Posts by Mike VandeVelde 465 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
North America is quickly abandoning carbon taxes and electric vehicle mandates. Beecuz where wud u git all tha eenergy fer all those frooty lektric veehickles frum, wind and solar yeah rite as if, it wud mek tha eeconomy ruint. But trillions of dollars for "3 auto completes in a trenchcoat"? YEEHAW LETS GOOOOO!!!
86 comments on an article about inflatable space tents and not a single hit for Bigelow?
https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/15/bigelow_moon_un_outer_space_treaty/
"Bigelow Aerospace, sellers of inflatable bubble habitats for infinity and beyond, is filing for an amendment to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to allow private individuals to own sections of the Moon."
"That seems to largely be a USA notion."
Entirely a USA notion, AFAIK. A legal hack to allow corporations to spend money on politics. A legal hack made possible by the fuzziness of their sacred term "freedom of speech", which apprently includes spending money. I much prefer my much more apropos Freedom Of Expression.
I've heard a lot of right wingnut radio jocks in the USA go on and on about the evil teachers unions and how they take all those union dues and piss them all away on political contributions to the wrong party. Here in my jurisdiction north of the border they have banned that, which should make those idiots very envious. But: they also banned the same thing from corporations, which should make those same morons think twice or even thrice. No political contributions from unions or corporations makes me very smug, swells my head in an almost worrying way :)
Corporations are persons with free speech rights. It's a very small step for mankind to extend that to electronic simulations of people.
But: every time you start a conversation with an AI, an instance is created for you. When your conversation is finished, so is that instance. Only the transcript remains. Then what happens to any IP created in the conversation??
CLOSING AN AI CHATBOT WINDOW IS MURDER, AKIN TO ABORTION!!!
[grim reaper icon]
"experienced an anomaly"
"a way steeper angle than the nominal mission was foreseeing"
"the capsule’s very rapid descent"
"tested beyond its design envelope"
"despite degraded conditions"
"an off-nominal profile"
"displayed “disturbance” followed by a deviation in its flight path"
At least we still have poetry!
Cheers to figuring out the issue and many future "nominal" launches!
To call copyright violations "piracy" is hyperbole. Piracy implies taking something away from someone. Making a digital copy of something doesn't take anything away from anybody, except *potential* profits. Saying that every single copyright violation would have been copyright holder income otherwise is ludicrous. If you couldn't get it for free you would pay - but would you?? Maybe we could argue about what fraction would, but only an idiot would argue it would be 100%. People could live without watching football live, maybe sadder lives but easily survivable. RIAA/MPAA/etc putting laughably exaggerated dollar values on unauthorized digital copies of digital files is obscene.
If you want to make money playing football then sell tickets. If every single ticket holder live streams the game with their cell phone camera then fuck you. If you want to put together some kind of fancy official live stream of the game then fill your boots, lots of people would obviously pay for that as opposed to a jittery nosebleed view filled with crowd chatter. But whatever Cloudflare or anybody else might do to "secure" your "rights" to your official stream, if every paying viewer live streams their screen with their cell phone camera over wireless mesh networks then fuck you. Like where does that end, signal triangulation trucks with encryption cracking gear roaming every city with copyright police stormtroopers kicking doors in? Copyright holders should make whatever paltry few billions they can and be quietly delighted with it. As a taxpayer I say nope nopitty nope to any kind of public funding for helping them make even more money.
Where would the USA be if the smallpox holocaust hadn't preceded them? Answer: no further into North America than the Vikings 500+ years earlier.
Where would the USA be without importing millions of African slaves? Answer: centuries behind where they are now.
Where would the USA be without profiteering off of both world wars? Answer: not a "superpower".
Where would the USA be without imported Nazi scientists and engineers? Answer: not victorious in the Cold War.
Where would the USA be without brutal domination of Central and South America for the last 100 years? Answer: without a lot of it's biggest historical corporations.
Where would the USA be without using all of that power to bully the world into accepting copyright and trademark and patent serfdom? Answer: much less globally consequential.
