Revolutions don’t stop. Once begun, they continue to revolve. There somehow remains, against the will of history, a presumption that they spin around to a state of grace, a better position on the wheel. We fantasise this about politics, and in the digital space, in the creative world and within the engines of commerce. It’s rare that we consider the wild machinery of revolution and understand that disruption is a runaway process, and that eventually even the most powerful disrupters will themselves be disrupted. Only those actors crushed in the cogs of the process are remembered as “revolutionaries”. Those who meet success become the establishment, and are themselves targeted by the operations of the dreamstate of revolution.

The Quora user Kynan Eng (via Comicbook.com) has provided all of us curious cinephiles with a great service – they have worked out how much it would cost to save Matt Damon’s character in various films where the actor has been in fictional danger.

Two things about “artificial intelligence.” It’s not artificial - it’s built on as much human activity as can be shoved into a
database. And it’s not intelligent - it is very fast manipulation of spreadsheets.

Der Besuch von Bildungsminister Polaschek bei Microsoft Österreich diente dazu, den Austausch zwischen dem Bildungsministerium und Microsoft zu fördern und die Weichen für zukünftige Kooperationen und Projekte im Bereich der digital unterstützen Bildung zu stellen.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

Ich so:
Wieso liegen die Mails nur auf den Laptops? Wieso gibt es von diesen Laptops keine Images?
Gibt es in Deutschland wirklich keine digital-ForensikerInnen oder ist das bewusste Inkompetenz?

Stephan so:
das sind Laptops mit Kopien der Mails für den Ausschuss.
Finde die Formulierung auch verwirrend, aber nach Lektüre des Artikels wird klar, dass es sich um Kopien handelt die von den Strafverfolgungsbehörden zur Verfügung gestellt wurden.
Und die sind auch nicht einfach verschwunden, sondern werden vorsätzlich zurückgehalten. Allerdings von einer Person die eigentlich gar keinen Zugriff darauf haben sollte. Sehr verwirrend, aber anders als man denkt.

The Great British Baking Show is the pinnacle of honorable competition; Nailed It is the pinnacle of selling yourself out. This divide lies in the difference between the two cultures that created the cooking shows and the construction of the shows themselves.

All tech news and especially social media posts are about hyperbole. Everything has to be the fastest, biggest, most growing and most disruptive. And when you don’t know about it or are not part of it, you are falling behind. And if that happens you will be irrelevant as a voice or outdated for the market. I’m sick of it and I am done with it.

Size isn’t everything. In fact, fast growth and inflated salaries are both red flags.

Die Stadt Siegen hat zwei Mitarbeiter abgestellt, die vor dem Haupteingang der Verwaltung stehen und die Besucher darauf hinweisen, dass das Rathaus bis auf Weiteres geschlossen ist.

So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.

Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.

Wie teuer ist “ein Admin-Team”? So teuer wie Deine AWS Rechnung hoch wäre, und die ist in den meisten Läden dreimal bis fünfmal höher als ursprünglich gedacht. Das ist das Ausmaß des Understaffing in Operations in den meisten Firmen.

Authorized transcript of Bruce Sterling’s lecture during the TU Eindhoven conference AI for All, From the Dark Side to the Light, November 25, 2022, at Evoluon, Eindhoven, co-organized by Next Nature.

YouTube link of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB461avEKnQ&t=3325s

In Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence, deception is placed at the centre of the test to determine a machine’s capacity to exhibit intelligent behaviour.
...
And even tho deception was never the main objective, creating the illusion of intelligence rather than intelligence itself became the force driving sentient-like technologies like AI.

I've been aware of the Bechdel Test since the late 1990s and actively using it as part of my unconscious checklist for how to write a novel that doesn't suck in some way, but even keeping it in mind, I sometimes fail. And I think it's worth looking at where and why that happens.

So I decided to compile this score card for my books. (SF novels first, then Merchant Princes and Laundry Files.)

The US, China, and the EU are exporting their domestic regulatory models in an effort to expand their respective spheres of influence, pulling other countries into the orbits of the American, Chinese, or European digital empires. The US’ global influence today manifests through the dominance of its tech companies that exercise private power across the global digital sphere. China’s global influence can be traced to its infrastructure power, where Chinese firms—all with close ties to the Chinese state—are building critical digital network infrastructures in countries near and far. The EU exercises global influence primarily through regulatory power that entrenches European digital norms across the global marketplace.

Fringe Science Warning Signs

“Money in the Bank,” a new story by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Researchers at Google say they used existing noise-canceling headphones to get pulse readings by updating their software

Chile was building an analog of our modern internet way back in the 1970s. A massive, national communications network for business and government to coordinate efficiently. The engineer (Stafford Beer) who designed it was from Surrey, in the UK, and worked for the Allende goverment that was building this system.

After the 1973 coup, General Pinochet had the system destroyed.

Had it caught on, we might have had global internet in our homes in the 1970s.