MomsAVoxell

If all we ever do is live in fear of someone, somewhere, using AI to end all humanity - then yes, someone, somewhere is going to use AI to end all humanity.

If we instead stop trying to scare ourselves in the darkness, and use AI to bring light into our metaphorical universe then we humans are a bit more useful, after all, to the AI overlords.

The one singularity I want to see, is humans using AI peacefully to improve life and make it more likely to survive.

Thankfully, I see that almost every day now.

What this story needs, is a dog.

You know, the one to keep the computer away from the human.

A nice, friendly dog, good at playing fetch, to get the human out of the room with the computer, and back out into the sunshine.

I’m that dog. Woof. Thanks for letting me use the computer, human.

It’s not sympathy so much with Russia, more of a complete distrust of US-led causes for war.

The US has betrayed a lot of humanity with the catastrophic wars it has fought since 2003. But in Europe, the results are very, very clear: many Europeans actually have the temerity to establish relations with the refugees who have been arriving for decades now, and through that contact, seek to understand that the world is being kept at war needlessly.

Many Western observers tend to miss the fact that there was a period between the end of the cold war and the beginning of the Ukraine conflict where Europeans were kind of glad to have peace in Europe - like actually with Russia being considered a part of the European community, where after years of distrust, peaceful relations between Europe and Russia were actually kind of happening.

This has all gone to /dev/null now, but there is still an unheard/heavily censored group of European citizens - in pretty much all of Europes’ western sphere - who simply would prefer to establish peaceful relations with Russia, and go back to actually flourishing and prospering.

Oh, and ending all wars on the Middle East, so the refugees from the US’ wars can rebuild their countries and go back home. Some day. Maybe.

Of course you won’t hear about them much, but if you pay close attention in the cafes and bars and riverside grills, you will hear them: many Europeans do actually believe in and want peace and simply don’t think the current crop of leaders are capable of it. So they express this not as sympathy with Russia, but as a willingness to effect the political change necessary to avoid catastrophe.

Maybe the conditions of the singularity are not going to be recognized, at first, for having produced new original decisions, and thus thought.

Perhaps it is going to be more like, we will see the singularity predict the future.

While “the model was trained on sessions including the ones in question” is one aspect; ‘the model produced an accurate prediction of future human thought’, I think, is another very interesting facet.

Models predicting future things might be how we see, actually, how we ourselves formulate thought - by saying, in big and small words, ‘something is about to happen’.

>unproven facts

This isn’t a court room. We’re discussing ways by which we humans both succeed and fail at reigning in our creations. The OpenAI kerfuffle is pretty much irrelevant already. Of course AI will fill in the gaps of human thought - it is literally constructed from the stuff, in every squeeze of the curd and whey.

How do you know? You’re not speaking for the Chinese government, are you?

The transition is off-grid.

The technology and the means are there - whats required is the willingness to adopt to the self-powered lifestyle.

Many, many folks have done this - stepped off the grid and live on self-harvested local energy sources - however, the grid is powerful.

It is difficult for entire cities to do away with it so rapidly .. at least until PV harvesting gets a significant order or two cheaper and more efficient…

I think it’s pretty obvious that electric transportation needs to fully adopt integrated energy harvesting. This seems to be an obvious legislative low-hanging fruit.

Gakken made Denshi variants, including one that looks a bit like the Lectron for students in Japan:

https://www.petervis.com/electronics-lab/denshi-block-series...

And:

https://axel.as-1.co.jp/asone/maker/MH17083/

The CHOMPI is a very fun project.. have considered building one myself over the years, but I think I have a bit more motivation to build a FundamentalFrequency LMN-3, which is in a similar form factor but is, imho, a bit more open ended with regards to what it can be used for ..

https://github.com/FundamentalFrequency

Either way the time has come for open source projects of this nature and form factor .. the world tires of overpriced junk from boutique vendors, and wants more DIY music making toys for the kids to rock out ..

Denshi blocks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block

Still got mine, which has a synthesizer module that can be used for interesting experiments.

In Japan the company made professional versions for students - they were a bit bigger and more robust, but the same basic concept.

If we have to look at how October 7 shaped Israeli culture, we also have to look at how all of the dates leading up to October 6 shaped Palestinian culture. How many people were killed in the West Bank on October 6 - does that register, anywhere?

