Wonder what the orange bastard will say when it burns on reentry due to the faulty heat shield.

Not the rocks. The helium-3 in the rocks, maybe.

Because it’s there.

No. Get out.

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children?

For 99% of what happens on the Internet? No. No, we can’t. That would be malicious fearmongering.

For the remaining 1% (or less)? Fine and impose sanctions on any companies that produce content intended to harm children (mostly Meta, and any company that makes games with lootboxes), and their CEOs and boards.

Educate parents so they can prevent their children from accessing that harmful 1%. Fine any that refuse, and take their children away as you would any other abusers’.

But this age tracking shit will do absolutely nothing to protect children, it will do absolutely nothing to educate parents, and worse of all will do absolutely nothing to stop the companies that intentionally harm children.

Its only purpose is to control access to the Internet, and to establish a foothold to justify a slippery slope of ever worsening spyware measures, that will harm not only children but the whole population.

Scam. We’re being sold an autocomplete tool as a search engine.

Or fraud, since some of the same companies destroyed the functionality of their search engines in order to make the autocomplete look better in comparison.

Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob’s parents were born—before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy—old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.

They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.

In America’s “Indian Summer” nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space—a more durable probe couldn’t be much of a challenge!

Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.

Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.

The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. “Why don’t you refrigerate?” she asked. “You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another.”

Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.

“Who said anything about equalizing?” the Belle of Cambridge replied. “You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren’t.”

“And that part will burn up!” one colleague said. “Yes, but we can make a chain of these ‘heat dumps,’” said another engineer, slightly more bright. “And then we can drop them off, one by one …”

“No, no you don’t quite understand.” The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.

'Here!" She pointed to the inner circle. “You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere.”

“And how,” asked a renowned physicist, “do you expect to do that?”

Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. “Why I’m surprised at all of you!” she said. “You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!”

Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.

— David Brin, Sundiver, 1980

Here’s an interesting discussion about the concept, with Brin himself explaining his reasoning.

None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres.

Except for Titan. Titan has a lot of atmosphere.

Ah, doing your best to break the Therac-25’s record, I see.

Story goes that Reagan got freaked out after watching the film and asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff if it’d be that easy to hack into the US military. After a week of looking into it came the answer: “no, the problem is much worse than that”, and fifteen months after having watched it signed the confidential directive “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security”, starting the implementation of cybersecurity measures in the country’s institutions.

More public money syphoned off to the parasitic corporations and dumber, easier to exploit proles.

Seems like a massive win for capitalism, really.

Until it all blows up on our faces, obviously, but when has capitalism ever cared about anything beyond the next quarter?

Everything starts with good intentions.

No it doesn’t.

When it comes to privacy, politics, and capitalism, almost nothing starts with good intentions.

Most everything starts for the short term benefit of whoever starts it and any investors putting money into it, at the expense of everyone else and ignoring any future negative consequences unless profit can be extracted from them.

It hurting people the starter doesn’t like (even if it will come back to hurt the starter in the long time) is also a very important factor, though secondary to the short term profit one.

Anyone remember RAMdisks?

We know what “AI” can do.

• Create one of the largest and most dangerous economic bubbles in history.
• Be a massive contributor to the climate catastrophe.
• Consume unfathomable amounts of resources like water, destroying the communities that need them.
• Make personal computing unaffordable. (And eventually any form of offline computing; if it’s up to these bastards we’ll end up back with only mainframes and dumb terminals, with them controlling the mainframes).
• Promote mass surveillance and constant erosion of privacy.
• Replace search engines making it impossible to find trustworthy information on the Internet.
• Destroy the open web by drowning it on useless slop.
• Destroy open source by overwhelming the maintainers with unusable slop.
• Destroy the livelihood of artists and programmers using their own stolen works as training data, without providing a useable replacement for the works they would have produced.
• Infect any code they touch with such an amount of untraceable bugs that it becomes unusable and dangerous (see windows updates since they replaced their programmers with copilot, for instance.
• Support the parasitic billionaire class and increase the wealth divide even more.
• Make you look like a monstrous moronic asshole for supporting all that shit.

It maybe being able to save you five minutes of coding in exchange for several hours of debugging (either by you or by whoever is burdened with your horrible slop) is not worth being an active contributor to all that monstrous harm on humanity and the world.

I don’t want my data poisoned, I’d rather just poison the AI bros.

The point is that if predicting the next word leads to it setting up a website to attempt to character assassinate someone, that can have real world consequences, and cause serious harm.

Even if no one ever reads it, crawlers will pick it up, it will be added to other bots’ knowledge bases, and it will become very relevant when it pops up as fact when the victim is trying to get a job, or cross a border, or whatever.

And that’s just the beginning. As these agents get more and more complex (not smarter, of course, but able to access more tools) they’ll be able to affect the real world more and more. Access public cameras, hire real human people, make phone calls…

Depending on what word they randomly predict next, they’ll be able to accidentally do a lot of harm. And the idiots setting them up and letting them roam unsupervised don’t seem to realise that.

Transmetropolitan was truly prescient (except when it came to politics; turns out that if the president’s crimes and disregard for the constitution become public the press and the law don’t care, and just let him get on with it, making the whole point of the book moot).

Other bots that might be run by the company you’re trying to get a job in, the college you want to attend, the customs agent at the airport, the online shop you’re trying to buy from, the social network you’re trying to join…

These dystopian days a hit piece can do a lot of harm, even if no human ever reads it…

Well, daemons, but still…