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Let's hope we never do. Of course, there's very little hope but we all would be better off if this product didn't exist.

Let me quote Paris Marx's excellent summary from his Apple Vision Pro preview https://disconnect.blog/apples-vision-pro-headset-deserves/

> Tech companies want us isolated and constantly staring at screens because it drives profit

and of course

> The Vision Pro lets users further separate themselves from their surroundings and even create “digital personas” for video calls so other people are talking to a digital, abstracted version of themselves instead of seeing the real person.

Even The Verge acknowledges:

> using the Vision Pro is such a lonely experience, regardless of the weird ghost eyes on the front.

Of course it's Apple so it'll catch on and what in 1969 was predicted to happen in 4545 will happen, well, quite a few years earlier

: In the year 4545

...

: Nobody's gonna look at you

And of course https://img.ifunny.co/images/3461f2f61d0ac8385d0c1985ac41554...

Oh yes, I have my eyes on the future.

It ain't the cheery future described by Extremely Online (although even that book mentions the ugly but not enough, not by far).

Not, it's the future of platform decay (to use a more polite word for enshittification) and Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

To be closer to topic , let me quote Paris Marx's excellent summary from his Apple Vision Pro preview https://disconnect.blog/apples-vision-pro-headset-deserves/

> Tech companies want us isolated and constantly staring at screens because it drives profit

and of course

> The Vision Pro lets users further separate themselves from their surroundings and even create “digital personas” for video calls so other people are talking to a digital, abstracted version of themselves instead of seeing the real person.

Even The Verge acknowledges:

> using the Vision Pro is such a lonely experience, regardless of the weird ghost eyes on the front.

Oh yes, I have my eyes on the future and I am bloody unhappy about it.

The PDP-11 was unusually well suited for that. They designed it so you needed less skilled workers to assemble it which meant a lot of tolerance in components which leads to much easier maintenance. For example, the backplane is wire wrapped so there's no soldiering there which can eventually tire out. If things move around, oh well.

Also the PDP-11 was designed at the time boundary of core vs semiconductor memory with the clear intent to be able switch to semiconductor which led to an unusually flexible design around memory (and also affected I/O design). Check this 1975 paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800110.803541

Nearing the finish line? https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12525

> One of the plan’s priorities is the retirement of the Business Master File by FY2027 and the Individual Master File by FY2028

But it's not at all clear whether there's funding available to execute this plan.

I mean, yes, it's been 15 years and now only about five remains (because these projects never meet deadlines, let's face it) so they are nearer the finish line ... but it's very far still.

Oh Win 3.11 is a modern system compared to support PDP-11 until 2050. https://web.archive.org/web/20161022133810/https://vcfed.org...

(GE Canada tried to headhunt me for that but I don't want a job where a typo turns Toronto into a parking lot. Thanks but no thanks. I will stick to web pages.)

> What genocide is Canada committing?

My educated guess based on "as well as freezing bank accounts just for attending a peaceful protest" in the same breath is vaccine mandates.

Poster is a nutjob. The "peaceful protest" was a Russian dark money backed attempt to disrupt Canadian life, to sow discord and chaos. I mean, they were successful with Brexit and Trump so they took a stab at Canada but they didn't manage to tear Canada apart. On the surface, they were protesting vaccine mandates but that was just the drivel for the redneck fodder. Canadian authorities haven't seen the like yet so they let it grow up to a point where they actually managed to disrupt Canadian economy seriously by occupying a bridge leading to a border crossing. So the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency, froze their bank accounts and sent them home. No one died. These nutjobs forget this rather important point: Canadian authorities peacefully managed to end this.

There are countless articles and various government agencies reporting on how this ancient system is still in use. Eg. https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/finance_r_lette... https://www.gao.gov/blog/irss-efforts-modernize-60-year-old-... https://www.cfodive.com/news/irs-relies-64-year-old-software... etc etc

> But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), which was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old.

Certainly but I'd say the most important ancient software is just a few years younger: the IRS Master Files. https://www.governmentattic.org/5docs/IRS-HistoricalFactBook...

