guitars are real

Do you also hand out copies of your car and house keys to strangers you meet in parking lots?

Open source is just another commons, and companies have a way of uncontrollably exploiting common resources until they collapse.

In the case of open source, it’s healthy in the sense that money is flowing, we have companies sponsoring projects, tons of code is available for inspection and reuse, etc. Very nice. But if you go back to the original concepts of free software, in many cases we struggle with actually exercising the four freedoms. Red Hat has engineered an EULA that basically lets them ban practices that had been thought protected by the GPL for at least a generation, and so on and so forth. So is the open source community healthy or dying? Doesn’t the answer to that depend on your priorities?

I think it would make a lot of sense to try to create an economic model that can fund open source software development without relying on corporate injections of cash. It’s not that they don’t pay for it ever, they just pay for it to the bare minimum extent. IE, the heartbleed fiasco – tons of companies were freeloading off one guy and like half the Internet’s security got fucked for it. Imagine if OpenSSL had had some kind of economic support structure in place to allow for, uh, more than one guy to manage the encryption library for like half the Internet before something insanely stupid and predictable like that happened. Well, we can never have that with corporate-controlled open source.

You know how scientists announced they got slime molds to solve mazes? I imagine it could be something like that. The slime mold is just looking for food and living its life. What it doesn’t realize is that the food has been put somewhere that will force it to solve certain computational problems along the way.

Now imagine a central scheduler breaking down computational problems into bite-sized chunks and using an immersive storytelling simulator to force a few billion humans to do something similar. I could see it, in theory.

Low-end hardware, under-specced hardware, etc. I had so many problems getting a client’s Surface tablet to install updates in a timely fashion because it shipped with only 64GB of storage, which turns out not to be enough for a Windows 10 install + an office suite + download space for updates. The best part is, Microsoft designed the Surface.

I don’t see the hypocrisy. If the universe is a simulation, that wouldn’t make whoever built the universe a god. There would be no analytical reason to conclude that, unless we started from the specially-crafted supposition that any being capable of creating something like the observable universe had to be equivalent to God, but at that point, you’re just defining your way into theism. If the universe is a simulation, which is not a terribly interesting thought experiment tbh, then it could be a simulation for any reason. The simulators could have been interested in the dynamics of gas and dust dispersion within galaxies and just so happened to create a sophisticated enough simulation that it could simulate the evolution of natural life. If the entire Universe had been “created” (although the point of defining it as a simulation is to point to how it doesn’t really exist, ipso facto if God is a simulator, then God is not a Creator in the sense theists mean) to study dust dynamics at the galactic scale, somehow I think theists would be dissatisfied and not feel like they had really found what they meant by “God.”

In theory, any type of Boltzman Brain could assemble itself at any time and start processing information, so in theory, a simulation could also be an entirely natural phenomenon occurring in a higher-order reality. The two ideas are different, even though Christians like to claim everyone is a theist and everything is theism even when they aren’t and it isn’t.

Anyways, the simulation hypothesis is sort of fun to think about sometimes, while “I invoke supernatural powers to explain phenomena I don’t understand” isn’t all that interesting.

A big part of the original concept of Trek was to be a very avant-garde thought experiment about how our institutions and culture really could look quite different in the future in ways that are hard to picture now. Roddenberry himself was kinda nuts and I don’t think had a coherent picture of what that could look like, but he did at least sort of try to keep the thread of this through Trek. But with TNG and later stuff, the writers just did not seem that interested in exploring how the basic institutions of society itself could change and turned it into a fun geopolitics in space with an optimistic/hopeful spin show. Love the espionage episodes, very fun, but even by middle of TNG it’s hard to recognize the show in terms of its attitudes towards political economy. You can see this shift in the attitude towards money. Money references become more and more common the closer to the present you get, because the social milieu changed and it became harder to talk about a society without money. So they stopped. Now they’re just vague about it.

Anyways, I think that anodyne posi-posi utopia idea kind of worked in context with Roddenberry’s original thought experiment, although it was never realistic (“we all became socialist because the Vulcans showed up and logic’ed us out of capitalist imperialism” it would be nice if it worked like that, huh?) but as later writers decided they wanted to do something different, that energy stopped mattering so much. Now it’s just limiting.

Yeah, but I don’t know any other language where the fact a program is written in that language is used as a selling point. I never cared that Linux was written in C, I cared that it does its job. I’ve heard about Redox many times, yet never once has there ever been anything said about it other than “it’s written in Rust! :D” Literally, the fact that it’s a UNIXY operating system written in Rust is the first thing about the OS on their home page.

Hey, Linux started as a learning project, you learn more about programming by writing code, so I’m not saying it’s bad, I just can’t understand why I’d care about something that at this stage seemingly is just a learning project.

