_wire_

These devices are a form of social pollution, whereby the desires and demands of others are mechanically proxied into common spaces.

When you negotiate others on the causeway, you are involved in human one-on-one exchanges with parity; each encountering the others on the level of interpersonal status, which is about the ways humans observe respect for each other.

But there can be no respect given nor received with a robot. It's an engine that's in competition for your space, presents as both a mechanical advantage and as handicapped, is not interesting nor appropriate to meet, and generally responds so stupidly and unpredictably that it's hazardous-- which makes its insertion into the commons an offense.

Combine the need for vigilance and avoidance with the realization that the robot annoyance is a proxy for someone else's privilege and as robots are instruments of private property extending deeply into common spaces and it's not a surprise to find people who are encroached upon by robots manifesting their displeasure through sabotage.

Anytime any device in any context greets you with "Hello" or "Welcome", it is announcing that it doesn't belong to you, and that you must be vigilant to its exploitation of you.

Windows is remarkable in that it is constantly editing itself, revising terms of service without notice, nudging, cajoling, and end-running you and at every turn.

Update cannot be stopped, yet updater messages make it seem like you are initiating work and responsible for its successful completion:

"You're 90% there...",

"Don't turn off your PC",

"Something didn't go as planned, don't worry your data is safe",

which is eternally followed by "Welcome" lets arrange a few things...

Apple's dark patterns are far lower key as they supply the total stack, it's feels more custodial.

Linux if it says anything-- which it usually doesn't say much-- will say these changes are well-known to wreck things but you're at our mercy, them your system is put into some polluted state associated with a bygone era and all your config and data is your problem hope you're skilled at IT.

Talk about the target becoming the measure...

"What our firm offers is re-alignment of your market data with the simulation"

For me, this is a memorable line from the 60s movie Becket with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton, which is a character study about state power, belief and love based on history of King Henry and his Archbishop, done with strong production values that with a thespian ornament distinctive of British film production houses of the decade it made.

According to the Gemeniz (reddit sourced) the line from history is "Will none of these lazy insignificant persons... deliver me from this turbulent priest?" although this was recorded hundreds of years after the fact of its utterance. The essence being that Henry being used to throwing his weight around was truly surprised that his complaint was regarded as an order.

The screenplay of Becket treats this gingerly, O'Toole gives King Henry both grief at the loss of his friend, and elation that his figurehead enjoys new status as Becket is sainted.

Within 10 minutes this presentation becomes exhausting.

Summary:

A thousand words are spoken where a hundred would to, including continuing repetitions of "um," "you know," and "right?", to make a point about reactor terminology so technically trivial that you'll wonder if the speaker knows anything at all about this subject.

The term "heresy" is used seemingly with no comprehension whatsoever.

The speaker tries to break the ice of his presentation by forcing a joke that he admits-- parenthetically, repeatedly-- is meaningless, so as to verbally goosestep towards his opening point about terminology, which is a trivial, personal bone of contention, not some fascinating insight.

The host, who admits he had not prepared for his guest, and oblivious to lack of presentation skills of his guest, interjects a bizarre bro-vibe "keeping going because this is so interesting" without do much as a tic of awareness that his guest (who btw is a phd candidate TA) may have no clear ideas about the domain he's instructing.

Jump ahead 30 minutes:

- "So, you know" "right?"

- "Hmm"

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, a dyed-in-the-wool academic, was remarking that his university was producing phd students who couldn't read nor write. It seems that today that they can't even maintain a conversation.

Yet another sky-is-falling lament about domination and consolidation by "frontier" AI companies that offers the meager insight that ultimately capitalism is a corpse.

A worthwhile question is begged: how will industry evolve humans consume the entire world? But this is not explored.

Makes me think of silly Artemis mission going on right now with a tiny woke cadre of space cadets searching for a new home for humanity on the dark side of the moon, vibing the influential 90s corporate self-help book "Who Moved My Cheese?" Like the Artemis mission, this article lifts off into the void makes an orbit, ands comes back to where it started with previous little information such as toilets are still tricky in zero-G.

