Happy holidays for you 5-6 people that read this series of delusional thoughts from this insane, but good-natured, product of your delusional mind/person.
I finished reading some days ago this book:
As my friend Juan puts it, this is 'hardcore SciFi'. I won't go into details on the plot (else my little Green friend will kill me, seriously), but I really recommend this book to anyone who wishes to be amazed by the simple grace and style in which Peter Watts speaks not only of a 'First-Encounter' event with real aliens, but his comments about the nature of us carbon-based lifeforms humans.
Also, he includes a vampire in the crew. Most people seem to find Sarasti scary, but I didn't (and I read this book at night with all lights off while everyone at home was sleeping). Don't know why, but my first bet is my tv-damaged-brain that maybe has made me more insensitive to such things along the years. Need to admit, cool vampire.
One of the comments that brought most of my attention is the one that talks about the difference of technology level in alien encounter situations (read the book if you want the exact exciting speech), also --SPOILER ALERT-- doesn't apply to the aliens in the book --SPOILER ALERT--:
- Technologically advanced civilizations will not be hostile
- Technologically advanced civilizations will be hostile
- I don't care
Point #1, when you reach certain level of knowledge your civilization will need not to resort to violence as a way to solve problems, since you will be enlightened, or something like that. I don't really identify with this point, so I don't know many arguments on this. Maybe possible, but what level is that? how far are we from that? is it possible that we already passed it?
Point #2, technology is used to dominate less advanced groups. The most compelling reason to create new technology is to gain an edge against other factions which we don't really like we <<insert uber-important philosofical reason here>>, so we need to vanquish them. This is the point I tend to agree the most...
Imagine you are a carbon-based monkey-descended lifeform whose ancestors from only a few hundred years ago were clubbing another carbon-based monkey-descended lifeform battling for the survival of your kind in some prehistoric marsh. Your most important technological achievements come from research for new-and-improved ways to club another carbon-based monkey-descended lifeforms defend yourself in the name of freedom, your religion, money (also a religion), etc. You live in what is defined as Society, defined as: something that forces you not to harm co-exist with other lifeforms you really can't stand living with for the sake of ... not being alone? getting some basic services and living longer?. But you don't live in The Society, you live in A Society, which implies that there are many more. You can't stand the people in your society, but somehow you manage to do it in a day-by-day basis. What you are sure about is that the thing you can't really stand are the other societies. Somehow you have technology.
Now comes the question: If you were to get some great technology breakthrough that allowed you to get the people in your society, the other societies, your entire planet, other races too under your cold steel hand, would you do it? even if it may be possible to destroy all the cited groups? including yourself?
Thought so.
If you came with a warning label, what would it say?
Submitted by chris.
Warning: Hammer-Wielding Wacko, may solve your code's problem if provoked. Keep away from non-technical persons unless you are ready for technical jokes and wordplay. Do not expose to fire and keep refrigerated at all costs. Is a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan.
Today I had a Dream (not that kind of dream, mind you). I somehow modified my car (A.K.A. "The Panzer", see this) that allowed it to drive me to work and/or hell college while I was comfortably sitting in the front passenger's seat. The implementation of such a system is left as an exercise to the reader. It involved a radar, some pretty sadomasochist programming and a whole lot of heavy wizardry. The system worked mostly flawlessly, except in locating the semaphores (like many humans do) but it was solved with some witty hack involving the radar and some sick calculations with the flow of the other cars (with the obvious shortcomings when there are no cars). The point is, I got stopped by a transit officer due to the fact that no one was driving my car at the moment, even if my car was handling the transit better than all the motorized monkeys the other human beigns in the beginning.
So, this brings 2 things to my mind:
- What the hell did I eat in yesterday's dinner?
- How would humanity take it if we suddenly created machines that could really do something useful like waking me up and taking me to work everyday (harder than you may think) and giving me some real support on any kind of mad crusade I may get into.
My personal bet is in the range of [Hell Yeah!] and [Duh], and would be happy to get one. But I'm not sure about the rest of humanity. See, as the monkey-descended apes we are, we like gadgets, flashy stuff and women in their 20s with big boobs. But nothing more that that, people would start complaining that their devices stop them from being creative, that somehow these devices are trying to control their life. [Insert some crazy conspiracy theory here]
The problem here is that these devices are stupid, they just have a magical way of finding out what you are doing and offer you some help (you just programmed it way back with the necessary tools, nothing more). There is no real reasoning or self-awareness going on here, there is no Judgement-Day coming, just PDA v. 2.0. Wouldn't that fear be better directed at the fact that the future of this world is in the hands of a group of monkeys that just need to press a Big Red Button for it to be over with?
