Amazon Cage Patent

US9280157B2: System and method for transporting personnel within an active workspace:

Always mount a scratch monkey.

The patent represents an extraordinary illustration of worker alienation, a stark moment in the relationship between humans and machines.

It depicts a metal cage intended for the worker, equipped with different cybernetic add-ons, that can be moved through a warehouse by the same motorized system that shifts shelves filled with merchandise. Here, the worker becomes a part of a machinic ballet, held upright in a cage which dictates and constrains their movement.

As we have seen time and time again in the research for our map, dystopian futures are built upon the unevenly distributed dystopian regimes of the past and present, scattered through an array of production chains for modern technical devices. The vanishingly few at the top of the fractal pyramid of value extraction live in extraordinary wealth and comfort. But the majority of the pyramids are made from the dark tunnels of mines, radioactive waste lakes, discarded shipping containers, and corporate factory dormitories.

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Magnetic Force

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WebSockets

I've been playing around with WebSockets. Apparently they're the new hotness. They're basically a distributed whiteboard, think of them as a realtime command-and-control IRC channel that you can access from Javascript.

But since this is the Stupidest Timeline, the received wisdom for how you spin up a WebSocket server involves installing libraries that will pull in 100k lines of code from whatever the singing-est dancing-est toolkit du jour is, and do you have time to audit that crap? I don't. All this just to let you burp out literally 20 lines of on-the-wire protocol.

Enter Net::WebSocket::Server, which gets my vote. It's tiny and very low level. The documentation was confusing and functional examples nonexistent. However, I eventually figured out how to make it go, and so now you can too:

  • dna-websock.pl -- It runs separate rooms for each "path" part of the wss: URL. You have access to cookies, so you can plug in your authentication mechanism that way.

  • websock-post.pl -- It lets you connect, post a notification, disconnect; or sit there and wait for a response for a little while.

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Clouston Self-Propelled Tree Shaver

"It was tricky, but..."

If, like me, you are wondering "but why would you do this?" the answer (per the patent) appears to be "more valuable lumber, and fire suppression".

So that's all well and good, and that's a soothing video over there, mercifully silent as it is, but if you want to see footage of a SCREAMING JUDDERING NIGHTMARE MACHINE that makes you ask WHY DID YOU GIVE THE ROBOT A CHAINSAW then you should watch this video instead.

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