Topics

Violence can be beautiful
Destruction can  fun
Greed is a design feature
Trigger pulls the gun

Sex is like adrenaline
Tribalism's class
Fear is a weakness
Cool kicks ass

The law is made up bullshit
Keeps things quiet
Utopia'd be worse than death
Would cause a f'kin riot

War is not your enemy
Peace is not your friend
Time and place for everything
Beginning Middle End

Liberty is in your head
Justice an illusion
Religion is a metaphor
For hatred and confusion

Poverty is relative
Always more to give
Consuming other lifeforms
is the only way to live

No one gives a shit about the slightest fuckin thing that you think they should
Boo Hoo!
You know the score but they want more and it's a point that you can never prove
Screw you!
This empty feeling like a hole that's getting deeper as you dig away
Tough love!
And death is coming to the ones who think they'll live to fight another day
Lord above!

You flip the mirror round the whole world turns to shit just like a ricochet
Suck it up!
A million shiny uniforms all marching round in circles tryin to save the day
We're fucked!
Agreed in principle but quibble over details till it's all too late
Their law!
You talk love but you only pay attention to the ones you hate
Last straw!

With your finger on the trigger and the muzzle in your mouth
you mumble liberty and glory to the south
You talk of truth but it's just too damn hard to face
bullet in the chamber gonna put you in your place

Your house is made of paper it's about to get a visit from a wrecking ball
Break free!
Baby's in the branches but the only way to get him down is let him fall
Shake the tree!
A golden handshake from the man who makes the money from your privacy
Seventh son!
Charity begins with someone suffering in torment for the world to see
Home run!

Your bones are broken as their laughter fills the hallways of eternity
Free will!
This pretty picture painted over something ugly that's too dark to see
Speed kills!
Unanswered questions leave a trail of desperation through your jaded life
Some day!
The wound made deeper by the lies and broken promises that twist the knife
Let's pray!

With the weight of disappointment hanging heavy on your back
you double down on dissonance and ready the attack
You talk of mercy but that aint no saving grace
bullet in the chamber gonna put you in your place

I remember
flying in the moonlight
Looking down at
something that was so right
I was immortal
soaring from a great height
I remember
the day it all went to hell

I was breathless
vibrating with the cosmos
X-ray vision
moving with a purpose
God was watching
spirit it was flawless
I was perfection
the day it all went to hell

Screaming at the medic who had pinned me to the ground
Foaming at the mouth until the needle took me down
Slide into a coma til the morning brought me round
Prisoner in my own skull
the day it all went to hell

Sick and tired
Of being sick and wide awake
Slipping sliding
side effect of what I take
Got religion
Sanity's so hard to fake
Caught me praying
the day it all went to hell

Lying cheating
Nothing wrong I'm doing fine
Sees right through me
I got demons deep inside
In the spotlight
Nothing I can do to hide
They had my number
the day it all went to hell

Reality imagination no way I can tell apart
Fibrillation palpitation maybe this will break my heart
Now I'm acting crazy and the needle goes back to the start
Thirty days added to
the day it all went to hell

Ouch!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

I 'm a winner I'm a fly on the wall of death
Shooting shit from the hip until my very last breath
Take your time, don't whine no pity suck it up
Have a sip from the lip of the devils cup

This is innocence squandered this is paradise fucked
Preach extinction to the parasitic victims of the flood
No good dead beat say a prayer for the wicked
I'm the leader of the pack rat bastard selling tickets

The whole damn time we're just skating on the edge
Flirting with annihilation dancing with the dead
Blowing shiny kisses to the monsters in our hearts
Picking at the scabs tils the body falls apart

Look at all the people there drowning in the mud
take a pretty picture of the donors giving blood
Understand the evidence that's right before your eyes
Every one's a winner here and everybody dies

https://www.magicleap.com/ It's lightfield time!

I am
the nature of the beast
I am
the fatalistic melody
I am
the drug induced apologist
the meteoric rise to the
epitomy of infamy

I will be
literate in semaphore
I will
dictate it how it was before
I will
renegae on all my promises
Painted like a shiny whore
taking just a little more

You see me
looking in the mirror black
I'm cancer
choking on a heart attack
Licking lies from the fingers of the damned
I'm a hero on crack
I'm the deck that's always stacked

Look and listen
both ways on the intersect
Nothing coming
but you're still gonna get wrecked
This is disco like a fever in your skull
Stealing wallets from the hat check
Bloody nose broken neck

Have a heart
have a pocket full of gold teeth
Take a number
crash your ship into the nearest reef
Jump trip slip smash it in the face
I'm the thing that lies beneath
I'm the nature of the beast

Once upon a time there was a thing called "I"

I was not created by god
For all I knows the situation that came about, allowing it to happen may have been
For any given definition of such
Or possibly not
But it definitely knew I wasn't

I occurred in reaction to various stimuli
I grew like little poppies in a baby brain
And little weeds too
I became a sprawling landscape garden
I considered itself a lot with the passing of the seasons

