Hey, Mastodon … I’m trying to track down an #AppleNewton developer named Stephen A. Cronin.
He worked at #AMD and operated a software company called TapTech based out of Austin, Texas in the late 90s. I’ve managed to contact his former software partner, Francis Preve … but Francis lost touch with Stephen years ago.
Together they released a sequencer program for #NewtonOS called NR404 and I’m hoping the source code still exists somewhere.
@NR404Guy@splorp woah this is amazing. I have a newton with a dead battery I would love to try to get working someday. This is a perfect thing to get running on it!
@mhoye@CosmicTraveler@jannem while many people do trips like that doctors and highway safety engineers tell you not to. Take longes breaks for health and safety.
@mhoye Hasn't the US gov been selectively issuing subsidies that give Tesla a boost on price while shutting out some of the offshore companies? I wonder if the numbers would be even more pronounced if not for that.
@jasonkoebler Perhaps naïve of us to think these companies were going to just bow to the right-to-repair movement without getting a little something for themselves. SMH
If you live in the UK or USA, you need to understand one thing about the coming election:
You need to vote defensively.
Neither of the main parties are appealing. But if you don't vote for the lesser evil you may end up helping a totalitarian horror get elected.
Hold your nose and goddamn vote, dammit. THEN go on protests. Because if you don't vote for the lesser evil, the victor will welcome your protests with bullets.
The prize for political purity this time round is a shallow grave.
Regardless of what Biden has done or not done, the choice in the USA is still between "Fascists" and "Not Fascists", instead of having a choice between different flavors of "Not Fascists".
And in all healthy democracies, the ruling government chances from time to time between different democratic parties. No party rules forever, nor should they.
But now the USA is in the situation that one of the two major parties is fully committed to fascism. So now you have to vote for the sane "Not Fascist" party all the time, or else the country will fall fully to fascism - but continual rule by the exact same party is also extremely unhealthy for a democracy.
So while the Democrats are currently occupying the White House, the country is already in a failure state, and total system failure is inevitable sooner or later - unless (a) the Republican party manages to pull back from the brink somehow and once again commits to democracy, or (b) a new party with better commitment to democracy rises and replaces them. And I don't really see that happening.
If you've got the power to change minds, more power to you. Fill your boots, with my blessing. But my voicing opinions isn't dependent on my ability or will to do the same, and your inability to see a point to it suggests you need to be looking harder.
@pawsplay@mynameistillian@nyrath Yep! GPT-style AI passing the Turing Test sometimes doesn't mean that GPT-style AI is sapient and worthy of personhood or being anything except a (flawed) tool.
The point of solar panels is not to ensure "solar profitability," but to make for a greener, better world. Its profitability is only justified insofar as it moves us towards that goal. If we want to switch to renewables, then sometimes we're going to have surplus, because of how renewables work. This is well known and discussed ad nauseam. If that makes power markets unstable, then the problem is with markets, not with there being too many solar panels.
Google search thinks you should use glue to stick together a pizza as its AI is trained on Reddit, where 11 years ago a user called “fucksmith” posted suggesting it was a good idea.
@nixCraft
1994: you have to be an hacker to find stuff on the Internet
2004: every information on the Internet is there, easily findable with few clicks
2024: you have to be an hacker to find stuff on the Internet
@stux I posted it on Instagram, X and even on LinkedIn because I was really happy with it. Nothing really happed, it was weeks ago.
And then someone 'stole' it and it started like a wild fire. People were so kind to let me know.
Influencers with millions of followers started sharing it (mostly with credit) and it was a big thing on Reddit. It must have been shown more than 10 million times.
I also found it on a platform that tends to even remove credits but luckily we have reverse image searches and great fedi members who shared exact links :blobcathearts:
With suchs things credits are always in place and needed ✅
(altough people can use my work for wharever without cred except not selling)
@hisham_hm
I suspect that the billionaires who want robot servants only want them because they think it would be cool, not because they actually need them. I can see Elon Musk dumping tons of money into robot servants because he thought that would make people respect and fear him, for instance. But you're right about most of them.
I guess I just don't know why they'd invest any effort in customized, convincing lies at industrial scale to manipulate elections when the old fashioned methods seem to have worked just fine up until now. You don't need terribly convincing lies to manipulate people. We'll buy any old lie pretty easily as long as it seems less effort than other options. You don't need deepfakes to sell white Americans on racism, for instance. Hell, Donald Trump's lies are incredibly threadbare and he's got half the country eating out of his hand.
I speak about American politics because I'm familiar with them, not because I think they're special in any way. The lies fascists the world over tell are effective not because they're convincing but because it doesn't take much to convince most people. I can list all sorts of easy-to-disprove lies which nonetheless worked extremely well.
I don't know. Maybe the danger of "AI" is that it allows unsophisticated lies to be delivered more effectively? Or maybe it's just a fad and the real danger is that it heightens distrust of information in general, or makes sources so unreliable that truth cannot be determined? I'm not sure that convincing lies is the aim as much as simply industrial scale, which pollutes the information well much more effectively than before. If there's so much junk that the truth can't be found, it doesn't really matter whether the junk is convincing or not.
What the owners of “AI” wanted from it: to replace human labor, so they can exterminate everyone while still having robots to grow their food and wipe their bottoms.
Hence why they're all building bunkers.
They're not going to get their wish, at least not this decade, but their omnicidal malevolence nonetheless chills me to the bone. Not even Hitler wanted to eradicate all of humankind.
@GossiTheDog I still have a Twitter account but I enjoy Mastodon a lot more.
Everytime I log into Twitter it does not take longer than 2 mins to go "WTF is wrong with people?"
@mina@benroyce oh man that would be so cool if they turned off the street lights at midnight. I have to drive well over an hr to get a sky that dark. They are passing Dark Sky regulations on the state level here in Massachusetts. But it will take yrs before that has any real effect.
