Posts by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) Post #AVNbYKLOTYbOjmL6B6 by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-06T13:35:54Z
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@lauren Just after they mocked the American pronunciation of “mall” I once asked someone from London “what do you call this thing one hangs pictures on?”, tapping a nearby wall.The look on their face as they said “A …wall?” was priceless.
(DIR) Post #AVPurPmSm1XYXujgUS by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-07T16:22:24Z
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@lauren I don’t know about “fault”. There are lots of obscure rules in sports (designated hitter?) that is pretty fairy dancing on a head of pin for me, but I don’t blame the baseball/sports world for my obliviousness to them.
(DIR) Post #AVPwy4SidKDeMannuq by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-07T16:46:02Z
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@lauren No, I’m just going to argue that it cuts two ways — one can’t “educate” someone about something they’re not interested in. If I were to talk in terms of “failure”, I’d point to the apparent *need* for “education” you feel exists. Ideally technology should be designed to be pretty transparent in how you use it and what it does. The fact that it is not as transparent as it possibly could be is where the failure lies.But “technology” is a broad brush. Perhaps we’re talking about different things when we use the term.I’m thinking UI stuff, or maybe the sorts of “Mastodon is hard” meta-discussion. Maybe you’re talking about, say, AI hype? In that case I quite agree. Even calling it “AI” causes me to bristle.
(DIR) Post #AVQxv9siK2pXPl61ho by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-08T04:31:23Z
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@lauren I've often thought a nice modern variation on the haiku allusive encryption system used in PKDick's *The man in the high castle* would be to just not correct the output of the autocorrect.
(DIR) Post #AVU3eEIKKOThwaYYsq by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-09T16:19:53Z
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@tante As @tomalak said, magical thinking is endemic among managers. I think an actual understanding of the technology is a challenge for engineers, as well. Compounding all of this is the chatter about “emergent abilities”, for which the evidence is ambiguous — the engineers lack all conviction, the venture capitalists are full of passionate intensity
(DIR) Post #AVajeGNhvnVdRIX0T2 by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-12T21:38:43Z
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@lauren That must be why their football team is called the 49ers
(DIR) Post #AVg1xLMYP8obM92Ulc by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-15T03:00:08Z
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@niconiconi "octet" instead of "byte" is pretty good, though.
(DIR) Post #AVmMIfwYO4Y8cSCiNU by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-18T11:29:53Z
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@niconiconi @lanodan That was the first step in booting the ARPANet, too. 16-word boot loader toggled in the front panel (when all else failed).Could boot from paper tape (we used Mylar tape --- the chad was a clingy nightmare) or from the next IMP (router) across the leased line.Talking janitors and security guards through the process late at night was always fun.
(DIR) Post #AW49GFOm2jVu56WPxI by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-27T00:54:14Z
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@rsalz @lauren There used to be one of those graphics demos -- basically a random walk through the colormap -- called "smoking clover" that I could imagine being used for self-hypnosis, if not meditation
(DIR) Post #AW5oh06rHlnVlEyfzs by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-05-27T20:11:45Z
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Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers as antidote for AI hype....This talk, from a few years ago, remains topical. Indeed more so than when first delivered :https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm#ai #superintelligence #tescreal
(DIR) Post #AXwAwTTVUUYKU92IKW by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-07-21T23:36:12Z
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@niconiconi “/bin/cat went off to Berkeley and came back waving flags”, Pike once said
(DIR) Post #AZ6kU2NxE1p0R9eQ8u by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-08-26T01:22:13Z
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@niconiconi @lanodan I heard that as "Write once, debug everywhere"
(DIR) Post #AZhu370lsAdjUb3NtQ by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2023-09-13T00:06:47Z
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@tante there was that credulous paper a while back from, I think, Microsoft and Deep Mind about how effectiveness of LLMS seemed to spike surprisingly once a size threshold was crossed. As I recall, either that paper or some informal responses to it speculated that the larger models were learning "concepts", or building more representational structure of of the additional matrices. So, they might think, even if the training data is the *same*, a larger net might build something more effective from it. I wouldn't be surprised if that leads some to the must-grow-ever-larger mindset (though you'd think someone writing eight- or nine-digit checks might want some better evidence that the money was being well-spent).