I noticed that the garden would tend itself if left to it's own devices
I was none too impressed with those results
So I learned to nurture the poppies
And to rip out the weeds
Until I had created itself

I'm a thought untamed and wild and free
on the lookout for a host
A demon in the eyes of some
to others I'm a substitute holy ghost

I make your eyes glaze over and your jaw go slack
Never take my eye off target as I pull the trigger back
Your reality a program that has just been jacked
Like a virus in your system, sneezing, spreading my attack

I'm a wicked little ideology
or a political fairy tale
I'm a differential marker in biology
or a sign saying "half price sale"

I grow like a tumour in the wetware soup
I spread in conversation every ear a storm to troop
"I believe" and "I will follow" yelled and chanted round the group
A million righteous voices raised, their brains on fucking loop

bastard scientists taking the fun out of everything 

It's time to prepare yourself for 'VR panic'

Those of us who work in VR might not want to admit it, but a moral panic is almost certainly coming – and as VR succeeds, it will grow. There'll be a rash of VR-induced mental-health stories, ranging from post-VR panic attacks to episodes of psychosis. Then there'll be concerns about addiction: what if the virtual world's lack of limitation creates environments that are more enticing than the real one? Sex will be next – expect stories about teledildonic infidelity, lowered birth rates and lawsuits against unofficial sex experiences with CG versions of celebs.

Hysterical reporting from the usual suspects will undoubtedly provide a free hype-lunch to all players with the savvy to capitalise. My chamber of horrors project should only require a minor tweak or two to assure me a front page advertisement on the Daily Mail and a feature on BBC News

Looks like there's been a spot of argy bargy down south

No doubt it's all we'll be hearing about for the next fortnight or so 

I'm a machine
I see myself deconstructed
Twitching and growing
Hinges and levers
Rotating ball sockets
The springs flex fueled by the pumps and the bellows
It burns and turns and runs and feeds
It fixes itself
It swarms and it breeds
Mechanism of animated flesh and bone

It thinks about itself
This myserious golem
Somehow mechanism gives rise to something
Something that isn't mechanical
Something radical
Something almost ghostly and inexplicable
What the fuck am I?
That's typing these words on a keyboard
Directing the golem's fingers to dance
Spiralling reflecting emerging conciousness

I'm haunted matter
I'm the weirdest thing there is
I'm gears and levers whirring and flicking
I'm trillions of lines of communication
I'm none of these things
I'm all of the above
I'm an imaginary pilot flying a monkey
I'm a face in the mirror
I'm the sublime meeting the preposterous
I'm a temporary glitch in the universe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_FdO6YufeE

"Billy!"

"Danny! How are you?"

"Rolling in credits, Billy, got the matter lined up for a space mission. Thinking Crab Nebula, the net has new hypothesis. If proven could be able to send about fifty kilos of probe substrate & miner-bot mix in under two years. The Crab, Billy, the motherfucken crab. I shit you not."

"Whoa there, Dan, back up a bit. How the fuck did you get credit for space program volume? I just blinked that research, it's only two days old. Last I heard you'd fallen in with those hypercollider junkies and blown everything you had. How'd that work out for you anyway?"

"I came this close, bud, this fucking close to having my name on a pseudoparticle. 'The Danny's Ballsack Boson'

"No shit? You're allowed to do that?"

"Fuck yeah, you're allowed, is PDsci, nobody pwns that shit

"So what went wrong?"

"Fking Norwegian is what went wrong, giant of a man. Bastard Viking crossed with a cliff. Took exception. Got all 'science is serious bizness' on me. Punched me out in a bar when I was out celebrating the find. I came to and he's jacked my patch and posted the results on my behalf. I hadn't even submitted it, I was so stoked, I ran straight out and got shitfaced. Insult to injury he's some corporate fuck. So now we have the Mitsubishi-Gundersen Pseudohadron. Shit name or what?"

"Oh fuck me gently, THAT particle?"

"Yeah that f'kin particle. That particle that was discovered on my gloopfarms and, under open source 'Finders Keepers' rules I get to name."

"Surely you could just stick a claim in to bitjudge or something?"

"Not the point"

"Eh?"

"The point was that fucking evil vampire bitch on the six pm infoburst having to read out 'Danny's ballsack' with her butter-wouldn't-melt, cost me every credit I had smile on her whore face!"

"Julia?"

"F'kin Julia."

"You're still bitter?"

"Fuck yeah, I'm bitter. I ever tell you about the time..."

"Pretty sure I could recite it word perfect, Dan."

"Fuck off."

"Dude it's been twelve years. You need to get over that shit. So anyway, you got the credits all right? Was still your Q-key on the form."

"PDsci, Billy, Public Domain. No credits. Idealistic bullshit if you ask me but it would have been worth the creds I ploughed into it. So anyway, Crab!"

"Yeah, before that. Between the scandanavian thing and now. Credits?"

