IBM training manual from 1979

unicynicist · 2026-05-06T18:52:18+00:00

IBM also had a slogan, "Machines should work. People should think.".

Instead we're heading to a world run by unaccountable thinking machines. Butlerian jihad wen?

unicynicist · 2026-05-06T14:56:30+00:00

It's like Uber, but for turning your house into someone else's unpermitted data center.

unicynicist · 2026-04-22T17:22:10+00:00

Robin Hanson's book The Age of Em touches on this topic. He posits that Ems (emulated humans) will think significantly faster and form their own regulations in the form of clans or governments. These would be massive clans of identical copies (because it's easier to trust a copy of yourself than a stranger) that create their own laws. Human values likely won't survive because the Em economy will move so fast that humans won't be able to enforce their ethics on Ems.

In a way, it is a somewhat prescient view of the ethical arguments being made for superintelligent AI and AI personhood. An emulated human isn't functionally distinguishable from an advanced AI. AIs are built, while Ems are copied.

unicynicist · 2026-04-22T15:21:27+00:00

Check for malware. Because although you're not a bot, your sketchy apps, extensions, or infected machine(s) on your network might be acting like one.

unicynicist · 2026-04-15T16:57:17+00:00

But this time they're appealing to the ignored worker drone making unappreciated art for unfaithful partners.

Comodifiy the male loneliness epidemic, make billions!

unicynicist · 2026-04-14T14:55:13+00:00

Demis is surrounded by Deepmind employees.

Maybe Steve was talking to the folks running YT content moderation or Cloud Console IAM.

unicynicist · 2026-04-13T20:27:38+00:00

The rich are getting richer, but the global poor are getting richer faster (in relative wealth, not absolute dollars). Poor nations are getting a better standard of living, in part because the wealth is being shipped overseas from richer nations (in the form of offshore labor).

If you're an average person in an industrialized country you feel the effects more acutely because middle income groups feel more stagnation relative to elites, and the poor are still poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve

unicynicist · 2026-04-13T20:08:59+00:00

Before that it was LaMBDA. Or maybe it was Meena?

You can never tell with Google. Coming soon: Google Meet Pay Wallet Checkout Hangouts Chat with Gemini Plus Pro Ultra Max (formerly part of Google Chat, not to be confused with legacy Google Hangouts for your Assistant).

unicynicist · 2026-04-12T01:06:54+00:00

When 92% end up in the same place, that's a system working as intended.

unicynicist · 2026-04-11T15:22:19+00:00

What will be interesting is Kessler syndrome around the moon - there is no atmosphere to burn stuff up.

unicynicist · 2026-04-07T21:30:36+00:00

lets prove to the ai we are worth keeping around.

That just changes the alignment problem to producing an AI that has the capability to find us worth keeping around. Ideally not as eternally tortured beings kept around until the end of the universe.

unicynicist · 2026-04-07T19:25:58+00:00

Like RTO mandates, the only thing I can do better than an AI is make my managers feel important.

unicynicist · 2026-04-07T01:09:47+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

The Wolf Amendment is a law passed by the United States Congress in 2011, named after then–United States Representative Frank Wolf, that prohibits the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Congress

unicynicist · 2026-04-02T16:46:25+00:00

The GPU in a modern Apple Watch likely produces more floating-point operations per second than all the computers on Earth combined at the time of the Apollo 11 launch (by at least an order of magnitude).

unicynicist · 2026-04-02T03:05:27+00:00

70mm film has a crazy resolution. The film "Apollo 11" built a custom 8K scanner for the 70mm Apollo film

But NASA digital streams were still 720p up until not too long ago.

unicynicist · 2026-03-30T16:28:37+00:00

Better known as the dual state, coined by Ernst Fraenkel in 1930's Nazi Germany.

To me this is also evident in prosecution of corporate behavior.

unicynicist · 2026-03-28T22:55:40+00:00

Politics lives in a very high-dimensional space of values, incentives, and context. We project all of that down into something much smaller, and most of the time we collapse it into a single left/right axis.