This would last for about 1 generation, then the next generation would embrace it and really kick off the technology. But the current generation would still see them as evil things, because we are afraid of change.
Why are we afraid of change? because change is uncomfortable, change brings risks, change brings change. (note the recursion)
We tend to accomodate ourselves to our boring everyday lives, we say that we are tired of doing the same thing every day, but if something comes and tries to change it we stand out and defend that same boredom. It's just like bad laziness (see my previous post).
Wouldn't it be nice if we could stop being lazy and embrace change?
What's your favorite heartbreak song?
Submitted by esta86.
"Bullet Proof Skin" by Institute
This song has almost all the phases I think there are for being heartbroken, specially the love you/hate you part.
What's on your Top 5 video games list?
Submitted by mileena.So far, these are the top 5 games on my 'Wish I had more time to play games' list:
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Battlefield 2
- Starcraft
- Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors
- Call of Duty
UT2k4, how else would I release all the daily stress I get from dealing with people that deal with computers?
Battlefield 2, how can you not love blowing the hell out of your enemies while driving classics like a M1A2 tank?
Starcraft. So far, the best RTS I have ever seen. Too bad Blizzard has not developed a second version of this masterpiece.
Yesterday, while finding a way to lose my time early in the morning checking my Google Reader account, one of my coworkers (Juan) showed me one of the books he is reading, "Accelerando" by Charles Stross. What started as a 'Hey, look at this funny part' ended in Juan giving me pointers to some great books that I shall read, including an essay written by Neal Stephenson titled like this post. You can get it here.
Now, that is what I call an interesting read. The essay goes with a bit of background on history, like Billy's great idea of tricking people into buying an intangible type of products called Software. Then it goes about the Windows vs Mac wars, the idea of GUIs and the metaphors used on them, why it is not so hip being a hardware company these days, his experience when he was Enlightened with Linux and finishes with some weird analogies about computers creating instances of universes, life, and stuff and how it would get to people wanting a GUI for a Life Generator software for such computer (this I really liked).
What we see here is one of the most important aspects of the human nature:
There are 2 kinds of laziness, or as my friend Mae puts it:
- Good Laziness
- Bad Laziness
Good Laziness is... well... good. This is the kind of laziness that
makes you find better ways NOT to do boring/repetitive things. This is what gets into you those saturday mornings when the world seems a very dull place. This is what makes you do invent weird interesting things that you would otherwise never have done in the first place. The problem with Good Laziness to most people is that it normally requires you to know/want to learn things, and this is where the problem lies.
People don't want to learn. People want to watch porn use computers, but people don't want to know what a computer is. People want water, but they are not thirsty. People want to speak their minds, but they don't think.
This is also the reason GUIs where invented. GUIs provide a comfortable abstraction of the inner workings of the black box that is your computer, which is good, but most of the time, they just get in the way. GUIs limit what you can do with your computer. Remember this the next time you want to do something with your computer that no GUI designer
ever thought you would want to do.
Why people don't want to learn? Bad Laziness.
Bad Laziness is the kind of recursive force with inertia that stops you from doing things. Yes, Laziness has inertia, people tend to preserve their state of laziness or boredom. Recursive? Hell Yes, you feel so lazy that you don't get to do anything because you are too lazy to do something about your current laziness level.
In the other side of the fight with the GUI we have the Command Line. The Command Line is like a big, nuclear powered, automatic hammer with little gold decorations on the side. You can do whatever you want to do with the command line, unless you are stuck with MS-DOS (in which case, your life probably sucks), but it requires you to know certain rules and what you want to do. It's like having a conversation with your computer: you say 'i want this', the computer says 'yes, master... here is your result'. Easy!, you don't have to lose time clicking, dragging or explaining what clicking and dragging is to another human. You just type what you want, and you get it, but you have to be careful because you will get what you want.
Why is this so? Because every human being in this unregarded little green-blue planet knows the answer to what they want (the results), but that same human being may not know how to ask the question to the machine, or what the hell the question is. That human being is also suffering from severe terror of asking what the question is.
The Point? The command line is your friend, learn how to use it, and use it well. If you don't know, ask people around. You won't regret it.
This is my first real post here, so this is probably buggy/inconsistent/pure nonsense so please submit your bug reports and I promise to fix them in the next release.
This is the first post of (hopefully) a series of nonsense-emiting strings of 0s and 1s that may or may not reflect my views on some particular topic that my delusional mind may find interesting to talk about.
