2,121 karma · joined June 7, 2023
My wife is the creator in the relationship, making a variety of apparel and decorative things for the home. She takes a huge amount of inspiration in her designs from Midcentury stuff like this, so she'll be thrilled when I share this with her.
But, let's push that fine up to $40 billion US (with a b) and see what happens. If we need to go harder, let's add some enforceability, too. Maybe they have 1 year to pay it or lose the right to do business in the US (or whatever country) for 12 months? Get creative with the pain, but cause it none the less.
Walk softly, but carry a big stick.
About half of my week is spend troubleshooting old legacy code for this or that industrial automation devices and PLCs, the latter being their own animal driven by ladder logic. Regardless if it's some firmware in C, some proprietary app pounded out in some ancient .NET version or just plane old PLC programming, the amount of times I have puzzled over what the heck the original programmer was thinking is mind blowing. Prior to moving into this position, I had no idea what the crufty greybeards meant when they were griping about spaghetti code. Now I do. Stepping back through someone else's work, often done with some kind of set-it-forget-it mindset because, for some reason, people create things and ignore that the environment will eventually change, is the biggest, dumbest headache. So dumb, that about a year ago, I start practicing things like writing firmware from scratch because just starting from zero turned out to be easier than trying to fix someone's old, convoluted mess.
Most humans code crap. Some humans code very, very well and write beautiful, eloquent software as a result. Congrats to those in that crowd, but understand they are the minority. So, when we started feeding a stochastic parrot some code to teach it to do our work for use, we fed it garbage. And what happens when garbage goes in?
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
Many of us are not only exhausted, but exasperated at the fact that the good majority of the consumer market continues to give permission to the very activities we are all supposed to be denying. In the end, we vote with our dollars, so we, the vocal minority can be as loud as we want but if the majority continues to buy, use and comply with the product, it's really just a lot of yelling for no reason, isn't it? That's how it feels, anyway.
I know, I know; can't start a fire without a spark. But I've been at it for two decades, since the first smartphone dropped, something I resist adopting for nearly a decade. I'm seeing my kid's generation growing up in this world, condition by it from the start despite our best efforts and they simply don't seem to care. From where I'm standing, I feel old, brittle and tired from all this, but there's nobody to pass the torch to.
So understand that when one of us comments "I'm so tired and disillusioned," we do so after years of resisting, and those words are not uttered lightly.
Google does not care if your data is leaked by an app offered by some nebulously defined verified developer that phones home without reason, or that you develop a problem with online gambling or predatory micro transactions, etc. Blows my mind that we have come this far in the fight for user rights, ownership and accountability and still the majority is going to just trust Google because they're Google. No corporation is your friend. Let the users operate the device they paid for* as they see fit, learning to accept the responsibility for for all the success and failures that come with it and we will suddenly start seeing much, much smarter users.
When I first learned about the dolphin "names" whistle, I thought of the way dogs supposedly identify each other by scent in the way that there's subtle differences that our olfactory system is not able to pick up on, but theirs is. In both cases, it begs me to ask what that means for consciousness. If the dolphins and dogs can assign individual labels to each other and recognize those labels when used later on, does that imply they form some sort of a personal identity? I also have to wonder how language, as opposed to other forms of communication, promotes the birth of that identity, but so much of this is over my head in a way that leaves me grasping at how to, well, communicate my own questions so that I receive answers that promote better understanding of the phenomenon and its challenges.
Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but I have been dabbling in development, lately. Fixing broken things because I grew up in a household that was too poor to think of anything as disposable is how I learned probably 90% of what I know, providing me with an understanding of the fragility of systems and the importance of anticipating maintenance the design process.
I see the forward was written by Oliver Sacks, whom I've read and enjoyed in the past, but from more of a pop-Psychology angle. But what you say about language being related to how we think of time and forming memories strikes me. I once heard that Indigenous Australian cultures had a different concept of time than Western culture does, passed down through the language used in their folklore. I posit that we can some evidence for proof of this happening in Western cultures currently with the way that we talk about decades.
With the advent of the year 2000, we lost the ability colloquially refer to the decade we were presently in. Prior to that, we were living in "the 90's," perhaps being born in "the 60's, 70's or 80's." Each of those decades even evokes a certain composite memory of the styles of clothing people may have worn, or the music we listened to, popular automobiles, etc. The character of the decade coalesced around the colloquial name.
2000 hit, and we didn't know how to refer to it. Some folks tried to make the "aughts" happen, which felt awkward or "the 2000's" which seemed to generalized and not specific enough to be referring to the current decade. Then 2010's, which we didn't really even bother calling "the Teens" as I recall, because by then we'd fallen out of the habit of referring to time by decade.
The result is seeing a movie from 2005 and feeling like that was so very long ago, versus when I watched Star Wars for the billionth time in 1997 and the 20 years that had passed since it's release didn't seem like much time at all; only two decades.
Anyway, getting a ramble on to show agreement, but you get the idea. I might have to look for some science fiction authors who have tried to tackle this, see what sort of thought-experiments we can do when we strip language as we know it from the development of the human mind.
