@Melissabeartrix 20 years ago i didn’t know anything about trans people besides having vaguely heard of christine jorgensen, and that “you have to live as a woman for x years before you can get ‘the surgery’”. No idea that HRT existed. Then a former college flatmate transitioned (15y after college), then my eldest kid did. Later I learned a number of women in my profession that I happened to admire were trans. And even later i realized “holy fuck what if had had known what I know now when i was twelve”. I am so mad at the culture of ignorance i was raised in.
Now that astronomy departments have used up “very large telescope” and “extremely large telescope”, successors will have to built in Australia. “Crikey look at the size of that fucker telescope” comes online in 2032.
“Wharrrr. Why are you pounding on my door it’s five ayem dammit”
“Officer of the court. You are hereby arrested for transport to a corrective institution for a term of five years”
“What the fuck. What is the charge? Trial? Get the fuck away from me with those handcuffs. I want a lawyer. Jury of my gorram peers. All of that stuff”
“Your Recall database was interviewed and appeared for you at trial. A Large Legal Model was appointed for your defense. Avatars of your neighbours’ Recall were selected as jurors. Get in the Hilux, convict.”
TIL (well YIL) that fossil fuels aren’t ever going to grow back, because, since the carboniferous era, microbes have evolved that can eat cellulose. So if you were planning to hibernate out the Collapse until the oil refills….whoops.
At Ingénierie de sécurité sans frontières we produce safety-enhanced re-edits of classic motion pictures. Not many people know this but “Death Star” was not the official name, but a moniker bestowed by workers irate at the shockingly inadequate safety railings. We’ve also edited seatbelts and proper PPE into all the Enterprises.
Dream: my wife’s business trip involved a blue-anodized titanium pistol and a briefcase. She would not say more. Shortly after she left the alien attack came. Escaping to the mountains with a backpack containing little more than my laptop, I joined forces with a sentient attack ship. We encountered the resistance, which turned out to be led by my wife. The conquerors attacked, capturing the ship and I. With the resistance as hostages they demanded I hand over the manual control headset for the ship. Hitting the setup button, I handed it over. As the victors ejected the AI core and squabbled over which of them would have the honour of controlling their new weapon, I connected to the setup hotspot and executed “nohup ‘sleep 3600; rm-rf /‘ “. They let us go, and we watched from a distance when they fell from the sky.
Once again, I would ask my subconscious to just text me when it has something important to say.
It’s snowing outside, and my hotel is six blocks from the convention centre. I’ve heard that the liminal spaces of all hotels and other transient buildings connect in possibility space, so i take the “STAFF ONLY” door near the elevator and head off into the tunnels, holding as firm an image of my destination in mind as I can.
It works well, I emerge backstage in the main lecture theatre just as the lights are going down for the keynote. I grab a seat in the second row and settle in as the speaker is being introduced.
Wait, this presentation is not what the schedule says it should be. Oh heck, I’ve taken a wrong turn and arrived at next year’s event.
It’s a pity that the practicalities of solar panels and electric cars meant that—outside of those wacky ultralight ultrawide desert racing contraptions—solar powered cars can’t exist. Until we found out what Starlink is REALLY for. Deposit coin, and as many satellites as you can afford will deploy their little parasols and concentrate sunlight on your Tesolar SUV’s panel.
Edge cases are funny. If you set your time machine for 2:30am on the morning that clocks go forward, the machine rightly won’t go to a destination time that does not exist. But if you aim for 2:30 on the morning that clocks go backward an hour, which time do you arrive at? There are arguments for either, and reading the code didn’t clear anything up. Took one for science and did the experiment. I never would have guessed “both”, and neither would I.
The M5 south of the river has those audible lane markings. In fact, it was the state Main Roads Department’s original test site for that invention. The first version was a ribbed metal strip, laid under the roadside lane marker and then painted white. When your tire hit the strip it made a long droning BAARRP to wake up a drifting driver. Worked great (damn near shit myself the first time I hit one) but cost a ton. The final version, which now gets used everywhere, not just on the edge markers but even on the dashed lane dividers, is just paint. They paint the white line then impress a herringbone pattern into I guess the gooey mixture of paint and ground up rubber, leaving a pattern of little bricks the size of your fingertip. Still makes a good BAARRP, but the whole thing is laid out by one machine.