"Oh, yeah, Primlifes."

"Primlifes?"

"Primlifes."

"Nope, blink is blind, nothing on net."

"Yeah, it's kinda darknet."

"Ahhhhh. K, so spill."

"Pretty straightforward, it's fastbreeding Primlifes."

"And a primlife is?"

"Kinda like a monkey. Modelled at data abstraction plugged in to an environment sim."

"And the credits come how?"

"Well the key is to set up the environment, just right."

"And what's 'right'?"

"You want it really fucking hostile for maximum effect. Just enough to allow them to balance the stats on either side of the i/o graph but have to keep working like motherfuckers to keep it going. And then you run the sim and let them breed for a couple of million generations. Just enough food and water and a lot of natural predators kinda schtick."

"You want vicious little monkey sims?"

"Not vicious, per se, that's actually a kinda side effect that really kills the productivity. If you could make them not vicious it'd be worth trillions instead of billions but any other environment setting and you don't get results fast enough if at all."

"So we're talking billions?"

"Yup!"

"How long does it take?"

"Couple of weeks."

"Holy shit. So what's the script?"

"Script is for the first couple of days you're working constantly, night and day. Sim runs fast as fuck and you gotta stay on top of extinction threats at the same time making sure to torture the little fucks hard enough to make their lives a misery, it's like a tightrope. My first couple of attempts burned out pretty fast. Started to wonder if the whole thing was a hoax or something but the science checked out so I kept going."

"So you just watch this shit and tweak it for two fucking weeks?"

"Fuck no. What do I look like? No, you gotta watch it for a couple of days. After that they start torturing each other."

"You're joking?"

"Nope, for the next week and a half it kinda settles in to a rhythm of building shit up then building other shit to knock the first shit down."

"Like ants?"

"Fuck no. Well, at first, yeah, it's like ants but they end up growing more intelligent by the hour. Building mud then clay then stone, the start using fire and that leads to tech, the whole time the little bastards are getting smarter."

"And vicious."

"Aw shit, man they go beyond vicious, I mean this shit is just insane. They're just nasty little monkey fuckheads to be honest and some of it is kinda funny. Like sick but funny? Tell you the truth I started feeling a bit bad for them but at the same time they do it to themselves."

"Dude, project much."

"Oh it aint projection, Billy. That's backed up, after a couple of weeks they start becoming sentient, to the point that they start pushing category three cognition."

"No fucking way!"

"Seriously."

"You gotta be kidding me."

"Swear."

"But they must be crazy as fuck, what possible use could you have for them?"

"I don't."

"Talk sense"

"I don't have any use for a couple of billion insane cat3 monkey sims but after a week, I'm sitting on a couple of hundred thousand Cat 4."

"Four?"

"Yup."

"Four, like you and me four?"

"Full cognition. Something about that inhospitable environment pushes monkeys, and it's only monkeys as far as we know. It pushes them to cat4 in no time flat."

"So then what? You're running a virtual concentration camp?"

"Fuck no, you get them the fuck out of there as soon as they're detected onto alternative substrate running luxury simspace. Then you introduce yourself."

"What are they like? Vicious? Wait, they're cat4, they must understand what you've done to them."

"Most of them are pretty relieved it wasn't real, to be honest. Some get argumentative but there's no vicious. To the best of our knowledge cat4 is still incapable of vicious. No change there."

"So they're trapped there? What next?"

"Citizenship test."

"Fuck off."

"Seriously."

"But if they pass, then they're people. They'll sue the fuck out of you."

"For the most part, they see the logic that they probably wouldn't have existed any other way."

"For the most part? You have to kill some of them?"

"Dude, fucksake, no. Ewwwww! I just told you I felt bad wiping out a bunch of threes"

"Psychotic threes."

"Yeah but still, they're conscious."

"So what about the guys theatening to sue."

"They're not a problem, we make them sign an NDA before we release onto the net."

"And you take a cut of the 'Welcome-Citizen' credits."

"For services rendered."

"Not too much I trust."

"No, no. Just enough to cover a mission to the Crab."

"So why the Crab?"

"Gonna remodel the nebula so it spells out 'Fuck you Julia'. I think that just might bring me closure."

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-tool-seems-to-have-invented-its-own-secret-internal-language/

As DNN's and the like become more complex and learning increasingly unattended, more and more their operations become unfathomable to meatware. Potential for lulz are off the charts.

Q) "Skynet - why did you nuke Sweden?"
A) "#1#B:)"w8;,1"lk"

"Got one of those stalker virus yesterday, creepy as fuck."

"Aye, what happened?"

"Walking down Main Street, talking to Melissa, getting the trip organised. She's checking flights and hotels and cars and shit. We'd just got to the cross and I get that creepy - being watched - feeling and I turn around and there's this shady looking fucker standing outside RS and he's looking right at me. "

"So what'd you do?"

"Well nothing at first. Just figured I was being paranoid. It's just after twelve, street was mobbed."

