palordrolap

We like Linux, but not to the point we’re aping Steve Ballmer.

(If this is lost on you, search up “Developers developers developers” along with his name.)

Condescending tone was not intended, but on rereading I can see how I’ve come across that way. Sorry about that.

I’m not going to disagree with this on the grounds that you could replace Python with any language and still be right for a handful of programmers using it.

Relatedly, there are plenty of people who write code in Python who know exactly what they’re doing (thus defeating the quote), to the point that an amateur reading that code has literally no idea what’s going on. Abstractions upon abstractions. Horrors upon horrors. Likewise this can be done in any language. Try taking apart one of the standard Perl modules (that’s written in Perl anyway), for example.

What does concern me is that the only source I can find for this quote is your comment. I can find Conal Elliot and even a suggestion that they have written code in Python (making the quote a self-burn, perhaps), but not the quote itself.

So who should be held accountable when (mis)use of AI results in a needless death? Or worse?

Let’s say a company creates an AI taxi that runs you over leaving you without legs. Who are you going to sue?

“Oh it’s grey, so I’ll have a dollar from each shareholder.” That doesn’t sound right to me.

My initial thought was that the computer pictured on the cover was a VIC-20 not a C64, then I remembered that they used old-stock VIC-20 keyboards and cases to get the first C64s out of the door quickly, so it’s probably an early model. Not enough pixels to make out what’s on the ID plate to the top left of the keyboard.

As for AI, I got a load of old Commodore magazines in the mid 90s, and one letter sent in to one of them has always stuck with me. The writer asked if AI was needed in order to make an enemy character follow a player character around the screen, and the response was along the lines of “no, you can do that with simple mathematics”, and provided a very simple algorithm.

The concept clearly generalises to “do not attribute to intelligence what can be achieved with simple mathematics” as well as being akin to “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and then “if you can convince a mark that your simple mathematics is intelligent, they’ll throw money at you”.

They’re probably referring to the fact it was founded by Jack Dorsey, who has since abandoned it because the other people in charge refused to let it be as bat-guano as he wanted.

Ironically, he left Twitter for the same reason. Bluesky was supposed to be his own version, in his image, and yet rational minds prevailed there at pretty much the same time Musk started pushing Twitter in the direction Dorsey had wanted all along.

Frick, you’re right. Bit late now, but I’ll edit my previous comment.

Not directly. The underlying protocols are incompatible. You have to follow a bridging service which then causes your posts to be reposted on the other side by a bot pretending to be you.

Sounds a bit convoluted, if somewhat sinister - pretending to be you?? - but that’s basically how it works. And it won’t pretend to be anyone who doesn’t sign up, and will stop as soon as you unfollow, so the sinisterness, if any, is minimised.

Dorsey left Bluesky precisely because the other people there felt they had to implement the old-Twitter-like checks and balances that caused him to leave Twitter in the first place. As such, it’s completely out of his influence.

Yes, it’s still one monolith waiting to be gobbled up by someone with a lot of cash, or to spiral down into what would seem to be almost inevitable enshittification, but it hasn’t done either of those yet, and both the good and bad there mean it’s the closest there is to old Twitter at the moment.

Please note that I’m not saying that everyone should go jump on there and use it, or even that we have to like it. Just pointing out that Dorsey has nothing to do with it any more.

Speaking of Dorsey, he went back to endorsing Twitter for a while, but now he’s started Edit: endorsing yet another platform called Nostr. Probably the better candidate for being avoided right now.

I have no such “but actually” about Threads. Definitely worth avoiding, even if it is supposed to be able to Federate.

Tell that to the unwashed masses.

If you accept Pluto, you have to accept at least half a dozen trans-Neptunian objects as well as the asteroid Ceres, in which case planet nine already exists and would be Neptune. Well, most of the time anyway. Sometimes Pluto passes inside Neptune’s orbit.

Or maybe you’d like to consider Triton, Neptune’s retrograde moon as a planet as well, on account of how it was probably a dwarf planet in its own right until Neptune plucked it out of its orbit. Once a planet, always a planet, right? Neptune even tried to do the same to Pluto which is why it has such a weird orbit.

Be team dwarf planet. Lots of new friends outside the regular eight, and Pluto’s a founder member.

Pretty sure my own education had a Tanenbaum book in amongst it, from which I learned a number of things. In another world, one where my brain isn’t its own worst enemy, I could well be one of those IT managers. There the FUD would have been the main factor in my decision. Probably. Because I’m not sure I’d be completely happy if it was a Linux buried in the chipset either. Especially one largely outside my control.

The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne’er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren’t ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it’s theoretically a lot more difficult.)

Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus’ dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there’s an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

Thus, if you’re a hypothetical IT manager and you’re going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you’re ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.