Not enough people realize that the "Turing Test" as originally presented was "can a gay English man in 1945 tell the difference between a chatbot and a femme-coded woman" over a teletype connection.
(Turing was very gay and had a sex-segregated education and then work life: he basically didn't know women and his alienation is palpable. But today's techbros don't have any such excuse, and the emphasis on femme-coded AI is ... telling.) https://mastodon.xyz/@pmorinerie/112506480363973206
@LALegault It's bad enough that some of the more honest politicians have noticed, and are discussing what to do: unfortunately this is the Welsh Assembly, not Parliament in Westminster, but it's a start.
@foone This is especially true of SpaceX, who have a demonstrated repeatable capability to drop a ~hundred ton booster onto a bullseye, only dropping subsonic in the last couple of seconds of flight. Forget the landing burn and it's a smart FAE bomb the size of a MOAB, incoming faster than a point defense C-RAM can track.
(Via reddit): "Q: what gives away that someone is not a good person?"
Me: it's always a red flag if they start showing you pictures of their secret base inside an extinct volcano on a tropical island, and there are missile launchers and boiler-suited minions in mirrorshades in the background.
Especially if their selfies all feature a fluffy white cat and a control room with a map of the world labelled TARGET.
A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up policy briefings for politicians.
The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs:
Thought for the day: if your business is collecting personal data sufficiently sensitive that your government doesn't want it to be processed or sold overseas, then you shouldn't be collecting it in the first place. (That aspect of your business should be totally illegal.)
Apple users from 1988-2008 had to justify to themselves staying with an awkwardly non-compatible platform run almost as a cult by a control freak (Steve Jobs). But Jobs got ill then died JUST as Apple launched a breakout product range (the iPhone, which revolutionized previously-awkward smartphones, and the iPad as a spin-off that totally overturned the idea of how a portable computer should work) and was replaced by a soulless paperclip maximizer of a CEO (to be unfairly nasty about Tim Cook).
The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
This actually says something about cultural continuity because back in 2004, when Apple was a roughly $3Bn (not $Tn) company it really *was* a minority pursuit in a sea of Windows, universally oppressed by corporate IT departments! It only shifted after iPhone ...
Cook took the existing Apple cultishness and advanced simultaneously on all fronts, building out the ecosystem along lines of attack that Jobs had already sketched in. Innovation since Jobs' death has taken place, but much more sluggishly. The key was to layer incentives for staying within the ecosystem.
Meanwhile the *existing* fetishistic Cult of Apple was already there. The religious iconography, minimalist store layouts, ads full of shiny, happy people: it's subliminally religious design.
@foone Your toaster works by casting tiny fireballs but to do that it needs roughly one ARM M3 microcontroller per square mm of exposed heating element surface and some utter arsewipe will upload a cryptominer to root it via zigbee and then later a different griefer will rootkit the mining software and there'll be a bug that turns it into a soul stealer and by the way your cat is now possessed by an eldritch horror from the universe next door
In 2011, researchers from Japan and the Center for Unconventional Computing in the UK asked one of the most important questions ever asked. How many crabs do you need to build a computer?
Turns out that a carcinized computer runs on 640 crabs per byte.
And it takes 46 megacrabs to build an Apollo Guidance Computer so that you can land on the moon WITH CRABS.
Having an office with barely working Wi-Fi sure is awkward for a company pushing a "return to office" plan that includes at least three days a week at Google's Wi-Fi desert.
"You’d think the world’s leading Internet company would have worked this out."
Scottish resident SF/F author (he/him/they/them). Three times Hugo Award winner. Does not play well with Nazis. Abolish the monarchy!@cstross.bsky.social on Blueskyblog at: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/Follow requests: I may reject follow requests from accounts with no profile, posting history, or that appear to be spammers.