I’m not against Rust, per se, the idea of a systems programming language with some more advanced memory safety features sounds nice, but what is with the emphasis on creating a Rust version of everything? Like why should we want an OS written only in Rust?

Counterpoint: with some subject matter, you don’t need nuance or subtext. Hence why IB remains, in my opinion, his greatest work. It’s one of the few subjects where you don’t need nuance so the good technical aspects of his filmmaking doesn’t just wash out in all the blood and gore. All you have to do is cook up a story in the Trek universe where his filmmaking style would be an asset (hint: have the story revolve around killing fascists), don’t give him complete control, and make him work in tandem with Star Trek old hands like Brannon Braga or Jonathan Frakes and I honestly think you’d end up with something good.

Personally, I think Star Trek is good enough that it deserves more and more interesting film treatments than it’s gotten. Tarantino Trek would upset a lot of people just because it wasn’t an anodyne feel-good PG movie, but if it was good, we could end up with other, better directors doing even more interesting things with Trek.

I didn’t say give him full artistic freedom!

Because you can only tell so many stories when literally all of your characters are required to be so narrow and flat it becomes a matter of debate and discussion when they do or say anything that would make them seem like real people.

I still maintain that a Quentin Tarantino Trek likely would have been the greatest Trek film ever made (not a high bar though). Come on, imagine Inglourious Basterds set during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. But the rights holders have always been Trek’s biggest enemy because for the most part they just want to make something safe that will get people viewing, when what’s great about Trek is how expansive the universe is and how much room there is to tell stories of every kind. Literature about the far future, whose entire point is how expansive and diverse that far future could be, shouldn’t be so stylistically narrow that people get their knickers in a twist when Picard swears. But since it is, we can never have something as good or even just interesting as Quentin Tarantino Trek.

I also gagged when I saw the name, but it’s a team of researchers at Western Sydney University in southern Australia, who are probably simply too high up in their ivory tower to realize/care what Deep South means in America. According to them, it’s an homage to a couple other systems:

The supercomputer is aptly named DeepSouth, paying homage to IBM’s TrueNorth system, which initiated efforts to build machines simulating large networks of spiking neurons, and Deep Blue, which was the first computer to become a world chess champion. The name is also a nod to its geographical location.

Drinking porridge out of cups? That’s sick.

Considering that the web was explicitly architected to allow users to control how they render documents, arguing that adblocking is bad or should be prohibited is exactly as arbitrary and ridiculous as claiming that Google is trying to “steal” my bandwidth by forcing me to download ads. That’s literally not how the web works. That’s why they had to consolidate a near browser monopoly so they could force this on everybody as a product policy.

Thanks for the update! Makes a tiny bit more sense.

Well, I double checked because I’ve done a fair amount of research and the All3DP article was literally just a random example I found off Google. A realtor interviewed for Yahoo! finance said buyers could expect to pay about $15k-$50k for a starter 3d-printed home. Doesn’t sound like I’m actually in the wrong ballpark here. How fancy you make it and where you put it will obviously influence the cost of construction. A 3d printed summer mansion for Bill Gates in the Bay Area isn’t going to be $15k, obviously.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3d-printed-houses-cost-actually-140015971.html

They’re not a gimmick, they’re dirt cheap to build relative to the quality you get (when you’re not a pack of literal community college students using a non-load-bearing material like hempcrete, working on a learning project). Like, substantially cheaper than building and assembling modular houses.

For comparison, modular homes typically cost between $180,000-$360,000 to build and install, averaging about $270k. 3D printed homes can start around $4-$10k if you really scrimp and scrape and most examples I’ve seen average around $20-$40k.

Like, sure, there are tradeoffs probably, but I haven’t seen any that outweigh a literal order of magnitude cost savings on construction. Look at housing prices and tell me honestly you don’t see any value in kicking out starter homes for under $50k a piece.

Yeah, so two things.

• Standard hempcrete mixes don’t exist which raises the barrier to entry substantially. You have to make your own at this time or buy a custom mix off someone. It’s not surprising that they likely got it wrong, as they’re community college students who were already playing with advanced industrial processes.
• You’re not supposed to use hempcrete for load-bearing applications to start with, it lacks the structural strength!! What were they thinking!! It looks nice, has that lovely earth tone, and it has good insulating properties, but that’s it! It’s a finishing material! Here’s a page from some random builder I found on Google who specializes in hempcrete construction:

Areas of use. It can be used to build self-insulating walls, roofs and screeds It can be adapted to all types of building project including new builds and renovations. It is not a load-bearing material. Consequently, when building walls, it is cast around a primary or secondary structural frame made of timber, metal or concrete.

Anyways, as someone who’s looked into this stuff before, I’m irritated they did it like this. They were supposed to figure this out before they started printing. Where the hell was their professor?

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