Notices by Your friendly 'net denizen (cstanhope@social.coop)

Reading about the situation with PFAS and how 3M knew it was being found in people's bodies as early as 1970s and knew it was toxic but buried the information.

How many more examples do we need of corporations doing things that are antithetical to life itself? It seems clear that no set of laws, regulatory pressure, or good people on the inside will ever stop it. The problem is in the very structure of these companies. They can't do the right thing. They're not designed to.

@foone Was it some strange format? Every bit on its own line encoded as ASCII 0 or 1?

It's Rust (except for all the parts that aren't Rust)! It's Python (except for all the parts that aren't Python)! It's Node (except for all the parts that aren't Node)! It's ...

@gemlog I haven't had a chance to look at that. It's all I can do to deal with all the languages I have to deal with on the job. At this point I'm not looking for a magic bullet in a language... It's all feeling very fragile, as it is all (at least generally when I look) built on the same towers of complexity. So we create a new language, but it's reliant on a bunch of stuff created in other languages and runtimes etc. There's a problem there that a new programming language won't fix.

@alcinnz I just remembered this one:

https://paperswelove.org/2018/video/dan-bentley-connection-machine/

My notes say, "Fun, but almost glib, talk about the connection machine." So I can't remember how informative it is. But it does link to Hillis' thesis at MIT, which might provide additional information.

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/14719/18524280-MIT.pdf

@alcinnz Maybe you calready came across these things, but I'll post it just in case you hadn't.

There's the book from Hillis that you can borrow for a little bit (I have a physical copy of this):

https://archive.org/details/connectionmachin0000hill

https://archive.org/details/connectionmachin00hill

There's also this paper on the architecture:

https://archive.org/details/06Kahle001177

@alcinnz I've really been enjoying this 8086 series of his reverse engineering efforts. :)

One last AI/ML thing from me, and then I'll put this topic down for a while.

Businesses are training large models on the work of artists without their permission so that their work can be automatically remixed at scale to provide a service.

This is very different from artists learning, sharing, and inspiring each other through the generations.

One is an ongoing heirloom project. The other is a short-term grift that threatens to undermine the very thing it is attempting to extract value from.