mpk

In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.

He’s on the hunt for that one special female who’s really, really into Ferengi.

That's just weird. I love voids. I've already given notice that our next two cats (not for a while yet, as the current two are going strong and showing no signs of keeling over) will be a void and an orange one.

Dear Mr Anus, it's not anti-AI, it's anti-bullshit and anti-shyster.

Very strong "University rag committee who spend half their time telling you how completely mad!!!!!! they all are and the other half telling you solemnly how important the work they're doing is" vibes here.

You forgot to mention that Mom and Pop also benefit from their fleet being linked exclusively to the Robocharge(tm) charging network, which provides reliable charging 24/7 for a simple convenience fee of 25% on top of the local power company's grid rate.

also why does he think people will take on his "wacky" pronunciation of "Robovan" to rhyme with "gas oven"? I generally leave actually listening to Musk's live ramblings to the professionals but damn, this guy is a terrible public speaker. Has his schtick always consisted mostly of awkward pauses and ers and ums or is this a new thing?

Anthony Levandowski (the Waymo guy) on the robot cabs: "You’re putting the power back into the people’s hands, where a small business owner could have, you know, a fleet of 10 cars or 20 cars that they run themselves as their business. It’s a great model for the future where it’s lots of mom and pops, rather than one mega corp that does that.”

Because that is EXACTLY what will happen and it will absolutely NOT be the case that megacorps will simply do exactly what megacorps do and flood cities with robotaxis running at a loss in order to control the market and then jack up prices. No siree, it'll be all Mom and Pop's Friendly Robotaxi Company.

Don't have much use for a protocol droid either.

(and that vision is "happily pissed people with empty wallets")

Knuth should have a special Nobel Prize for Being Donald Motherfuckin' Knuth.

Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who'd describe themselves using titles like "futurist" and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they'd have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech -- didn't actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.

Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like "Chief Visionary". These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)

Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he's being showered with cash and hyping for all it's worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and... we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.

The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs... none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it's just that people would have asked "What is this for?" and "Why is it better?". It's what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who've spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.

Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as "a startup" now has to mean $10m in seed capital and "graduating" from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.

How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.

(full disclosure: I've had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied "I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly" person I've ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)