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Who should lead us?
Consider these two people, each captured in the midst of delivering a technical talk.
Based on appearances alone, what do you think of them?
The person on the left is a woman. She’s also pretty young, one might infer something about her level of experience accordingly. I imagine that she has led a much different life than I have, and may have a much different perspective, worldview, identity, and politics than I. Does she complain about sexism and discrimination in her work? Is she a feminist? Does she lean left or right on the political spectrum?
The person on the right looks like most of...
rc: a new shell for Unix
rc is a Unix shell I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks, though it’s been in the design stages for a while longer than that. It’s not done or ready for general use yet, but it is interesting, so let’s talk about it.
As the name (which is subject to change) implies, rc is inspired by the Plan 9 rc shell. It’s not an implementation of Plan 9 rc, however: it departs in many notable ways. I’ll assume most readers are more familiar with POSIX shell or Bash and skip many of the direct comparisons to Plan 9. Also, though most of the features...
The Free Software Foundation is dying
The Free Software Foundation is one of the longest-running missions in the free software movement, effectively defining it. It provides a legal foundation for the movement and organizes activism around software freedom. The GNU project, closely related, has its own long story in our movement as the coding arm of the Free Software Foundation, taking these principles and philosophy into practice by developing free software; notably the GNU operating system that famously rests atop GNU/Linux.
Today, almost 40 years on, the FSF is dying.
Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software...
Writing Helios drivers in the Mercury driver environment
Helios is a microkernel written in the Hare programming language and is part of the larger Ares operating system. You can watch my FOSDEM 2023 talk introducing Helios on PeerTube.
Let’s take a look at the new Mercury driver development environment for Helios.
As you may remember from my FOSDEM talk, the Ares operating system is built out of several layers which provide progressively higher-level environments for an operating system. At the bottom is the Helios microkernel, and today we’re going to talk about the second layer: the Mercury environment, which is used for writing and running device drivers in userspace. Let’s take a look at a serial driver...
Fine-tuning with LoRA: create your own avatars & styles!
Remember Magic Avatars in the Lensa app that were all the rage a few months ago? The custom AI generated avatars from just a few photos of your face were a huge hit!
Reference portrait image of me
One of my Lensa “Magic Avatars”
The technology behind this product is the open source Stable Diffusion image generation model. You can run this model on your own computer, on a cloud GPU instance, or even a free colab notebook — to generate your own avatars. In this post...
Quick guide to installing Stable Diffusion
In my last post “AI primer: Image Models 101”, I recommended Midjourney and Stable Diffusion as my top two choices. If your goal is to make beautiful images and art, Midjourney is the best choice, as they have a very easy to use service and can produce high quality output with minimal effort.
However, if you are a hobbyist and tinkerer, or just want to invest a bit of time to go deeper in this space, Stable Diffusion is a great choice. It’s a bit more involved to set up, but has several advantages:
It is one of the few...AI Primer: Image Models 101
It’s spring of 2023, and if you aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in the world of AI, you really should. The world is about to change in big ways!
I’ll save the general discussion on AI for another post — I’m hoping for this article to be one of a multipart series where we dive into the practical aspects of each major area of advancement. My goal is to give readers a taste of what’s going on, what the capabilities of these AI models are, and why you should care.
Let’s start with image generation models, as they’re the oldest in...