Something is something than you think, part 1001

Republicans

The grid is always missing its 4th and most interesting quadrant: the "unknown knowns"; what Zizek calls the contents of ideology; or how Chomsky might regard UG. The unknowns that prescribe our capacity to know.

As to "any sufficiently abc is xyz": this tired tautology must be retired as hyperbolic jargon. Lead any writeup with it at penalty of being ignored.

But HN is still partying like it's 1999...

Couldn't he offer a 1/4 day for a HN revamp?

Prefer the observations that gen-AI can retrieve, in a manner that looks remarkably lifelike.

Use gen-AI to assist composition, under the expectation that it will retrieve code with surprisingly high context sensitivity.

Never expect gen-AI to generally reason. It can't do it.

In pursuit of vast monetary incentives, the designers of gen-AI have overwhelming reasons to align gen-AI to fake reasoning. One very easy way to do this is to make agents appear agreeable. A more pernicious way is observe edge-cases, and mechanically turk additional context sensitivity for those cases (RLHF).

If AGI is anywhere on the horizon this will be surprising given that there is so little understanding of the nature of intelligence. Nevermind the ethical concerns surrounding any pursuit of sentient AI.

Because oldschool is the future! Just ask AI. It's where the profits come from doing things the same old way that profits came from...

Incredibly cancerous technology that is obliterating privacy and eclipsing local control of devices.

Following the lead of Microsoft PC, the device is a trojan horse for unstated, unregulated interests of the app.

The half-life of enshittification of any commons based on this technology should be expected to be an order of magnitude shorter than it was for the web, and malicious application causing an order of magnitude greater damage.

--

Trekkies have already foretold the hazard (withstanding the already totalitarian dimensions of the premise of Star Trek's Federation):

ep. 106 "The Game" -> social-media pleasure/pain pathos and distortion and exploitation of human relationships.

ep. 25 "Conspiracy" -> parasitic infection of command & control structures that pollute autonomy.

-- We're on the cusp of becoming enslaved by the organizations designing this tech.

If that sounds hyperbolic, merely notice that the entire computing industry has pivoted away from the personal towards the corporate under conditions of war, usurping production and deployment of this technology at a planetary scale, within a time-frame of a decade for AI versus a century for pre-AI computing.

A thoughtful review of the filmography of Mani Haghighi, and on his influences, eg Abbas Kiarostami. (By Richard Brody.)

EnPoopification... Let 'em in early to build the brand then shut 'em out later to protect it.

The point of any media outlet is thought control, and venture capital knows the vital importance of thought control to returns on investment.

What's the context of approval? To approve, of course!

Those little scamps. Oh, they grow up so fast.

MAGA: Make Apple Great Again

"I'm not here to turn Apple around..."

Wonderful to see the iBook in a context of seeming cool when that was such a disgusting era of product design, hamstrung between the 1940s and the next millennium.

Jobs' comment about how you've got to choose clunkier form factors to make products affordable while stipulating that the "the plan" is to increase churn captures a seeming paradox that eventually becomes a long running series of lectures by Cory Doctorow.

Obsolescence has been very planned and very necessary for the industrial revolution.

Begging a question about human generations: do we have to obsolesce ourselves? Given that we're always dying anyway, there's maybe a natural rhythm to industrial change that ought to be respected.

Praise be to Allah that the Bondi Blue iBook is gone the way of the dodo. And marvel at "progress". As Jobs holds up that LCD (and wifi chip) in the iBook, he portends of everything we are going through today: we are making the crossing from a victorian era of geniuses showing off tubes and sparks to being obsolesced by a galactic civilization of robots! -- compared to Jobs, Musk is such a chump. But Jobs is now lost in the circle of life, and soon Musk and we will be lost too.

Where are the old Esalen Institute dorks when we need them?!