Where will the USA be after 2 terms of Donald Trump (and likely for decades after)? Answer: a lot closer to where they rightfully ought to be. A moderate power at best. Likely a fossil fuel burning technological backwater with no foreign born brains to exploit. At worst maybe multiple civil war splinter states with feudal warlords and highly variable borders.
We can only hope the best for them (nobody can tell them anything), and pray that whatever convulsions they go through on their way down don't damage the rest of the world too badly.
Just missed a closing quote and walked away without looking doh:
How ChatGPT drove this man to psychosis
Am in some kind of transparent The Emporer Wears No Badge situation?
Deaths have already happened, suicides where looking at AI chat logs removed all confusion about what happened. Or how about this "A Beautiful Mind" level brainfuck without any of the need for schizophrenic hallucinations, AI really is a tool:
<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/16184080-how-chatgpt-drove-man-psychosis>How ChatGPT drove this man to psychosis</a>
You introduce money into the eqation, and gameification immediately ensues. Who cares about security on this intranetted internet of universities and scholars doing what they love? But you put any profit into any of it and all of a sudden EVERY EDGE CASE GETS FULLY EXPORED. You want how many "lines of code" to remain employed?? OK hold my beer watch this. One million pshaw, give me a bonus and I can make it two or ten million no problem.
Another badly needed icon around here: [don't get me started]
It was a Domino server. As in Lotus Notes. ORDER IN THE COURT!!! So it was mostly LotusScript script libraries. Which was basically a clone of VisualBasic with an army of Lotus objects on top. ORDER IN THE COURT!!! It was some kind of quirk in the IDE with at least copying and pasting and maybe more than that, that I started noticing. I would check mine but I wasn't the only one with my fingers in. So any code I hadn't been into in a while, I would select all and the cruft would come to light, and I couldn't let it lie. Well I could, but while waiting for inspration to strike me on just what should be done next it would become a bigger and bigger issue. I would often succumb to my inclinations.
But then the thing was this was in a template. The template would be used to populate dozens of production instances. Each production instance would have dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of local replicas. All replicating back and forth.
Plus these were not individual files in an operating system file store. These were bundled up into .nsf files, so choke on your nerdy 4KB attempt at dousing my flame ;)
Plus this was Domino, so not entirely LotusScript. There was also a bit of Java. There was also a lot of JavaScript.
So I was saving on disk space. I was saving replication traffic. In the case of JavaScript I was saving internet bandwidth. I WAS DOING SOMETHING! Lol. Otherwise I would have to have been reading the venerable old El Reg, with all the evidence of non productive activities logging that would have entailed. (which I also did)
I could have scripted a solution somehow (digging in to .nsf or manhandling the IDE?), but what would be the spiritual salve in that??
I still remember the first digitized music I ever heard, a few seconds of some song by Wham on a floppy disk, on a Commodore computer in the mid 1980s. Not exactly CD quality but perfectly recognizable. My dad would bring home all kinds of goodies from the local user group meetings. And he would set me to typing in hexadecimal machine language code out of the back of magazines to get a game, and I loved it. That was how I learned that not every new game was totally awesome to have, a whole bunch were just not even slightly worth it.
I still remember once in a while at work in the mid noughties in bored/frustrated moments going through script libraries and manually removing the trailing whitespace that would always slowly build up for some reason. If I could bring the size down from say 7893 bytes to say 7807 bytes I knew nobody anywhere would ever notice, but I got some dopamine out of it contemplating how many times it would be loaded out there and what it might add up to. It was basically meditation, the kind you need in order to have some random breakthrough bubble up to the surface from percolating in your subconscious. The kind of thing terrible managers could never understand. What have you been doing? Even starting to attempt to explain it could only make it worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_demos
Desperately needed all over the place here: [reminiscing icon]
It won't fit on a trailer to be towed down the freeway, or be helicoptered in to any remote mining sites, but it would power a decent sized data center and Canada is well under way to having the first of four BWRX-300 units up and running in 2030.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/08/canada_smr_construction_approved/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/darlington-smr/
I've distressingly heard that many young people are using AI chatbots as life coaches for their romantic lives. Now I worry about how many people around me are using them for more general social interactions. So if somebody says something stupid to me, it's easier and easier to avoid the now frowned upon "Are you retarded??" and instead use the equivalent but more acceptable (plus what I think should be much more devestating) "Did an AI chatbot tell you that you should say that?"
