gurneyHaleck

Yes. A recent one. Prior to 2003, people were less interested in non-sentient autonomous machines. Drones.

As technology advances, autonomous machines may very likely grow beyond the definition/parlance of a "drone" (machinery designed and dedicated only to perform specific tasks) into more powerful forms of intelligence.

At that point, such machinery graduates beyond the definition of an artifact (a possession held in the ownership of higher-order life), and one might speculate whether it represents a form of life unto itself, or where one might draw such a boundary.

Either way, such sentient machinery (read: not drones) might not be bound by geological/astronomical timescales, outlasting its inventors possibly permanently, but still represents a component of the Fermi Paradox. If such things are possible, where are they?

The Fermi Paradox posits the premise of ANY artifact indicative of intelligent origins.

It doesn't have to be "self replicating drones." It could be inert bullets, arrow heads, sharp sticks, carefully arranged electromagnetic retro-reflectors.

Drones are a fad. The paradox doesn't require an alien implementation of drone technology, self replicating, autonomous, or what have you.

Just because you like the idea, doesn't mean it gets adopted.

Yeah, I really don't buy that premise at all. Just because some individual likes the idea of drones, doesn't make them implicitly virtuous.

The decision to use resources to pollute the wilderness with arbitrary technology is a leadership decision, relying on the personality characteristics of an entity or social chain of command.

This business about "drones" is an anachronistic paraphrasing of the original concept. People didn't speak in terms of the "drone" fad in the 20th century, like we do now. Drones were usually just target practice for the Air Force and Navy.

The original concept just specified range of influence, and a demonstration of presence. It did not impose a manner of activity, be it drone replication or direct colonization with regimented staff, and divisions of duty among personel. [0] The Fermi paradox remained agnostic, simply implying possible speed of travel given geological time scales.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos mentioned unmanned satellites (or unaliened? unoccupied...) as the most likely hypothetical form of first contact. Before we bump into any living thing, will probably notice a few remote control devices fanned out in front of their main corpus of civilization or colonization. That TV show also hypothesized about the possibility of dying civilizations leaving behind self-perpetuating remnants of technology, the likes of which might or might not be sentient. All of it was TV speculation though, not presented as surely factual.

If you read between the lines, the premise of a "dying" civilization hints at the lack of self control present in a runaway factory neglected and left to churn out garbage. That idea does not assume that a collective of entities would always wish to tamper with and contaminate their surrounding domain presumptiously.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

If that's the case then we definitely do not want to face the universe as primitive indiginous people unceremoniously discovered by technologically mature explorers.

I, uh, don't happen to understand where... precisely, that real people paid with their lives, due to these leaks.

From where I stand, he released Power Point slides to journalists, outlining the broad strokes of some programs and projects.

He did so in a way that proved there were deep flaws to be found in the manner in which the NSA secured itself. Had he not proven these flaws by demonstration, those flaws would likely have persisted until, instead of merely having its pants pulled down in the middle of the street, the NSA might have been stabbed to death for its wallet.

Why listen to me though? This very document even says they still live with the hazard of another Snowden coming along and pulling another Snowden. It is, in fact, the conclusion of the document we are discussing right now.

I can't help but stand this next to the Challenger Space Shuttle O-ring thread, without feeling a profound sense of resonance between these 2 scenarios.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13238346

Compare this passage:

  (U) Third, two weeks before Snowden began mass 
      downloads of classified documents, he was 
      reprimanded after engaging in a workplace 
      spat with NSA managers. Snowden was repeatedly 
      counseled by his managers regarding his behavior 
      at work. For example, in June 2012, Snowden became 
      involved in a fiery email argument with a 
      supervisor about how computer updates should be 
      managed. Snowden added an NSA senior executive 
      several levels above the supervisor to the email 
      thread, an action that earned him a swift 
      reprimand from his contracting officer for failing 
      to follow the proper protocol for raising 
      grievances through the chain of command. Two weeks 
      later, Snowden began his mass downloads of 
      classified information from NSA networks.

