Michael Will 🍁

Spock: "It would be most interesting to impress your memory engrams on a computer, Doctor. The resulting torrential flood of illogic would be most entertaining." - Season 2, "The Ultimate Computer" Vibe coding. Don't get some. #StarTrekWisdom #GenAI

I learned this lesson while buying and using many GPUs for #CitizenScience work in the 2010s: #GPU chips are like yogurt. Wonderful today, landfill next week. Only fools warehouse them for some future project. #AI #GOFAI #Science

Good morning from @perimeterinstitute.bsky.social ! ☀️

How can anyone comprehend a data center without grokking the miracle of a single transistor? To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. - William Blake #ComputationalThinking #Information

A Canadian is someone who can make AI in a canoe. #GOFAI #ComputationalThinking #Canada www.scidata.ca/the-picoxper...

Chekov: "That may take some time." Scotty: "Let it take time, lad." - s2e25 "Bread and Circuses" Scotty's discipline and patience saves the entire crew. A lesson to remember in these times of snake oil, contrived urgency, panic, and frantic flim-flammery. Measure twice, cut once. #StarTrekWisdom

Chat? No! It’s Think-a-Tron! #vcfmw

Takes me back to my commercial ROV days. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLaR...

"Is AI a good bet?" Nerds, analysts, investors, influencers, politicians, and journalists will often answer, "Yes, we just need to be patient because we've never seen anything like this before." I have. It was called #ExpertSystems. It never scaled, triggering a decades-long AI Winter. #AI #GenAI

This vacuum tube module was used in an IBM programmable calculator from 1948. This module, called a "trigger", stored one bit of information. Let's take a closer look and see the module operate.

#CanadianMusic #UnderratedSongs www.youtube.com/watch?v=azqS...

Siccar Point: A POTA Activation at the Birthplace of Deep Time by Thomas (K4SWL) On Saturday, June 20, 2026, my wife and I decided to spend the day exploring one of the most remarkable places along Scotland's southeastern coastline: Siccar Point. The Siccar Point Site of Significant Scientific…

It's nice to have so many from the Old Country joining us. Bring on the next match. Set phasers to milky and get in amongst yeh. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xar7... #Canada #WorldCup

Is something lost when life is copied (transformed) by a machine? Is live Jazz equivalent to sheet music? Ian Malcolm in JURASSIC PARK, and Seth Brundle in THE FLY (both roles played by Jeff Goldblum) addressed this question beautifully. Goldblum strikes again here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_6R...

#BlueJays describe their first ever home run. For Daulton Varsho, it was the day his dad got fired which made it possible for him to come to the game and see his son hit his first. Wow "What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise" - Oscar Wilde www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXU2...

City-sized data centers seem like a misstep. AGI should really fit in a pocket computer. That's my gut feeling. Perhaps using stuff like "Reservoir Computing". youtu.be/cDxtFtoQVNc #GOFAI #PortableComputing #Calculators

The Oldham coupling, invented in 1821, remains essential in robotics today, ensuring smooth motion between misaligned axes. A true engineering marvel in automation.

Hewlett Packard HP 200LX Pocket Computer (1994)

"You're my reason for reason" - Smooth [Santana] www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY5N... #bestlyric

To be a lackey in the Age of Oligarchy Or be ranked lower than a machine "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves" - Cassius, "Julius Caesar" #Shakespeare #ArtificialIntelligence

First results from the Exoasteroids citizen science project! iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... #astronomy #news

WOPR was right: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play." #GOFAI #ComputationalThinking

Cleo Abram interviewed Demis Hassabis (CEO Google Deep Mind) I’ll follow up here with thoughts, as I make my way through. Clearly it’s going to be a good interview. youtu.be/C0gErQtnNFE

BlackBerry 5810 (2002)

The COSMAC 1802 microprocessor (1976) had approximately 5,000 transistors, and 16x16-bit internal registers. The MOS 6502 (1975) had even fewer transistors, yet went on to power most of the early PC era. A human brain weighs 3lbs and draws 30W. Perhaps we're scaling in the wrong direction. #GOFAI

Sony Video TV Recorder GV8 (1988)

The Jupiter ACE was built by two ex-Sinclair engineers who helped design the ZX Spectrum — the only home micro to run FORTH! The archive preserving its legacy needs support. Help keep this Sinclair heritage alive! 🕹️ https://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk/

When I was a student, Alan Winfield, one of my lecturers started up a spin-out company to create a fast hardware Forth processor. alanwinfield.blogspot.com/2013/03/extr...

