He also states: “If a hoard (sic) of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible agent will abandon reasonableness.”

Wrong. If a horde of barbarians descends on the lecture theatre, the professor will be delighted to see so many people taking in an interest in, say, recent developments in differential calculus.

The only place I’ve read about in an SF book where I’d really like to live is the world of Neal Stephen’s Anathem, and that’s mostly because they keep all the nerds in big nerd communities where they nerd away without being hassled by the outside world.

I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain

It may need to be removed for the purpose, but they’ll be fine because you can just ask an LLM how to put it back again when you’re done.

“come closer, my child, I must feel your bumps and measure your cranium”

Mosquito nets are still an effective intervention against malaria, not least as “there’s a vaccine” is a very, very long way from “everyone is vaccinated” especially as really useful interventions such as draining marshland where A. falciparum breeds or attempting to eradicate it with insecticide are substantially harder and, also, take time. Given that half of all deaths from malaria are in children under 5 and that the malaria parasite is not transmitted between humans but from mosquitos to humans the herd immunity effect doesn’t really exist if people are still getting bitten. (FWIW, my dad literally wrote a book called “Malaria”)

EAs are wrong about a lot of stuff but they’re not wrong about malaria eradication being about more than vaccines.

In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.

I was a member of the ARRL for a year just to get QST, and found that so much of the American outlook on amateur radio is so different to that here in Europe with allthe stuff about patriotism (what? no.) and prepping and massive amplifiers and driving your pickup truck to the park (here in Austria we do SOTA, not POTA :) ) that it held no real interest for me. The tech reviews were great, though.

He’s on the hunt for that one special female who’s really, really into Ferengi.

That’s just weird. I love voids. I’ve already given notice that our next two cats (not for a while yet, as the current two are going strong and showing no signs of keeling over) will be a void and an orange one.

Dear Mr Anus, it’s not anti-AI, it’s anti-bullshit and anti-shyster.

Very strong “University rag committee who spend half their time telling you how completely mad!!! they all are and the other half telling you solemnly how important the work they’re doing is” vibes here.

You forgot to mention that Mom and Pop also benefit from their fleet being linked exclusively to the Robocharge™ charging network, which provides reliable charging 24/7 for a simple convenience fee of 25% on top of the local power company’s grid rate.

also why does he think people will take on his “wacky” pronunciation of “Robovan” to rhyme with “gas oven”? I generally leave actually listening to Musk’s live ramblings to the professionals but damn, this guy is a terrible public speaker. Has his schtick always consisted mostly of awkward pauses and ers and ums or is this a new thing?

Anthony Levandowski (the Waymo guy) on the robot cabs: "You’re putting the power back into the people’s hands, where a small business owner could have, you know, a fleet of 10 cars or 20 cars that they run themselves as their business. It’s a great model for the future where it’s lots of mom and pops, rather than one mega corp that does that.”

Because that is EXACTLY what will happen and it will absolutely NOT be the case that megacorps will simply do exactly what megacorps do and flood cities with robotaxis running at a loss in order to control the market and then jack up prices. No siree, it’ll be all Mom and Pop’s Friendly Robotaxi Company.

Don’t have much use for a protocol droid either.

(and that vision is “happily pissed people with empty wallets”)

Knuth should have a special Nobel Prize for Being Donald Motherfuckin’ Knuth.

Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who’d describe themselves using titles like “futurist” and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they’d have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech – didn’t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.

Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like “Chief Visionary”. These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)

Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he’s being showered with cash and hyping for all it’s worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and… we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.

The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs… none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it’s just that people would have asked “What is this for?” and “Why is it better?”. It’s what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who’ve spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.

Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as “a startup” now has to mean $10m in seed capital and “graduating” from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.

How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.

(full disclosure: I’ve had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied “I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly” person I’ve ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)

Having read a bit about this dispute and the parties involved I think the best settlement prospect for this lawsuit is to set everybody involved on fire.

Ooh, I know! I’d not exactly call it a moral panic but there were people who were convinced that people would be driving off cliffs or getting lost in the mountains because they didn’t have the skills to read a paper map properly. Wasn’t very convincing, especially as if people are determined to be stupid enough to drive off a cliff without noticing they’re going to find a way to do that even if there’s a big sign in front of them saying “Cliff, do not drive off”.

In much of the world online mapping services still aren’t anywhere near the standard of a proper topological map and there’s really no substitute for (say) an Ordnance Survey map if you’re climbing in the Cuillins, but that’s not the fault of GPS.