Baffled European

Tag: disappearing

  • Ampelalphamännchen

    “Hi, this is Elon Musk. They say money can’t buy happiness, and I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, so that’s pretty sick, right? Fuck, I’m so alone.”

    This is the message played by a pedestrian crossing in California when you press the button to cross the road. Similar AI generated recordings of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have been added to crossings in other states.

    It’s quite easy to do. The magic boxes on the traffic lights run some software which is configured over a Bluetooth connection. If you have the app and the correct password, you’re in and you can reconfigure the crossing to do as you want. The default password is “1234”. Polara, the manufacturer, gives strong warnings about changing it before putting the device into public use. This seems like sensible advice, but obviously nobody does it.

    Polara has removed the app from Google Play Store, which will at least slow down any copycat hacks. Local authorities have reset the devices, presumably setting a proper password this time.

    “Hey, it’s Zuck here. I just want to tell you how very proud I am of everything we’ve been building together. From undermining democracy to cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop, to — to making the world less safe for trans people. Nobody does it better than us, and, uh, and I think that’s pretty neat. Zuck out!”

  • 4-dimensional chess

    Elon Musk was boasting a few days ago that his predictions have generally come true. This comes as a surprise to me.

    It turns out it was as long ago as 2013 that we all got excited about self-driving cars and their imminent arrival. Musk has made regular promises about such technology, usually several times a year, but still no self-driving cars.

    We all know he wants to go to Mars. In fact, he reckoned he would send two rockets there by the end of 2022. That moved to 2025, now 2029. Not to mention that StarShip, among all the rapid unplanned disassemblies, does not meet specifications and will probably never work as promised.

    Then there’s his Boring Company. The idea was to have a tunnel for public transport. He expects cars to travel through this tunnel at 250kmh. They don’t. His sales patter following the obvious failure is like that of a perpetual motion crank: the prototype is there, we just need more money.

    Predictions for Neuralink are for 2025. Maybe they will come true. On the other hand, research suggests that the human brain is like a very very slow modem in computing terms and cannot be linked to a gigabyte stream. I await the breakthrough.

    Most recently, he predicted he could put a puppet in charge of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Despite spending $25million on this project, and engaging in outright election fraud, he got that wrong as well.

  • Brexiters tried this

    The USA’s new Golden Age starts today. It’s the president’s flagship policy, all based around his favourite word: tariffs. This is his opportunity to show that he can run the country just as well as he does his businesses.

    He started this on day one, raising arbitrary tariffs at random levels. Cancelling them. Reapplying them. Increasing them. Delaying them. Nobody seems to know what is going on. Fortunately, they can spend their time congratulating themselves on having such a strong and decisive leader.

    In the past, there were monolithic factories where raw materials went in at the start, with finished products coming out at the end. This is not the way things work anymore. Components are produced all over the world and supplied just in time to the assembly process. It’s more efficient.

    All that tariff increases do is increase costs at particular points in the process. Some components can even be hit several times by tariffs as they move along the chain.

    These tariffs will not recreate the old and inefficient processes of the past, at least not within the next five years. They will also do nothing to reduce the trade deficit, its stated aim. All they will do is raise costs for USAian businesses and consumers, and create loads of unnecessary trouble for everybody else in the world.

    In other news, Marine Le Pen has been convicted of corruption and banned from office. This sort of thing is possible.

  • Secret Service

    “Dominos Pizza Service, how can I help?”

    “Yeah, hello, do you have any war plans?”

    “I’m sorry sir, we don’t have any war plans on the menu.”

    “Then they need to be on the menu. You gotta get used to the idea of – yeah, bourbon, please… large, thanks – yeah, the idea of war plans. We’ll get these war plans rolling and then it’ll be margarita time!”

    “One Margherita. Do you want coke with that?”

    “Obviously. I tell you, if you haven’t got your own war plans – another bourbon, yes, that’s lovely – I got some war plans of my own that I made myself. Those Pentagon plans, that’s for those goddamn pathetic Europeans. They just freeload off of us – if it looks like it’s going down, just top it up, cheers – like they’re on vacation in Hawaii.”

    “One Hawaii. With extra pineapples?”

    “As many as possible. Yeah, where are they then? Anybody seen the war plans? Don’t tell me I left them on the S-Bahn, I was sure I had them when I got off. What’s that James? You got a copy on Google Drive? Email it to me, but remember what happened last time – what, empty? there’s a bottle of Drambuie in the cabinet, I think there’s some left in that – got them, great. War plans, now listen. You remember what happened to Hallo Pizza, you don’t want that to happen to you …”