In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today's tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas -- often the parts that were meant as warnings -- and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales to avoid. "The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry. "Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical -- dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us." Here's an excerpt from the report: You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school. The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie "Idiocracy," America loved a show called "Ow! My Balls!" in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. "Robocop" imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. "The Running Man" had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn't feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.

The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Atari has announced yet another retro console revival, but this time it's launching hardware from an old competitor.

Atari and Plaion, a company that develops, publishes, and distributes games, have collaborated on the new Intellivision Sprint that blends '80s console aesthetics with modern gaming conveniences. It's a new take on Mattel's Intellivision, which initially went head-to-head with the Atari 2600 when it was released in 1979.

The $150 Sprint looks a lot like the original Intellivision with a gold and black case and a wood-grain panel on the front, but there are a lot fewer cables. It connects to a TV using a single HDMI cable, and while it still includes two controllers featuring dials and number pads instead of joysticks, they're both wireless and charge when docked to the console.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: Craigslist emerged in 1995 to connect strangers through a free, web-based platform that has endured as rivals services like Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and countless dating apps emerged with advanced features and slick interfaces. These platforms survive on advertising and subscription revenue. Craigslist, of course, has none of that. Over the years, the OG online marketplace has all but refused to modernize; its mobile app only came out in 2019 after nearly 25 years in business. Why does the website still look the same after so many decades? That was the main question I had when I sat down for a video call with craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who joined me from the New York City apartment he shares with his wife, Eileen Whelpley.

Newmark stepped down as CEO of craigslist in 2000 after others told him he wasn't cut out for management, he says. Jim Buckmaster has been at the helm since, though Newmark remains a partial owner. He now works on philanthropy full time, supporting groups like the Coalition Against Online Violence, which helps combat harassment against female journalists. Still, the 69-year-old entrepreneur is a billionaire (or near-billionaire since he's given away millions). Our chat yielded much more than expected, from Costco hotdogs to Hello Kitty and his childhood Sunday School lessons. It's clear that the website is the purest and most enduring expression of Craig Newmark, a humble tech mogul who marches to the beat of his own drum. Here's what Newmark had to say when asked about the site's appearance:

Why does the website still look the pretty much the same today as when you founded it? There's even a new CEO. What's going on?
Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.

Well, you can still have simplicity with a modern font or a new UI. The definition of simplicity on the web has changed over the years. Is it just that you're making enough money and there's a desire to keep it the way it is?
I'll challenge the premise that the idea of simplicity has changed. The deal is that people still use the site in great numbers. And again, it helps people get something done. It's fast and easy for people, and that's a big deal.

And maybe you also don't care too much about aesthetics (of the website, for example)?
For me as an engineer, simple as beautiful. Functional is beautiful.

How would you feel if craigslist dramatically changed in its appearance or its function?
I'm okay if the spirit is maintained. I like a very simple site with its use and functionality obvious when you look at it. Now maybe there's a better way to do that, that no one has come up with yet. If it's really better, I can't object to that. If it's genuinely better, I will say something. But again, I can't legitimately try to exert serious influence. Jim's boss.

In summary, what is your most concise answer to why craigslist still looks the same today?
People tell me it gets the job done. They want it done. As I like to put it, a nerd's got to do what a nerd's got to do.

Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to "explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level," according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can not only surpass all human knowledge of chess, but also "allow us to reimagine the game as we know it...."

"For example, the 'castling' move was only introduced in its current form in the 17th century. What would chess have been like had castling not been incorporated into the rules?"

AfterAlphaZero was trained to play 9 different "variants" of chess, it then played 11,000 games against itself, while the researchers assessed things like the number of stalemates and how often the special new moves were actually used. The variations tested:

- Castling is no longer allowed
- Castling is only allowed after the 10th move
- Pawns can only move one square
- Stalemates are a win for the attacking side (rather than a draw)
- Pawns have the option of moving two squares on any turn (and can also be captured en passant if they do)
- Pawns have the option of moving two squares -- but only when they're in the second or third row of squares. (After which they can be captured en passant )
- Pawns can move backwards (except from their starting square).
- Pawns can also move sideways by one square.
- It's possible to capture your own pieces.


"The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess."

AlphaZero's ability to continually improve its understanding of the game, and reach superhuman playing strength in classical chess and Go, lends itself to the question of assessing chess variants and potential variants of other board games in the future. Provided only with the implementation of the rules, it is possible to effectively simulate decades of human experience in a day, opening a window into top-level play of each variant. In doing so, computer chess completes the circle, from the early days of pitting man vs. machine to a collaborative present of man with machine, where AI can empower players to explore what chess is and what it could become....

The combination of human curiosity and a powerful reinforcement learning system allowed us to reimagine what chess would have looked like if history had taken a slightly different course. When the statistical properties of top-level AlphaZero games are compared to classical chess, a number of more decisive variants appear, without impacting the diversity of plausible options available to a player....

Taken together, the statistical properties and aesthetics provide evidence that some variants would lead to games that are at least as engaging as classical chess. "Chess's role in artificial intelligence research is far from over..." their article concludes, arguing that AI "can provide the evidence to take reimagining to reality."

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

"Are you old enough to remember when laptops had removable batteries?" asks CNET. "Frustrated by mainstream laptops with memory soldered to the motherboard and therefore not upgradable?"

