roughly

Talos is another good look. I haven’t checked incus specifically, but Talos is a beautiful immutable OS for building a k8s cluster. Subs in for ProxMox if you don’t need VMs or Pi’s on the homelab.

The name “data swamp” just absolutely got me. I love it.

Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.

This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.

(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)

One problem for internet vs AI is the internet boom laid down a bunch of fiber, which has a usable life of decades. The AI boom is 10% datacenter, 90% GPU, and the GPUs are consumables on a timeline of ~3-5 years, and even that's being optimistic compared to rumored real-world degradation rates. 2000 put a couple trillion in the ground that we got to dig up later, 2026 is setting a couple trillion on fire.

Some of the best hires I ever made came through GHC - truly a sad day.

Also, half the sites on the Internet don’t work properly on anything but chrome. At home, I’m an ardent and committed Firefox user, at work, I use Chrome like everyone else (and keep anything personal as far away from it as I can).

Yeah, so this is also why there’s a raft of stuff Apple will never support integrations with. They’ll bill it under security, and they’re not entirely wrong, but it’s also a threat to their core value prop, so you’ll never get open source iMessage, for example.

Do I sound sedated?

And the reason to trust Apple is because they recognize this - they’re not under any illusion about why their products command a premium, and so the security and privacy angle is (or should be) one of the sacred cows inside Apple.

And you’re absolutely right - as soon as they break the value proposition, the value of their package and the price people are willing to pay for it drops in half and they’ve all the sudden gotta compete with Google and Samsung and Huaiwei and the rest of that jungle, and that market sucks.

Apple’s agreement is that if you trust Apple, their stuff is the best in the business - if Apple is not a weak link, it’s real hard to argue with the design, and the ease of use and UX for the level of security you get is unequal anywhere else. Apple’s side of the bargain is you pay them money, and lots of it.

If you don’t trust Apple, you’re on your own - you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything, and you’re on the hook for explaining it to everyone you know so they can use it, too. It’s not that you _can’t_ do it yourself, it’s just a whole lot harder than if you accept the bargain and trust Apple.

Whether or not you want to do that is up to you, but I don’t think anyone’s in the dark on what the bargain is.

Yeah, nature’s a hacker, and you’re right, a wrench is a hammer when you don’t have a hammer. You see the same thing in biology - that enzyme’s not available, but this one works in a pinch.

Yeah, always the problem with tech - a camera is a useful tool and also an opportunity for a parasite to watch over your shoulder, a display is a place for presenting information and also an opportunity for a parasite to influence your behavior. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Also explains the purring. Waveform collapse as all nine cats coalesce for pets.

Very often the appropriate lens for genetic expression isn’t traits, it’s tools - a gene knockout isn’t “blue eyes now”, it’s “socket #6 is missing from the kit,” which is why you’ll see blue eyes and a bunch of other unrelated stuff.

(With love to my blue-eyed friends in the thread)

Yeah, the safety features aren’t _bad_, though. If you want to go 75mph and not die (or kill others), that’s the cost. You don’t need the next 2 tons and the infotainment system, but 500kg at 70 ain’t safe.

Presumably with louder prayers, because of the road and wind noise.

Take it up with the man who wrote the thing you’re praising.

Bisson’s the author, that’s his site.

For anyone unaware: https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

Add to that, the previous species you identified as a particularly clever pack animal formed a relationship with the monkeys and now looks like this:

https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...

At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.

Aside from the obvious attack vectors, this is just an incredibly fragile system. That’s fine if you’re willing to just go ahead and make all the actual humans whole when the cards collapse, but if not, you probably want this system to fail closed.

If you don’t understand the consequences, the Hole Hawg is not for you, and neither is the AI.

Jesus, that’s a great essay. Gibson and Stephenson are seen as the twin prophets of Cyberpunk - Gibson wrote about society, Stephenson wrote about technology. That man understands the technium better than anyone else out there.

(Bruce Sterling was the weird hippie who kept feeding interesting things into the machine to see what colors they made - without him, Cyberpunk would’ve died on the vine.)

Even when there’s not a direct connection, it’s usually a good sign to take a look at what’s going on. In this case, even if COVID was a random isolated mutation in an unrelated marketplace nearby, it shone a spotlight on a place doing gain of function research on novel coronaviruses where if one did escape lab confinement, we were woefully unprepared to deal with the full consequences of that outbreak (eg: COVID). Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, we should be taking exactly the same precautions as if it were.

weird when people make that swap without noticing it, huh?

There are a category of things that are technically impossible until a burly man threatens to break your arm if you don't do them, and a category of things that are still impossible.

Doesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.

The other side of that is that a big problem we're going to have moving forward is dealing with increased humidity - the climate change angle isn't just heat, heat + high humidity (the wet bulb temperature) is the actual health risk and the thing that takes a heat wave from inconvenient to a genuine crisis. Turning high humidity into drinkable water is two birds with one stone, if you do it right.

(To your point, it's almost impossible to imagine we'd be able to operate it at a scale that makes a genuine impact, but these are all chaotic systems and a couple percent here and there can compound to keep things on the right side of the phase shift.)

I love this. It’s basically an edge cache for power, with an enormous amount of side benefits - smooths out solar power, smooths out the duck curve, and allows the grid to size closer to the average load and absorb the spikes at the edge, instead of cascading into the core.

There was an article earlier about the distribution challenges that come from large workload fluxes, too - tl;dr is the transmission lines get less efficient under higher load, so smoothing out the demand curve to the end user also raises the efficiency of the entire grid.

And as someone points out below - the proliferation of EVs also helps this, because they can act as a “deep” reservoir so the local residential batteries can be much smaller - more buffers than something expected to run the house for more than a couple hours, so that makes the whole setup even cheaper, depending on when and where the EVs are getting charged.

You’re misreading me. I’m agreeing with you.

Sure, but who does the physical violence, and why isn't that guy in charge? That's the question - all power comes from the barrel of a gun, so why's the person in charge walking around unarmed?

Elizabeth ruled England for 50 years and is remembered fondly for building a global empire (by the English, don't get me wrong), and she was a woman. Yes, it's all relationships, that's the point.