Open Tabs #1

So I read the internets in the morning… “Ooh, that’s interesting” I go. I’ll come back to that…

… and so I wind up with a load of open-tabs, that sort of semi-relate, but don’t… and don’t have an overarching theme, or even a point… but…

… anyway, here they are:

1) Bitcoin Nordic.

This is how to acquire bitcoins if you’re in the UK (or EU, or anywhere), but specifically the UK, because the site that I used to use now says “By invitation only. Don’t ask for an invitation”. So a massive fuck-you with bells on to you then.

2) Bitpay

An ecommerce thing for bitcoin. Not sure how (or if) it works… possibly like paypal, possibly not… but the main thing is if the transactions are going through someone else’s central server, then it does kindof defeat the entire point of bitcoins. ALL of the “scandals” involving bitcoin have been down to the failures of gatekeepers. The parts of the system where things stop being distributed, and all funnel through a single point. As above, so below.

3) Realtime Machine Translation

I bet it doesn’t do Scottish.

This is (more accurately) real-time speech recognition… a technology that’s been a loooooong time coming, mainly because you can’t talk and think at the same time… the way you can with typing. I like this thing though because it’s using neural networks… aka CREODES… which I’m really interested in at the moment because Terrence McKenna opined that they might be how “nature” works at a really low level. An alternative to Newtonian Physics etc. It’s a really interesting thing to think about on hallucinogens.

Because… if the entire universe is based upon creodes, rather than billiard-balls… then the entire universe is a giant AI. Not metaphorically, not in some vague airy-fairy metaphysical way… but in actual, knock-on-wood reality. The entire universe is literally an AI. Without the A. Think about it next time you’re out of your mind on drugs. You know I’m right.

4) Namecoin

A bitcoin-style network for the registration of domain names… which means the powers of old and ugly can’t take down your website. I think I’ll sign up for one of these just to see how it works.

Interesting from the perspective, that each node in the system has (holograph-like) a symbolic copy of the entire system. As above, so below.

5) Kim Dot Com’s new thing, Mega

Which is interesting because KDC is now something of a national hero in New Zealand, even though he doesn’t come from here… and one of the first things he did when he got here, was make a large donation to NZ’s most right-wing, and visibly corrupt politician. A great deal of “not recalling” has been going on over Captain Com… which must take quite a bit of doing, because he doesn’t strike me as being the kind of guy who’s easy to forget.

He’s also talking about putting in another trans-pacific cable, and bringing free wifi to all of NZ. This he could actually, conceivably do… it’s a project that someone else was working on, but couldn’t get the funding (or something) so it fell through. I suspect there might be an issue though because across the other side of the pacific… where the cable will touch ground, is the country that hates him most… the home of repressive corporate law. He’d be better off going in the other direction. Up to Korea or somewhere. Over to Hong Kong. I make it sound so easy don’t I.

6) A Mesh Network Project

Cool. These last 3 items come courtesy of Vinay Gupta… who points out that these 3 things put together could conceivably give us an internet entirely free from top-down control. He could be right… so what I’m going to do is get to “hello world” with all 3 of these services… just to… widen the creodic pathway, as it were.

7) An Internet for Machines

A data network in France for transmitting tiny blips of info, so machines can talk to each other with far greater efficiency.

8) Google Fibre Goes Live

That (at the time of writing) is fucking fast man. Here in NZ, I get this:

But the reality of it is, that the absolute maximum download speed is around 300 kbis… and more often than not, it struggles away in double figures… not that much more than the old dial-up systems.

If I didn’t have family in this country, I’d leave.

9) Another Mega Pedometer

With a couple of interesting interface innovations… although the video does have that oozily insincere apple-speak, dripping with marketing trigger-words (“smart, simple, elegant”)… and the whole thing reeks of “we believe in this; we believe in that”… attaching some sort of new-age religious fervour to things that they’re trying to sell. It’s creepy. Blandly creepy.

But don’t mind me, I came from the generation that found marketing to be bogus and manipulative so we rejected it. Apparently younger generations buy into the entire thing, like children main-lining sugar.

10) Foxconn has begun replacing it’s suicidal workforce with machines.

11) Pakistan is developing its own drone capability (and so it begins. The AK47 of Drones is just around the corner)

12) Getting desktop robot arms to work

A crowd-sourced Foxconn waiting in the wings. Maybe.

Looking at this thing, it occured to me that if these robots get any traction, the killer-app, is not the ability to do tedious, repetitive tasks, it’s the ability to do things at a precision that humans can’t… which is what the current triad of digital fabrications do. The triad being:

1) Laser-cutting
2) CNC-milling
3) 3D-printing

Which is cool, but if you want to knock a zero off your costs, you need to be building your own surface-mount electronics from individual components. And that is hard.

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So that’s about 1/2 the tabs… and I’ll stop here, because there is a kind of coalescing theme to the stuff above… which is to do with The Information Wars I guess. The War against Boundary Dissolution.

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Boundary Dissolution is the wellspring of creativity. Creativity itself is a process of crystalisation… to create new boundaries… because perception can only see edges. That’s why fish didn’t discover water.

Just a thought etc.