kyb

Recent Actions
Comment Threads

Recent Actions

Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
There's some hilarious-if-it-wasnt-exactly-what-this-article-is-warning-against discussion on hubris relating to this article over on hackernews. I particularly enjoyed this quote "The story of Icarus is the story of inadequacies of wax as an adhesive." Don't worry sci-fi authors! We'll get the torment...
Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
Some really great ideas in the comments here. My concern is that most versions of this make it way too easy to destroy the universe. In fact, so easy that it would certainly have happened before most of the interesting...
Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
The other big one will be rules relating to mortmain. If I can have an immortal AI that is an extension of my will beyond my death, we could end up with the kind of situation C S Lewis describes...
Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
My Core-I7 desktop with 16G RAm and terabytes of storage And if you do much more with all that power than access services run on cloud compute then you're not the normal person. I'm finding that even dumb simple...
Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
The horrors that will be available to those controlling the compute resource will be appalling, however it is likely to be something that gets sorted out within a generation or so - most probably, it'll be the elite that get...
Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
I'm not sure of the calculations here, does beaming with all the losses definitely outweigh space trucking batteries? How about if we assume an order of magnitude improvement in battery technology and extremely cheap space trucking, with rockets shuttling up...
Commented on Because I am bored ...
If the probe only signs things it's told to sign by the 'owner', then I don't think this is very different from just trusting certain people/organisations to sign blocks of transactions for you (proof of authority - enterprise ethereum, and...
Commented on Burn The Programmer!
It sounds especially mysterious if you mention that many of the sigils in your regex are in fact ancient ways of describing different characters that are entirely invisible....

Recent Actions from kyb

Comment Threads

ilya187 commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
"self-checkout" is so obviously a flawed concept executives at retail chains are slowly retreating from it Unfortunate. I really like self-checkout....
Howard NYC commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
I'm 6'0" (182.88) and near-sighted... every self-check is positioned to be just a bit too far down for ease of use as well utilizing too small text on a grimy screen... annoying that... but the aggravating thing is veggies each of which as a distinct four digit code... plus it is really annoying hearing my purchases announced one by one... the noise is made worse by all the other kiosks doing it also... just really stupid feature, that...
Moz commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
When it works well it's great, but the failure modes are truly awful. Sadly it seems that given the choice between easy to use or annoying to steal from, most places are going for the annoying version. Amusingly the local supermarket staff seem to have decided that theft is not their problem so will happily scan their magic card and validate whatever the customer has done regardless of how egregious. Kind of necessary when half the time re-usable shopping bags trigger a machine melt-down "unexpected itme in bagging area"... "I pushed the fucking 'have own bags' button, bags there are...
JHomes commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
" but the aggravating thing is veggies each of which as a distinct four digit code" They make you do that? In these here parts, they just have a set of screens, you tap to get to the right screen, then tap on the item. I think you can key in a code instead, but I've never had to. "... plus it is really annoying hearing my purchases announced one by one" Are you telling me me they are batshit enough to do that? Yes, you are telling me that they are that batshit. If they did that around here,...
David L commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
Self checkout at groceries and such. Isn't it great that we are all mental clones of each other with identical preferences? In the US all (or nearly all) groceries use the same 4 digit codes for produce. (Bananas are 4011 everywhere.) So it's not all that hard. Plus all of the various stores we shop at (6 major brands at least) put a tag on each item, clump, or bag of things. So it's easy to enter. And if you want you can look it up by picture and description. And the cashiers, if you use one, use the exact...

Responses to Comments from kyb

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

kyb

Recent Actions

Comment Threads

Following

Buy my Books

Quick Stuff

Specials

Merchandise

About This Page

Propaganda

Categories

Monthly Archives