Here’s a glimpse of the future. Can’t wait ’till Croquet is ready to play.
There’s a new PlayStation 2 game called Karaoke Revolution. You sing into the computer while an animated character lip-syncs. The game grades you on your pitch and timing, and the animated crowd goes wild or boos you off stage as appropriate.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Worried about persistent security flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, officials at the Pennsylvania State University system have taken the unusual step of recommending that students, professors, and staff members stop using the popular Web browser.
“The threats are real, and alternatives exist,” the university said in an announcement posted on its Web site this week.
Penn State appears to be the first American college to recommend against the use of Internet Explorer. However, the CERT Coordination Center, a federal computer-security center operated by Carnegie Mellon University, made a similar recommendation to the public earlier this year.
Internet Explorer, which is distributed free by the Microsoft Corporation, has more than 90 percent of the worldwide browser market. …
Croquet is “about” real-time collaboration. A bunch of people can be in the same virtual environment and see the live effects of each other moving around and manipulating things. It seems natural to add audio chat using existing Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. So now you can talk to folks in the same space while you work together. We’re working on Webcam video, too, so that it’s generally suitable for holding distance meetings in a Croquet place. I didn’t think much about displacing land-line telephones. Who cares.
We thought a bit about how you could connect the telephone system so that you could call in to a Croquet place and join a meeting (audio only?) from a cell phone.
But then I read this quote from Patrick Scaglia, Vice-President and Director of the Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center at HP Lab:
“Croquet is a first in many ways. It represents a major step in our vision of computation as a communications platform and service, available anytime, anywhere, from any device. Soon, Croquet will run on everything, from a PDA through a set-top box; persistent Croquet worlds will be ubiquitous on the Internet, routed intelligently to each user through computational services overlays like PlanetLab. This will change the way people think about software and computation, from today’s device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive, service”.
It took a day to sink in.
Eventually, people will want and get always-on connectivity for mobile devices, just as over half of American Internet users now get for fixed-position access. After demand evens out, I think device costs are first-order proportional to the number of chips, with the complexity of chips being a second-order effect. So the cost of a PDA capable of running Croquet will someday not be inherently much more expensive then a cell phone such as is now being given away by providers.
So, will we have telephones? Of any kind?
As far as I know, the Croquet developers didn’t set out to replace the telephone. If I had, my wife would have threatened divorce for such a hair-brained idea. And I’m not predicting that Croquet will displace the telephone. But it is interesting that progress in solving an abstract and general problem
mightlead to the merging of computers and telephones.
The real-time collaboration in Croquet is cool. It provides a very different way of structuring applications that will allow things that nothing else can. The croquet team is working hard on this aspect. But we’re just begining to consider the implications of shared persistence. I think this is just as radical in itself, and will inspire truly extroadinary software when combined with Croquet’s other aspects.
A long time ago, I think I mentioned in a comment to something that there was a project at the MIT Media Lab to keep a database of uncorroborated information about government officials, analogous to Ashcroft and Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” monstrosity.
The project had been written up in several places, including Wired and slashdot, but now it seems to have shut down.
Why? Lack of interest (we get the government we deserve), or were they shut down? I have no idea.
The TIA project (ephemistically renamed “Terorist Information Awareness”) seems to have disappeared from the DARPA site, too. Does that mean it has been abandoned, or just gone silent.
Our home desktop Windows machine is used only by my wife and two pre-teen girls. We’ve been infected by some crapware lately and I tried to clean it up. In addition to the stuff visible on the hard disk, there’s this thing called the Windows registry. This is is used for all sorts of nefarious purposes, such as boot-time start-up of programs that you never heard of and don’t want running on your machine. I couldn’t believe what I found in there.
I did this:
start->run
(and then type)
regedit
(In the regedit menus do:)
edit->find
(and type)
fuck
(or erotic, or anything else you’d be surprised to find on your computer).
I feel so violated.
Croquet is an ambitious project to develop an entirely new way to work with computers, including 3D user interfaces and real-time collaboration between separate people manipulating the same virtual objects. Although this could be used in many domains, the focus of the core developers is on educational uses.
Imagine you could make computers work however you wanted. What would you have them do? That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Fast machines. Graphics coprocessors. Fast worldwide networks. And it’s only going to get better.
I started a new job yesterday. My job is to help invent the future.
Says US appeals court decision:
I often get chain letters about things like wearing yellow ribbons and not buying gas on a particular Sunday. I sympathize with many, though I doubt if I ever passed any on. But I sure like the idea that I can.
At one point do I actually participate? At what point do I feel I must take action including either passing the communications or doing what the letter asks? Am I moved to action more by anger or love or fear?
Here’s one to which I’m particular drawn, which I have edited and posted for reference.
But while the uproar has swayed much of the public to Johansson's defense at a time when #genAI is increasingly under scrutiny, this may not quite be an open-and-shut case should she decide to sue . Read the breakdown from @M_F_Rose in her latest article:
The release of @OpenAI's new digital assistant "Sky" stirred controversy after actress Scarlett Johansson alleged that the company had infringed on her rights by using a soundalike voice of hers after she'd declined to voice it herself.
Just saw @MargotSusca fantastic interview with @adamconover about the death of local news at the hands of hedge funds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA A theme I have written about *a lot*. Like this blog post from 2018: https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/we-need-to-fix-the-news-media-not-just-social-media-part-i/ This has been a long time in the making.
I wrote yesterday on the terrifying escalation of antisemitism in Canada, citing events just over past week. Now there is more: last night a firebomb attempt at a Vancouver synagogue. Daily antisemitic incidents is who we are now.
https://www.jewishvancouver.com/important-community-updates-may-20-2024
https://x.com/mgeist/status/1796233336203194446
