I can’t find this being a problem. What circles do you move in where “jerk” is a problematic word?

This seems like the natural extension of Telemarketers

It’s a really powerful story and shows up a lot in SF academia. I was introduced to through Dr James Gunn’s histories.

I don’t know if I’d say “inherently hopeful.” Sturgeon’s approach to science fiction was “ask the next question” which is sometimes not so hopeful. I do think a lot of golden age and even new wave (which Ellison defined) is very hopeful. I think genres like cyberpunk and more modern interpretations of dystopian science fiction explore less hopeful situations. You also have stuff like “The Heat Death of the Universe” by Pamela Zoline which could be evaluated from many perspectives on hope.

You very clearly did not process either one of my comments. Have fun with that!

I think that’s a fantastic description of the Israeli colonizers!

Edit: very important to note that not all Jews are Israeli, not all Israelis are Jews or colonizers, and not all Palestinians are Muslim or Hamas.

Edit edit: it’s kinda fucking stupid that I have to pull a “not all…” because that’s really fucking dumb with any discourse. It shows just how loaded this conversation is and how difficult it is to call out the problem, Zionist colonizers, without being misinterpreted eg assumed antisemitism

throwing paint and writing slogans on the homes of Jews is antisemitism

This is a very, very dangerous idea to perpetuate. Saying any act of protest against Jewish people, whether or not it’s related to their religion or heritage, is antisemitic means we cannot criticize Jewish people for valid reasons unrelated to their religion or heritage. Misguided or not, it does not seem that these protestors were attacking them because they are Jewish but rather because they are Zionist and just happen to be Jewish. A natural extension of this idea is that protesting the rampant fraud from previous Netanyahu terms would make me antisemitic which is patently false.

To quote you, I’m not sure we read the same article if you think the homes were vandalized because the occupants are Jewish.

This whole conversation is super fraught with nuance.

As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!

If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.

Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

For more color, check out Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus and her guest Behind the Bastards episode about Major League Eating.

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

• Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
• Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
• Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
• A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

In the forty years since its introduction, most of the people that support the broken windows theory are the police and the people that disagree with it are basically everyone else. Not a great foundation for any computing conversations today.

That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.

Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?