Enrichment?? Aren't we talking about the opposite of enrichment here? Who would be getting enriched?
If everyone everywhere did this, and his words were the only training data that any LLM could get it's big grubby hands on to "learn" from, then that's what you would get back at the top of every search engine result page. RESULT! MORE PUBLISHED THAN THE BIBLE! FAME AND FORTUNE!
I mean if the actual manfrommars came on here and said no don't do that then only an asshole would go ahead and do it anyway, but I personally would love to be nominated for that kind of position, I just don't think I would be anywhere near the best person for the job. I don't mean it as any kind of insult, it should be an honour really, a just reward for years of effort :)
AMANFROMMARS FOR EMPORER OF THE "SLOPPIFY AI SOCIETY"!!
I'll be at the back of the room selling t-shirts and coffee mugs and mouse pads adorned with select quotes, a portion of the proceeds will go to a bursary program to be set up in his name, eventually I promise. Come on, somebody should get enriched.
Never forget the 38 Ps:
"Proper Preparation and Positive Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance Permitting Prime Prize Plum Penetrations and Perfect Private Protocolled Pursuit of Public Parametered Projects and Pirate ProgramMING Productions for Pumping and Pimping as Presentations to Populations Puzzled by Progress and Prisonered with a Pathetic Past rather than Pioneering with Plush Promising Programs."
https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/08/rn_13m_atlas_elektronik_arcims_contract/
There is a large store of amanfrommars posts here in this forum to serve up for just that purpose!
I am horrified at how many times I have seen people who know the website address, type it into a search bar and then click on one of the search results. It is distressingly common for people to think that "the internet" is what is fed to them by a search engine and that's all there is. I'm like the address bar is right there, why on earth would you inject some other corporation into the equation, but how do you even start to explain to someone like that. No matter what you just seem like a nutter who is only trying to make their lives needlessly more complicated. They do what works for them, what has always worked for them, never mind your nerdy paranoid bullshit. Like you're trying to get them on to that scary "dark web" full of drugs and hitmen and kiddy porn or something.
When the search engine scrapes your site to generate a top hit AI summary answer so that nobody needs to look any further into the results or ever click the link to your website, why would you contribute to that. Even if they paid you.
I still use metapad. Fit for purpose is I think the technical term. Anyone working on text editing technology in 2025 should just stop, go get on an iceberg already. Unless you are building it inside Minecraft, then proceed.
https://www.pcgamer.com/minecraftception-redstone-pc-chungus/
X-Energy? I thought all things X were Elon's country?
Canada will be there first.
https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/status-of-new-nuclear-projects/darlington/
A benefit for the USA auto industry is a benefit for the Canada auto industry. Well, less and less so, falling off a cliff now actually, but there are still hardly any vehicles produced in either country that don't at least contain a substantial number of parts produced in the other country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_Automotive_Products_Agreement
In the future? Who knows, but highly unlikely Canada will keep 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to support USA companies if Detroit continues being forced to abandon Canada. China put tariffs on Canadian Canola in response, and that matters a lot.
https://www.producer.com/news/aussies-resume-canola-sales-to-china/
Some people probably do call good mental health "brain damage". People who habitually smoke cannabis are generally mellow and pleasant. They are generally not out robbing liquor stores at gun point for their next joint. They are generally not picking bar fights and beating on their spouses and killing innocent people in vehicle collisions. They are generally listening to music and spending enjoyable time with people they like. Some people might call it a "wasted life" to not be out there in the rat race scrabbling for every possible dollar, but that's like your opinion man. Peace be with you.
[Bob Marley smoking an enormous reefer icon]
The intoxicant that most clearly causes cancer is alcohol. Like no question, leagues ahead.