> FEBRUARY 1962 The first master file, the Business Master File, was established at the National Computer Center

Individual Master File operations began a few years later. Let that sink in: every tax transaction a company or an individual makes in the United States is handled by a piece of software written for the IBM 7074. These were using a CPU of about 27 000 instructions per second and had 9900 words of core memory. It's hard to paint a picture of just how old we are talking about. While the Beatles already existed at the time, the Beatlemania is still a phenomena for the future. This https://i.imgur.com/dtmPy3a.jpg is a luxury car from that year.

Oh first ISPs are fun.

I worked for the first commercial ISP in Hungary in 1995. At the time phone lines were still a hot commodity -- it takes a bit of time to fix decades of neglect, after all (Hungary was a Soviet satellite until 1989 and the wait time for a landline was ~ten years in the 80s). So supply side for lines was low and prices were high. On the other hand, the potential income for the ISP was limited because, well, it's 1995, not many people or businesses even know what Internet is good for. So how on earth did they afford the necessary many lines?

Well, see, they didn't. The guys running the place got wind of a CO in an older district in Budapest has excess capacity so they rented a flat next to the CO and drilled the wall. Presto! Plenty phone lines without installation costs.

Multiple someones, in fact.

Why not? Someone makes a faster driver, another makes say a more power efficient one so the card is quieter. And yes it vould cost money. You could compete on this thing. Once upon a time there were competing commercial operation systems. Can't see why GPU drivers couldn't compete.

C code? Nah, my friend, firmware is written in SPARK to achieve the highest possible quality. /s

(and yes it should have been written in it, arduous it is, it's a "you had one job" situation)

Yes, much like Framework has completely upended the laptop industry.

/s

How close do they need to be? China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec Group) has, for all intents and purposes, financed the genocide in Darfur. See for example https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/03/statement-on-... on this.

Of course it is.

FTX collapses (November 2-11, 2022), crypto hustle-scam is over, the decision is made to release whatever there is at the moment at OpenAI to start the next cycle, a few weeks later (November 30, 2022) there we go. Same thing as always: some investors -- mostly white males -- get filthy rich meanwhile some others get exploited -- this time it's Kenyan workers -- and many, many people get hoodwinked and then lose their shirt. Same story, different hype.

https://youtu.be/I6IQ_FOCE6I did everyone forget? I guess. At we got something out of web2.0 ... but we also got a genocide and a few warped elections / referendums out of it so the jury is still out how history will see it. Crypto was a net negative for humankind in every possible way (except a few people walked away with tons of money of course but at what cost) and now we are facing down this terrible wave of AI. Yay?

> his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.

that's cute.

What worries me is the here and now leading to a very imminent future where purported "artificial intelligence" which is just a plausible sentence generator but damn plausible alas will kill democracy and people.

We are seeing the first signs of both.

Perhaps not 2024 but 2028 almost certainly will be an election where simply the candidate with the most computing resources win and since computing costs money, guess who wins. A prelude happened in Indian elections https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-voice-modi-singing-politics and this article mentions:

> AI can be game-changing for [the] 2024 elections.

People dying also has a prelude with AI written mushroom hunting guides available on Amazon. No one AFAIK died of them yet but that's just dumb luck at this point -- or is it lack of reporting? As for the larger scale problem and I might be wrong because I haven't foreseen the mushroom guides so it's possible something else will come along to kill people but I think it'll be the next pandemic. In this pandemic hand written anti vaxx propaganda killed 300 000 people in the US alone (source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... ) and I am deeply afraid what will happen when this gets cranked to an industrial scale. We have seen how ChatGPT can crank out believable looking but totally fake scientific papers, full of fake sources etc.

Trans women are not males who call themselves women, though.

If you insist they are , that's denial of trans existence and that's the road to genocide.

Trans women are not males who call themselves women, though.

If you insist they are , that's denial of trans existence and that's the road to genocide.

Apparently I was wrong on top surgeries. I will be more careful with phrasing then. However, sterilization (aka genital surgery) still is not a thing.

I find this hypocritical. C executives of tech orgs with world class products often have eight figures compensation -- if not from salary then from stock options. I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete.

to me this smells transphobic but it's possible the trans genocide several US states are working on made me oversensitive

There are fundamentally two kinds of attacks, preimage which splits into two:

In a first-preimage attack, you know a hash value but not the message that created it, and you want to discover any message with the known hash value; in the second-preimage attack, you have a message and you want to find a second message that has the same hash. Attacks that can find one type of preimage can often find the other as well. A weak algorithm allows this to be done in less than 2^(hash length) attempts.