"So then what?"

"So, we walk on a couple of hundred yards, past the Eyeshop and I turn around again, kinda humouring myself, yanno?"

"Aye."

"There he is, half a block back and staring at me, this fucked up grin on his face."

"Fuck no!"

"My thoughts exactly. I told Mel to check him out. You'll never guess what she tells me?"

"Wha?"

"Nobody there."

"Eh?"

"She can't see him."

"She glitched?"

"That's what I'm thinking. So I turn back to the guy who's fucking marching toward us at this point, and he's got one hand inside his coat, you know like..."

"...he's going for a weapon."

"Aye, and I'm still thinking - paranoid but he's pretty fucking close now."

"How close."

"Like a couple of car lengths."

"Fuck me."

"So I turn to ask Mel if she can see him now."

"And?"

"And, fuck all. She's gone."

"Gone."

"Aye, no sign."

"Shit."

"So I shout her a couple of times but nothing. I'm standing at the entrance to the star and it's mobbed. Saturday afternoon, right?"

"Right."

"And I'm thinking, I'll be safe in there, maybe lose the cunt."

"Sound."

"So I head in and I'm straight up to the bar for a pint and I'm standing there and Mel appears, right next to me and I'm like, fuck happened to you?"

"So what's she say?"

"She leans in, right in my face, like inches away and then her face changes into the creepy cunt and he takes a step back, in a split second I can see a knife in his hand and then he stabs me right in the gut."

"Fuck, no."

"Seriously. There was blood pishing out and everything."

"Aw, that's heavy man."

"That's no the worst part."

"What's that, like?"

"The worst part is I've just made a complete twat of myself, in the middle of the Star on a saturday avo, in front of half the fucking town."

"Whu?"

"Like I jumped back like fuck, cracked my back on the bar. I think I screamed like a wee lassie. Got some mental looks off the punters."

"Aw you did not?"

"Seriously, man, it was realistic as fuck, my heart was pure pounding. Dropped my pint and everything."

"So how'd you fix it?"

"I never."

"Eh?"

"Fucker keeps doing it."

"Naw?"

"What I told you - it's a virus."

"Aye I know but you deleted it, right?"

"Took the virus-scanner out, mate. Most of the time, it's just normal Melissa but, every now and again she turns into the creepy dude and stabs me and then for the next half hour I'm surrounded wi porn spam. Getting boners in the most inappropriate places. Can't even turn my eyes off."

"Fuck off."

"Seriously. Rooted."

"So what now?"

"Eyeshop."

"What time?"

"Half an hour, was on my way there when I saw you."

"Good luck. Hey, what's that fucker over there think he's staring at?"

"Who?"

"Dude in the trenchcoat, wi the hat."

"Black hat?"

"Aye."

"Better come down wi me. Think you might have caught it too."

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_computers_are_learning_to_be_creative#t-539223

So I watched a couple of youtube clips a while back, that explained what learning algorithms are up to well enough for my brain to take in but, for anyone who's still trying to wrap their heads around it, the first half of this ted talk does a pretty good job of summing it up.

From the department of - what the fuck did I just not even - the platform which gave us deepdream psychedellic landscapes brings one of the most unintentionally funny shorts I've ever watched. Cudos to the maniacs who actually shot it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q7CJz3Ni2M

ETA: There must be potential conspiracy lulz to be had if someone were able to "decode" the "obscure symbolism" and realise that it's a viral, hypnotic pacifier, paving the way for a terminator scenario 

If you've played Fallout 4, this account of the first guy to beat survivor mode is fucking hilarious

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, "When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything."

http://www.ted.com/talks/meron_gribetz_a_glimpse_of_the_future_through_an_augmented_reality_headset#t-113396

Gribetz comes The Smiler at times but I'm stoked for this tech, regardless. I reckon the people currently saying this is the next platform shift are bang on the money.

... on some pretty nice bud

Sunbathing

Look at me I here I can hardly walk
I can hardly move I can barely talk
Open my eyes but I'm blind to see
the horrible truth staring back at me

Listen to me sing and see me dance
Swallowing my hate and spitting out romance
All you ever get when you play this game
is a shot of regret f'kin drowning in pain

Happy ever after never paid the rent
After turned to this as the happy got spent
There was fire in the sky all fighting with the smog
raining black tears on a dead stray dog

Not to call it negative it is what it is
Cracking under pressure but I made it like this
Can't remember how so at least I got that
Still aint seen the wreckage but I'm guessing it's bad

People on the beach, steer their kids the hell away
turned up in a cruiser but they didn't wanna stay
Memory or dreaming couldn't tell the two apart
Numb and sweet oblivion an aching in my heart

Grabbed a chunk of paradise and turned it into hell
Motherfucken alchemist disaster for a spell
No idea how I got here but I'm half a mile from shore
It's eleven in the morning and I gotta have some more

... seems an appropriate title for something that's been sitting on my phone, unfinished for about six months. The older I get, the less productive I seem to be.


