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Depiction of the Butlerian Jihad from the books

Earlier this year, my friend asked me to come over to her place to watch Dune Part One so she could the next day drag me to see Part Two in cinema. After that weekend, I gained a new set of worlds to explore: a universe once tainted by artificial intelligence but no longer thanks to a war with “thinking machines”.

This wasn’t my first experience with Dune, as I had at one point in my past watched the David Lynch rendition, which came out the year I was born. However, the Denis Villeneuve version captured my attention due to its non-goofy approach to the story, and as a consequence I now find myself reading through the books.

One plot device of the (known) universe in Frank Herbert’s Dune is the lack of anything resembling a computer as we know it. Approximately ten thousand years before protagonist Paul Atreides appearance in the story, the established royal houses were engaged in a war — dubbed the “Butlerian Jihad” — with thinking machines where humanity was victorious.

Thufir Hawat, a mentat as depicted in Dune (2021), played by Stephen McKinley

This victory led to anything resembling a thinking machine considered as forbidden technology and instead led to humanity being dependent on but not limited to mentats (human computers basically), analogue technology, and genetic modification including eugenics (unfortunate).

In the real world of 2024, we don’t have to worry about computers having sentience and we never will in 2025, 2026, 2032, or 2038 — check in with me in 2039 for an update. The suggestion that it will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) any time soon is absolute nonsense — the power requirements that AI-championing OpenAI is desiring is the equivalent to the output of some countries.

Just to map one cubic millimetre of the human brain required 1.4 petabytes of storage, meaning that to do its entirety, based on its average size of 2,174,340 mm², you’d need 3,044,076 petabytes of storage. If you convert that to zettabytes, you’d end up with about 3, which about 2% of what is suggested as the entire Internet’s total storage capability.

This is for one human brain. The entire Internet infrastructure is suggested to consume about 800 TWh of electricity, meaning that to simulate this one human brain, you’d need 16 TWh just for storage — this is enough to power all of Cuba just to put it all into context and we’re not even considering all of the other technicals we’d need to examine to pull it off.

At 640 grams each, you’d have 64,000,000 KG of these bad boys floating around for just one brain, putting them all at around 20% the total weight of the Empire State Building

We cannot map the entire brain without having to have nearly 100 million of these hard drives spinning at any given time (imagine the failure rate you’d have to contend with) and yet we’re expected to believe arrogant pricks like Sam Altman have any clue about what its usefulness is?

Even if we play into the fool’s statement that we only use 10% of our brains (this is untrue), we’d still need just over 1 TWh for storage for a human brain. Why are we suggesting that we go and speed up climate change in favour of a machine that relies on a garbage in garbage out philosophy?

Recently, I became aware that I was put on someone’s list as “someone who doesn’t get AI/NFTs/crypto” — here’s the thing: I do understand it, but what I don’t get is why do these types of people who champion these fads never take a step back to understand them?

I have a decade and a half experience with computer security and have seen so much change, but what hasn’t changed is the creature in front of the display. Humans are complex creatures; we don’t understand why we have consciousness and yet we have clowns in the world who suggest we can replicate some or all of it?

Quantum computers probably won’t help either here — if they even ever work.

The idea of classical computers with their binary states achieving the intelligence of a human brain is short-sighted — the idiocy I already am making an argument for here.

A thousand lines of code is more than enough to power a large language model, which forms the basis for the AI software we see commonly today, but to suggest that is enough in contrast to the billions of years of evolution that led to our species being here today is pure hubris and will lead to us hoisting ourselves by our own petard.

Were the Butlerian Jihad were to start today, I know which side I’d find myself on. Stop boiling the damn ocean to make soulless art, worthless and insecure code, and education materials of which are lacking in facts.

You have a brain; use it, exercise it, and find what you’re actually capable of.

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Press release from the Saskatchewan Party on September 13, 2024

Often I find myself writing about transit and thinking that many lives would not have been lost were we to have more publicly funded transit options. However, despite all of that, we have governments that don’t ever equate the use of transit and the reduction of vehicular alcohol abuse.

Earlier this month, The Saskatchewan Party released details about its slate of candidates ahead of the election writ being dropped. What was interesting was a line stating that there are five candidates who have past drunk driving charges.

Scott Moe, both current leader of the Saskatchewan Party and Premier of Saskatchewan, is also included in this list of having an impaired driving charge in 1992.

However, what is not mentioned here is that he has had two other incidents including a 1994 charge of a hit-and-run and a 1997 collision that took the life of a mother of two sons.

