#Python gets frozendict at last
discussion of #Trump #politics switching the #USA State Department back from Calibri to Times New Roman, with an amused comment by Lucas de Groot, whose studio designed Calibri #fonts
sans-serif #fonts by the #USA government licensed under the SIL Open Font License: “A strong, neutral, principles-driven, open source typeface for text or display”
The Bormann brief ordering the use of Antiqua rather than Schwabacher “Jewish letters” or Fraktur. #history #fonts #Germany #politics
#fonts #history including a lovely (facsimile) specimen of Jenson’s roman
early version of the LibreSSL website used Comic Sans #fonts
hilarious can’t-believe-it’s-not-satire article on #Trump #politics switching the #USA State Department back from Calibri to Times New Roman
Microsoft Windows can’t do post-hoc I/O redirection
apparently it’s hard to get a #Google Gemini #AI API key if you’re not a big company and especially if you’re using an Indian credit card to pay
January #news about #Facebook employees getting mad because people will be allowed to use Facebook to say LGBTQA+ people are “mentally ill” #censorship #human-rights #LGBT
#News that #Facebook is shutting down #LGBT and #abortion information accounts, including in countries where they’re legal. #censorship #human-rights
#PDF of a #flexure pivot #precision #mechanism #patent from 01996 for detecting gravity gradients to parts-per-trillion precision for Earth surveying. #toread
#PDF #paper from 01969 about “COM”, #computer-output-microfilm, as was used in the development of #Hershey-fonts, including #Charactron use. #history
#PDF of IBM #SAGE CRT #displays manual explaining how they cloned the #Charactron #hardware wih a 63-character stencil disk
#paper on the “tropical approach” in #math, starting with the #tropical semiring, then presenting phylogenetic tree derivation. #toread
#Tropical String Mathematics, using lexicographical minimum as ⊕ and concatenation as ⊙. Very, very pretty web #typography. #toread
“Word Processing in Groups is a monograph in mathematics on the theory of automatic groups, a type of abstract algebra whose operations are defined by the behavior of finite automata.” #math #toread
#AI bubble enthusiasts following Ed Zitron awaiting the Bubble Popping like acting like Evangelicals awaiting the Rapture
James Proud of #Substrate supposedly has a history of #fraud and, at Folsom Street Labs, overambitious research claims
Lee Jacobs explains why he invested in James Proud of #Substrate. Looks like AI slop
Article from 8 years ago about Hello, the previous venture by James Proud of #Substrate, which sold “an orb the size of a tennis ball that sits on your bedside table and uses a variety of hidden sensors to track your movements and the surrounding nighttime atmosphere. The $149 gadget, called Sense, grades your sleep on a scale from 0 to 100--and tries to help you improve that score over time. Proud claims that the Sense holiday rollout at Target is the biggest the retailer has ever done for a startup's new electronics product (Target says that's incorrect). (...) He fed himself by faking hole punches on loyalty cards from a British chicken chain, Nando’s, or else schmoozing venture capitalists and other European techies over lunch, quietly praying that they would pick up the check.” Part of Forbes’s “30 under 30”.
Cyan Banister explains why she invested in James Proud of #Substrate on April Fool’s Day in 02022, and got their logo tattooed on her spine (in addition to the #Anduril logo on her left shoulder). This article also looks like AI slop: “This isn’t Chick-fil-A. This isn’t Hobby Lobby. This is the company that holds Western civilization together through its semiconductor monopoly, saying atheists need not apply to their scientific positions.” Also talks a little bit about the failure of Proud’s previous startup, Hello, the one that was going to revolutionize sleeping by gamifying it.
Virginia Hefferman’s Wired article about #TSMC (archive of https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/)
why Fox Chapel Research thinks #Substrate’s claims of cheap #lithography are #fraud because it’s probably direct-write e-beam lithography (rather than anything with X-rays), describing James Proud’s previous company Sense as a “Kickstarter scam”: “It raised $2.5 million dollars for an alarm clock that did not function as advertised, and that—despite a flashy marketing effort—did not actually do anything it was marketed as doing when the Kickstarter launched; rather, it was a con.” Quoting The Verge: “More than 19,000 backers bought into the Sense idea, so it was clearly hitting on a hot area of consumer interest and demand, however the one thing the company forgot to do was develop a robust device that actually did what it promised.” More damningly: “Buyers were also told they could use their own API for the tracker so that the device could still be useful if servers were ever shut down. This was also untrue.” Fox Chapel Research makes some boner mistakes about electrostatic chucks, but I do believe their claim that patents wouldn’t be able to stop TSMC or “China” (SMIC) from duplicating Substrate’s performance if real.
Vlad Savov’s 02017 article about the closing of Sense, James Proud’s borderline-fraudulent company preceding #Substrate.
