utilityhotbar

> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI

As an avid reader of your blog I would never presume such a thing lightly, even when thinking about your old work. Also really enjoyed what I read of Laundry Files :)

This was written in 2005(!) ->

> Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"

> "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."

The triplet of wind, pole, dragon appears multiple times in the same order, so is possibly a single phrase that has been broken up into three parts by Google Translate. In error reports that I have seen, the second line would usually convey something about the user's system. For example:

> Minecraft installer keeps crashing, I'm using a Macbook pro 2014. (...)

Based on that, if I had to guess "wind" is actually a coercion of the katakana ウィンドウ into ウインド based on simple pattern-matching, then translated into "wind". I'm sure you can guess where this is going... that's right, ウィンドウ is "Window/Windows" (for an example of how it is used as tech terminology, see https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3...). Typing ウィンドウ into google search also autocompletes with ウィンドウ 10 , ウィンドウ 11 (this should be easy enough to guess).

Then the whole thing can be read as

> When I try to install the runtime it throws an error. Does this happen a lot on Windows [Version]? I tried two, three times and it throws an error

[Error]

> That's not the exact error but it's about right. Is the full error in the runtime log? [Something]? Is this a problem with the JSP error handler on Windows [Version] when you install the runtime? Or maybe I just got something wrong with the runtime?

Otherwise I subscribe most to @brazzy 's point about this possibly just being a joke or a prank with multiple layers of machine translation. Still, this doesn't exactly seem like a big newsgroup so I don't see why someone would go to the effort.

I consider it very characteristic of Silicon Valley that nobody can think of a more immediately useful task for something supposedly capable of multi-stage intelligent planning and execution other than "plan me a vacation to X location". Are all of their hundreds of millions of prospective customers all software engineers with long holidays and too much disposable income xD

This post is part of a collection of loose thoughts (read as very, very contained blog ig) that I've put together as I get ready to leave university and decide what to do with my life. The rest of the series can be found here: https://utilityhotbar.github.io/signal_flare/

I hope this will be of some interest to people here :)