the tech scene in the KSI headquarters where Stanley Tucci demonstrates Transformium , is more science-y for me than any scene in Silicon Valley.

how far astray am I ? I spent my entire childhood with the idea that science is what everybody is going to be doing daily to break past our human barriers and birth a Jetsons-style age.

has all our lives been, and continuing to be, one large wank ?

the engine of  modern civilisation is thus - create misery in free creatures, who know what a misery-less life is . this will force them to come to you for relief. make them do work for you, like slaving in factories. 

the drug dealer is the pinnacle of our economic evolution.  in his existence you find ALL the qualities that made the imperial and industrial ages come to be

illegal, (and hence)  monopoly on  supply, causes misery with product AND without product for those involved

waiting for matter compilers to create a world without economics

if driverless cars killed less people overall than drunk drivers and accidents, and society wouldn't accept them, can you justify that society's existence, and take seriously its other life-preservation laws on, say, murder ?

now replace driverless cars with vaccines which have a 0.001 % fatality (- ie - 1 in 100,000 folks injected with the vaccine will die)

isn't it scary that measles wipes out the body's immune registry ? resets it to zero ? isn't it scarier that there are humans going around unvaccinated and fighting to prevent wholesale vaccination ?

like Rama in the mythology, do the good folks HAVE to live a life of pain and suffering and meaningless work forever ?

watching : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeEJ4HhrB8U

 gas shortage in US is a BIG thing. pipeline hack achieved that ?

 

Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Covid and quarantine has proven this to a very great degree, that the ones we choose to spend our lives with, we cannot tolerate permanent exposure to

Somebody ( Graeber?  no it was Turchin (the son, not the dad, the dad made Refal (thank you, Principia Cybernetica)) was making the case that we have a ton of over educated elites and this is a marker for a particular flavour of the end of times to come about.

That our civilisation machine has stagnated  enough for the large middles with surplus to compound their surplus up to elite status.but they still don't have power of the real elite net that controls the world, for that is a closed ,insiders-only club . Forever.

Anyways. Graeber 's book was about how most of us don't have any real work to do anyway ( cos innovator's dilemma ? counterpoint - sacred cows make the best burgers ), and capitalism has evolved to be a system that buys a person's life through their time, rather than anything else, probably in an attempt to keep the masses distracted and a well-fed surplus, while the machines continue to churn out economic progress.

Tainter argued something on the lines of increasing complexity involved in getting things done in a society makes it inefficient over time, with the core (80/20) surviving at the last plush savepoint of progress while the rest lose the bricks of their walls one by one ( Mark?)

Samo Burja's point was that civilisation is already too complex for the folks that built it and that we keep losing the engineers who know how things work, and pretty soon everybody's flying blind. End of times.

Now Ran Prieur talks of the skills crash coming up,as no one knows how things work down to the metal (or earth)

At some point, population will fall locally the point that bodies of technology will fall to disrepair. Has happened before. will happen again. 

reading the excellent 'Unauthorised Bread' by Doctorow C

in 2012 , Halting State was delicious near future SF. Now most of it is mundane banal  routine day-to-day tech encased soul-less drudgery  that our lives have become. 

Seriously i don't want to hear about any startup doing anything any more. From reinventing the wheel (juice pressers with overpriced tech ?) to the insanely difficult AND unnecessary - driverless trucks driving in a convoy (trains anyone?)

enough of everyone and everybody coming up with 'new' things, which are anything but. 

also the Hyper-Suffering-Drive  that powers the economy needs to go. The princess is always in another castle, but just eat this burger buy this house this car this wacko protein bar or shake or this salad made from lawn mowings marked up 10000% .....

Doing a job that you have no feel for, in the hope that some marketer will persuade someone to spend $ on , is the root of all evil. 

Feed that troll and it metastasizes (turchin!)  to the point that everyone is running on a treadmill turning out turds feverishly   that   Central Marketing Committee believes is shovable-without-gagging to some segment of the population. 

And you consume the party propaganda  ads, drink the kool-aid and spend your $ on it 

and round and round it goes. GIGO

Benjamin Hoff :
"And so, after two or three centuries of pushing, pushing, and pushing the once-fertile earth, and a few years of depleting its energy still further with synthetic stimulants, we have apples that taste like cardboard, oranges that taste like tennis balls, and pears that taste like sweetened Styrofoam, all products of soil that is not allowed to relax. We're not supposed to complain, but There It Is."

No one thinks of writing ,say, Java code, and having it compiled for a Golang runtime, or javascript compiled into kotlin. 

C platformised servers ,but at compile time.

The JVM platformised servers at runtime, with its WORA

 It's time to platformise program runtimes, don't you think ?

maybe its time to bring fire down from the gods, and give programming to the people. write code in a non-magic language, and make your devices work for you.make your files work for you.  then maybe we'll get closer to our molecular assemblers and nano-bots crawling your veins eating up cholesterol and killing invasive pathogens,then maybe we'll get cold fusion and the Epstein drive

until then, boycott the lie sold you in the name of tech

 grist for my procrastination mill

a reading of King Lear, accompanied by Gutenberg Galaxy.

Coincidentally downloading the former on Gutenberg.org

one of the only places where i hear someone say 'default state of oral societies is terror'

maybe help understand india

2001/cosl adventures

project gutenberg ( TK told me about it. Joy of WOrk also)

sacred-texts

liar's poker(book)

voidspace.org.uk (most of it is now gone)