"The 13.5-inch Framework Laptop taps into that nostalgia, addressing one of the biggest drawbacks in modern laptops as part of the right-to-repair movement. It was designed from the ground up to be as customizable, upgradable and repairable as technologically possible... and boy does it deliver." It features four expansion card slots, slide-in modules that snap into USB-C connectors, socketed storage and RAM, a replaceable mainboard module with fixed CPU and fan, battery, screen, keyboard and more. It's a design that makes the parts easy to access, all while delivering solid performance at competitive prices and without sacrificing aesthetics.

The laptop's in preorder now for the U.S. and Canada, slated to ship in small batches depending upon the configuration. Core i7-based systems are expected to go out in August, while Core i5 systems won't be available until September. Prices for the Framework Laptop start at $999 for the prefab Core i5-1135G7 model with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD, $1,399 for the Core i7-1165G7 Performance model with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage or a vPro Core i7-1185G7 Professional model with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage. Framework expects to expand into new regions by the end of the year; $999 converts to roughly £730 or AU$1,360... The DIY model adds Linux to the list of operating systems you can install, and doesn't restrict Windows Pro to the vPro model...

With the Framework, in addition to the ports you can swap out the mainboard, touchpad, keyboard, speakers, battery... anything you can think of. Don't feel like doing it yourself? Framework is publishing all the information necessary for a repair shop or IT department to not just swap parts, but to perform repairs... Nothing is buried under other parts, so everything's easy to get to. Each Framework part has a QR code and short URL to take you to all the info you'll need about it and the labels on the standard parts (memory and SSD) are easy to read.
Or, as Engadget puts it, the laptop is "designed, from the get-go, to be modular and repairable by every one of its users." Created by Nirav Patel, formerly of Oculus, the machine aims to demonstrate that there is a better, more sustainable way of doing things. It shouldn't be that, if your tech fails, you either have to buy a new model, or let the manufacturer's in-house repair teams charge $700 for a job that should've cost $50 . After all, if we're going to survive climate change, we need to treat our tech more sustainably and keep as much as possible out of the landfill...

The Framework laptop is equipped with a 1080p, 60fps webcam with an 80-degree field of view, and it's one of the best built-in webcams I've seen.
PCWorld calls it "the ultimate Right to Repair laptop."

A few weeks ago you had the chance to ask Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan about programming and their upcoming book, The Go Programming Language (available as an eBook Friday the 20th). Below you'll find their answers to your questions.

John Cowan recently gave a talk on the progress of R7RS (slides), the next revision of the Scheme language standard, at LispNYC. After the R6RS debacle, the community stepped back and is now basing the next standard on R5RS; the work has been split into two languages — R7RS-Small and R7RS-Large. The first working group is preparing to issue a final draft of the R7RS-Small language (PDF; clocking in at 73 pages vs. R5RS's 50) within the next few weeks. Read on for a summary of the planned changes to R7RS (more or less in the order of presentation).

An anonymous reader tips a post from Pascal Eggert, a gun enthusiast and Crytek developer, who sheds some light on how weaponry in modern shooters is designed. Quoting: "Guns in games are like guns in movies: it is all about looks, sounds and clichés. Just like in the movies, games have established a certain perception of weapons in the mind of the public and just like in movies games get almost everything wrong. ... The fact is that we are not trying to simulate reality but are creating products to provide entertainment. ... if you want to replicate the looks of something you need to at least see it, but using it is even better. You should hold a gun in your hands, fire it and reload it to understand what does what — and at that point you will realize, there is nothing on it that does not have a function — because guns are tools for professionals. Lot of weapon designers in the game industry get that wrong. They think of guns like products for consumers or magic devices that kill people at a distance when really it's just a simple and elegant mechanism that propels little pieces of metal. Unfortunately 3D artists often only get access to the photos that Google Image Search comes up with if you enter 'future assault rifle' or, even worse, pictures from other games and movies that also got it wrong. This may explain a lot of common visual mistakes in games, especially since guns are mostly photographed from the side and egoshooters show weapons from the first person view." This article is drawn from his personal experience in the game industry. The images shown are Pascal's personal work and are not related to his work at Crytek.

It would be an understatement to say that Nintendo's signature character, the shell-stomping princess-saving Mario, needs no introduction. He's a world-wide phenomenon and has appeared in enough game spin-offs to spawn a genre of his own. The title that just keeps coming back, though, is Mario Kart. The irreverent and addictive combat racing gameplay is just as enjoyable today on Nintendo's Dual-Screen wonderkind as it was on the SNES. Read on for my impressions of another powerhouse title featuring the mustachioed multitalented plumber.

The H1-B visa program allows many thousands of non-American technical workers (about half a million at the moment) to hold jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the U.S. -- jobs which are seemingly difficult to fill from the American labor pool for a variety of reasons, and which are eagerly filled by employers who find that qualified, talented people come from countries all over the world. N. Sivakumar's first-person account of being an Indian programmer working for companies in several U.S. states over the past decade illustrates a side of the H1-B system that doesn't get talked about much: the experience of skilled, highly educated workers taking jobs in an environment that offers, besides welcome employment, various levels of hostility and resentment. Read on for my review of his book, Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, Did I Steal Your Job?

Joanne Pransky's tongue is firmly in her cheek a fair amount of the time as she answers your questions, but much of what she says is thought-provoking, especially in light of speculations like Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays about the inevitable spread of robotic devices in our society.

Kent M. Pitman has already given you his first 11 answers to the questions you asked him about Lisp, Scheme, the creation of programming standards, and much more -- below are his answers to another eight (starting with answer #12). Thanks again, Kent.