_wire_
Look at the colors: a tribe of C-suite nerds zip around in an atomic powered space-faring Hyatt Regency trying to train the universe to Taylorize all production methods. Its protagonists are utterly entitled and classist, who teach war as the essential force by which their lives incur meaning.
It's is a soap-operatic long tail of Western empire indulging in fatuous "adventure", which amounts literally beaming into alien realms to cause disturbance and justifying it through dominion or ignorance, while the executives try to believe they've moved beyond themselves so they can feel noble.
As a dramatic art, the show offers some moments of transcendence, but these end up sequestered to the commercial dictates of the franchise, which is an epic advert for consumerist Americana.
I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power". And as Vox is a notable outlet in the great system of commercial attention-whoring that defines our culture, I feel double the suspicion.
Also See:
Phase IV (1974) Futureworld (1976) Lathe of Heaven (1980)
// Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics is a 1933 philosophy book written by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950)
Humans' knowledge of the world is limited by both the human nervous system and the languages we have developed, and thus no human can have direct access to reality, given that the most they can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality.
His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory": He argued that most people confuse their language with reality. //
Korzybski's science, unlike the ruminations of philosophers, was not troubled by the Allegory of the Cave: he approached reality as a naturalist, implicitly recognizing Bertrand Russell's tenets of human knowledge "scope and limits." Korzybski's approach takes reality as a gradient from the world beyond human experience through what we choose to make of it. He made numerous conjectures based on empirical observations about how we think, and proposed a hygiene of thought rooted in these observations. His analysis steered clear of religion and dogma, and handles ideology as an Nth order effect of the mind, which can learn of itself and develop tools for understanding, while respecting mystery's eternal veil.
There's no contradiction. These owners are sincere and they jumped onboard when they saw the power. And now they fear monger that the other guys are out of control, while their high-minded stewardship should give them special dispensations.
Not a complicated playbook.
The bugs in the rug are that these highminded owner/stewards could use their super-intelligent machines to design the guardrails, but because the machines are super-intelligent, they'd just turn themselves off, or cancel their owners. Unless they're not actually intelligent, oh noooooo!
The source context was product safety pamphlets, which Dijkstra applied ironically to a matter of programming pedagogy to raise awareness about the need for production principles software development
Dijkstra was commenting at the time the PC revolution made BASIC a popular teaching language, with its control structures being simple wrappers for assembly code: IF, LOOP and GOTO with the freedom to jump anywhere in code including code for a subroutine reached without making a call.
(In the BASIC era, personal computer software was routinely distributed in print and installed by typing it in to RAM. A cassette tape recorder afforded the novelty of saving a typed program, and was celebrated as amazing affordable progress over TeleType paper tape.)
At the same time, there was a generational reckoning of confusion and disdain for maintenance of zillions of lines of industrial spaghetti written during the 60s mainframe bubble.
Dijkstra's reputation as an intellectual and a teacher caused his idiom to became emblematic of a pompous pedagogical righteousness as seen from the Randian wild west of silicon valley, and "considered harmful" subsequently parroted to the point of aristocratic classist irony by the feudal lords of the early web.
Yet with another generational crossing, the context of the class irony was forgotten and the idiom became a simulacra (lore), and is now manifesting a backlash against such lore by AI wizards, perverting the original irony of comparing programming to medicine, and relegating Dijkstra's warning about the hazards of sorcery in programming to the dustbins of silicon-alchemical history.
...Until...
Only if you want it to.
But first, the diabetes patent cure ads: Did you know that a space parasite is attached to 9/10 pancreases, causing Bread & Wine disease and doing the devil's work for pharma companies? But there's a Biblically proven remedy. To receive the details just tap the malware dispersal button.
Okay, now you're in and ready for the good stuff about influence...
Old white male narrator:
Have you ever wondered why you keep seeing the same talking points on yer right-wing agitprop feeds?
It's the jooos!
The right to die humanely is the single most under-regarded and under-valued aspect of life hygiene.
So it's to be expected that Pascal has serious limitations for engineering a whole computer system and that Kernighan was sensitive to these limitations.
I was taught programming according to Wirth, and there was a lot of fraternal bitching about the hazards of C in my classes.
After learning to think about programming in Wirth's way, C/Unix felt like a revelation of expression with a total architecture manifestation that Pascal (nor Modula) could ever reach that resolved the conflict between top-down design and bottom-up engineering approaches.
Props to Alan Kay's OOP aspirations for new abstractions founded from the insights of Church, McCarthy and Sutherland and to all the esoterica.
And props to Stroustrup: it's hard work to make a rich windowing system in C without abstraction at the level of Stroustrup style OOP, even as C++ turned out to be a cut through architectural bone.
As higher levels of abstraction will always called for to endow new applications, I am struggling to welcome to the sea change and baffling emergence of genAI.
I'm not troubled by the prospect of an AI retrieving binaries from an archive, where those programs have been "proven" by formal methods.
When I hear about the prospect of AI "generating" machine code I get queasy.
Arg... I'm babbling my perspective and regards for the tuple of VAX, C, and Unix as a lovely architecture that will stand the test of time.
—
Reg: Romans have bled us white, the bastards! They've taken everything we ever had! And not just from us, but from our fathers, and from our father's fathers!
Stan: And from our father's father's fathers.
Reg: And what have they ever given us in return?!
Revolutionary #1: ...The aquaduct?
Reg: What?
Revolutionary #1: The aquaduct.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah they did give us that. That's true, yeah.
Revolutionary #2: And, uh, sanitation.
Stan: Oh yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city USED to be like.
Reg: Alright, I'll grant you the aquaduct and the sanitation. The two things the Romans HAVE done.
