Hey, I’m David Rinaldo!

I read How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens recently which talks about Niklas Luhmann’s zettlekasten (English: slip-box) note-taking method. Luhmann was a prolific sociologist who came from humble beginnings. Check out video of the relationships in my zettelkasten so far: I highly recommend reading How to Take Smart Notes but to summarize the method: You want to keep notes unitary. Each note contains one idea, and one idea only....

Computerphile (a YouTube channel I really love) released a video today titled Has Generative AI Already Peaked?. In the video, Mike Pound talks about a research paper released in April called No “Zero-Shot” Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance. I think this video and the paper resonate with how I’ve felt about the hype around generative AI in the last several years. To summarize Mike’s thesis, he’s developing a view, which the paper corroborates, that producing a general intelligence through large training data that can solve new, and previously unseen problems (a “zero-shot”) is an exponential data problem....

I visualize knowledge as a horizon. Everyone has a personal “horizon of knowing”, and all that you see is the ocean of all that you know. Beyond your horizon is a vast “void of unknowing”. Out there are all the things you don’t know, and it’s infinite. Within your “horizon of knowing”, in your personal ocean of knowledge, you will find clues of holes in your understanding. Clues that when followed lead you way out in the void of unknowing....

I’m sure some would wonder, “What the hell does dvdt.dev mean? Why would you make that your personal brand?” Well there’s a bit of a story to it. It all started when I was 9… (I wish I was kidding, but I’ll try to make this interesting.) The Set Up Shocking noone, I was a nerdy kid. I was gifted an encyclopedia set by my uncle when I was 9 or 10....

Today marks 30 days since I voluntarily left my job managing a high performing software engineering team. I’ve worked non-stop since I was 14 years old and those who know me know that I pour my heart and soul into anything I do. My life motto is “no half measures” because I believe anything worth doing is worth putting your all into. But that’s meant I haven’t had a lot of free time or mental space to work on personal projects....

Freedom dies by people just taking little bit more and a little bit more… we just end up in a situation people are like “How the fuck did we end up here?” And at some point down the line you have to practice civil disobedience and say: “No, I will not fucking comply.” Matt Odell https://odell.xyz Peter McCormack hosted Matt Odell on What Bitcoin Did with discussion focused around why decentralized technology is so important....

I don’t publish very frequently and it’s because I feel like this site represents my public image and the things I put here should be somewhat polished since it’s “how the world will see me.” If I write something here I tend to keep a draft for months. Write it and rewrite it again and save it to reread later and decide it’s not good enough to publish. But in truth, I’m not always polished....

How many people feel like they have a handle on their digital selves? I remember years ago before I embarked on a journey of “digital hygiene” that I knew that I was just leaking information everywhere. Facebook, Snapchat, Google/Gmail.. Data everywhere, under control from big corporations. It was a feeling of being bare and vulnerable but I didn’t quite understand why I should care. Google’s motto was “Do no evil” so they’re trustworthy, right?...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted! Thought I’d give an update on a recent change I made in my home lab I’m calling “The Great VM Migration” but do it as a thinly veiled demonstration of something far cooler, ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to write this post through a conversation. It got some things wrong, and I corrected it by saying “Not quite what I meant, …” and explaining where it got it wrong....

Like the title says, how do you decrypt a headless server at boot time that has it’s root partition LUKS encrypted.. while not on site? I’ve been running my server for almost two years and I knew this problem would come up eventually so it’s been at the back of my mind for a while. And you know it had to come up at the most inopportune time… 15 minutes before I leave town for a weekend away....