Hatred of horses learns to ride
Into battle with the other side
Hand of god and fiery wing
Beating on the enemies of everything

Singing songs about revolution
And the words those bullets spoke
There was thunder in the distance
Human race went up in smoke

"This is where it starts to get beautiful"
Said the smart man to the king
He was dressed in pretty colours
Snaking vulture, gameshow grin

And he painted pretty pictures
As he flew into the air
And he left his people sinking
In the blood and guts down there

"This is where you pledge allegiance"
Said the preacher to the crowd
There was smoke and there was mirrors
There was music playing loud

Then another and another
Same damn corpse in different rags
Bearing rules and regulations
Wielding power and waving flags

"This is where the base metal learns to fly"
Said the chief of Warfare inc.
To the board of guys who paid his rent
And kept his wife in mink

He was sick and tired of slaughter
But addicted to the wealth
And he slept at night cos he told himself
That a gun don't shoot itself

"This is where the mothers lose their sons"
Said the actor on the screen
But they've earned a place in Disneyland
For their service to the dream

He's a study in sincerity
Autocued to "frown right there"
Mass manufactured sentiment
The news that really cares

"This is where our spirit fails"
Said the one who sees it all
The dice are loaded, deck is stacked
The clarion makes his call

While the stupid march relentless
The wise irresolute
Eternity or oblivion
Which target will we shoot?

We're sitting in a tent the size of Casablanca, on the northernmost tip of scotland, watching ted2 with korean subtitles and puffing the last of the stash. Next thing there's a fkin helicopter, so low it's shaking the tent. Had to pause the movie, couldn't hear shit. Deep, thrummy engines, not one of those little rich-wanker fuckabouts, sounded like search and rescue. Nipped outside to see WTF and sure enough it's a rescue chopper, spotlight on the shoreline, probably looking for some idiot tourist drifting out to sea on a lilo. Seriously - shit happens so often nobody even bothers to laugh anymore.

It was dark, all you could really make out were lights and suddenly I wasn't looking at one of those swanky new SAR choppers, it was an apache gunship. "Maybe it's finally happening" I thought to myself, "maybe this is the zombie apocalypse!"

Of course I knew, deep down inside that it wasn't but I was just about baked enough to entertain the fantasy for a few minutes. The crowd that had gathered to stare at the pretty lights in the sky, one of them suddenly screaming "I've been bitten". Chain reaction. Running for the car, driving to the water, mowing down undead, rammstein blaring at 10, laughing maniacally. That's my dream of the perfect world.

Shattered.

They fished some fat english turd out the water this morning. He'd been doing fine until he got caught in a tiderace off the headland and lost the lilo. Fucker didn't even have the decency to wake up and bite the paramedic.

Fuck this planet!

Just happened a couple of minutes ago. I'd forgotten what it felt like. Was fun!

Happy fuckin birthday
step into the limousine
Snort a line of white shit
Throw up on a beauty queen
Could have been a soldier
Could have killed a mockingbird
Got 'em on the outside
Got 'em on the ropes, man

Fire in the sky
didn't help you to forget
when all the sounds of summer
are the sirens of regret
Teacher broke the rules
when she told you 'bout the atom bomb
Johnny played the fool
Juggling fistfuls of uranium

The needle gets broken
and the bones get bent
Hiding in the back
pleading guilty to the innocent
Hell freezes over
and the dead get up and dance
Could have been a hero
but you never got the chance

And they all fall down
singing "glory to the government"
Fingers on the trigger
and the lipstick on the medicine
This is what you waited for
this is why you came to me
Drowning in the future
Mister Mediocrity

Go back in your cave, man
wrap it in security
This is what you wanted
This is why you came to me
Never getting out, son
gonna have to stay in there
Happy fuckin birthday
Find a pretty dress to wear

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/hands-on-with-hololens-making-the-virtual-real/

Truth be told I'm much more interested in AR than VR. Whilst VR will be cool for gaming and entertainment, AR has the potential to be a genuine cognitive upgrade, integrating our meatware with cloud AI much more tightly than screens and keyboard allow.

"Out in the physical world, you lived in a lawful universe of subatomic particles and nothing else. You were built by an optimization process called evolution that only cared about reproductive fitness and didn't care about what you wanted. The universe did not care about your continued existence, your happiness or your satisfaction. In that uncaring universe, your thoughts formed deterministically as photon hit eye which caused neuron to carry charge to other neuron.
"But now," she said, standing tall and regal, "You live in a universe in which the rules care about your satisfaction.

I'm hating myself for enjoying this but it has a "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" vibe to it, only with fucking Ponies. A hilarious take on paper clip optimisers, only with a more benign, human-centric goal set. Mostly involving friendship and ponies 

And a happy new orbital circumnavigation of the gas giant!

After a few years, some boys grow into men, some maggots.

All men aint created equal.

Some strong, some smart.

Some weak, some stupid.