(DIR) Post #Aj1jtECVmEdMJivK8e by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2024-06-17T18:11:26Z
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@futurebird @llewelly @SmudgeTheInsultCat There’s always Chinese characters. Even if you restrict yourself to the radicals, you have 250+ distinct characters, ~200 with 8 or fewer strokes.Some of those might even be mnemonic (木, tree, might see a lot of use in parsing or graphs).
(DIR) Post #Aj28Mf17YFo2mgAAbI by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2024-06-17T14:48:07Z
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@izaya @chjara pull out two of those at once and you risk tipping the rack over. Led to a “Pbwt” (lead weight) part number and engineering change order when this was inadvertently discovered at one company I worked for.
(DIR) Post #AjEmPt8as2Dq7CcGR6 by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2024-06-24T01:35:39Z
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@futurebird maybe dental mirrors? Ebay had tons, and I bet your local pharmacist.
(DIR) Post #An2KLD9mlKHup8bBDs by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2024-10-15T00:43:25Z
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@robpike @nytimes Oh, I remember her theory about “Mona Leo” — that the Mona Lisa is a covert self-portrait, argued on the basis that you can line up Mona Lisa’s face with a true self-portrait of Davinci and the features line up perfectly.I thought it was quite plausible.
(DIR) Post #AsDakP1bWEoJryqChc by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2025-03-19T16:39:07Z
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@futurebird The feature i really like is to screenshot a slide during a zoom lecture and having it figure out the url in the little footnote or citation at the bottom of the slide
(DIR) Post #AxFAbfgEqeGNSD39KC by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2025-08-17T00:08:31Z
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404 media reports on a Columbia University DARPA project that makes robot K’nex. Struts with pistons and magnetic couplings at the end:https://www.404media.co/pentagon-funded-experiment-develops-robots-that-change-by-consuming-other-robots/The researchers’ video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDYLUnniysU&t=1sshows the effectiveness of these machines joining up to form tetrahedrons, and then adding another strut for increased mobility. Plus some blue-sky dreaming of what you could do with these things.Pay no attention to the lurid “consuming other robots” (nor the researchers’ own “robot metabolism” metaphor. I do like their thoughts about using these to embody AI (an embodiment that would be nearly as alien as octopus consciousness).These are ants. Ants that work together to build structures and accomplish things single ants can’t do. It’s a very cool idea. @futurebird I have to compliment the 404-media journalist (Matthew Gault) for the depth of the reporting — an in-depth dive into the research (the robot struts aren’t driven autonomously, they have human operators at the moment — Gault even has a diagram of the keyboard control layout.If they can get the control software to work (think of the massive clouds of coordinated drones now used in place of fireworks, it can be done), um… you’ll never struggle getting your tent set up again? Maybe it could be a flexible alternative to the Deep Origami used to unfold structures in satellites (which isn’t so far from some of their blue-sky dreaming). I don’t have the imagination (thank heaven) to see ways to Torment Nexus these things, but I’m sure it’s out there. Smart dust, I suppose….#robotics #404media
(DIR) Post #AzddtukiFT2kFltid6 by lain_7@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-26T21:08:36Z
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@tante @philip “Open Source” *never* had a leftist bent — it was always a business-friendly alternative to “Free Software” of the GNU ilk.Before “Open Source” there was the MIT license, which was business-friendly because it came out of MIT’s Project Athena, a distributed computing initiative for education funded by IBM and DEC. That license was heavily influenced by Stallman’s ideas though I doubt by Stallman himself (he was on campus at the time and had just came up with the idea of GNU a year or so before). I expect the MIT license was also heavily influenced by the Multics experience, which was fresh on everyone’s minds. I think Multics licensing complicated sharing research results developed on Multics. MIT didn’t want the same to happen to anything that came out of Project Athena.