In the 1994 incident, Scott Moe never received a breathalyzer test but did admit that he had consumed alcohol earlier in the day. However, there is a contradiction in all of this because this is what the police charge stating:

…control of a motor vehicle that was involved in an accident with a vehicle at the Shellbrook Co-op with intent to escape civil or criminal liability, fail to stop his vehicle and give his name and address…

With Moe clarifying in an interview when he was confronted over it:

I exchanged information with the owner of the other vehicle and I called in the accident to the police.

Of course, since he apparently only called in the accident to police, there would be no evidence of him being under the influence at the time. We will just have to take him at his word that in 1997 when he killed 39-year old Joanne Bolog and injured her 18-year old son.

No alcohol was cited here, but he was charged with driving without “due care” and “failing to come to a complete stop”.

Especially rich considering that in 2019, the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team had sixteen players killed when their bus was hit by a truck in a much similar fashion. The driver of the truck, who was just a permanent resident at the time, is now facing deportation.

Scott Moe commented on the tragedy:

“Nobody sets out one morning with any intent of being in a car accident of any type […] [to] some degree I feel for Mr. Sidhu and his family.”

Moe is just lucky that he has a certain degree of privilege that lets him get away with his past behaviour.

I could comment on other reasons for why Scott Moe (and his Saskatchewan Party) are a danger to others, but it doesn’t really matter what happens before you enter public life because it won’t matter when you are in office as Premier of a province anyhow.

Then-Premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell

In January 2003, while leaving friend and Vancouver-area broadcaster Fred Latremouille’s Hawaiian home, Premier Gordon Campbell was arrested and pled no contest to driving under the influence of alcohol.

In Hawaii, it was merely a misdemeanour and not a criminal offence such as the case is in Canada, so he was fined US$913 and sent on his merry way under the condition he be checked for alcoholism and participate in a substance abuse program.

Calls for his resignation were made from groups such as MADD, but he managed to survive another seven years in office only resigning in March 2011 after being bogged down by a poorly implemented sales tax.

Drunk driving is OK because these two idiots never faced the music for it.

This was mirrored from cohost after being posted as my final piece there before it went into “read-only” mode.

This is my last long-form post on cohost and I figure I’d give you my thoughts before I go.

I’ve been on some form of social media for better or for worse since December 2000. To put into context where I was at in life back then, I was 16-years old and was still in secondary school. I was not an adult but found myself amongst many people who were often twice my age. These were people who themselves before then didn’t have Internet access in the same form I did at my age, and yet here we all were congregating together.

This of course was the Something Awful forums and while not social media explicitly (really “ur-social media”), it had all of the functions of social media baked within.

At the same time, I also joined LiveJournal, which is why I found cohost rather liberating. While the stories I could talk about from the Something Awful forums could be relatable to someone on cohost, because of its primitive nature, they would not compare to what I saw on LJ. However, both shaped the Western Internet good and bad and it’s why I have always had hesitation to comment on the affairs of this website.

However, since this website is about to cease to be anything but a time capsule in just a few weeks, that hesitation is no longer there as the audience is beginning to disperse.

One of the things that made cohost interesting is that it was rather insular. This is not a negative, but things didn’t escape the confines of this website often. Memes such as Ryan Reynolds’ becoming carbon and “Love Honk” did escape this website, but CSS crimes while cool did not spread around because they simply could not.

Somehow search indexes loved cohost URLs and it led to the local transit agency becoming aware of my posts, but they didn’t drive people to come here and participate.

Something Awful for example had a lot of content leak out to the point where it was basically freebooted for someone else’s profit. All your base are belong to us is a perfect example as after a forum member made a song to commemorate the meme, someone lifted it to create a video and it then spread like wildfire.

This wasn’t a bad thing for the forums ultimately as it led to more people joining the place, but the song’s creator, JRR never really saw a cent for it and sadly passed away in 2011 without people outside of the forums noticing.

LiveJournal was a different beast. It is more of an analogue to cohost than SA and often when describing this website to people, I tell them it’s like what Tumblr and LiveJournal birthing a child would be.

However, LJ never really had memes like AYBABTU, but it did however birth a toxic culture that fortunately never saw the light of day on this website. I won’t elaborate on what this culture evolved into, but much of the ills of the Western Internet can be focused on one particular account that went out of its way to document all of the misgivings individuals users engaged in.

These sites have aged in weird ways and ended up as neighbourhoods I could not navigate anymore.

