Tag: Silicon Valley

Think Bigger, Silicon Valley


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only talk about this again because I can not believe that of all the things generating buzz right now fucking a digital version of the old rural party line — Clubhouse — is huge. What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Where’s all the talk of “disrupting” the way we live in fundimental ways? Meh. Give me a Mindcap like in Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey instead of a tech weenie circle jerk.

But, I don’t see my vision happening. Even if Big Tech can read my mind as I suspect, no one cares,. I’m just a rando writing a novel. Though, to be fair to myself, I am using some of my allotted words to give people my personal vision of how some of the technology I believe SHOULD exist would be used in a practical fashion.

That’s one of the unexpected aspects of this novel — how much it’s veered off into practical scifi in ways I didn’t really expect. But I really need to just throw myself back into this novel again.

This weekend I kind of relaxed. Now it’s time write write write. Maybe I’ll inspire so nerd to change our lives again en mass.

Hey, Elon Musk, Don’t Waste Your Time Terraforming Mars


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems to me the logical way to settle the universe is to simply turn people into data then shoot tiny probes out across the galaxy at near the speed of light. Once they reach, say, Alpha Centauri, you zap the all the information to the probe. Using nanotech, you re-create humans and look around.

Now, that last bit is a bit much even for me.

More likely, what you do is, you have hard AI and that hard AI is zapped to your tiny probe which then creates an android body of some sort using the aforementioned nanotech.

Anyway, the point is, it seems like a huge fucking waste of time to actually send humans anywhere off planet. Using hard AI, nanotech and the speed of light, you could look around the galactic neighborhood pretty easily. Or, put another way — you’d be an idiot to throw any resources at terraforming Mars when you could wait for technology to reach the point where you could zap humans to a livable planet at the speed of light.

In the 10,000 years it would take to terraform Mars, you could settle hundreds — thousands — of planets within 10,000 lightyears of earth. Seems a no-brainer to me.

Silicon Valley’s Next Frontier: The Mind


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

First, I’m a nobody and no one listens to me. But I’m old enough to notice something — the last time Silicon Valley changed the average person’s life on a practical level was the smart phone.

Since then, Silicon Valley’s been resting on is loreals by designing apps.

Now, Elon Musk is apparently trying to take things to the next level by doing a some sort of neural link. But, fuck, man, I’m not drilling into my skull. It seems like there’s a pretty obvious way to avoid giving someone a lobotomy during the development process of such an invention. If you want to know what I’m alluding to, read Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: Final Odyssey. There’s a pretty obvious way to allow us to do the obvious — skip the goggle phase of MX (VR / AR) and get plugged directly into our minds wetware.

If you could use your own mind’s processing ability, then you don’t have much need for googles that no one will wear. It’s the most intuitive — and logical — next step in media: use your own mind as your media player.

I still think Big Tech can read our minds (to some extent) via our phones. And, to that extent, I think we’ve reached something akin to a “soft Singularity.” The Singularity is here, but it’s so subtle in nature that not everyone realizes it’s happened.

Those who do know, are making a shit ton of money off of it.

Silicon Valley Is Embarrassing Itself — Of Course We Need An Adult Version Of Tik-Tok To Serve As A ‘Twitter Killer!’

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Silicon Valley, you are pathetic. Tik-Tok is proof of concept, all you need to tweak it a little bit so it can become a Twitter Killer. Why is this so difficult to see?

It’s so simple. So very simple. Now, I’m not saying you would have to do videos on such a service, but the current Twitter implementation of video is piss-poor.

There’s at least a $1 billion market for a native-video discussion service that is essentially Tik-Tok but for news. Why no one has done this, I don’t know. I guess it’s not sexxy.