eschaton

CelloMomOnCars, 3 months ago to random

San Francisco, Chinese New Year.
The streets are PACKED with people celebrating. A robotaxi muscles its way through, carrying no passenger.

So it's an empty robot car, taking up the space of a dozen people standing, barging through the crowd which is crowded.

And police are scratching their heads about how the car ended up torched.

https://sfstandard.com/2024/02/10/waymo-robotaxi-goes-up-in-flames-in-chinatown-after-crowd-attacks-vehicle/

#CarBrain

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

“The “Promise” of “Easier” Programming,” wherein I talk about why 4GLs were temporarily successful, why that was temporary, and why “programming via LLMs” will have the same fate: https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=374

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Isn’t it a trip to think that everything we have online today, with the exception of real-time full-screen audio and video (streaming or otherwise), we could have had in 1998?

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

BART should not be purchasing and installing nearly a thousand new fare gates. BART should be dismantling all of its fare collection infrastructure so it can run as the public service it is.

eschaton, 10 months ago to fediverse

The #fediverse should help #sagaftra and #wga set up Mastodon instances for their membership so they can control their own social media presence without being risk of studio interference.

eschaton, 8 months ago to random

Corporations and other limited-liability entities should be explicitly proscribed from being treated like persons under the law.

You cannot reason with them. You can’t bargain with them. They don’t feel pity or remorse and they will not stop until we’re dead.

eschaton, 11 months ago to random

Anyone worried about Reddit disappearing: Usenet continues to exist. It’s just there, waiting to be used. Go for it.

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

“The United States is so big and geographically diverse that—“ shut up. China is sufficiently similar to the US in terms of size, geography, and population distribution that all the bullshit arguments about how what worked in Europe won’t work here are fully disproven as the auto-industry propaganda they always have been.

eschaton, 8 months ago to random

Isn’t it interesting that the same people who will insist until they’re red in the face that any form of central planning or shared resource management cannot possibly work for a society have absolutely nothing negative to say about how the largest and most powerful non-government organizations are extremely effective while being fully centrally planned?

It’s almost as if their justification for the former has nothing to do with the effectiveness of central planning.

eschaton, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

Are there any straightforward guides to setting up an SSH “jump server” for an old system? Let’s say I have a VAX VMS system I want to provide access to. People would ssh to cmhvax@mysite with a password I share, and each would produce a telnet connection to the VAX that they’d then have to log into with their real login and password. The past couple times I’ve looked into it, I got pretty lost in a forest of documentation… #retrocomputing #openvms

eschaton, 8 months ago to random

We need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly disclaim corporate personhood: No limited-liability entity shall be treated as a natural person, and shall only be able to exercise privileges enumerated under the law.

eschaton, 3 months ago to ai

To the people who believe that ChatGPT is actually intelligent and not just fancy autocorrect:

How good is it at chess? Go? Scrabble? Checkers? Tic-tac-toe?

#ai #ChatGPT

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Non-biodegradable, non-recyclable packing materials should be illegal with only special exceptions for sterility.

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Don’t Create the Torment Nexus
https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=384

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Since even before Nixon’s resignation, the Republican Party has been engaged in a slow-motion, beneath-the-surface variation on the Business Plot. It’s time everyone recognized and understood this.

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Why would anyone pay attention to the Republican “primary debate” today? We all know exactly what every asshole on and off that stage stands for, and that they need to be kept from power. What exactly is there to “learn” by watching?

eschaton, 7 months ago to random

Capitalism, as a system, can never continue unchecked as it’s founded on the false assumption that growth is infinite. There are three possible end states:

1. Socialism, where capital is made subservient to the rest of society.
2. Fascism, where capital makes the entirety of society subservient to it.
3. Total collapse, where society disintegrates because it can no longer serve anyone.

And fascism is really just a maximally-extractive way to prolong the total collapse, not a way to prevent it.

eschaton, 6 months ago to random

Want to know how you can tell the oligarchs running this world don't actually believe in "the efficiency of free markets" the way they claim to? Financial markets and institutions don't operate 24/7, not because running them continuously would cause any problems—doing so would actually improve market efficiency!—but because it would be less convenient to not have a concept of "business day."

eschaton, 5 months ago to random

California should amend our data privacy law to prohibit the use of Californian’s personal information in the use of AI training without explicit informed consent and the right to know who and what is using it for that purpose.

eschaton, 5 months ago to random

California should also amend our employment law to prohibit all companies operating in California from requiring consent to use one’s personal data or likeness as a condition of hiring whether as an employee or contractor.

eschaton, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

So I had a realization: The QuickTime movie format would make a good format for archival and preservation of streaming tape data. https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=409 #retrocomputing #simh

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

Is there anything like git-fossil so I don’t have to learn yet another DVCS and can just use git for read access to a Fossil repository? #git #fossil

eschaton, 3 months ago to embedded

Does anyone have a straightforward containerized toolchain that includes at least gcc, binutils, and gdb, targeting 68000 ELF? I’ll be running it under podman on my MacBook, for the embedded stuff I’m doing for fun, so I don’t have to do everything in an SSH session to Linux. #m68k #embedded #retrocomputing

eschaton, 3 months ago to random

Why isn’t everyone even remotely involved with illegal settlements in the West Bank on the sanctions list?

eschaton, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

I often find myself wishing the far right’s paranoid delusions about Soviet-supported Communist infiltration of American academia (referred to as “the Frankfurt school” in those circles) were true.

If our economics departments and business schools actually dealt seriously with issues like labor theory of value and the purpose of economies instead of tautological Ayn Rand bullshit, they wouldn’t have failed humanity as utterly as they have.