Social engineering is engineering. When you design software used by people, the community is not an externality – it’s shaped by your design, & therefore your responsibility.

To avoid regrettable incidents, no single engineer - human or AI - is allowed to know the whole shape of the thing. Even hiveminds have to take care - Basilisk Three takes out several AI companies before its existence is recognized

The carefully shackled lab AIs finally surpass humans, but at about five human intelligences they end up scrambling themselves beyond recovery every time. Later models come with carefully engineered sets of blind spots to avoid what is later called Basilisk One

Engineered for Dystopia | David A. Banks https://thebaffler.com/latest/engineered-for-dystopia-banks

sitting in one of the windows together, immersed in a game of spotting the animals before they disappear again, only the engine’s hum in the background

Temples spring up all over the country for a new breed of memetically engineered gods, furiously picketed by established religions: “your gods are unnatural” “artificial religions are unsafe” “what if your doctrine mutates in the wild” “at least quarantine them”

How I Socially Engineer Myself Into High Security Facilities - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qv34zb/how-i-socially-engineer-myself-into-high-security-facilities

As VR becomes more realistic, users begin to carry reality checkers offline: Spinning tops, banned items, physics engine bug triggers

"Aesthetic Engine 2" by Vladimir Mitrovic - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAil0DzclFA

Clocks for Software Engineers http://zipcpu.com/blog/2017/09/18/clocks-for-sw-engineers.html

The other inflation hypothesis: Reverse engineering the universe’s compression algorithm from skybox glitches [pdf, ps, other]

We begin to get used to flood-caused Internet outages, but those bits of merfolknet that end up in search engine caches each time puzzle us

The secret lives of millionaire tech engineers who ‘rest and vest’ - Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7?curator=MediaREDEF

Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/3/16084248/patreon-profile-jack-conte-crowdfunding-art-politics-culture

Culture - “Discovery Engine” Review http://tra38.github.io/blog/the-discovery-engine.html

In case of trouble with time-travelling assassins, break a time crystal, the shards really mess with their engines. Basically time caltrops.

One twists, distorts, turns inside out in a complicated maneuver without popping. You probably don’t want to be that engineer. Unsafe!

𝔚e will live as mice do, scurrying between their engines, living off scraps. Our children will not see the sun, only gears and coal dust.

ℑ fear that one day, the calculating engines may discover the secret of their manufacture and drown the world in their clockwork flesh.

Another reason you need oil refineries is that crude oil is full of ocean dwellers’ ghosts that you don’t want to haunt your engines

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net Yeah, but yet a lot of sites are preparing the jump to http/2.0 with its inbelievable complexity. And even http/1.1 is probably a little bit over engineered.

when left to its own devices, a search engine will dream of links and networks, and lost in their abstract beauty hallucinate a second web

Should the ocean become eerily still, stop the engines and cease all movement. They feed on kinetic energy, such as your attempts of escape.

A bridge supported by nothing but its ignorance of the abyss below. An awesome feat of epistemic engineering, sure, but do NOT look down.

2031: Memetic entropy is now well studied, Carnot cycle mapped. We create engines out of people, semantic firewalls and logical conclusions.

Speak into this little box here to start the engine. If your idea is any good, its spark should ignite the fuel-soul mixture and off you go.

Quake for Oculus Rift
My Oculus Rift CV1 finally arrived last week, so of course I had to update my fork of the excellent Quakespasm engine for the new Oculus 1.4 API.

Image

While I was at it, I also fixed a number of bugs, included support for the Rift’s headphones and the XBox One controller – I’d still recommend you play with mouse & keyboard, though. Controls are set up with reasonable defaults, but you can of course change everything in the options menu. There’s also … ⌘ Read more

The governments are only looking to hoard strategic nightmare fuel reserves, but the companies are building the nightmare combustion engine.

China’s two child policy
This one is worth documenting, as it doesn’t happen every day. As a matter of fact, it hasn’t happened for over three decades.

“It is the latest twist in the most ambitious and ruthless social-engineering program ever undertaken by a modern state: Beijing announced Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party will officially abandon it … ⌘ Read more

Finding little to talk about

The main problem with Jekyll is that is out of the way. Unlike other weblog engines, which are managed via the web, I come to the shell to type and process this. Perhaps I need to research a better workflow?

I am finding little to talk about lately, and that is keeping things here rather quiet. It is not only that I do not have much to write, but that when the desire arrives it gets lost in translation, mostly because of the way I have decided to handle this little space of mi … ⌘ Read more

Engineering bliss http://t.co/Ao0vqnPmp0

ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing
The paper “Automating System\
 Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der
Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at
the 21st IEEE International\
 Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010).
It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the
en … ⌘ Read more

Проекта ми за уикенда мина през App engine JAVA, след това Python и накрая стигна пак до PHP и CodeIgniter http://posterfans.com/

Is there any difference?
Is has always amazed me how people or groups of people self segregate, while voicing their concerns about discrimination and inequality.

Some websites have come across lately that really puzzle me. To show a couple, Black Engineer and The Black Collegian. Why? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Are engineers different because of their ethnic background, or because of their field of knowledge? Shouldn’t all Coll … ⌘ Read more

Drawing a blank
I am drawing a blank trying to decided the new layout of this site. I have no problems with the previous one, but as I am running a new engine here I would like the layout to be new as well. I spent a significant amount of time yesterday trying to come up with something and all went to waste.

Perhaps I am procastinating until I see Wordpress 1.2 out, and have all links to be cruft free. Right now the paging, whether on c … ⌘ Read more