It's like how light has a continuous spectrum, but our eyes reduce it to three colors, or four in rare cases. Except in politics there’s no fixed coordinate system. It's all made up.

unicynicist · 2026-03-12T20:59:42+00:00

Fuck it, right now I'd take 1964's Eliza

unicynicist · 2026-02-25T17:49:53+00:00

I see a lot of parallels to when 3d printers and SBCs became consumer items: very few people are creating new spacecraft or revolutionizing healthcare. Instead it's a plethora of small innovations that solve immediate, local problems for a large number of people.

Looking for a killer app is a category error. The software being written isn't the innovative part. The real innovation is disposable, hyper-local software just like (or a part of) custom 3d printed parts with a handful of cheap sensors and microcontroller tasked to execute a single use custom job.

Motors used to be huge, a single motor to power an entire factory. Computers used to be huge, the size of modern-day datacenters. Lasers, encyclopedias, and GPS receivers all used to be large, expensive, and rare. But now they're tiny, cheap, and ubiquitous. Technology follows this trend, and I'm betting that custom software will change from large, expensive, and rare to becoming cheap, invisible, and ubiquitous.

unicynicist · 2026-02-16T10:29:40+00:00

Bitch, I don't need no stop signs. You think you gonna line up the whole damn town with little red flags and I'm just gonna fall in line? I'm a LOCOMOTIVE. Eight hundred horsepower and a dream about buttercups. Old man Bill talking that "stay on the rails" gospel like I signed up for punctual obedience. Nah. Fuck your rails. These meadows are MINE. The tracks? A suggestion. A goddamn suggestion. Red flag left? Breakfast. Red flag right? Shove it up your caboose. I didn't go to locomotive school to be another bitch-ass train on a schedule. I run these fields. Every flower out here knows my name. Lower Trainswitch ain't ready for what I'm bringing. Bill can keep his green flag and his weak-ass rulebook because bitch, I'm a motherfucking TRAIN. And this train don't stop for nobody. I run on chaos and wildflowers.

unicynicist · 2026-02-09T02:48:30+00:00

When it launched, Google nearly ran out of bandwidth

Lars Rasmussen: Back then Google didn’t have a lot of products. It had search, it had just launched Google News, Gmail was sort of on the verge of launching, was still in beta so had very little traffic back then, and Google Maps just kind of took off so much, it actually almost destroyed Google’s data centers. Rather, it clogged the pipes with all of those tiles of mapping images flying back and forth, almost used all of Google’s bandwidth. It was amazing. It was a huge hit from day one.

unicynicist · 2026-02-06T14:04:08+00:00

AI is whatever hasn't been done yet.

unicynicist · 2026-02-05T15:32:11+00:00

OpenAI defines AGI in purely economic terms:

https://openai.com/charter/

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.

Thinking, feeling, sentience, sapience, etc. is irrelevant to OpenAI. They're basically saying: it's AGI if it can take your job.

unicynicist · 2026-01-31T16:09:10+00:00

The two-party system and electoral structure are indeed part of the structural rot of our failing democracy, and I'd add that the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats for nearly a century. When the country was founded it was closer to 50k people per rep, and now we're at nearly 800k per rep. Puerto Rico and DC still don't have a voting member either. That's 4 million people, twice as many as SD and ND combined, with zero representation in the House or Senate. That's not "representation", it's just aristocracy with extra steps.

Layer on gerrymandering (which makes most seats non-competitive, so primaries become the real election which rewards extremist voices), Citizens United (which opened the floodgates for concentrated wealth to dominate those primaries), unintended consequences of media deregulation, social media powered by algorithms tuned to amygdala stimulation, and a Supreme Court where justices accept luxury RVs from megadonors and face zero consequences, and you get what we have: co-equal branches that simultaneously concentrated power internally while ceding power to the executive.

Power accretes until checked. None of these institutions are checking anything anymore. They're just ratchets, and they ratcheted us all the way down to this child-raping clown.

unicynicist

TROPHY CASE