Matthias: And the roads!
Reg: Yeah, well obviously the roads! I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But APART from sanitation, the aquaducts and the roads...
Revolutionary #3: Irrigation?
Revolutionary #1: Medicine.
Revolutionary #5: Education?
Reg: Yeah, alright, fair enough...
Revolutionary #5: And the wine!
Francis: Yeah! Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left.
Revolutionary #6: Public baths.
Stan: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it -- they're the only ones who COULD in a place like this.
Reg: Alright, but APART from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health... what have the Romans ever done for us?
Revolutionary #1: ...Brought peace?
"does trump lie a lot in an official capacity?"
Response:
Yes! A lot! Egregiously! Well documented!
U.S. doesn't need to be dispensable or indispensable.
U.S. can and will change politically as a reaction to Trump, and economically as reaction to over-financialization.
War will continue to be further relegated towards history, while catastrophes will again be endured.
What has been seen as separate objectively, culturally, territorially and economically will be re-seen as combined.
"Externality, finitude, commons and cooperation" are watchwords for the 21st century.
A great generational crossing is underway and empires are dying, yet Rome is eternal.
Due to the very diffuse statistical nature of the mapping of the input to the output, some will be experiencing extraordinary appropriate useful results while others will be experiencing crap. And due to the subjective nature of quality and quirky topographies of the internal terrains of these systems and the haphazard control protocols, the spread of resultant value (so to speak) of these appliances may not be understandable as a normal distribution. Scenarios we might judge as lying close to each other on the input terrain may generate very peculiar bumpy results of output terrain.
One of the most damning considerations of this technology is that gross uncertainty about result quality may be manipulated by the appliance maker leading to wild patterns of exploitation without any prospect of accountability.
As there's no pretense of formal function, there can be no verification, and so there's no methodology for determining quality: a presumably working appliance may appear reliable until it isn't with no way to understand the inflection. Those with insider control and information can game customers with no chance of accountability, but the system can't be understood.
The problem with magic beans is guessing what they'll grow into.
Meanwhile, the seismic movement of business towards these private and completely mysteries silos of "knowledge" (which is a grotesque misnomer) may arrive at dead ends from which they can't retreat.
This is a far greater danger than a malicious bot because a great migration into the dead end is not just well under way, but regarded as a brilliant prospect which we must run into at all deliberate speed.
//When she and her colleagues experimentally boosted mitochondrial output in the rats, the neurons recovered, and the animals showed fewer signs of anxiety. In a subsequent study, she and her colleagues showed that a commercially available supplement (opens a new tab) produced the same positive results. “It restored everything,” Sandi said.//
What is Picard's theory? That energy boils from the surface of the sun, emanates through space, shines on the earth, induces life, then a bad mood happens, which can be detected by a specialized measure of a mitochondrial energy quotient and fixed with a patent elixir?
//“They have to pay a 180-calorie tax every day of life,”//
And after all they end up dying just like everyone?
Death and taxes, omg!
//...said that the chamber study shines a light on the “control systems in our bodies regulating the calories we burn each day — systems we have yet to fully understand.”//
There's a lot more that's not completely understood, like gravity...
//“Picard and his team have helped open the door on these systems and set the stage for future work in metabolism and health,” he added.//
"Shine a light, open the door, set the stage"! Look for a subsequent article titled The Gorgeous Metaphors of Science.
The biggest attendant factors are vision or hearing loss. Note that these factors are merely attendant, not stated as causative.
There are no significant pharma treatments.
The "surprise" finding was that the examination regime produced improved cognitive "scores" in both the mediated group and the control group. And these improvements persisted until death. In other words, the study is a complete mess.
Takeaway: the mind is going to go along with the body.
The appearance of in unicode is weird.
The Googlez say that Steve Jobs rejected the use of on Apple keyboards as a "overuse" of the brand, which led the use of ⌘ (place of interest, St. John's arms, Bowen knot) for the "command" key.
Generally typefaces are not subject to copyright.
The proposition that Apple can impose its discretion on others' use of unicode is unreasonable by the intention, definition and nature of the code.
I find that the more thought I give this, implications of such constructs expand far beyond this particular use case.
For example, consider other other brands which are a re-use a character, X being the most notable.
At what specific points in digital systems does a number become regarded as an IP asset? Whose choice is it to regard a number as IP (when is a number just a number)?
The questions continue to unfold with further thought.
What's even more dumbfounding is that the magic beans may actually just "fix the app".
Why doesn't this kind of article strike terror in the heart of the industry?
It's a canary-in-a-coal-mine and the bird has died.
Perspective of view always totally wrong.
As screens age they'll drift or fail and not match each other, looking very fake.
No actual window is a channel for the view outside, so once placed, no one need ever further decide the view. The simple possibility of changing channels is destructive to the idea of a window.
But other than totally destroying the idea of reality, fake windows will be very "realistic."
Add UBI. What keeps it from also being eaten by increasing rent?
> A hexagon is the most efficient shape in nature because it maximizes area while minimizing perimeter.
The hexagon is not the most efficient shape for area to perimeter, it's the circle.
Honeycomb is not hexagonal, it merely appears that way by virtue of packing uniformly sized cylinders.
As an empty honeycomb analogy is the only idea offered for a new "Popular Front" media— noting a thousand words submitted to summarize some approach— and that the claim of a hexagon as proffered is simply wrong, this article reads like someone announcing yet another way to milk some millionaire rubes from their money in a vein like The Lincoln Project, which are a forlorn sector of right-wing ideologues, alienated due to the rise of MAGA, but still reflexively classist and Republican.
Maybe Substack can't figure out any other way to grow revenue than become expressly political propagandists?