by running XML files through XSLT and using Makefiles to handle selective rebuilding.

It also reminds me somewhat of Blosxom, which was the first dynamic blog engine I had ever run, and which also uses flatfiles with embedded metadata instead of using a RDBMS as has been the more recent fashion.

So I’ve got a sense of going full circle.

I’ve been slowly manually converting my old, old blog posts that I had originally written in XML into Markdown + YAML. I’ve also been editing the entries that I migrated from Mephisto and Typo (now called Publify) via Jekyll’s built-in importers (none of which handles metadata particularly well—I’m not entirely sure how to extract Mephisto’s tags from the database and the way Ruby handles timestamps is kind of messy.) I also wrote a simple script that added YAML frontmatter to all my Blosxom blog entries.

Granted, there is a part of me that thinks that I should just leave my old entries where they lie and make a clean break. But partly because I want to save a little money on domain names and hosting and partly because ヾA彡 has made me paranoid about how visible my existing blog is on the web, I think I’m gonna have to go for it.

I’ve always been skeptical of many of the claims that people who are pro-Singularity have made regarding Moore’s Law.

The main basis of my skepticism lies in the fact that there isn’t really anything that grows exponentially ad infinitum.

Just like how in the 19th century, Verhulst realized that Malthus had oversimplified how fast the world population would grow and how catastrophic the situation would be when the population growth rate started outstripping the ability to grow food, I think John Markoff is similarly correct about the ultimate fate of Moore’s Law. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be some massively disruptive IT advance occurring in the future (Markoff is betting on augmented reality) but it certainly won’t be the result of simply packing more and more transistors onto a chip.

(via Could the End of Moore’s Law Be Near? If so, What’s Next? • 2015 Aug 4 • Irving Wladawsky-Berger)