@robpike.io

@mattblaze Thanks, I didn't know.

Please stop anthropomorphizing AI company executives.

They're not sentient and they can't actually think. They just predict token sequences using statistical patterns scraped from LinkedIn, X and the Financial Times. The apparent "understanding" is simply a parlor trick: They produce text strings that *sound* plausible, but they don't actually have any understanding of the world.

I'll grant that they became a lot more technically impressive when Reinforcement Learning from Investor Sentiment pipelines were introduced, but fundamentally they're still just stochastic bullshit generators. Giving them access to the internet will end up being the most expensive mistake in the history of technology.

In 1979, IBM stated that since a computer can never be held accountable, a computer must never make a management decision.

Our society now operates on the exact opposite principle, that computers (AI) should make managment decisions precisely because they can never be held accountable, thus shielding the people behind the decisions from accountability and consequence.

dog no. 9 watercolor on paper

Okay, so to try and throw a little light into the darkness, here’s my favourite Pat Stewart fact:

He had the largest collection of Star Trek memorabilia in the world. Most of it in a warehouse that he’d never seen. Part of his contract when signing on to play Picard was to receive one of every officially licensed Star Trek item that bore his likeness. Plates, posters, action figures, t-shirts, video games. Everything!

Bought a colored vinyl record today. Takes me back.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/117515229068094233

New dwarf planet!

@timbray Heard it a couple of days ago (thanks, qobuz) and ordered the CD.

Can you see what I mean here? Look closely.

@oneiros @fluepke Also, it's worth pointing that the way human language is handled with computers today is staggeringly better than it was back in the 1960s when I started playing with them. It's far from perfect but it used to be very close to totally batshit pointlessly lazily bad, inconsistent, and nationalistic to boot. Even if we just talk about EBCDIC and ASCII and exclude the dozens of other unrelated distinct coding systems, it was appallingly bad.

@oneiros @fluepke So sure, complain about how bad it is, but be thankful for how far it's come.

@oneiros @fluepke Also, it's worth pointing that the way human language is handled with computers today is staggeringly better than it was back in the 1960s when I started playing with them. It's far from perfect but it used to be very close to totally batshit pointlessly lazily bad, inconsistent, and nationalistic to boot. Even if we just talk about EBCDIC and ASCII and exclude the dozens of other unrelated distinct coding systems, it was appallingly bad.

Why? Why? Why would you do this? Why would you ever think this was a good idea? Why?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/26/california-sunlight-space-mirrors-satellites

@sundogplanets And it's the only one we have.

@oneiros @fluepke I would counter that human language is too intricate, variable, and nuanced to be captured in simple nerd-originating rules, and I'm fine with that. UTF-8 codified a tiny subset of that space.

@timbray When we at the Labs were putting together what should have happened instead of MP3 (long sad story), I used Patsy's Crazy as my test song because I knew I could hear it forever and not mind.

@timbray Needs some Dinah Washington. Good list though.

@adrianco @phredmoyer I hope I'm wrong and that it's not the Ellison bauble I used to see in parking lots around the Valley. The stripes do appear different.

@adrianco @phredmoyer You can decide for yourself what you think about it, but it offends me for a number of reasons.

https://horsepowersports.com/the-art-of-engineering-kirkham-motorsports-builds-the-ultimate-cobra-roadster/

@adrianco @phredmoyer Looks like a Cobra, but it's just a copy.