For example, I can issue a warning to another human by using the words "step back or there will be a problem." Assuming they also speak English, my structured sentence conveys the warning in a clear way.
My neighbor's dog can also issue a similar warning by growling as I move into it's space. It's not using any sort of structure or specific messaging, rather a universally understood sound that conveys some sort of feeling related to caution and fear.
I use the "warning" example since fear/caution are extremely powerful and seem easiest to convey across species. Again, not adept at this, so my example might be dumb. I'm super interested in understanding more about this, though.
Any suggestions of further reading?
It takes some pretty impressive mental gymastics to rationalize holding people today accountable for something that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, as though the people today were somehow responsible. Wouldn't working together to share the space be a much more reasonable and sustainable solution?
But no, let's tell people who had nothing to do with historical events to get out and create more conflict. Sure.
Back to the original point of this thread, science doubts until certainty, or as close to certainty as our current capabilities will allow, is achieved. That doubt is what allows it to change with the introduction of new information. This is why the religious hold on to what they do, the paranormal believers cling to what seems like misunderstood phenomenon to the rest of us; they don't doubt, and are thus barred from discovery of the truth.
What you say can be true about a static isolated system, though. My employer has a Windows XP computer still running a machine in our factory. The PC was built built in 2006, connected to the Internet once upon deployment then disconnected thereafter. It has been running the software and machine more or less untouched since, receiving zero updates, performing it's duty as it was built to.
The phone I had in mind is akin to Motorola's RAZR Ultra. As opposed to opening like a book the way Samsung's latest does, unfolding the "top" half provides a smaller-than-average smartphone screen, leaving room for a Blackberry-style keyboard below.
I'm in that niche market where I do not need a large screen on my phone since I am mostly reading text as opposed to watching media. It's not likely I'll ever get precisely what I want due to practicality of both manufacturing and what the general market demands are. I've come to terms with it, but if someone ever drops such a device, I will get in line for it.
I cannot possibly imagine what I'd do with a "rollable" laptop, but I do see one tiny benefit to foldable phones; reduced pocket consumption. Having a smaller device or a device that gets smaller is just two different ways to solve my main beef with modern phablets.
Personally, I wish someone would just make a clamshell smart phone where I open it up to a single screen on one half and a physical keyboard on another, but that's a different discussion.
That all said, I'm curious to hear from the people who want this device. What's drawing you to it? What problem does this type of display on a laptop solve for you? What are your concerns about its robustness or longevity, if any?
Time is your most precious resource. Everyone wants more, but there is no way to get more. Nobody knows when their supply will run out. We do not produce it, having been granted a finite amount of it by our existence.
Attention is to time as shopping is to your paycheck.
Whatever cool people there were have either died or saw the writing on the wall as IRC slowly faded into obscurity with the introduction of better (debatable) chat systems, especially these days with things like Discord or Slack that do every IRC does in some capacity and more, perhaps most importantly simply making chat accessible in a safe way to less technically savvy users. That genie is kinda out of the bottle, so getting anyone aside from grumpy old guard to use IRC versus the modern alternatives is pretty much impossible. As a result, and aside from the bots doing things like letting me play IdleRPG or whatever, you're more likely to encounter people like me who don't feel like we fit in anywhere or conspiracy theorists, returning to IRC the way Romero's zombies wandered to the shopping mall because they had a vague memory of it from a former life.
Side 1: the workers, especially the labor portion, are extremely resistant to learning new ways to do things unless you can prove, beyond the shadow of doubt, that the new way will be easier than the old way (aka, less to remember/think about) but also does not diminish the quality of their work or increase the perception that their coworkers might see them as having it easier than them.
Side 2: the people responsible for purchasing and resource allocation often do not know what they are buying. In any shop, if you say "we need new PC's for the office" the first thing the purchaser will do is ask a supplier for a deal on a fleet of Dells because that's just what they've always done. If the company is larger and has an actual IT department, they will just provide Windows PCs because that's what they were trained to support. The alternative, Linux, is never considered because they simply don't know anything about it and it's not being offered by their suppliers anyway, so why learn?
Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
When I use Claude for code, for example, I am not asking it to write my code. I'm asking it to review what I have written and either suggest improvements or ways to troubleshoot a problem I am having. I also don't always follow its advice, either, but that depends on how much I understand the reply. Sometimes it outputs something that makes sense based on my current skill level, sometimes it proposes things that I know nothing about, in which case I ask it to break it down further so I can go search the Internet for more info and see if I can learn more, which pushes the limits of my skill level.
It works well, since my goal is to improve what I bring to the table and I have learned a lot, both about coding and about prompt engineering.
When I talk to other people, they accuse me of having the AI do all the work for me because that's how they approach their use of it. They want the AI to produce the whole project, as opposed to just using it as a second brain to offload some mental chunking. That's where Gen AI fails and the user spends all their time correcting convoluted mistakes caused by confabulation, unless they're making a simple monolithic program or script, but even then there's often hiccups.
Point is, Gen AI is a great tool, if you approach it with the right mindset. The hammer does not build the whole house, but it can certainly help.
That should automatically tell us we shouldn't trust them, and yet fandoms and followings abound.