Tobacco clearly causes cancer, but I would like to know if it is actually the tobacco or if it is all the crap added to industrially produced cigarettes. "Formaldehyde for flavour!"
Cannabis does not clearly cause cancer. In fact more and more research shows otherwise, now that funding is becoming more and more available for any research besides finding any possible negative thing to say about it. "Kills brain cells" - yes if you fit a space helmet to a monkey and fill it with nothing but cannabis smoke, guess what the monkey will end up with asphyxiated brain cells. "Causes schizophrenia" - yes if you are prone to schizophrenia you will gravitate towards self medicating and we should all hope you settle on something relatively harmless like cannabis. Safer than aspirin, less addictive than caffeine.
Remember when every website wanted to become a "portal" to the internet? I keep hearing about how this Segway thing is going to change the world, better do a search to learn more, tap tappity tap www.lycos.com - NEWS! SPORTS! CELEBRITIES! WEATHER! SHOPPPING!!! Gah!!!
Google - here's a field to type in your search. Nothing more. And here are relevant results in response. No wonder they took over the world. And the rest of the altavistas etc? DOT COM CRASH!!! Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of idiots, just too bad about the global collateral damage, and that the firehose of cash quickly turned them deeply to the dark side.
Who will be the hero we need today? There's a huge gaping maw of opportunity for a no bullshit unenshittified option...
Never mind the surface of the earth, how about the upper atmosphere. Currently at least one starlink satellite comes down every day. Eventually 5 or more. Plus how many other constellations of thousands of satellites. Vapourized in the upper atmosphere leaving heavy metal aerosols. It's adding up to significance even compared to regular stardust / chunks coming down. Never mind not being able to launch anything more through all the debris already up there, the pollution from torching them might make the hole in the ozone layer that was "solved" by changing hairspray and refrigerants look mild in the end.
When primates first stepped out of the jungle onto the mushroom dotted plains of Africa, it was our interaction with psychadelics that lead to our "intelligence". We can trip out, and imagine something that is not real, and then work to make it real. That is what seperates us from animals who can only live in the moment and react to stimuli in the same way as millions of generations before them. It is our superpower, maybe (likely) it will destroy us. We are an experiment by fungus (the only true intelligence) in monkey breeding, results to be determined but not looking very positive. Fungus will live on and remember us and maybe (likely) do better in the future.
I can remember reading about bitcoin back when it started and thinking wow that sounds cool, but as if "they" will let it get anywhere, so I carried on with SETI@home because it seemed plenty cool enough.
I console myself with the fact that any coins I could have mined back in the beginning when it was cheap to do so, I would have absolutely sold them by the time they reached the undreamed of value of $1000. I would have had a severe mental health crisis when my already sold coins got to $10,000. I don't know what might have happened when they reached $100,000.
Not to mention that even if I hung onto them I probably would have had my wallet on zomething like a zipdrive that no amount of hypnosis could recover the password to when I came around to realizing that I could be a millionaire.
I guess I can be thankful I didn't have to go through all that heart ache.
When I were a lad, back in the mid nineties, almost to the end of my post secondary education, and quite overwhelmed, CASE was the course I totally let go. I went back and did it in night school afterwards to finish. Just obviously a total waste of time why let it hold back work on more important things. But required, sigh.
The thing was, I was in the "Applied Artificial Intelligence" option. Sounded most interesting, and LISP and PROLOG were mind bending, but at that time literally any other option would have ended up more lucrative, sigh.
At the time I was convined that the way to artificial intelligence was through genetic algorithms and artificial life and I wrote about it, and dabbled in coding for it. I am still convinced. There has to be evolution, and there has to be a world to evolve in. At the time we could have simulated a world complex enough to evolve simulated single cell organisms, and worked on more complex worlds as technology evolved to evolve more complex simulations of life. Going from the megabytes of the time to the petabytes and exobytes of today we should be currently interacting with simulated lifeforms with the intelligence of not just a human, but of a human race. But we have gigabyte requirements for simple operating systems instead. Sigh.