And then there is collision: two messages which produce the same hash. A weak algorithm allows this to be done in less than 2^(half of hash length) attempts.

Source: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4270

I know at least one patent author for whom the system worked exactly as designed. That being my uncle. Imagine the literal bearded tinkerer in his garage inventing a (much) better sprinkler head. What's the next step? Without the patent system, I guess raise money, build a factory and establish yourself in the market? With the patent system, he sold it to one of the largest manufacturers and today AFAIK about a third of sprinkler heads sold in the US are his invention. He was paid handsomely for the decade plus of tinkering, the manufacturer got a great invention without spending a decade on R&D. Win all around.

Notably this was a physical object and not maths.

Because anti vaxxers want to downplay the disease to convince people not to get the vaccine.

> I'm offering what worked for me

I choose not to believe you because you refused to vaccinate which makes everything you say suspect. Sorry.

do not listen to this guy.

long covid is not something you can combat with fresh fruits, it can cause a life long disability, brain damage and more. it's quite obvious an anti-vaxxer would try to dismiss it as a "sucks but you can make it through". Look up the stories of people who still can barely get out of bed after years of long covid.

There was a time when ML brought us things like https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ and we had a good laugh.

Then came ChatGPT. The tens of billions dollars poured into the next hype, often by the same hustlers who hyped crypto (but for sure they were not the ones who lost the billions or stood in front of the court). Same environmental damage due to wasted electricity poured into wasteful, pointless computation. Same hype without any actual usefulness. In both cases this sentiment is met with a huff but it's factual.

Came the AI-written mushroom hunting guides.

Came AI Modi singing trending garnering votes for him. Our worst fears of democracy ending in favor of the candidate with the most processing power aka with the most money winning.

This pandemic (for covid didn't end yet) already 300 000 people died because of hand written propaganda (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071...) when the next pandemic will come the AI produced oh so plausible bullshit will flood everything and millions will die.

Aza Raskin compared it to a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity and he is oh so right.

Who is laughing now?

The English Wikipedia might (or might not) have achieved this but certainly the Croatian and Polish were caught to be heavily influenced by right wing extremists, the Hungarian was not yet because no one gives a damn.

But my recipe of adding anything to Wikipedia still stands, I adopted it from an article added by Hungarian nationalists: while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it. No one will try to dig up a small run German book decades or even hundreds of years old to verify. Or will be able to.

The thing is, the people Wikipedia successfully did drive out are actual experts -- or rather they never came. The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks.

Wise has recently made a big batch of account verifications which overwhelmed their verifications staff and support both and left a company we do in Austria unable to do payroll. That was fun. Of course we moved that company elsewhere (in this case xe) and my brother moved his personal to Starling in the UK.

Then they changed the US accounts with three weeks notice and I am like, you can't do this on such a short notice, WTF, I have outstanding invoices now need to be wired elsewhere, this is a gigantic mess. I completely expect at least one partner to screw this up in November, can't wait. Perhaps I should've moved this company to xe as well but I am exhausted.

Why can't we have nice things. (And please, do not recommend Revolut, look up their 2021 audit and the lack of 2022 accounts, so far. Not touching that. If and when they can convince the brits they are gucci I will take a look, not until.)

Well, they have TrackPoints. I did learn to live without a seven row keyboard the last two years -- previously I even bought the collector edition ThinkPad 25 to put that day off as far as I could -- but living without a TrackPoint? I am not keen on pawing at the wrist rest in a futile attempt to precisely move my mouse pointer. Mind you, I can barely use a mobile phone either, I hate the touchscreen keyboard with a fiery passion. I am efficient with my ThinkPads and https://xkcd.com/1806/ applies very heavily.

Also, there are some claims by ThinkPad fans about it being sturdier and easier to repair still. I do not know how much truth is in this. Lenovo still does publish Hardware Maintenance Manuals, do HP/Dell?

Just an example https://www.newegg.com/p/2SW-003Z-00008 but countless examples on amazon,newegg,aliexpress

Hello from an AI safety ninny. I have posted these two concerns multiple times and no one posted any counters to them.

1. There was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ where they argued for 2028 and on will be AI elections where the person with most computing power wins.

2. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it.

However, the dangers here are immense. There was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it.

This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.