Ever had fresh, wild mountain blueberries? Most delightful snack I’ve had after a 6 hour hike, ever. Get to the right height on the mountainside, see a field of soft low bushes, not really think about it much until I sit down and realize the field is ripe with blueberries.. harvest a tub full, wash them in a mountain spring (that’s another delight everyone should experience), and enjoy one of the greatest snacks under a wide blue sky, ever to be had.

I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.

So, I do it a bit.

I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.

>secret group chat, etc.

I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.

Just a thought, though ..

Yes, that is very real to me, the AI "revolution" is more of a battle between traditional devs trying to replace their managers with AI, and professional managers trying to get rid of the devs the same way. There is a wide degree and scope of knicker-twister'ing in these trenches.

Everyone can write code these days. Trouble is, all code has to be SIL-4 code now, because, human, you will never know if your compiler trusts your AI until you trust your compiler. This rule will be true for decades into the future, I'm willing to wager...

But, ultimately, software has to follow certain rules, or it just doesn't work. Proper workflows - involving review - are needed. Because security is pretty much over, otherwise.

Folks are finding it easier to make their own software now, too - rather than use others. I predict an end to the app stores - or at least, the primary interface is going to end up being "describe the app you want to use today" instead of picking words from a list ..

I am finding this, professionally, not so dramatic - but mostly because the industries in which I've consistently shipped code at scale involve review as a first principle, as in no un-tested, un-reviewed code gets shipped, because: safety critical/realtime requirements and certification specs, say so.

And having AI code to review is no different than any other code that ever was to review, so the review tooling is - as it necessitates - also benefited by lugubrious application of .. more AI. But: all AI is human reviewed.

So it's not a big impact. We just don't ship code that isn't 100% human reviewed, If that's insurmountable: you're doing it wrong. Use AI to make code readable again.

And then, also, put AI back in its box. Don't give devs 100% full-time API access to subscriptions: give them actual hardware to use, to go 100% local.

Local AI is, thus, the best AI, folks. Don't use more than you can run locally, is a great way to keep AI code properly maintainable.

The industry will prove this, itself, sooner or later: If you can't put your AI in its box for safe-keeping, you're doing it wrong, anyway... and should've already learned this practice as a habit, decades ago, vis a vis future-proof tooling... (See also: not logging everything you do with an AI? Big fail.)

Sure, the absolutely intoxicating addiction of Big Metal AI™ is going to put a lot of consumers in a deep, deep pit of Neo-Illiteracy - however: 'good' AI code is actually just good code.

Nice to hear your experience .. I myself have kept pretty much every system I’ve hacked on since 1978 in my personal collection[1] - or at least, where feasible. Anyway, it means about 50 years of computing history in my collection, which .. sooner or later .. I will have to turn over to others to maintain/use/do whatever, off into the future.

The great thing about these machines, actually, is that .. you can always find a new user for an old machine.

The 8-bit systems of today would give the 8-bit users of the decades past, positive conniptions at the mere concept that there are, pretty much every week or so, new releases for these ‘’ancient’’ systems ..

Actually, kids learning computers these days -definitely need to know more about ancient computers- as a positively directed purpose.

So, if you’ve got someone in your life who has the interest, all I can say is - crank out the old machine, turn it on, and do something fun/useful with it.

[1] Disclaimer: 40 years of computing, mostly in working order. Mostly missing the early things I bolted together myself in the outback HAM workshop where I first burned my fingers on building things ..

I too maintain a small fleet of virtualized copies of the silent machines which now still sit on the shelf, unpowered, nevertheless .. there if they are needed.

Vernor Vinge’s works have indeed had a huge impact on the way we think about things, and his immense insight is still extraordinary with every read.

Yamaha’s piano presets are perfectly fine for the intended use case. Have a jam with it, sit it in the mix, you’ll see .. of course it’s not going to be their concert grand ..

I have a couple of Kelly Kettles (portable rocket-stoves), and one is for water and the other is for sand. The sand-filled one is a heat battery - charge it up after boiling some water with the other one, and bring it in the tent to keep things positively toasty.

Its not? Yamaha Reface.

Yes if you do Eurorack you can get a synth system built out of a kind of monthly spend or two in the 100 - 200 range, and have a bit of a play first as you build out your rack.

But you should prepare yourself for a very, very large set of complex inputs and outputs. There must be a design to the spend.

So start virtually first.

You can connect software synths such as VCV Rack, with hardware synths eventually, as you get into the subject - you don't have to spend 600 straight away - unless you just really want hardware.

