I think it was Cory Doctorow who compared AI-generated code to asbestos.
Back in its day,
asbestos was in everything,
because of how useful it seemed.
Fast forward decades and now asbestos abatement is a hugely expensive and time-consuming requirement for any remodeling or teardown project.
Lead paint has some of the same history.
In my experience,
part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does.
Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it,
but once they've found their final design,
they strongly resist changing it,
even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.
Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy.
He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.
Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.
There's an important difference between facts and truth.
There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>"
After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.
What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.
Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.
This also happens with Mayan script.
When the group led by Linda Schele made major leaps in the 70s,
to the point where 90% of the glyphs have now been deciphered,
scholars mostly considered their meaning settled.
That obviously hasn't kept cranks from asserting all kinds of wild ideas,
but there are still scholars who dispute the accuracy and meaning of the interpretations.
TIL.
I remember my parents had von Däniken books.
I, on the other hand,
was deeply into Isaac Asimov,
both his fiction and non-fiction.
He was a pretty good debunker.
I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above.
What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.
He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.
Here "face mask" means the common surgical face mask ubiquitous in operating rooms,
and "respirator" does not refer to anything like a gas mask,
but in fact the humble masks "meeting FFP2/3 standards in the UK or N95 in the US".
In other words,
the kinds of masks that everyone wanting to protect themselves and others from COVID transmission have been wearing for six years now.
Here in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A., I NEVER see people out and about wearing masks (perhaps 1% of people overall at most; very rare) using anything but the cloth/surgical masks seen in operating rooms. Same with sporting events on TV: the rare person in the crowd wearing a mask always has a surgical-type mask.
This may be hijacking the thread,
but I had an interesting experience lately.
Bear with me,
Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the story.
I'm a film photographer,
and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned.
A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days.
Some two months later,
I still had not gotten my film back.
I went to the lab and spoke with the owner,
and he said that LANL was sending him so much film to develop and scan that he couldn't get to his other customers,
and he expected that the volume would increase.
He was nice enough to give me my undeveloped film and and refund the prepaid bill.
I did not ask,
as I didn't want to piss of the owner,
but I have many questions.
Why is LANL sending so much film to a lab for developing?
Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab,
it's not nuclear engineering,
it just requires some equipment and a little expertise.
Why now?
Why are the even using film these days?
Why did the lab's owner feel it necessary to prioritize LANL's business over others,
rather than putting it in the queue to wait its turn?
>Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab
Are you asking why a government agency can't just magic up random money and employees during a time the parent government is saying privatization and getting rid of government employees is the way to go?
No.
Perhaps I should have noted that LANL was established in 1943.
They obviously used film,
and more obviously would not have sent it to some random lab for processing.
Did they lose that capability?
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