And that is why I am sad to see cohost go the way it did. Its demise was never surprising as launching a social media website in the year 2022 is risky, but it still saddens me as it was my home on the Internet. I was one of the original test users with a two-digit user ID and was excited to see this go somewhere especially in light of my departing Twitter.

cohost was never perfect and was never destined to be–it didn’t need to be. I have long-practiced the philosophy of not letting perfect get in the way of good or as I put it, looking for satisfaction. I could go on and on about the flaws of this website, but it’s not important to me as this website actually tried a new approach to things.

I think that for many of you, you will never understand this mindset I hold. It’s easy to lash out at the site’s creators for doing things in a way you think is wrong, for not having the right policies, for not adopting the right features, and so on, but it’s another to go and look at them pragmatically–I can point out so many shortcomings I witnessed on part of the ASSC here, but I will not because it’s not pragmatic.

They tried. They put the work in. They listened. They worked what they could. They taxed themselves. Even in shutting down this place, they told us what is up. They told us how much it cost to run this place. Many of you were right, but did you ever try yourself? How did you come to that conclusion?

I’ve run a startup myself and I never once vented out what I thought was wrong.

Some of the worst behaviour I ever saw on the Internet has been on this website and yet somehow I still wanted these individuals around because I wanted them to see them succeed because their success was cohost’s success.

This website drove four people to burn out–Tumblr somehow has 2,500 employees I will point out here. Workload and user behaviour definitely played its part in their role in how this website succumbed, but I don’t see it as a failure because they pointed out a huge problem with the Internet: capitalism reigns supreme.

We don’t have good online communities anymore that are accessible. cohost does have accessibility issues I must point out, but its barrier to entry is significantly lower considering it was never really riddled with algorithms such as what is seen on Facebook. The capitalism machine has turned that social media website into a place where some countries cannot share news, people in their 60s respond to AI-generated posts and say it is truth, and selling a video card on the website often requires you to know where the closest CCTV camera is pointed at.

cohost never devolved into a place to post shrimp Jesus and I’d argue it hasn’t devolved at all. It pointed out the problems with running a service on the Internet. In a better timeline, this website would have thrived and many would clamour to have the coolest user names, the coolest CSS crimes, and the best love honk remixes.

cohost was a success because it did cool shit™ and it did shit no other website has ever done.

When this website ceases to permit new posts and is then confined to the Internet Archives, it should be looked at fondly. I want this post to be in the IA and I want people to hate what I have to say. I’ve been on the Internet long enough to not feel bothered by what I am posting here and the responses that it delivers.

When you find your new home on the Internet, remember this: don’t let perfect get in the way of good.

Make whatever your new home is your home. Learn to cultivate what you see and filter out what you do not want. Do not expect others to make their home on the Internet inviting to you, but you should also make good neighbours with those whose gardens have similar flowers as you.

You may not always like everything about your neighbours, but they’ll be there for you when you need your garden appropriately watered while you are not there.

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Promotional image showing a Class 142 railbus somewhere in the Fraser Valley (British Rail)

The theme of Expo 86 was transportation and many, many countries took advantage of the show to demonstrate their developments in this field. Of course, the star of the show was Canada’s SkyTrain, but Japan showed its maglev train, America its cars, and the United Kingdom showed its conventional rail.

Said railbus being transported to Vancouver (Colin Arnot/RRPicturesArchives.NET)

British Rail, the then government corporation behind operation and development of rail transportation in the United Kingdom decided to send one of its Class 142 train sets (aka “Pacer”) diesel trains (dubbed as “railbus”) to tour Metro Vancouver.

They regularly ran service from a temporary station in Abbotsford to New Westminster during the summer months of 1986 along the railway once referred to as the Fraser Valley Line during the BC Electric Railway days.

Railbus parked at the railyards in Strathcona (City of Vancouver Archives)

It did make an appearance near the Expo grounds at Pacific Central and was given a largely lukewarm reception by locals and government officials. The common critique of the train was the one shared by those back in the UK: it was an uncomfortable ride.

Railbus parked in New Westminster (J.W. Booth)

The reasons behind the uncomfortable ride are known: unlike most trains, this was based on a bus made by British Leyland. A rail chassis was fixed to the bus body and then some slight modifications were made to the cab to make it “rail-ready”. Unlike a typical train, the wheels were fixed in place which made them noisy. To add to this, there were only two axels per car unlike the typical four you’d see on other trains including all of the ones used by SkyTrain today, which resulted in a rougher ride.

Railbus parked somewhere in the Fraser Valley (City of Vancouver Archives)

After the summer, the train set was sent back to the UK where it operated on various different services until all Pacers were retired at the end of 2020.

Waking up and seeing this mountain each morning while camping was just excellent.

(Taken just north of Pemberton, British Columbia)