Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
I see Malick in a lot but similarly I see Tarkovsky in a lot of overlapping movies. I don’t think Americans are as attuned to Tarkovskys influence on modern film. I definitely recommend Stalker as an amazing film.
The ICFP/SPLASH papers are now starting to find their way to HN.
This was a HUGE combined programming conference with several competing tracks over 7 days. You can find the program here ^1 (you can often find a link to the abstract or full paper if you click on it)
Streams from the sessions will also show up here^2 (you’ll need to match the day and room and ff to the time it appeared)
Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barret [1] for an exploration of the psychology of this "mesmerizing" effect - at least in general, if not specifically in short-form video and infinite scroll.
Whether the artificial stimulus comes in the form of junk food, entertainment, social connection, sex, we've seen time and time again that trillion-dollar megacorps employing thousands of the greatest minds of our generation have been able to invent substitutes that are more compelling than evolution has prepared the human brain to be able to deal with.
It does seem like video shorts are especially easy to exploit.
> software quality doesn't appear because you have good developers. It's the end result of a process, and that process informs both your software development practices, but also your testing. Your management. Even your sales and servicing.
If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be this one! The Therac-25 incident is a horrifying and important part of software history, it's really easy to think type-systems, unit-testing and defensive-coding can solve all software problems. They definitely can help a lot, but the real failure in the story of the Therac-25 from my understanding, is that it took far too long for incidents to be reported, investigated and fixed.
There was a great Cautionary Tales podcast about the device recently[0], one thing mentioned was that, even aside from the catasrophic accidents, Therac-25 machines were routinely seen by users to show unexplained errors, but these issues never made it to the desk of someone who might fix it.
My dots are open to anyone who cares to view my GitHub. I do tend to keep employer specific aliases/stuff in an `.employer.zsh` file that is sourced by my main `.zshrc`. But my NeoVim config is completely open for inspection. I'm not doing anything all that extraordinary though. I don't share my dots on Reddit simply because I don't feel like using my real identity on that platform.
When it comes to consuming the dots of others, I just switched to AxOS for Linux... and am auditioning Celestia (https://github.com/caelestia-dots/shell). This means that in 3 months, my desktop will likely look like everyone else's. I probably won't even commit any of this as it's not really my stuff.
Probably my single favorite podcast episode ever is the Future of Coding's episode on INTERCAL [0]. At least I think they tried to make it about INTERCAL.
No matter what - a consideration befitting the subject.
I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need.
Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car.
To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.
There are psychological blindspots that we all have as human beings, and when stimulus is structured in specific ways people lose their grip on reality, or rather more accurately, people have their grip on objective reality ripped away from them without them realizing it because these things operate on us subliminally (to a lesser or greater degree depending on the individual), and it mostly happens pre-perception with the victim none the wiser. They then effectively become slaves to the loudest monster, which is the AI speaking in their ear more than anyone else, and by extension to the slave master who programmed the AI.
One such blindspot is the consistency blindspot where someone may induce you to say something indicating agreement with something similar first, and then ask the question they really want to ask. Once you say something that's in agreement, and by extension something similar is asked, there is bleedover and you fight your own psychology later if you didn't have defenses to short circuit this fixed action pattern (i.e. and already know), and that's just a surface level blindspot that car salesman use all the time; there are much more subtle ones like distorted reflected appraisal which are used by cults, and nation states for thought reform.
To remain internally consistent, with distorted reflected appraisal, your psychology warps itself, and you as a person unravel. These things have been used in torture, but almost no one today is taught what the elements of torture are so they can recognize it, or know how it works. You would be surprised to find that these things are everywhere today, even in K12 education and that's not an accident.
Everyone has reflected appraisal because this is how we adopt the cultural identity we have as people from our parents while we are children.
All that's needed for torture to break someone down are the elements, structuring, and clustering.
Those elements are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with perceived or real loss, and lack of agency to remove with these you break in a series of steps rational thought receding, involuntary hypnosis, and then psychological break (disassociation or a special semi-lucid psychosis capable of planning); with time and exposure.
Structuring uses diabolical structures to turn the psyche back on itself in a trauma loop, and clustering includes any multiples of these elements or structures within a short time period, as well as events that increase susceptibility such as narco-analysis/synthesis based in dopamine spikes triggered by associative priming (operant conditioning). Drug use makes one more susceptible as they found in the early 30s with barbituates, and its since been improved so you can induce this is in almost anyone with a phone.
No AI will ever be able to create and maintain a consistent reflected appraisal for the people they are interacting with, but because the harmful effects aren't seen immediately, people today have blinded themselves and discount the harms that naturally result. The harms from the unnatural loss of objective reality.
Someone will be along in a minute to tell you to watch Micro Men, an amusing and fairly accurate BBC dramatization of the Sinclair/Acorn rivalry :) but I'm here to recommend that you watch the Computer History Museum's interview with Hermann Hauser the erstwhile director of Acorn - he's very charming: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q
I'm fairly sure they've got one with Chris Curry too, but I can't spot it just now.
From the article: Keichii Matsuda wrote a manifesto called "GODS". In it he describes an anaphor for augmented reality rooted in pagan animism. Unlike monotheistic Western approaches of interfacing artificial intelligence like ChatGPT or Siri, he advocates to leverage the possibility of augmented reality technologies to extend places and objects to populate the world with many different agents or "gods".
Author should read Daemon by Daniel Suarez written in 2006 that explores the idea of persistent and potentially powerful AR entities that interact with humans. It also loosely plays with the idea of AR somatic gestures acting as a mystical conduit for "primitive incantations" that have a physical affect on the real world.
This is from the SQLite creator D. Richard Hipp who is always worth reading, but, I'd like to recommend reading what TCL's creator John Ousterhout has to say.
His article on threads from 1995 was highly influential on me, and I remember it to this day. More recently (2018, revised and expanded in 2021), he published a book on software engineering practices called A Philosophy of Software Design which is, in my opinion, the best in its category.
The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.
It is a profound synthesis of classical philosophy and personal reflection on the human condition. Boethius, writing in prison while awaiting execution, blends Stoic, Neoplatonic, and Christian ideas to address timeless questions of fate, fortune, happiness, and virtue. It transcends religious dogma and focuses on rational inquiry into how one can find inner peace and intellectual clarity amidst an almost total inversion of fortune.
Unlike Marcus Aurelius, writing at the peak of his power, Boethius wrote his at the bottom, and did so with more skin in the game. Marcus gave us Commodus and the Decline, Boethius gave us Aristotle and the Rebirth.
Once you are familiar with either Erlang or Elixir I strongly recommend the book "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP" (the one with the bee and honeycomb on the front).
It's not a programming tutorial, but it shows how to structure real world programs to make best use of what you get with Beam+OTP+Er{lang,lixir}. It's written as an Elixir book, but it's talking about architectural concepts that map directly and easily to Erlang.
[summary of the book: write as much as you possibly can in pure functional code, mostly because it's so easy to test. Then use GenServers (etc.) at the boundary to hold the state at the top of your stack of pure code]
Synthesized voices are legitimately a great way to read more and give your eyes a break. I personally prefer just converting a page or book to an audiobook myself locally.
The new piper TTS models are easy to run locally and work very well. I made a simple CLI application and some other folks here liked it so figured I post it.
There's a software directory called "zero data" that aims to catalogue software/sites/etc. that allow you to completely own and control your data in respect to their usage: https://0data.app/
You put words onto page with which given a thousand I could not have equaled. We will all follow, in time.
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlors, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I'm given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too."
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.