self

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

• if you’re new to playing interactive fiction (essentially the modernized form of the old Infocom text adventures), check out his tutorial game and guide to IF parser commands
• Spider and Web is an old favorite; it uses the nature of the interactive fiction medium to involve the player in a game of deception
• Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home is a good interactive sci-fi short story
• Shade is an exploration into dreamlike writing and horror
• Lists and Lists is a gamified Lisp tutorial — it’s where I learned the language!

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:

• its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077
• the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner
• the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it
• the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner.

because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap:

• any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing
• you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards
• or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on jinteki.net, a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet

the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics.

Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.

Hypnospace Outlaw is that funny meme game with the pizza dance. it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic.

above all, it’s one of the better cyberpunk games I’ve played, though I can’t really explain why without spoiling the ending. Hypnospace Outlaw can be finished fairly quickly, so I encourage anyone who hasn’t to give it a play or at least watch a playthrough from a non-annoying YouTuber. ending spoilers follow:

the game’s author, Jay Tholen, is currently in progress on its sequel, Dreamsettler. I can’t wait for more good cyberpunk.

this is a computer that’s almost entirely without graphical capabilities, so here’s a demo featuring animations and sound someone did last year