Yeah, just a week ago I read an interview with Alan Kay from 1990, where he shared his thoughts about the third revolution in computing: the "intimate computer" (the agentic platform that follows the "institutional computer" and the "personal computer").
Funnily enough, he spoke about one of his first "agentic computing" implementations: a computer agent of his he tasked with compiling a sort of newspaper for breakfast reading. It ran overnight for 12 to 15 hrs., and collated textual as well as graphical information from specified news resources and databases. That was ten years before the interview, in 1980. Sadly, the piece doesn't go into more detail on the setup or its performance metrics.
He also mentioned that the idea of agentic computing was already 30 years old, and that he was busying himself with the topic for 15 years by then (1990). So... five years from taking interest (mid-70s) to his first practical implementations (1980).
Take that "sort of newspaper for breakfast reading" description and multiply that by 20 million MAU and you have the yahoo.com front page circa 1999, or the opening screen of the Reddit app circa 2020.
There are going to be a lot of tasks where if someone wired up some tools to do it for personal consumption, you'd call it agentic. Since there are a lot of overlapping interests, the obvious route is to have a handful of specialists building the tools and selling them as a packaged service to a broader consumer-type audience. While this will move away from the "a agent following your specific directives" narrative, since all you'll get is a few tunable knobs, it will also offer instant gratification and probably fewer footguns than trying to build your own.
This bodes poorly for a certain type of dev though. I suspect every shop of a certain size or larger now has at least one AI evnagelist building a bespoke "agentic" workflow that converts inbound support tickets to outbound CVEs. When you've got a brace of vendors all offering that as a COTS product, do you still want him? Firms like Atlassian and Github/lab might be in privileged positions for that storyline, because they already know all the secrets of the systems they're trying to instrument, and could potentially build API extensions to suit their needs.
The GOP rigs elections in their favor and it's well known, but they don't have the power to throw out an additional 87 million votes if they don't go in their favor.
The logical conclusion then if despite everyone voting D then getting their votes tossed out is either violent revolution or liberation with the aid of another nuclear-armed state.
In our modern democracies, we are highly dependent on our information economies to build consensus.
Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally.
In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support.
America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace.
The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact.
The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough.
The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on.
Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.
It was a scheduled Trump win, from how demotivating Harris was. Sure Trump demotivated a little over a million or two from bothering to show up to the polls for him, Harris was five to ten times that number (depending on whose numbers you use).
The will of the plurality you mean? He didn’t win a majority of the votes. He is the legitimately elected office holder; but it was not the will of the people, it was the outcome of this particularly electoral process. Many American electoral processes require a run off without a majority for this reason, and it’s an intensely weak platform to claim a mandate from - not only did more people not vote for you than half the voters, if you add in the people who could vote but didn’t, it’s by far not “the will of the people”.
I apologize but I don’t understand this metric - you’re saying Trump would have gotten the majority if republicans who didn’t vote for him had voted for him ? That’s some serious squinting and if you do that I’ll just take everyone who voted for Biden in the primary and add it to Harris and now she won close to 70% of the votes? Maybe add in Obama’s last election results and every democrat that ever ran in any races and Trump then got about 0% of the votes.
Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
Coming from Australia, which has a more sensible electoral system, I instinctively think about "preference flows" of the minority candidates when I look at these numbers.
Trump was 316,571 short of majority, Harris was 2,601,538.
Neither party gained an absolute majority because 2.9 million out of 155.2 million voters picked third-party candidates: 862,049 Green, 756,393 RFKJr, 650,126 Libertarian, 171,786 PSL, and 477,755 "other".
One of the many failings of the US electoral system is that it effectively ignores these 2,918,109 million voters. But, if forced to state a preference between the two majority candidates, how do you genuinely think they would've gone?
I don't think there's any question that, even just among the 756,393 people who voted for a guy actively campaigning for Trump, there are 316,571 people who would prefer a Trump presidency over a Harris presidency.
That in itself - if 100% of Greens and 100% of Libertarians, and 100% of PSL, and 100% of "other", and the other 58.14% of RFKJr voters ALL prefer Harris - is enough to grant an absolute majority to Trump.
If you plug more realistic guesstimates into preference distributions for the minor candidates, I don't think there is a plausible run-off result below 50.5-49.5 Trump out of those numbers.
Somehow you blame these who not voted for the rapist and a cheat?
(but I agree with you, Kamala wasn't a good candidate, at least in this moment, and the DNCs response to Israel genocide in Gaza might as well sink it alone).
