Dave5

About

Tag: culture

  • Will Climate Engineering Really Save Us? Do Me a Favour

    Infrastructure improvements may seem unsexy and unheroic, but to my mind, tech-utopian hero worship is one of the social scourges of our time. A reinvigoration of collective solidarity and a commitment to making major infrastructural improvements seems much more likely to lead us to a better future.

  • You Could Have a Wealth Tax Raising a Few Billion or Major Reforms to Existing Taxes That Could Raise £100 Billion or More? Which Would You Prefer if You Wanted To Tackle Inequality?

    I like this reframing…I’ve never cared about people being wealthy. I’ve care about: But if you want to tax wealth, what is better, a few billion in many years’ time after a watered-down wealth tax is introduced, or reforms that could be done almost overnight now to existing laws that would undoubtedly raise more money?

  • The IDEs we had 30 years ago… and we lost

    Our current computing eco-system is, essentially, a speed-run down *one* branch of the possibility tree. When you grok that, you then ask the what-if question. When you unhook yourself from the profit motive as a culling mechanism… shit gets really interesting. If I die an old man exploring those other branches… I’ll die a happy…

  • RISC-V In An FPGA or Compute a Mandelbrot with a custom instruction

    This makes me borderline giddy… I fucking love it! Here’s a project that demonstrates the advantage of having an opensource instruction set (RISC-V) along with the power of being able to wire an FPGA into one. This project implements a minimal RISC-V core in an iceFUN FPGA board. While having a license-free instruction set is nice,…

  • Pluralistic: The super-rich got that way through monopolies (17 Jan 2024)

    We are living in the age of the monopoly. In the 1930s, the top 0.1% of US companies accounted for less than half of America’s GDP. Today, it’s 90%. And it’s accelerating, with global mergers climbing from 2,676 in 1985 to 62,000 in 2021. Monopoly’s cheerleaders claim that these numbers vindicate them. Monopolies are so efficient that everyone…

  • Who pays?

    Building a bridge between now and later is often a challenge when we seek to rewire our tech. The internet only arrived because DARPA and others kept it going for more than twenty years before it clicked. Refocusing on the ‘we’ is a powerful way for us to get from here to there.

  • ‘It hasn’t delivered’: The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology

    Self-checkout is one of those consensual hallucinations that you see in tech a lot. People see a leader implement it and then follow like sheep… “no one gets fired for buying IBM”. In the US these machines can lead to really dire legal trouble if you get pinged for theft. “It hasn’t delivered anything that…

  • PSA: Wear fake fingers to make real photos look AI generated.

    I LOOOOOOVE the cultural weirdness of this. It’s an unintended consequence of GenAI systems when they bump into legal systems. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/15/24038880/psa-wear-fake-fingers-to-make-real-photos-look-ai-generated

  • How Changing Military Technology Has Contributed To End of Empire

    It was always clear that drones were not going to be weapons of the powerful. What matters for weapons systems is who can afford them. If you need aircraft carriers and you’re not a major country, you’re shit outta luck. The end of medieval nobility arrived with gunpowder weapons, specifically cannons. King could afford them,…

  • Dame Anne Salmond: How to split a society

    In forming the new Government, the National Party forged alliances with smaller, more extreme parties intent on amplifying their power, entering dangerous territory.  With its immoderate attacks on the media, te reo, women and the environment, New Zealand First plays upon ethnic, gender and rural-urban polarities to increase its influence far beyond its 6 percent…