As they say: “never meet your heroes”. Two out of three ain’t bad.

a weird, stupid, amazing mess. 100% worth it.

No notes.

Absolutely, a spot-on assessment. If you haven’t put that review on IMDB, you should.

Honey, we have Neuromancer at home. ::holds up copy of Johnny Mnemonic::

I want it too, but there’s no need. Johnny Mnemonic was the original short-story template for Neuromancer, and fits into a feature-length film just fine. Campyness be damned - I love that movie. Meanwhile, Neuromancer would need a miniseries to do it justice. And we’re “people living in orbit” and “AGI” away from being inside that book.

Plus it’s permanently stuck in development hell, so we’ll probably never get one.

I’d like to chime in here and add that just about everything I could possibly think of is on that list.

Okay, maybe Megazone23 if you’re into classic anime with great animation and b-tier plots. There’s probably a lot more in that genre.

I’d also like to give Avalon a shout since I think it’s underrated, and kind of a unique film.

Three times++, actually. The second attack was documented to have resumed after the third, with different payload URLs.

https://securelist.com/notepad-supply-chain-attack/118708/

As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.

We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.

To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.

And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.

Or you’d get lucky and some other program you installed happens to have the right dependencies. Just copy them to the application install dir or to C:\windows\win32\ and off you go.

Yeah, stuff like that continues to be the best use-case for windows virtualization. Sounds a lot like trying to upgrade the BIOS or Firmware on an older PC; often the installer is some binary that only runs on Windows of the same vintage.

Backwards-compatibility with older web browsers so engineers can build websites for them, is another. I’ve also heard of industrial automation (e.g. CNC machines) being married to Win2k or WinXP, so being able to run an old OS on new hardware is crucial.

Windows, can I run this 25 year old software I just installed?

My money’s on optics, so PR but not for ICE so directly. They’re trying to pull a Big Fascism here and they need to project power at every turn. An ostentatious and loyal armed guard made up of knuckle-draggers that aren’t afraid to break every last law, fit the bill for future photo ops. The Secret Service is more about blending in so they’re not going to cut it.

Yes, but also no. I think @pulsewidth is being cheeky as both uses of the abbreviation apply.

suggesting that ICE agents would be deployed in Italy to protect US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That’s a big fucking problem, right there. Is the Secret Service not enough? Gotta have the low-EQ/IQ goon squad there too?

Works great on 300 baud; not many editors can boast that. Also, if your programs are all under 2000 lines long.

Thank you for your service.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I have a lot of thoughts on this because this is a complicated topic.

TL;DR: it’s breakthrough tech, made possible by GPUs left over from the crypto hype, but TechBros and Billionaires are dead set on ruining it for everyone.

It’s clearly overhyped as a solution in a lot of contexts. I object to the mass scraping of data to train it, the lack of transparency around what data exactly went into it, and the inability to request one’s art from being excused from any/all models.

Neural nets as a technology have a lot of legitimate uses for connecting disparate elements in large datasets, finding patterns where people struggle, and more. There is ample room for legitimately curated (vegan? we’re talking consent after all) training data, getting results that matter, and not pissing anyone off. Sadly, this has been obscured by everything else encircling the technology.

At the same time, AI is flawed in practice as it’s single greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. “Hallucinations” are really all this thing does. We just call obviously wrong output that because that’s in the eye of the beholder. In the end, these things don’t really think, so it’s not capable of producing right or wrong answers. It just compiles stuff out of its dataset by playing the odds on what tokens come next. It’s very fancy autocomplete.

To put the above into focus, it’s possible to use a trained model to implement lossy text compression. You ship a model of a boatload of text, prose, and poetry, ahead of time. Then you can send compressed payloads as a prompt. The receiver uses the prompt to “decompress” your message by running it through the model, and they get a facsimile of what you wrote. It wont’ be a 1:1 copy, but the gist will be in there. It works even better if its trained on the sender’s written work.

The hype surrounding AI is both a product of securing investment, and the staggeringly huge levels of investment that generated. I think it’s all caught up in a self-sustaining hype cycle now that will eventually run out of energy. We may as well be talking about Stanley Cups or limited edition Crocs… the actual product doesn’t even matter at this point.

The resource impact brought on by record investment is nothing short of tragic. Considering the steep competition in the AI space, I wager we have somewhere between 3-8x the amount of AI-capable hardware deployed than we could ever possibly use at the current level of demand. While I’m sure everyone is projecting for future use, and “building a market” (see hype above), I think the flaws and limitations in the tech will temper those numbers substantially. As much as I’d love some second-hand AI datacenter tech after this all pops, something tells me that’s not going to be possible.

Meanwhile, the resource drain on other tangent tech markets have punched down even harder on anyone that might compete, let alone just use their own hardware; I can’t help but feel that’s by design.

Sweet tap-dancing christ, this whole thread. If there’s anything I’ve learned today, it’s that some teachers are the most petty dictators that cannot tolerate being proven in the wrong, nor can handle having their decision making skills challenged. They’re out there doing real lasting damage to people and their ability to think critically.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go into education, just to displace one of these tyrants.

Sincerely, I’m sorry all of you had to go through any of this. Here’s hoping you have support and find closure.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.