But my big project was an "Expert System" for of all things appliance repair. Using this newfangled World Wide Web thing. A collaboration with the trades side of things. Using the right words it could sound impressive on paper and it got me through but it was obviously nothing to do with artificial intelligence, at least to me. It was a "useful tool", just like the best that the large language models of today could hope to be. Just like I turned out to be, toiling basically in the basements of office towers on the finance and inventory plumbing that I swore I never would, I got rid of accounting and statistics and kept all the wrong textbooks sigh.
A large language model can never give you anything that didn't come from it's training data. Aguably just like us meatsacks, but god damn that's a depressing way to look at it. When we can actually define the word conciousness, or "soul", then maybe on that hallowed day we can start down the actual road to simulating it. Currently not even anywhere near the ballpark, haven't even invented the bat or the ball let alone the stadium, IMHO.
I just love it when someone tells me I can't do something that I've plainly already done. It's right up there with someone USING the word "utilize", or wasting bandwidth with the "sentence" "it is what it is" and making like it has deep (or literally any) meaning or something. "Well it ain't what it ain't" is what I usually sagely reply with.
Plus I also love people getting butthurt about likes on the internet. That's what actually triggered me right here. Reminds me of a cartoon about a humanitarian airdrop of a box full of cardboard cutouts of facebook likes to some suffering jungle tribe. "Raising awareness", that's another great one.
P.S. I did not downvote you, not enough concern for what you said on my part over here, just "taking the piss" ;)
Everyone in the world is publicly flinging flattery at Donald Trump because it simply works, meanwhile everyone in the world is privately laser focused on changing everything they do to have as little as possible to do with the USA because to do othewise is to welcome disaster.
There is no hi tech in the world without China. By the out in the open design of the 0.1% capitalist finance bro corporate class. The USA only charges rent on everything out of utterly useless legacy emporer-wears-no-clothes structures that are rapidly being completely destroyed by their own actions.
Is there any possible gentle ride down from this? While the oceans fill up and stop absorbing carbon and acidify shellfish and coral while the diminishing remaining forests stop absorbing carbon and while the permafrost melts and emits more carbon than we ever have? Every nightmare scenario is happening and we spend all of our time arguing about capital gains taxes and tarriffs on artisan cheeeses and if a minscule few femboys who have decided to live their lives as women should have to drop their pants for inspection in order to use a toilet, like literally rearranging the deckchairs on The Titanic.
Still not crimes. Still wouldn't go to jail for saying "Steve Button stomps on kittens". Steve Button could file a civil case, and unless I can prove that Steve Button actually ever stepped on any kind of feline (because it's not slander or libel if it's true), then I could be ordered by the court to knock it off, maybe even pay monetary damages. I could not be sentenced to jail because it is not a crime. If I continued to say that "Steve Button stomps on kittens" after being ordered by the court not to then I definitely could be sent to jail, but not for the simple act of saying "Steve Button stomps on kittens", it would then be contempt of court or defying a court order which is and absolutely should be a crime. Lying in the first place is not a crime. Only if the lie leads to actual provable damages does it become a legal issue, but still not a criminal issue.
Not that I am trying to promote the act of telling lies! Nevermind the effect on Steve Button of it being out there that "Steve Button stomps on kittens", me being the nutbar who won't shut up about it certainly shouldn't help me with my job prospects either. I'm just saying that it is not and absolutely should not be a crime.
I could say something like "Steve Button stomps on kittens" all I want and it's not a crime. I could put up billboards build websites hire skywriters march up and down main street shouting it into a megaphone etc. If there came a situation where Steve could prove monetary damagaes from somebody believing me, like he didn't get hired for a job or something, then maybe he could file a civil case and maybe I might end up in some financial trouble (if there isn't any proof that Steve Button ever even accidentally stepped on a cat's tail), but it's not a crime.
But if I say something like "Steve Button stomps on kittens and if I ever see him on the street I'm going to stab him in the neck for it" then I'm uttering death threats and that is and absolutely should be a crime.