How magpies and jackdaws developed from pies and daws. “And methinks that the Prayer of the Popish Priest is very large, in that he desireth of God, that as many as taste of that conjured Bread may receive health both of Body and Soul. What if Mag Pie,or Jack Daw,or Philip Sparrow, should chance to eat of it, as it may happen (hath it not been known that the little god of the Altar hath been eaten and devoured of Mother Mouse and Will. Worm) should they also, through the tasting and eating thereof, receive health and salvation both of body and soul? A foul and a great oversight.” #history
Donors to #Trump’s White House Ballroom include “Ripple and Coinbase. (...) Nvidia, [the trading firm] Susquehanna International Group and ExtremityCare [which makes costly human cell and tissue medical products] (...) Google, Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as cell phone carrier T-Mobile (...) Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin brothers who own crypto exchange Gemini (...) Lockheed Martin (...) Booz Allen Hamilton”. #USA #politics #corruption
#Trump lifts most #export-controls on #NVIDIA to #China for #AI, permitting sales of up to H200, and promising the same to Intel and AMD. #politics
“The testing of Hitler’s DNA showed “very high” scores — in the top one percent — for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and [bipolar] disorder,” but rule out Jewish ancestry: “the Y chromosome data matches the DNA of Hitler’s male line relative. If he had Jewish ancestry (through an outside relationship), that match wouldn’t be there.” Also he probably had Kallmann Syndrome, which can cause micropenis and undescended testicles. #history #Germany
#Adversarial-collaboration between #AI doomers and AI-as-normal-technology advocates. #futurism
#News from October: “Without question, #Trump can claim credit for the ceasefire and hostage exchange deal. #Qatar, #Turkey and #Egypt used their leverage with Hamas to force it to accept.
That made it a joint effort, but Trump’s role was decisive.
Without his push to demand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agreement to terms that he had previously rejected, the deal would not have been signed.” #politics #Israel #Gaza #USA
“The tanker, which transported oil from #Venezuela and Iran, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for years “due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” Bondi wrote on X.” #USA #politics
“Australians are among some visitors to the US who may soon have to provide their social media history from the prior five years to enter the country, according to a new #Trump administration proposal.
The proposal, posted on the Federal Register by US Customs and Border Protection, suggests travellers coming from countries that are part of a visa waiver program would need to give additional personal information as part of an electronic application.
The requirement would be for travellers using the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or #ESTA, as part of a visa waiver program for citizens from 42 countries, including Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and Qatar, as well as many other European countries. (...) The new proposal – open for public comment until February 9 – would make that information [social media history mandatory and (...) “high value data elements,” including the person’s phone numbers and email addresses over the prior five years, plus close family members’ names and birth dates, along with their birthplaces, residences and phone numbers over the prior five years] mandatory, though it’s unclear how it would impact those wishing to come to the US.” #USA #immigration #politics
They literally called it the “maniac murder cult”, or maybe “Maniac: cult of murder”: “Маньяки: культ убийства”. #humor #Russia #politics #order-of-nine-angles
Modulok was a fictional supervillain from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe who could disassemble and reassemble himself in different forms
#video on #SAGE, the Semi-Automated Ground Environment, showing the #displays, which it looks like were circular, about 60 characters tall and 60 characters wide, typically displaying about 100 characters or vectors. #history
100-minute #video on #SAGE #history from a Sun-sponsored #lecture at the #CHM in 01998. Relevant context is the USSR’s first atomic bomb test in 01949. Aircraft kill ratios in the Battle of Britain were 10%, so an effective air defense was unthinkable. At 30'00” Paul Edwards gives the cost as US$4–12B in 01960 dollars. At 30'40” Paul Edwards explains that IBM got paid US$500 million to build the planned 56 computers (28 duplexes). Western Electric film on it starts at 5'11”. 800 programmers (34'00”) which was 20% of the world’s programmers, all working at SDC, which spun off from RAND toward the end of 57, as James Wong explains (55'20”). Maguire went online in June of 01958. Stuart Air Force Base in September. Apparently MIT’s original proposal was to put the whole system underground, but the Pentagon decided that was too expensive. Invited speaker #Les-Earnest (?) says, “This gave rise to this whole industry of ‘L-systems’, so-called: 438L, 465L, all this stuff, that were competing for funds with other things. And for the most part, none of them worked worth a damn. Uh, there were a few exceptions. The satellite control system, I would say, and provided good intelligence, but most of these others, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, were basically boondoggles, and we ain’t through it yet. This stuff is still going on. It gave rise to a multi-billion-dollar industry that basically produces useless junk. And here we are 40 years later.” They tried doing SAGE in JOVIAL, but ended up doing it all in assembly. Mean time between failures of each half of the duplex was maybe days.
Transcript of the #SAGE #history #lecture at the #CHM in 01998.
TheDrummer’s Q4_K_M quantization of Tiger-Gemma-12B-v3. #neural-networks #AI
VICE #news about #SAGE #history from 02011. It’s missing the images.
Announcement of the 01998 #SAGE #history #lecture at the #CHM.
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine was #fiction in 01958 about “MINIAC”, a home computer invented by the professor he lived with
#Argentina in 01951 #history #video
#video on the #history of computing in the #USSR, with the MESM, the BESM, and the ES, but mostly stock photos by "Asianometry".
Eva Galperin’s #Mastodon