Tom Burkert
Tom Burkert
Tom Burkert
Tom Burkert’s personal blog focused on technology, privacy, AI and other nerdy stuff.
Latest Posts
I remember back in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released and everyone was going crazy about how smart and humanlike it was. I sat down and started talking to it in Czech. After reading so many raving reviews and hyperbolic...
A few days ago, I opened the window and heard a familiar sound I have not heard in a while: it was a fieldfare’s call, probably one of the first who migrated back to my town this year. And just today, I saw my first chaffinch of the year...
I love e-readers. I was an early adopter of the good old dorky-looking Kindle 3 (aka Kindle Keyboard), some 15 years ago, and I read many a book on it or its successors. A few years later, I upgraded to Kindle Paperwhite 3 (a 2015...
In the last few months, various prominent figures in big tech have claimed that voice is the user interface of the future. It’s an interesting revival of voice interaction, which already fell flat on its face in the late 2010s during the...
This is going to be a fairly niche post, so I will make it clear right away: If you are not using Hyprland on Fedora 43, you can close this post and move on with your day. Now, those of you who are using Hyprland on Fedora 43 are likely...
It started with a broken hinge in our kitchen cabinet. I am no handyman, but I like to do as much as I can around the house and I dare say I’ve gotten pretty okay at it. The one thing that can set me back, though, is not knowing the...
The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone. I’ve made several adjustments to my information diet and to how I consume content online, but many of these changes made me even more tethered to my phone. So I set out to read...
I spent the majority of this week at a conference and in dinners and networking events, and as a result, I have fallen woefully behind my regular catching up on news and reading. Opening my RSS reader to see 400 unread articles was a...
In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box...
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding...
The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds,...
Our old friend Pygmalion Humans have always anthropomorphized1 non-human entities, from ancient gods and natural forces to modern cars and ships. But our tendency to see machines as human-like has dramatically intensified with the advent...
Whenever I get to travel, especially on business trips, I usually seek out two types of entertainment: botanical gardens and art galleries. Botanical gardens offer a soothing combination of being surrounded by vegetation (which is proven...
Recently, I have been re-reading one of the classic books of Czech literature, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, and I have been intrigued by some of the parallels between Čapek’s newts and LLMs. Mind you, I am probably highly primed to...
The problem Window management for GUI operating systems has been with us for decades, but it still feels a bit broken to me. Yes, everyone has their preferences and not everyone needs to run as many programs as I do at times, but there...