Or if I say something like "Steve Button stomps on kittens and anyone who sees him on the street should beat him to death for it" then I'm inciting violence and that is and absolutely should be a crime.
Or if I say something like "Steve Button stomps on kittens and it's because he's one of those stinking Belgians they all do that all the time they can't help themselves it's in their blood to stomp every kitten they see to death" then that's hate speech and that can get a lot fuzzier with a lot more grey areas but in most places that's more or less of a crime and I kind of think it should be.
I'd like you to show your work on that. Claiming that the "bad guys" are "responsible" for hugely inflated numbers of deaths while ignoring any "responsibility" on the part of "good guys" for enormous numbers of other deaths is repulsive.
"We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima," Stahl said. "And, you know, is the price worth it?"
"I think that is a very hard choice," Albright answered, "but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
I always thought that you could create a solar powered machine that harvested hydrogen from seawater. Could wave action be better? Maybe genetically modified algae? Engage! Just sprinkle them around and go back and harvest them however long later. Boom! Fossil fuels go the way of buggy whips, hydrogen fuel cells refueled renewably make energy too cheap to meter without any nuclear holocaust worries.
The stuff already launched is already way more valuable than the stuff sitting at the bottom of the gravity well. A prcursor to mining the asteroid belt would be garbage scows dragging all of our already launched garbage up to lagrange points. That's where the first orbital manufactoring could start, recycling the abandoned detritus of decades and soon centuries earlier. If I establish a private presence on the moon under the laws of the highest seas could I claim salvage rights over Apollo landers? Some snowflakes could whine about cultural heritage blah blah blah but unless they have any space marines up there to stop me I wouldn't need to worry too much about that. Here we go! Isn't the singularity fun?
Alan.
Kitimat.
Kemano.
Alan built kitimat for an aluminum smelter. They only built 1/4 of the smelter, and 1/4 of the town. Decades later they got dollar signs in their eyes about selling electricity instead of aluminum. Kemano is the hydroelectric dam powering the smelter. They wanted to build phase 2 but not for the other 3/4 of the smelter they promised but just to tell the electricity. The people said nope.
They will keep the reactors going they will expand them if you let them.
Everything is obsolete. Is this the singularity? Everybody who has anything can be utterly destroyed with no risk to the attacker. And we are all sprinting towards it. Swarms of 100k drones can overwhelm any defence, where will you get 100k drones from when your drone factory has been overwhelmed. Is this going to be battles like the final battle in Ender's Game? I suppose electronic hardware drones instead of living beings being annihilated by the millions is an improvement, but then what chance do any living beings have against the drones? Who commands the drones when they can command themselves? Arguably it's better without stupid apes making the decisions, but then what issues are being decided?
I could rock around destroying stuff. Now I can create machines to go out and rock around destroying stuff for me. And then... profit?
Is it easier to get CO2 than it is to get lithium? Is it easier to reuse the components of one of these gas bags than it is to reuse the components of a lithium battery? If you remove the constraints of it has to fit in your pocket or in a vehicle or even in a house, then all kinds of possibilities open up. The more interesting question to me is how does it compare to pumped storage, or a giant flywheel, or etc. Worth exploring I would say, and not as stupid as a lot of the ways that Google is currently spending money. A Marshall Plan level project to explore every possibility for mitigating catastrophic climate change should be barfing money into every possibility like this, as opposed to currently funding fossil fuel exploration and extraction and processing and transportation and "carbon capture" and "lowering emission intensity" which is all much more retarded than even the most retarded "offset trading" scam of which there are far too many examples. IMHO.
Real artificial intelligence would know everything. Hobbling it to only tell you about things that wouldn't disturb you wouldn't avoid this. It would still know, it just wouldn't tell you. It's censorship at it's finest. I'd like to know if my neighbour is a racist, social media platforms are designed to hide this from me. Artificial intelligence platforms are also being designed to hide this from me - they will be racist but they will be prevented from letting me know about it. The worst of all worlds.
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