My travels to places where there are no paths to follow.
In 1968, when I first entered the Philippine Science High School, our science textbooks and even books in the school library were not very strong on astronomy.
But my older brother, Kuya Obet, an avowed astronomy fanatic who was then in his graduating year at the same high school, more than made up for the apparent lack of school books on the subject by buying what his monthly scholar stipend could afford.
Continue reading “Pulsars, women in astronomy, and Kuya Obet”
This blog piece grew from my comment on a humorous post of an FB friend about the bilingualism that comes so naturally to young children growing up in bilingual environments. The humor arose from a meme triggered by a viral news piece, about Princess Charlotte of Wales speaking two languages at age two—to which someone retorted that this was usual among immigrant children but didn’t hug the headlines because they were poor (unlike children of famous royalty).
Continue reading “Do bilingual Filipinos enjoy an advantage?”
LAST DECEMBER 2022 (which seemed so long ago, in infotech terms), at first I had wanted my study group at UP Open University to focus on the potentials of an AI-based operating system (think of Linux on AI steroids) that ran on an alternative PC architecture. This AI-muscled PC would rely almost purely on GPUs + a standard CPU (think of a souped-up Raspberry Pi with external GPUs).
Such an approach would make it much easier for barrio kids to assemble a fairly cheap AI-powered rural network for empowering their province’s educational-cultural and info needs. If successfully deployed in many rural provinces, it could serve as a long-term innovator-disruptor not just in the “IT industry” sense but in the wider socio-economic and political sense.
But since my group was pressed for time, and what with the hype around Midjourney, Dall-E etc., I agreed with the more popular choice to focus on AI generative art and lit — which of course have their own immense (but I now feel, short-lived) innovator-disruptor potentials. I’m still satisfied though with how the research turned out.
But now I want to return to my original interest, advocacy, and prediction: that, in the longer-term, the biggest arena of struggle for cyber-control (in the IT field) will feature the “weaponry” of streamlined mini-PC servers on AI-architecture GPUs (even just Raspberry Pi-based for now).
It would run AI-enabled open-source operating systems and software, and be capable of hosting distributed-cloud services that can empower community-based networks. The network can even shield itself from external attack, to some extent.
So here are some links that should be of interest to 21st-century tech activists:
The key elements of this future 21st-century tech arena of social/class struggles are now here, or fast looming on the horizon. #