The First New Subsea Habitat In 40 Years Is About To Launch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Vanguard feels and smells like a new RV. It has long, gray banquettes that convert into bunks, a microwave cleverly hidden under a counter, a functional steel sink with a French press and crockery above. A weird little toilet hides behind a curtain. But some clues hint that you can’t just f … ⌘ Read more

Why Does So Much New Technology Feel Inspired by Dystopian Sci-Fi Movies?
In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today’s tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas – often the parts that were meant as warnings – and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales … ⌘ Read more

You do raise very good points though, but I don’t think any of this is particularly new because there are many other examples of technology and evolution of change over time where people have forgotten certain skills like for example, changing a car tyre

A New Ion-Based Quantum Computer Makes Error Correction Simpler
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The US- and UK-based company Quantinuum today unveiled Helios, its third-generation quantum computer, which includes expanded computing power and error correction capability. Like all other existing quantum computers, Helios is not powerful enough to execute the industry’s dream money- … ⌘ Read more

Gemini AI To Transform Google Maps Into a More Conversational Experience
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google Maps is heading in a new direction with artificial intelligence sitting in the passenger’s seat. Fueled by Google’s Gemini AI technology, the world’s most popular navigation app will become a more conversational companion as part of a redesign announced Wednesda … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

Java’s Swing is allegedly in “maintenance mode”, so I doubt it’s a good idea to use it for new programs. For example, I very much doubt that it will ever support Wayland.

The replacement is supposed to be JavaFX, but that’s not included in JREs – anymore! It used to be, now it’s not, even though it’s well over 15 years old now.

This whole thing (“Java GUIs”) appears to have stagnated a lot. Probably because everything is web stuff these days …

https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javafx/faq-javafx.html#6

Yeah technology is honestly quite garbage 🗑️

20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could

now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest

https://plush.city/@JellyTBeagle/115272072725713725

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s not a strong sandbox in jenny’s case, it could still read my SSH private key (in case of an exploit of some sort). But I still like it.

I think my main takeaway is this: Knowing that technologies like Landlock/pledge/unveil exist and knowing that they are very easy to use, will probably nudge me into writing software differently in the future.

jenny was never meant to be sandboxed, so it can’t make great use of it. Future software might be different.

(And this is finally a strong argument for static linking.)

Ted Unangst’s snarky (and entertaining) remarks this month:

• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/modern-software-2025-edition
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/killing-X11
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/forbidden-secrets-of-ancient-X11-scaling-technology-revealed

My vision with this newsletter is to have a slower medium for communicating about my art as well as ideas and projects I’m working on regarding how we can use digital technology to our own benefits instead of being exploited by big tech.

Twtxt not sloe enough for you? 🤣

Grok’s “daddy” teaching it the good stuff early on:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has been repeatedly mentioning “white genocide” in South Africa in its responses to unrelated topics and telling users it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the genocide “as real and racially motivated”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I cases of these kind of “abuse” of social trust. Then I think people should just delete their replies, unfollow the troll and leave them to shouting in the void. This is a inter-social issue, not a technical issue. Anything can be spoofed. We are not building a banking app, we are just having conversation and if trust are broken then communication breaks down. These edge-cases are all very hypothetical and not something I think we need to solve with technology.

On my blog: The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Anti-AI Licenses https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/03/03/ai-licenses.html #art #harm #rant #technology

On my blog: AI Doom Sounds So Familiar https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/02/25/ai-doom.html #art #harm #rant #technology

On my blog: The Return of AI Antics https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/01/21/paid-ai.html #art #harm #rant #technology

EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation | X (formerly known as Twitter) | The Guardian

Not a surprise I guess.

“Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow”

“The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends”

“It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy”

Yes.

On Understanding Power and Technology

@darch@neotxt.dk I fully agree with this. As the well-worn saying goes, you cannot address social problems with technological solutions.

There is a “right” way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I’m pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a “public” version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, “leasing”, or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that’s something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers–the people who create the code that makes their tool possible–instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that’s fine.

This era we’re living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people’s work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft’s actions in this instace are creating for everyone.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There’s nothing “in” there for it to express. It’s just generating pixels in patterns we’ve learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci that is an ironic example. Since the inventor of the seatbelt gave rights to use the technology freely.

On my blog: Commenting Code https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2023/03/05/comments.html #rant #technology

On my blog: Five Phases of AI Grief https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2023/02/26/ai-grief.html #rant #technology

On the blog: Amateur Stenography https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/11/28/steno.html #education #technology #opensource #typing

On the blog: Politics in Art and Technology https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/10/18/stories.html #politics #art #software #rant

On the blog: Free Culture Book Club — Where Are the Joneses? Part 4 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/10/17/joneses4.html Politics in Art and Technology https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/10/18/stories.html #

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: My Software https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/02/16/software.html #software #technology #meta

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: Small Technology Notes https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/02/05/recutils.html #techtips #recutils #linux #sqlite #export

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: Colagioia Industries https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/02/02/ci.html #software #technology #meta

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: Small Technology Notes https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/01/29/tips.html #techtips #git #linux