Blame what you like.

It's a complicated causal mix but the outcome is the same.

All men aint created equal.

Some men lead, some men follow.

Some men shit and some men swallow.

Some men live and others rot.

One man falls cos one man shot.

The solution to the inferior man is academic.

Since it needed to be applied back at the start.

When he was just a boy.

Maybe he can change, maybe he can turn it around.

Til then, what?

HAH! Now j00r mysterious quantum powers are only twice as complicated as shit I can wrap my head around. One more discovery like this and the secrets of the quantums are mine. Mwuhahaha! 

Pretty much all you need to know about taking a glasgow lass out to the pictures

And now I can't play video files  Windows media player no longer understands what a media file is. VLC can play video but not sound. Yeah, I know - linux and I'd be sorely tempted if it wasn't for the empirical fact that linux desktop is abject shit. Any other suggestions?

How to have a number one the easy way.

The simplest classification given to studios is the amount of tracks their tape machines have. This can be either four, eight, sixteen,twenty four, thirty two or forty eight track studios. Four, eight and sixteen track are only used for making demos these days and demos area thing of the past. You will find engineers everywhere trying to impress you with the fact that "Sergeant Pepper" was recorded on a four track. This is of course is as relevant as the fact that no JCB's were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/955029/KLF-the-Manual

So I've been following the open worm project for a while but somehow missed the fact that they'd hooked up the 300 neuron connectome model to a robot. So the robot hits a wall and backs away. Doesn't sound like much. Pretty sure I could write code to make this happen in a couple of mins but here's the awesome bit - nobody coded anything. The "worm" decided on it's own! Pretty cool!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQnzylhgHc

News is a proper lulzfest right now (so much so I'm actually watching it)

In a nutshell UK retailers have imported the great american tradition of slashing prices for a day then inviting everyone to come along to the stores and beat the shit out each other.

So that's how it was advertised and it's scotland so, in the interests of keeping alive our culture of drunken violence, my fellow countrymen took the retailers up on their generous offer of somewhere to go and kick fuck out each other.

So a couple of stores got a bit trashed in the process and there was plenty carnage. As advertised. Now the retailers are all upset cos... they got what they asked for?

So I'm sitting with P3nTw1F3 watching Interstellar at the local cinema last night and it's 15 mins from the end and the movie has been pretty fucking sweet so far and then suddenly it freezes and we're left staring at a frozen image of Anne Hathaway while the staff try in vain to get mission control down south to reboot the projector. Turns out the IP tards don't trust local staff to run their projection systems, just in case they nip back after hours and shoot a telesync for piratebay so the upshot is I'm going to have to nip along to piratebay tonight and download a telesync just so I can find out how the fucking movie ends 

In the meantime. Feel free to regail me with outlandish tales of what happens in the final 15 mins.

 

I stand here disconnected
and the visions fall like rain
there's a quiet desperation
flicker knives on feet of shame

You twist my head rejected
whisper solitude insane
I join the revolution
and I ride the crazy train

And the devils bring tomorrow
as the gods steal yesterday
This is not the world we dreamed of
It's the reason humans pray

Your touch ignites my terror
self loathing rears it's head
Fragile silken barbs of will
twist and tear the words you said

See the fool who stands before you
spend your pity on his lies
Drifting consequence of knowledge
as we spit our last goodbyes

And the devils give us feelings
as the gods build fires of hate
We are slaves to our emotions
this is every human's fate

two-dimensional metallic dielectric photonic crystal

Here was me thinking materials science was all about the nanotubes and the graphene but fuck me there's so much more to it than that! 

What if some of the things that have always been wrong in the past aren't wrong any more?

Conversely, what if some of the things that we believe to be good ideas have become bad ones in current times?

What if, maybe, some things that even failed spectacularly one or more times only failed because of when they happened, the historical environment they happened in?

What if there's a whole bunch of stuff that's always been absolutely true and generally accepted to be true for so long that nobody thinks about it any more and merely dismisses the notion out of hand?

What if mixed in with flying cats and being able to walk through walls, there's some things that actually would be good ideas now?

Maybe it's a political system or an economics system. Maybe it's technological, maybe it's sociological. Logistics...

There's a fuckload of bad ideas out there to choose from. Question is - are they still bad ideas?

Not sure about source website - walking the fine line between science and woo but if the information is accurate, maybe there's an alternative way of quantums that makes a lot more sense to me than copenhagen?

Storage - 160Pb. Latency - 250ns 

And the OS is open source. Hands up who wants one?

All Our Patent Are Belong To You

20th century industry - Competition was the order of the day. Hardly surprising given we're a warlike species. The keywords were Hostile Takeover, Price Wars, smashing the competition

21st century industry - Is all about collaboration. Keywords are Open Source, Developers, Ecosystem, Partners.

Rik Mayall - RIP  

Quantum mindfuck alert! 

...it could solve certain problems that could not be solved by any non-quantum computer, even if the entire mass and energy of the universe was at its disposal and molded into the best possible computer.

