The hype around AI (artificial intelligence) is off the charts. People are not only talking about it but actively using AI-driven tools like ChatGPT. The big tech companies – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, NVidia, et al – are making huge investments in it.

In my lifetime, I’ve lived through what I would consider to be three major technology shifts – the transition to PCs, the emergence of the internet, and the shift to mobile phones or, more generally, mobile computing. With AI, it would appear that we are on the verge of the next major technology shift. In fact, one could convincingly argue that it’s already well underway.

While there are valid reasons to be concerned about the development of AI and calls to pause its development, there’s also plenty of opportunities, which is the focus of this post.

I’ve previously made my opinions known regarding remote work, or as I like to call it, WFH (Work from Home). I didn’t envision wanting, or needing, to address the issue again, but a recent post that showed up in my blog feed caught my attention and caused me to revisit the topic. I just couldn’t help myself.

This may be a good time to get up, take a break, stretch your legs, refill your coffee, and settle in for my latest rant.

After upgrading an Amazon EC2 instance from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.4, I ran into a problem – the server would regularly hang. Sometimes it would happen after a few days. Sometimes it would take a month. In either case, websites served by the instance became unresponsive. The only way to get things back online was through a hard reboot, which a few times had to be done at the Amazon console level. It was not a good situation.

Through lots of research and reading, I finally feel like I have things under control. If you’re struggling with a similar problem, here’s what I did to fix it. The server has went over 4 months without requiring a hard reboot since making the changes.

One of my guiding philosophies is that ideas are cheap. Ideas don’t lead to success. Successful people are those who take ideas and follow-through. They implement them. They make them happen. The bigger the idea, the bigger the success.

If you agree with my philosophy, then Elon Musk’s success should not surprise you. He has taken big ideas like mass-market electric vehicles and reusable rockets and turned them into a reality. Therefore, when he starts talking about his vision of the future, I listen.

Earlier this month, he sat down with the head of TED, Chris Anderson, for an interview that covered a wide range of topics. Musk talked about his vision for sustainable energy by 2050, when autonomous vehicles would be a reality, household robots, armadas of starships taking people to Mars, and his plan to augment humans with AI and why it needs to happen.

It’s a rather long interview at just over an hour, but worth your time if you have any interest in how the future may unfold. Usually I would discount this kind of “crazy” talk, but Musk has a track record of making it happen. I’ve included additional interviews of Musk below that date back to 2013 if you want to see how his past predictions have panned out. Spoiler alert: they were pretty spot on, especially when you consider how big the vision is.

I ran into a problem recently on a WordPress site that I manage where I was unable to disable and uninstall numerous plug-ins. After looking through the error logs on the web server, I found the following warning showing up repeatedly in the PHP error log:

PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /var/www/html/example.com/wp-cron.php on line 117

Here’s what I did to identify and fix the problem.