Compare to:

  2) The engineers actually knew the risk (~1% chance 
     of loss per launch, not specific to the o-rings, 
     compared with two actual losses of the shuttle 
     over ~130 missions). Management used entirely 
     invented numbers for the risk which were not 
     justified.

It's like, hey, Snowden tried to tell them to apply their updates. He tried to tell them the o-rings might blow. He warned them that there was a one-in-one-hundred probability of failure.

If he didn't blow the gasket on the launchpad himself, before launch, how disasterously awful might this have really been, if he had behaved like a good little cubicle drone, followed protocol, drank the Kool-Ade, and permitted this so-called "counseling" to brainwash him?

  "Do you realise the astronauts 
   will run out of nitrogen on day 
   59 and die?" 

  So Mars One isn't really funny, it 
  has probably set back the credibility 
  of the movement by a decade. 

I realize it's not meant to be a truly quantifiable statement, but I'm always curious why people regard incidents like this as producing serious damage to progress.

There are definitely crucial moments in political science, when an absurd gaff completely botches a carefully crafted image, completely imploding the efforts of hundreds of people, and sinking an entire team permanently. Cringey things that seem to matter to the echo chamber of a 24 hour news cycle.

But I don't feel like hard science works that way. When it comes to real engineering feats, if one company tries to trade on faulty calculations, and their charade is laid bare, the smoke and mirrors disappear only to reveal the same bald truth that had always been there from the start: hard problems defy shenanigans.

A political failure doesn't deflate an engineering problem. Not in the same way it deflates a PR campaign. If the hard science was not respected, then there was no investment in a decade of progress to begin with.

So, these swindlers then maybe blew a decade of real funding, only to burn their investors with bogus project plans and proposals, ripping off charity and fomenting skepticism and suspicion? I think skepticism in this sphere is actually healthy, and separates the children from the adults.

Waste is a bad thing, and maybe real money disappears, but maybe that kind money came from the kinds of people who might have just as soon blown their cash on personal assistants, vacations and clothes. Clearly such investors were not "buying science," or they'd have known better.

So, then the only thing left is that maybe there's the premise that admirers of the charade would not have loitered on the sidelines, simply yearning to lend their support to the parlour trick they were true believers in. That they would have stepped up to the task, had they known progress was stalled. I don't buy that.

No matter what, I don't think there has even been a decade of effort spent on crewing a mission to Mars. It's all been so much conjecture. It's never seemed to be an easier idea than an underground moon base, and no one seems to be giving lunar round-trips or installations much more consideration than mars.

Space shuttle accidents and launchpad explosions cast the true hazards in a much more severe relief, but knowing that people are even trying and failing feels like much more significant progress than a lot of talk and faulty plans.

So was there really any "damage" done by some of these PR goof ups?

Very true. The Mac Pro is eternally reminiscent of a trash can, and it feels hazardous leaving it out in the open, because maybe someone might actually mistake it for one and drop an empty coffee cup in it.

The lack of expandability makes it feel like a doomed purchase, and costing more than $2,000 means spending on something that might prove obsolete in a year (or possibly less) feels extremely frivolous.

Extensible hardware allows us to rationalize a big purchase with the mindset that there's an intent to future-proof with an investment that allocates room for growth.

That concept does not exist with the Mac Pro form factor at all. The purchase is not even slightly user-servicable. Only a subscription to a service/maintenance agreement (read: applecare) provides nigh-full-replacement insurance. And basically, you're just paying for the privilege to gamble. You'll never get to change your old toy into a new toy.

Oh, definitely true. Apple is always a higher price in general, just as a brand name. It's their intended marketing strategy.

Even within Apple's own product line though, compare what you get with the cylindrical desktop Mac Pro for the price, and stand it next to one of their own laptops.

Then stand the Mac Mini next to them. It's a lower price, but it's uncharismatic.

A game changer for the mac mini might be improved methods of environmental integration. Most of the time I think about better ways to hide it, out of sight, out of mind.