"I just got my third coffee and I'm feeling really good about the quality of this code. I don't even bother to look at it. Keeps my tests simple to not test at all. You know, 'in theory'. Of course when the architecture gets genuinely tangled... Just keep your IDE open so the code knows where to go. Whoa, too much caffeine, super sleepy..."

Terafab is suddenly making so much sense!

I was off by a lot:

World oil is 6 billion tons per year:

100 million barrels per day times 365 divided by 6 barrels per ton.

The plan wants 20 billion tons per year, so 3x world output.

Ok, I am so wrong! Sounds totally doable!

For kit placed in low earth orbit, where it tends to come back down again, fuel to payload is greater than 20:1, so to get 100 million tons of payload up, so the "plan" specs 2 billion tons of fuel-- per year!

If rockets were powered solely by kerosene (not) and observing that crude roughly converts to kerosene at 10:1, then the "plan" requires 2 billion tons of kerosene times 10 -> 20 billion tons of crude per year.

Note that the world uses 365 million barrels of crude per year. A barrel weighs 300 lbs -> 6 barrels per ton, so the world uses about 60 million tons of crude per year.

The "plan" wants 333x world crude output per year, or maybe the 2-3x per year the total crude ever consumed by humanity.

(Never mind for how long)

And for what purpose? To access solar energy ??? in space ??? to power chips ??? used by optimus robots ??? "among the stars"

Sounds like "galactic" jerking off. But it's what Musk knows best.

Didn't Musk have a toy digging project on earth that was going to revolutionize Vegas holidays? But he gave up because it was too hard or he got bored before the project did.

Maybe start with a lunar civilization, and let things move on from there.

Plus psychopathic hypocrisy.

It's not simply the pathos of lack of decorum, it's maniacal, inverted decorum.

But in USA we are proud to do everything beyond excess.

Terrible thinking is distinguished by proximate correctness under a tarp of inconsiderate or un-examined assumptions, leading to tautology and a false sense of understanding.

In Butler's case, the terms "race", "slavery", "machine" stand out as begged questions.

Butler offers Luddite ranting to assuage his own confusion and fear.

Prefer Herbert's simpler, more self-reflective, nuanced warning to not desecrate the divine mystery of mind.

To believe in "Make America Great Again" you have to believe that America is not great, and this implies you are ashamed of your country. Shame is built in to MAGA.

Thanks to the unbridled power of artificial intelligence, I just have to specify all the edge cases and the world will be mine!

If her brain had wires, it might have worked. Except drugs don't have anything to do with wires either. But she'd try anything once. Far out!

Similar to U.S. conduct within the UN, the U.S. and its proxy on the Sinai routinely, exclusively, overwhelmingly betray the will of collective, to a degree of monstrous hubris and violence.

Re NATO -- which term it should be noted the British press has perversely redefined as Nato, a proper name, abdicating the memory of hemispheric treaty organization -- the intent of the doctrine was the avoidance of war through mutual security guarantees. But according to the distorted history proffered by U.S. Republicans, NATO's function is as a hemispheric cartel which U.S. and U.K. multinational corporations operate internally as a protection racket, demanding fealty from vassals under duress of war.

Pathetic politics of terrorism.

It's baffling and shameful that the multipolar commons does not offer any advance over this cartel; the globe is operated as franchises under cartel ideology and the intellectual culture has obviated philosophy for public relations (PR).

> He just authenticated with his own device’s token and discovered that the system had absolutely no concept of which devices that token was supposed to be allowed to access.

Privacy thru ubiquity?

(this is a dumb joke)

But do you want domestic appliances representing "proof of who you are" interacting on a universal public network?

Would it be a bigger fail if this product were better designed in such regard?

e.g., the Ring debacle

The designers of the internet left a lot on the table regarding security architecture and we will be paying the price for this design neglect for generations.

When "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is combined with crime it seems clear that betting on crime is acting as an accessory. A business facilitating betting on crime is a criminal enterprise, in the sense of RICO.

Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:

War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise.

Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism.

In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.