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My laptop quietly celebrates ten years of existence around this month. Or perhaps not so quietly, its fan makes enough noise to mask faint dialogue at otherwise comfortable listening levels. The Icelandic word for computer, I seem to recall (and my memory is not to be trusted) is etymologically derived from the word for fan [*]. Reference missing, as wikipedia would say.
Tölvan segir nei
While updating to the latest version of my operative system I ran into unexpected trouble: full disk. Not just /home, which is manageable, but also the arcane places called /root and /boot. I know it's possible to repartition everything, but that seems a risky endeavor without somewhere to practice and a fresh harddisk to back up to, neither of which are available. After a few days of perusing obscure tutorials (some of which weren't even correct) I found a few files it seemed safe to remove and plugins & commands for actually getting them rm'ed. Had I enjoyed tinkering with computers I might have written a tutorial, but I don't particularly enjoy it and would rather forget about the whole episode so I can go on with business as usual.
The Great Computer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy knows in advance how long it will take to calculate the answer to life and everything. Knowing in advance how complex a computation will be seems to violate some fundamental law of computer science, but I may be thinking about the halting problem which might not apply to problems such as the multiplication of six and nine, which of course yields ... 42.
Another noteworthy scene is the restaurant at the end of the universe, where a living, talking pig is served as a meal; the logic being that this animal has been genetically engineered to actually enjoy being bred as food for others. The character of a sentient, depressed robot also seems foresighted. If robots were to gain consciousness, would we then have to grant them "human" rights or something close to that, as Nick Bostrom has suggested? Fortunately this is still a moot discussion.
https://ristoid.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-generative-ai
The C programming language must have been designed with the goal of making language processing so hard and off-putting that no-one would want to do that, especially outside of the safe-haven of plain ascii characters. Blame must also be doled out to the inventors of the utf-8 character set for having different characters taking up different sizes. Anyway, I have about a million new words for the babel fish to translate. Sprillans new!
My mail art initiative also continues, recently I sent something _funny_ to Japan. The ambition is still to make animations with readings of the concrete poems that go into the letters. But even if I try to make as simple videos as possible it ends up taking about a month for a two minute video. See, that's why I'm not a content creator on youtube (and it's not the only reason).
Since I got an article published in a Springer anthology I've noticed some academia spam in my inbox. Polite but annoying offers of services to help divulge my research and make it accessible to the layman. What an irony, since the piece in question was written in plain language and should be easily comprehensible by anyone with the slightest interest in the subject. (Let's call it artistic research, a term I don't particularly like but it kind of covers it.) And for those who aren't interested, that's ok, it's not that revolutionary or important anyway! Most recently someone offered to make an animation to help spread my research to the masses. I'll consider writing a half-offended reply, explaining that I do my own animations when necessary. For the curious, this is the anthology:
Sonic Design (open access book)
What else? Good news about Assange. And Chomsky is not dead yet. I happened upon some false obituaries whilst for an exception logged in to that tooting site. Interesting political developments in France, UK, and probably a few other places in Europe. Dangerous times globally because of the war hawks and neocons (or whatever their DSM diagnosis is) who don't know how to de-escalate. It's sixty seconds to midnight, although that measure makes no sense really; there is no way of assessing precisely how close we are. We don't need to wait for some stupid galactic bureaucrat who has decided to set up a highway through our solar system, meaning that the earth must be demolished; we are finally advanced enough to finish the job ourselves quite easily.
In the future (in the lucky scenario) we will own nothing and be happy. I'm already almost there. Still owning quite a few things, but no income since last november. I ought to sell a few prints so I can buy me something interesting to read.
[*] Update: Idiomdrottning explained to me that "tölvan" is derived from the word for number (töl) and sorceress (volva). There you have the spirit in the machine seeing to it that everything works!