"The Wizard of Oz" (1939). A tale of snake oil, flimflammery, androids, witchcraft, lies about the nature of true intelligence, lots of wind. It had it all. #ArtificialIntelligence

On this International Women’s Day, we remain vigilant about what we must protect. And we remain determined about accomplishing the work ahead.

If your pop-sci book shelf is looking for a new addition - Emma Chapman's Radio Universe is coming out this week. It's genuinely delightful and well worth picking up a copy! 👉@dreochapman.bsky.social 📖: www.waterstones.com/book/radio-u...

Interesting new M dwarf #exoplanet occurrence rates paper! I'm glad to see that the new TESS result (with much lower uncertainties) is consistent with our Kepler result! arxiv.org/abs/2602.23364

Begun, the Slop Wars have. #GenAI vs #ComputationalThinking #Forth #GOFAI

I was curious to figure out what the beefiest single board computer under $30 is (AKA C$40). The first real standout is the Radxa Cubie A7Z. The model with 1 GB DDR4 meets that. Features an Allwinner A733 SOC: 8 CPU cores, PCIe 3.0, WiFi6+BT5.4, RISC-V coprocessor. 🤯 Also available with 2/4/8 GB.

Air Force veteran Kimberly O’Brien explains why NASA citizen science and veterans go together so well. www.military.com/feature/2026...

An abstract representation of the #LEGO mindset has been available as a programming language since 1970. It's called #FORTH. #ComputationalThinking #AssemblyTheory #Concatenative #ThreadedLanguages

The 1st planet candidate w/Earth-like radius & orbit transiting a Sun-like star bright enough for serious follow-up. Congrats to citizen scientists Alexander Venner, Hans Martin Schwengeler, Martti H. Kristiansen, Mark Omohundro & Ivan A. Terentev! iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... #news #astronomy

“Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.” Isaac Asimov, "Pebble in the Sky" #Subjectivity #Rationality #Psychology

More than 650 amateur scientists have now become coauthors of published, refereed scientific papers through their work on NASA citizen science. science.nasa.gov/citizen-scie... #astrophotography #space #news

The galaxy MoM-z14 could offer clues to what the universe looked like in its early infancy

Planetary-scale Rube Goldberg machines may find occasional nuggets by sifting through Humanity's accumulated wisdom, but at what cost? Especially if one of those costs is the vast dumbing-down of people à la "Brave New World". A human mind uses tens of watts, not billions. #GenAI #GOFAI

"I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses" - Johannes Kepler This might be applied to AI as well as to 'the masses', especially the 'thoughtless' part. #Rationalism #CriticalThinking

With the crazy jump in RAM prices, the #RetroComputing community might do well to make adapters for using old memory in new computers, if that's possible. #Legacy #RAM #DRAM

🥳 Major milestone for the 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scottish Dark Sky Observatory: architectural designs are now public and isn't she a beauty! Two 5m 🔭domes, observing deck, solar-panelled planetarium, exhibition area & cafe. Fingers crossed that planning permission gets approved! ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 📷: arpl

In the early 1980s, ordinary citizens had access to real computing. Ubiquitous computational thinking was within our grasp. But sadly, the world fell into decades of sifting eye candy, and eventually became a wasteland of zombified slopchuggers. Alas, what might have been. gofai.discourse.group

A mini setup on the bench today, I needed to do some PET stuff and my main bench is full of a different project. One of the first batch of SD2PETs (2019). The first Mini PET (2020). The first Deluxe Keyboard (2020). Definitely not the first mini LCD from Amazon (2024). All still working nicely.

I miss when the OS was a self-contained tool rather than an internet service. We had to manually configure the date and time, which was a small trade off in exchange for the independence.

In theory this might work on a Speccy. github.com/HarryR/z80ai

HP-41C calculator from 1979

Making progress with my port of #PerilousSwamp to Tree Forth on #Minstrel4. #retrogaming