Mark my words: they will keep growing until they collapse, and once that happens, they will use their reach and contacts with the Italian government to ask to be bailed out out of debt. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”.
It’s a well known strategy that has been applied by several Italian companies, FIAT (now Stellantis) first and foremost.
My Nokia 5800 express could connect to a VPN and run a bridged internet connection over Bluetooth in 2008. I clearly remember using it in Switzerland around 2010 to pay for a tramway using a QR code.
Sure, UI was way worse compared to UIKit but in term of features Symbian phones were light-years beyond the iPhone at least until the iPhone 4.
Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM.
Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago.
But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.
I have been building a small web app for my family recently. I was planning to host it on my own server and not do any fancy reactive and asynchronous stuff. It was a simple multi-page app with simple forms and links. And it sucked because we didn’t know who was doing what live, we needed to refresh pages needlessly just to see if something has changed. Funny that it seemed fine while I have been the only user testing the app but once we got more family members in what seemed like “production ready” it was immediately obvious that it needed interactivity.
Because once shit hits the fan, those responsible for destroying the ecosystem will take a one-way flight for a fully air-conditioned bunkerized apartment lot in Dubai with any Epstein island-level luxury you can think of and fuck the consequences for everyone else, that's why.
I hope before I die we finally prove that the human brain has no peculiar qualia but it is an entirely deterministic, albeit extremely sophisticated, machine. And by touching the right triggers, even the worst human being can become a saint.
That would finally force us to rethink how we see the morality of "virtuosity", punishment and our justice system.
Our thoughts are an electric cloud and I believe randomness is involved, and like a bolt of lightning, the path taken is unpredictable.
And make it a tempestuous lightning storm where the state of all lightning bolts represents a moment of consciousness. That will take a lot to model accurately.
An electric cloud with quantum effects that we also don’t fully understand. There will always be a layer deeper that we just do not know the effects of or what actually exists there or “under there”.
What we too easily forget is that for millennia we had societies where an infinitesimally amount of people (a dozen of families, at best) held almost all the wealth, another thousands ensured that order was maintained throughout the kingdom/empire by force, and everyone else lived by subsistence economy.
Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.
It has become a meme at this point but this sentence still stands: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth".
Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.
Haven’t heard that meme, but it seems like you could replace “AI” with “civilizational striving/class struggle” and extend it across the whole of human history
Of course! This is just class consciousness. But AI does potentially represent a sea change in the ability of the capital class to make labor superfluous. Considering AI outside of the context of the eternal class struggle risks missing the forest for the trees.
You could also replace AI with (Proper) Education and get the same logical conclusion. The wealthy would be able to access future advanced pedagogical techniques that would equalize the advantages of both talent and hard work in a post-competence future.
But a post-competence future is ultimately a good thing for humanity. There is no inherent reason why somebody who is talented or skilled in the specific abilities that society deeems necessary should be privileged if those needs can now be automated. It just sounds more like an arbitary class deemed the "skilled" complaining about the loss of their elite status against another, more entrenched elite class relying on wealth. But as a commoner, why should I favour the meritocrats who look down on me over the wealthy who might be more magnanimous in understanding their privilege?
Oh God, what a sad day to know how to read.
"Why should I favor the people that at some point had struggles like mine and has better chances to understand and empathize with me over the people who cannot understand what the expression 'paycheck to paycheck' really entails?"
Thinking that multi-millionaires/billionaires will "understand their privilege" or that they will be "magnanimous" is beyond naivite and goes straight to stupidity. Have you read any news in the past decade‽‽
I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.
I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:
Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.
We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
You're probably right that it's forgotten and all, but..
> We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
Have you looked at any rediscovered repositories lately?
It's a pretty daft assumption that the original source code wouldn't carry more value than the decompiled machine-generated "source code". And much more so.
Certainly from the game historian's perspective. Just think about it. Inline comments, logs, scraps of documents/notes, variable/function naming, scrapped files and artwork, engine code, etc. These things are essentially a time capsule treasure and a peek into the history of the game, no matter their state.
If you've seen any rediscovered source code releases of old software, e.g. 86-DOS, Prince of Persia, Command & Conquer, Little Big Adventure, even Apollo or any of the "the making of"-style game releases built around it (Karateka, Ninja Turles) you'd probably think differently. These are super interesting to dive into because they capture the thoughts and decisions of the developers at the time.
I was lucky enough to speak with one of the guys who ported Final Fantasy VIII to Windows (A crazy talented guy from Naples and one of the earliest members of the OG playstation emulation scene) and the porting team of several IREM arcade shootemups to the Game boy advance (incidentally they were also from south Italy) and both of them told me the same story:
The source code they were given for the job was so specific to the assembler, compiler, build stack and internal company libraries and SDKs (which often they had no access to) that reverse engineering the final game was usually the quickest route.
> Certainly from the game historian's perspective.
That's a completely different topic, and I mean, sure - from an historical perspective it's absolutely essential, even simple changelogs become of enormous importance.
No? Funny how that works, isn’t?
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