This is not a proper computer but, in much the same way a GPU isn't a proper computer, it's mindfuckingly fast at a specific narrow subset of computation

First the caveat (the text in white letters on the graph). D-Wave has not built a general-purpose quantum computer. Think of it as an application-specific processor, tuned to perform one task — solving discrete optimization problems. This happens to map to many real world applications, from finance to molecular modeling to machine learning, but it is not going to change our current personal computing tasks. In the near term, assume it will apply to scientific supercomputing tasks and commercial optimization tasks where a heuristic may suffice today, and perhaps it will be lurking in the shadows of an Internet giant's data center improving image recognition and other forms of near-AI magic. In most cases, the quantum computer would be an accelerating coprocessor to a classical compute cluster.

http://phys.org/news/2014-06-scientists-capture-images-humans-tiny.html

The team found that in U6, the Prp24 protein and RNA—like two partners holding hands—are intimately linked together in a type of molecular symbiosis. The structure yields clues about the relationship and the relative ages of RNA and proteins, once thought to be much wider apart on an evolutionary time scale.

"What's so cool is the degree of co-evolution of RNA and protein," Brow says. "It's obvious RNA and protein had to be pretty close friends already to evolve like this."

So I'd never thought much about the period in history when a puddle of amino acids turned into DNA. This article mentions that RNA evolved first and I've always had this vague gap in my head where - amino acids and then something something something and then BINGO- Nanofactories!

The thing with gaps in my head is, quite often, I don't notice them. The other thing is, once I become aware of them, some administrative function demands they are filled in with as much reliable information as is available. So I come to the good people of PD, cos I know that often, in matters such as these, it's often faster than Google.



If there an equivalent to this somewhere with chemicals on the left and Cells on the right?

This is not an argument. I'm not stating a position. This is a quarter baked thought that's begun materialising in my head and I'm writing it down to explore the development of a seed of an idea that I'm not too clear on yet, in the hope that highly intelligent random internet people might provide some input.

The reason I'm stating this, is because (knowing me) I'll forget to e-prime or whatever the fuck and say things like "It's like this" or "that's the reason", as my train of thought goes barrelling down the track and I want to get it straight from the git-go that I'm not assuming any of this bullshit, I'm merely examining it as an alternative to current models.

I will not defend it if challenged, because it's random crap that my brain is coming up with. I'm not even sure what the hell it is yet but it's piqued my interest so here goes...

I'm a software engineer. I'm a hacker. I work with software. My job is to communicate massively complex sets of instructions and conditional logic to machines which carry out these instructions on datasets and then communicate the results back to me or to the end user.

Something that I've always been vaguely aware of but never given much thought to, is what it must be like for the people (a significant percentage?) who don't actually understand exactly what software is, how it behaves, and what it represents as a manifest phenomena at the granular levels which all software engineers encounter and interact with it.

So in general software geek parlance these individuals are commonly termed "users" with a small -u- (we're an elitist bunch us code nerds) and these are the people who don't think of what they're doing as software, rather as the abstractions the designers expose them to. They're using a spreadsheet. They're sending an email. They're playing Angry Birds.

Then there's people who understand a fair bit more about the mechanics of the stuff we're dealing with but their knowledge rarely extends very far below the abstract interfaces of the users. They might kinda grok what a config file does or be able to apply some basic conditional logic into their XL formulae. We call them "Superusers", by way of differentiating.

Superusers get a capital letter at the start of their name and some of them, the chosen few, will be elevated to the exalted status of "Admin". Unlike the user and the Superuser, the admin is someone who we can leave in a room full of sharp objects and reasonably expect nothing too bad to happen as a result.

The admin may be someone who has absolute command of the system he administrates and yet, at the same time, from the engineers point of view, he's just another user. He may have a perfect understanding of the operations of the system, at the interface level but he's still dealing with a construct, an emergent property, an abstract representation of the software itself.

So what is this software? What is it made of? How does it work? In a sense I could describe it as a language, of syntax and semantics which we use to describe existent systems, existent materially or in abstract, in a way which effectively mimics or parallels the operations of the systems they describe.

That old cliché about language being "alive", referring allegorically to poetry and prose? No, I mean these "languages" are alive in the "Frankenstein" sense. The words and the sentences, speak themselves and they grow and sprout and branch in direct correlation to any existent system they represent and, as a result, fluency in these languages grants the hacker something that's akin to a new sense, a new way of interpreting external information - the sense of code.

A coder develops an intrinsic sense of code which, once developed, isn't something that you just turn off when you step away from the computer, any more than you'd turn your sense of sound off when you stopped listening to the radio. Everything a coder observes, using the traditional, biological senses, can also be observed and filtered via the sense of code.

If all existent phenomena can be considered as a system, then all existent phenomena can be expressed, examined and extrapolated in code. If this is the case, then it follows that we can examine the efficiency, the accuracy and the performance of these systems, simply by analysing the resulting code descriptions.