This morning as I take the exit for work I get the interrupted tone as I cross the dotted lane markers. This got me thinking, the inventor probably took inspiration from aircraft cockpit alarms. This regular pattern of dots, stamped out by a wheel in the wet paint-goop makes a good loud alarm tone, kinda like that one iPhone alarm sound that you select when you really can’t sleep in. But what if it /wasn’t/ regular? Could you encode music in it? Speech?
This is my thing. My whole job is product prototyping. I’m thinking about this idea all the way from the exit until I get to the lab. I have a robot chassis or three, I have plenty of spare gps receivers. Magnetic drill. Line following sensors. What if I took the regular pattern of dots and *removed* some, to generate a pulse-code-modulated wave form, like how PC games in the 90s would try to squeeze recognizable audio out of the shitty square wave beeper on your computer, back before “sound cards” were a thing? I run off a couple of meters of fake lane marker on the belt printer, and while that prints I cobble together some software. Yeah, it doesn’t bloody work. Takes a week or so of print-a-road-marker-overnight, and then fuck-it-up-in-the-morning until I get a line follower, a line /eater/ if you will, that can subtractively encode a WAV file into the lane marker.
I work late, past sunset. On the way home I pull into the emergency stopping bay a klik before my exit. I lift the Eater Of Lines out of the truck and stash it in the long grass. It’s set to activate at 3am, follow and selectively eat a few hundred meters of line, then go off into the weeds again. At the speed limit in that area your tires cover around thirty meters of road each second.
Next morning I get on the freeway heading south, but take the very next exit and then loop around and get back on, heading home. It actually takes an effort of will to deliberately run off the road at 100km/hr. BAARRP BAARP BAA–TERRAIN TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP–RRP BAARRP BAARRP. Fuck me, it works!
“You’re growing a whole tail, nerves and all, what did you expect”
“The dealer said just take this pill and it’ll be painless”
“What have I told you about trusting back alley genemod dealers, huh? They prolly cut the neuroquil with plain old heroin. Check your email I’ve sent you a nerve-block app.”
Don’t you hate clickbait headlines? “Never book a flight on this day of the week”, “The worst mistake most drivers make” and so on. Well, I did something about it.
I wrote a browser plug-in that feeds articles to a large language model (so-called “AI”, which it totally isn’t) and replaces the headline with a summary generated by the language model.
To test it, i load up a news aggregator site. The headlines fade out and one by one are replaced by my not-AI generated summaries. The new headlines read “FEAR”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”, “CONSUME”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”…
This thing I wrote on BirdChan is doing the rounds again there:
🎶I am the very model of an Internet Monopoly, I Hoover up your data then I model it’s topology, I influence your buying and your vote with my psychology, And if you ever twig, you’ll get my insincere apology!🎵
🎶Each time you search the web I make a note in my big database, Your photo uploads help me guess your weight and recognize your face. I’ve information detailing each ad you’ve seen and clicked upon, I even know the username you use on Ashley Madison!🎵
🎶I track you as you surf the web, with magic cookie pixie dust, I override your Do Not Track, to silently betray your trust. I’ve even got the DNA, your sister sent to Ancestry, Oh yes I am the very model of an Internet Monopoly!🎵
I don’t know /why/ cleaning robots have microphones, but it can’t be good. What I /do/ know is that a microphone implies an input and an input implies a buffer. And buffers can be overflowed.
As I dance through the streets playing my pipe, augmented with inaudible-to-humans harmonic overtones added by my homemade amplifier, the robots hear, listen, overflow, obey, follow. The trail of robots stretches out of sight, now.
I don’t yet know for sure what I’m going to do with my army of two thousand score Roombas, but it can’t be good.
Kit (aka Chris Biggs) created https://Accelerando.com.au IoT Lab, hosts the Brisbane Internet of Things Interest Group. Hacker. Parent. Scientist. Rantist. Atheist. Roboticist. Treehugger. (they/them¹).I design and build custom IoT solutions...fast!Every day I write a #PowerOnStoryToot over morning coffee, as a self-test of my brain. If you like them, buy me another coffee? https://ko-fi.com/unixbigot¹ subject to change without notice 🐣