Go virtual for a while to explore the subject first - then you'll have a bit of an idea of what to spend the cash on, later.

There are tons and tons of free synthesizers that will give you the modular synth experience as well as serving as a playground for personal exploration of the subject.

VCV Rack is great. Use it to work out what to build in a Eurorack system eventually, for example.

A nice $600 Eurorack setup is feasible.

Browse the racks of others (https://modulargrid.net/e/racks) and learn all the basics a bit in advance, building your own setup in VCV Rack as you go ..

You don't have to take 5 months to wire things up.

My holy trinity has long been: a multitimbral synth, a drum machine, a sequencer. Just doing things on a single multitimbral synth, with a separate drum/sequencing paradigm, makes for much fun, e.g. Virus,MachineDrum,QY700 .. okay that's two multitimbral synths, since the QY700 has XG, but yeah its a stonkin' setup that only takes 20 minutes to set up and turn on and warm up ..

Yes, some folks do just get into this subject for the GAS. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) .. but there are also professional reasons to build a new setup every year or so.

How does VCV Rack have a high entry cost?

Put something like a Morphagene in the mix and you don't see patch recall as much of a bother, the timeline of the instrument itself becomes parameterized ...

I use my Eurorack as an extension of the realtime synths and 19"-rack stuff I already have MIDI'ed up and so on. I do think I could put everything I need into Eurorack, eventually. It is extremely versatile.

13 year old me had a box of cassette tapes with index labels like "0 DEBUG", and "10 ASS", and "28 MEMHAK", "30 UNDEL", and so on, where the #'s were the position - on tape - of the little bundle of utilities I would auto-load as soon as I got home from school, while having dinner, etc. I spent days, dreaming of having a ROM burner to put all these things in the last (usable) 16k address space of things ..

I'm guessing you don't still have the machine?

In any case, Apple II simulators might be one way you can take another look at the subject, with wiser old eyes.

Yes, I remember when this happened, it was a bummer .. but taught us the valuable lesson that the hardware manufacturer can give, but also take away. At least it kind of kicked off a tooling market ..

Incidentally, apropos onboard assemblies, in my retro collection I have a Commodore PC running an ancient DOS, and it is unique because of two reasons: it has DEBUG.com, and .. the machine is infected with one of the very early viruses of the era.

So, if you know the right path to take on boot, you can get the virus to infect things, under the debugger, and see it in action.

DEBUG.com was for me, a complete boon of a tool, so to speak, back in the day. It was just enough assembler/debugger to be able to do very effective things.

Anyway, Z80 REPL is delightful, I want a 6502 REPL now, and can't stop thinking about how to get one on the Atmos..

Use swap for the important things: the part of your operating system at run time which doesn't get used much, but needs to be around when needed - the contents of /lib and /usr/lib and so on, all the *.so's and the things they allocate - shared libraries among the distro install, these things can be tidily swapped, until you need it.

If you need an application to always be responsive, start it with the swappable flag turned off, i.e. something like this:

    $ systemd-run --user --scope \
    -p MemorySwapMax=0 \
    -- /path/to/my/program arg1 arg2

Anyway, this is a distro-originated knob which every user must tweak for their use-case.

Your distro may vary on the policies around this, but the way the stack generally works, is that whatever shared libraries, and their memory resources, which haven't been touched in a while, are put into swap. So if you've run a few programs, left them open or whatever, switched the UI to other things and whatever over a period of a day, or even a few hours/minutes (its a knob), then bits of those programs will have gone cold. The local libraries and static things that haven't been executed - in a while - will move into that qualification.

You can tweak this, it is indeed a local-system configuration thing that a Linux user should know and think about - and maybe - if your distro has such a thing as a policy about it - this ought to be considered as well.

For example, I use Ubuntu Studio, precisely because it is generally well set up, swap-wise, to absolutely not interfere with audio performance (note: this DAW has been rock solid for decades) .. but every distro has its own 'medium ground' to consider when setting this.

The thesis/antithesis for/against swap is un-useful. Swap is a knob, not a switch.

No sorry, its not a broken idea: throughput über alles is true of high-throughput-demanding systems, but latency matters is also true, for latency-demanding systems, and the two use cases represent - in an industrial sense - a very vast array of values. It's not really either/or - you are indeed identifying a knob that needs to be turned, in your particular use-case, on your particular system. There is no one-size fits all: it's a knob.