The only thing I want within immediate reach is a power button, and a wall switch (any variety of toggle) would be ideal. Hard wired. An actual button. I press button, it goes on. I press button, it goes off. Not an animated skeuomorphic 16 million color display depicting one. No wi-fi tether. No analytics. No GPS. No chipset. No thunderbolt. No USB. No IP address. No internet of things. Just a god damned switch. On/off. The end.

An iPad with a keyboard. God help us all.

And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway.

Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately.

I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life.

No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches)

Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time.

Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.

But don't actually LIKE the mac mini. It's not something I particularly want.

I do kind of want the huge cinema displays. But they're expensive.

I do kind of want the cylindrical mac pro. But it's expensive.

Apple's laptops are the sweet spot. I want them. The price is right. And they have performed. Tablets and touchscreens suck compared to a solid laptop.

Mac minis are borderline indistinguishable from any other mac during use. But they've always been coasters. Lazy susans. Arm rests. Furniture.

The only time you think about it being a mac mini is when you cycle power, or when you imagine opening it up, and adding more power because multi-tasking.

Providing the mac pro at closer to mini prices would be cool. The polished metal cyclinder is kind of cool. But it's hard to find fetish items that endure six months these days. The death march of cell phone upgrades has seen to that.

Once they started soldering and epoxying internals, well... I start to feel guilty about polluting the environment with electronics waste, and I start googling recycling programs.

Sometimes I get the feeling that those who control industries that profit from climate-altering human behavior believe that it's okay to alter the climate, because whatever they have caused, they will assuredly be able to override, and undo, through similar force of will.

Too hot? Cooling something is easy! Block out the sun, somehow, until things cool off!

Too cold? Simple! Pump up those greenhouse gases again! Earth has a thermostat, and it's easy to mess with!

I think this is why there's so much willful ignorance and obfuscation, deliberately muddying the waters. They want control, and no one else must tamper or meddle with such grand designs.

Of course, the world is larger than they are. And what if they aren't around to help fix what they've ruined.

It seems their answer is:

  If *WE'RE* dead, who fucking cares about the rest?

Last time I checked, a jet engine doesn't quite blow smoke entirely across a tarmac.

Maybe hot air just rises anyway. Maybe kinetic influence matters less than boosting the thermal energy?

But inversion layers change with the weather, so even if this works once, it may not work every time. And a band-aid that fixes this now, may only encourage more runaway growth covered up by more band-aids.

Wouldn't want to actually change technologies though. Just blunder along and cobble together dust busters and blow torches and continue with business as usual.

I suppose I'd only expect roughly the same from my own town supervisor...

No, that's a bad idea.

TC articles ARE many times vapid, uniformative and click-baity, but...

They will remain tech-oriented, timely and do serve the purpose of initiating conversation, by drawing attention to information sources that might not have gained visibility on their own. In short, you risk harming the network effect by applying a censor or restriction against such behavior.

This is one of those nuances that requires to blood and sweat of moderation. Unless there's a reasonable way to maybe crawl the submission and search its contents reliably, preventing such links carries risk.

But by Christmas of 2001, a lot of people would just roll their eyes, and say things like "Oh come on. Iraq? Bullshit. No way." [0]

By mid-2002 there were weird goings on, things like lumber shortages, and it was like "Oh fuck. Iraq is happening for real, and this isn't going to be a quick in-and-out." [1]

This is just according to my personal memories, of course. They pretty much line up with wikiepedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

  [0] Donald Rumsfeld memo dated 27 November 
      2001 (still bullshit territory)

  [1] During 2002, the amount of ordnance 
      used by British and American aircraft 
      patrolling the no-fly zones of Iraq 
      increased compared to the previous 
      years and by August had "become a full
      air offensive". (was actually happening)

Yeah, that's probably true. I'm thinking in terms of conversations at Christmas parties in 2001.

If there's only one source of news that feeds into the grapevine effect then you only need to tune into the grapevine.