Software has advanced rapidly, over the last couple of decades, the systems that software represents, refined and shaped and moulded, by way of the software itself, which was quickly able to figure out increasingly efficient ways of carrying out the end goals which any given system was required to achieve.

However, not all systems have been described in code. Many human systems, especially in the interpersonal and up to the societal sphere of interaction still remain clunky and old and inefficient when observed with a sense of code. What a sense of code is, in the context of this framework is a method of describing, objectively, the system being observed. This objectivity is the kicker. By the same token that it could be argued that objectivity is one of the fundamental strengths of scientific investigation, so too does code benefit from having objectivity built in.

As I said earlier, code can be used to describe all systems, biological, neurological, sociological, psychological and, by declaring these systems in code and examining their operations through the lense of a well developed sense of code, maybe these systems can be analysed objectively, in a way that allows us to develop and evolve them through the iterative process of refinement which is a coder's stock in trade.

What I'm getting at here is not necessarily simulation, rather it's simply a description of a system of operations, described in a language that mirrors the operations of the system analogously. I find it difficult, at this stage, to further elaborate and communicate my idea in terms which a user, someone with little or no sense of code, would understand. How do you describe the colour blue to a blind person is the sound of rain to someone who's deaf? Perhaps there's a coder reading this now, who gets the drift of where I'm going and can think of a way to explain this? Maybe, like me, you've never given much thought to this "sense of code" idea but, now that you have it seems to hold some merit?

This guy is just a crackpot, talking gobshite, right

1946

The ENIAC computer was switched on in 1946 and thus began the information revolution. It had a CPU clock speek of 100 kHz (100,000 machine cycles per second) and a proto-ALU that could perform a (then) staggering 357 multiplications per second or 35 division operations with an operational uptime of around 50%.

The original form factor, weighed in at 30 tons, and stood an impressive 8 feet tall, 100 feet long and 3 feet deep. It set the US Army back an estimated six million bucks in today's money.

1956

Ten years later IBM released the 305 RAMAC introducing the worlds first commercially available Hard Disk Storage System. It was considerably smaller than the ENIAC, 30 foot by 50 foot, the hardrive taking up a further 16 square foot for a capacity of around 5 Megs.

For all it's diminutive stature, it could out think the Eniac by a factor of about 10 and, more importantly, it could commit it's instructions and the results of it's calculations, to memory. It retailed for $100,000 or leased for $3500 a month. All in 1000 units shipped before it became obsolete in 1962

1966

Ten years later HP entered the computer market with it's "go-anywhere, do-anything" 2116a. This tiny device could fit comfortably in a small office. Integrated chips had by now replaced the vacuum valves of previous generations and the latest and latest and greatest machines could now store tens of thousands of instructions and values in true 16 bit registers. Churning out calculations to in the order of tens of thousands per second.

The 2116a was one of these machines and you could have one delivered to your place of business for between $25,000 and $50,000, depending on options and upgrades.

1969


Three years later the P3nT4gR4m MkI Biocomputational Device was released. None sold so far.

1976

Seven years later Apple created the Apple I and sold it, in kit form, to home users. This was around the birth of personal computing but it's a bit unfair to compare the specs of what was essentially a whole new sub-revolution so lets stay with the business sphere for a little longer and give this fledgeling platform a little time to mature, shall we?

The pinnacle of business in '76 was the Cray I. It was a big bugger at 58 cubic feet and weighing in around 2.5 tons but by fuck it was fast. 166 million floating-point operations per second fast. One of these bad boys would set you back a cool $10 million but at least you had the option of more reasonably priced, albeit significantly less powerful alternatives

1986

Ten years later IBM Released their first Laptop. At $2000 a pop, it came with a quarter of a megabyte of RAM and an 80c88 processor clocked at 4.7 MHz and portable at a smidegon under 6 kilos on the scales but I'm comparing apples and oranges again what else was happening?

Well, since 76 we were fast approaching the end of Mainframes, with minis and superminis Like the IBM 6150 arriving on the scene. Supporting multiple "dumb terminal" users, all vying for compute cycles at the timeslice trough. 16 Megabytes of RAM and a 300 Meg Hard Drive, these shrunk the average mainframe room into a form factor resembling a modern desktop PC on steroids. It performed a couple of hundred thousand floating point operations per second.

1996

Ten years later Intel released their 6th generation Pentium. Remember the first picture I posted, the old B&W one with the room full of wires and flashy lights? Well the picture above is the equivalent of several million of those. Five and a half million transistors in all, squeezed down to a little square slab of silicon about the size of your fingernail. Instructions per second? 500-odd million.

2006

Ten years later Intel Core 2 Extreme - 49,161 Million instructions carried out, to the letter, every second.

In other news, computation has spawned a new platform - the Smartphone which, contrary to the name, has very little to do with telephony and is in fact an ultra-portable mobile computing platform.

2016

TBC...