That makes no sense whatsoever. Voting for Trump (or anyone with an R by their name) is wrong; sitting out a vote is wrong. Why save all the blame for the side that actually put up resistance, however ineptly?
I don’t think blue team good, red team bad is a very mature take on US politics. When it comes to substantive policy, voters do not get a choice. The same wars will be fought. The same lobbies will have their way. Just because one side will make tactless, self-deifying inaugural speeches about how the sea levels will cease to rise and the Earth will start to heal, that does not make it so.
I think that if these sensors were providing useful, actionable information more valuable than their maintenance cost is not well supported.
The only sensible take is blue team good cop, red team bad cop; they're still both cops, working for the system and against you. You can see from the voting record that there's always just enough dems to defect to pass through any laws that the GOP wants through. The Democrats in congress are still guilty of treason against the Constitution, the number of exceptions to that rule remains in the single digits.
The only non-violent way to save your country is to primary all current incumbents and convict both party leadership for treason.
I hate divisive language like this, but Trump's only major concrete "policy" (if you can call it that) during his 2024 campaign was that he was going to somehow lower grocery prices by instituting tariffs, so basically "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices".
That kind of idiotic quasi-doublespeak should have been a disqualifier for anyone with at least a two-digit IQ, but apparently it's not. The only scenarios that I can see for this:
1) People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs.
This is so idiotic because even if that were true, which it's not, those costs would still be ruled into the price. "No such thing as a free lunch" is very literally the first thing I learned in high school economics.
If people are that stupid then they can be blamed for their idiotic decisions to vote for a despot.
2) They didn't believe in the tariff rhetoric, and wanted to vote for Trump based on a nebulous "personality".
This is stupid. If you really are voting for people because you think you'd "like to have a beer with them", then you should be blamed when bad things happen from that idiotic decision.
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Kamala wasn't a great candidate, but I really hate this sort of "both sides"-ing people do to try and engage in apologetics for people's ridiculous decision to vote for the guy who, as far as I can tell, has literally no expertise in anything.
> People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs.
Many believed this, think about how many Americans do not understand the Progressive Tax system. I believe it has been intentional for many years to keep up some of these misunderstanding of basic governance.
Average IQ in US hovers around 100. It means half of population is lower, from what I've found online it seems like a standard bell curve distribution.
You can't talk about higher concepts with people on the low part of the scale, I mean come on we are adults and experienced this in our lives 1000x over. It can easily end up insulting to them or make them feel (even more) sidelined. trump's campaign aimed very effectively in that below-100 crowd, for the second time. Easy to understand statements even if completely incorrect, appeal to negative emotions instead of rational facts.
At the end, everybody knew what kind of POS they are dealing with and everybody voted accordingly. Talks about strong/weak candidate are beyond useless and pathetic excuse and attempt to shift blame - even if you have a choice between strong leader hitler and weaker freedom-liking candidate its ridiculous to state 'but the other person was weak so I went against all my moral values'. If one actually has them - maybe thats core of the issue, many people like to pretend but deep inside are not that nice or caring.
All the tariffs were stupid, Trump is mostly stupid and completely corrupt, but voters felt a justifiable need to punish the Democrats for a presidency where they were gaslit every day. Inflation? What inflation? And the economy is great, actually! Biden’s mind is sharp as a tack! etc. That’s before you get into culture war social issues topics, where the Democrats were miles away from the average non-blue-haired voter. And not only that, Dems ran another campaign with a tone of “Everyone who disagrees with me is an evil and/or stupid bigot” - H. Clinton’s winning strategy.
I was glad to see Harris lose, as I thought losing to Trump would sufficiently humiliate all those responsible for pushing the asinine platform and unlikeable candidate on us into changing their ways. Sadly, Dems still learned absolutely nothing and changed nothing. “A perfect campaign.”
I'll let you in on a secret. The main reason why nobody is catering to you isn't because what you want goes against the money, the status quo, or whatever big bad you imagine. It is because if you don't vote then you are about as good for them as nipples on a Breast Plate. There is a reason seniors get everything that they want: it is because they always show up to vote!
> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
> "I think, realistically, the issues the author describes - particularly with the keyboard and trackpad - would drive me up the wall for any kind of serious use."
Me too. But the tray table compatibility resonates. I had hoped someone would build a modern netbook as a detachable focused on productivity and light gaming (say, Steamdeck class), maintainability and (modular) expandability; a modern road warrior that's also a nice hobbyist machine that stands some abuse. Framework was/is positioned to put something out, but they decided to release the F-12 instead.
MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible
from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing
must be seen as a flop."
Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.
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