There are like five journalistic camps that feed into my grapevine, and they all report the same stories, and spin five different opinions on the same daily topics. Thus, the grapevine provides the same complete set, five times, redundantly.

All of the stories from these camps are useless. The stories are not, in fact relevant, and so I do not care how slowly they appear at my feet. I usually just step over them anyway and go about my business.

My house didn't have cable at that time, and I was not yet in high school.

We watched the first gulf war in social studies class, putting it in league with the space shuttle challenger disaster. It was a classroom topic for a few months, and then gone.

Next year it was Rodney King and Amy Fisher or something. More irrelevant popcorn.

Yes, but that was tabloid junk. A seedy hollywood yarn.

Not an air disaster that demolished two buildings filled with people. 9/11 had teeth that other stories couldn't come close to.

Like JFK, it was on another level, and hard to not watch.

There was a period of time, starting upon the day of, and then continuing for some years after the 9/11 attacks, where "The News" was something you couldn't help but be engrossed by.

Growing up during an era of Johnny Carson, in a house with no cable, and attending high school in the 90's, "The News" was something very different prior to 9/11.

24 hour cable news started providing information on fast moving events, and that was relevent, in the lead up to the Iraq war, when everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It was obvious something bad would come out of 9/11, but what? There were hushed whispers of an Iraq invasion exfiltrating into grapevines by word of mouth (but not in the news, and not on TV) as early as January 2002, but would it become a reality? And if so, my god, why?

By summer, word of mouth was firm. Iraq was going to be a thing, according to people with family members in the military. And so, you waited for that to show up in the news.

By 2005, George W. Bush had been re-elected, and there was no longer any relevant information to be had.

The ruse was over. It was clear that cable news was a sham. Popcorn, for the mob attending yet another gladiator tournament at the colosseum.

Traffic and the comparative size of automobiles, compared to buses, means buses get stuck in congestion and delayed more readily in shared roadways. Buses almost always have to compromise with the surrounding vehicles and yeild right-of-way to others, which pretty much means they go slower, and you suffer a longer ride.

Waiting for a bus usually means waiting outdoors. There are tons of reasons why bus stops are no fun at all.

Streetcars can operate on rails too, and thus are not implicitly buses.

There is evidence of this still embedded in the pavement of cities which have, or used to have, above-ground trolley systems.

And that's because buses are THE WORST form of transportation imaginable.

Anything is better than a bus.

Buses have never been the opposite of obsolete. They were always a step backwards.

Trolleys with dedicated lanes make sense.

When travelling distances of less than 30 miles, buses are for people who hate themselves.

I can see it now:

  "This graph depicting
   revenue reveals that
   the maternity ward is
   quite the cost center. It
   should be going up and 
   to the right!

   Smithers, why are there
   so few pregnancies? We
   need more in-patients,
   otherwise our overhead
   starts eating away at 
   our profits."

  "Well, sir, I suppose 
   there aren't as many
   teen pregnancies as 
   there used to be, and
   with the benefit of 
   modern procedures, the
   pregnancies we do see
   are fairly uncomplicated..."

  "Uncomplicated?! Why,
   everyone knows live
   vaginal births are the
   devil's causeway. Those
   infants can't be as 
   healthy as these so-
   called 'doctors' seem
   to believe. See to it
   that more tests are 
   performed. I'm sure we
   can find something wrong 
   with some of these 
   freeloaders."

...enter Dr. Nick.

  "Hi, everybody!"

So much for CORS policies.

If browsers restricted cross-origin sharing of image resources to same domain only, bazillions of dollars in tracking pixel revenue would evaporate.

Deep inspection of image rasters by script execution isn't going to get locked down anytime soon, I surmise.

Being a party to lackluster software development on a regular basis, I somewhat pine for projects this strict.

As part of my daily routine, feigning surprise at the fact that, given a tree of decisions, I'm only permitted to code for the ones that make money, simply to find that "Quality Testing" reveals the 500 other permutations will inevitably result in thrown exceptions with hideous, glaring error messages.

"WHOOPS."