_wire_

It says that smart people are taken in by propaganda, and the reason we know this is because of vigilant even smarter people.

It declares that the Ukraine people are interested in joining NATO because of Russian attacks not the other way around. But since when did the U.S. policy makers seriously care what the Ukrainian people? They don't care what the people of U.S. want!

Why are they making categorical claims about a population at large but picking on 3 influencers?

It's very well understood across all forms of mass media that the primary purpose is to psychically agitate audiences while rendering them passive to policy. This is merely confirmed by the engineering of social media, not a new cause.

There's no honest reckoning that can blame NATO for the Russian invasion, but the U.S was carrying out provocative political moves knowing this must arouse Russian aggression.

Eatern Germany is the line that has defined expansionist policy overall. As to the legalese of international law...

The article's litany of Russian aggression being not limited to NATO includes events before the formation of NATO, and strives to dump the history of two world wars down the memory hole.

Morally, Chomsky would be the first to say that responsibility for events belongs to the predictable consequences of one's own actions. But this article pleas that actually Russia is responsible for U.S. actions to destabilize the region, you know, because freedom!

Regarding arguing for truth in a "post truth world": Sounds like propaganda rules the roost.

As to telling others how to think about democracy, the U.S. really needs to look in the mirror.

Marshall McLuhan was influenced by hemispheric science and Jaynes in his observations about cognition and media.

McLuhan never claimed any theories, he "probed" and free associated to develop the idea that the phonetic alphabet and visual (spatial) continuity led to our cultural bias towards discrete, highly linear thought. He speculated that the work of Euclid could not have appeared without the phonetic alphabet.

McLuhan also proposed a brain hemispheric bias of mental adaptation between the Occident and the Orient: that as electronic media (particularly TV and telephone) was inducing a shift of western adaptation towards the East, the phonetic alphabet and mechanical media (printing press / copy machine) were doing the reverse in the East.

I like the idea of a recent history of human evolution where inner voices were not united as a sense of a common self.

I've heard of a science of bi-lateral hemispheric partitioning in cognition, and a science that the conscious intentional self is not a cause of action but a manifestation of awareness over subconscious agency.

Such science seems at least loosely related to Jayne's speculations.

But I have also heard there's no science of such and that Jaynes views are generally regarded as having been debunked.

Turing never proposed this in his paper...

He wrote:

//If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd.//

Implicit to his observation is the stipulation that the only reference for thought available is what humans do, so he proposed a placeholder test called the imitation game, and proposed criteria for interrogation, including a gender-pertinent test configuration.

And just as salient to the the test is what constitutes a "machine".

Well, this report totally avoids consideration of Turing's test criteria even as it uses his name.

By reducing "thinking" and "machine" to the ordinary meanings of these words and observing humans who interact in thoughtful discourse with the device in a natural way, it looks to me like a generic Turing test was passed by Weisebaum's Eliza (The Doctor) in the 1970s. The conclusion drawn that it's not that difficult to seem human, and we find examples of anthropomorphization all around us.

If you read his paper with attention to tone, Turing might be flabbergasted at the simulation capabilities of today's AI, but he anticipated such a development.

But this report doesn't really consider Turing's test as he proposed it, and seems wholly uninterested in Turings questions about what it means to think and what constitutes a machine.

The ideological aspect at play is that it was known and understood from the start that the temptation was there and a clearly defined as a means.

Someone telling you what they don't want to be may be telling you what they want to be.

Politics is rife with such seeming contradictions. The beauty of power is living beyond your own concerns.

> Don't anthropomorphize the grass cutter. All social structures...

What could be more anthropomorphic than "social structures"? Baffling comment.

It's systems of abstraction and layering that make software engineering possible. Coding is a medium for a given layer of abstraction.

Yet by definition "vibe coding" ignores abstraction and substitutes software engineering for wish fulfillment.

The elephant-sized hazard with vibe coding is "how do I know if my wish is fulfilled?" It should be obvious to the most inexperienced coder that "running code" is not a satisfactory assessment of it's correctness.

However, once you have adopted wish fulfillment as your primary development technique, it seems completely natural to try to resolve problems with borked code made by wishing with fixes made by more wishing.

There's a hackneyed quote from the days of Algol that captures today's sad state of software development: If engineers built buildings the way programmers write programs civilization would be destroyed by a woodpecker.

Although this sage quote was regarded as a cliche around 1990, it's now a definitive comment on the world's most powerful industry.

Based on the preponderance of the news about programming posted on HN, wishful thinking is considered a primary approach and great wave of the future, while discussions about engineering have disappeared.

Not that software engineering ever had much academic representation in silicon valley: there's been an unhealthy confusion of computer science and vendor certification exams with software engineering since the late 1980s.

What's presented here reads like horse whispering.

--

_"New Michael Jackson movie looks lit"_

https://beige.party/@TheBreadmonkey/116605546578502422

Think of the possibilities!

AI whisperer

— Why do we regard a lock that can be opened by any key as a weak lock, but call a key that can open any lock a "master key"?

Everything that presents is another form of presence.

My immediate favorite Mt. St. Helens exploding volcano. Tmr might be person getting sucked into jet-liner engine, or great white shark at a surf beach.

The permit is a license to pollute, but go on:

>> ...and the company has pointed out that ditch samples can pick up contaminants from sources that have nothing to do with Tesla’s wastewater.

Downstream, others are picking up contaminants from a source that has nothing to do with them.

> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.

OK, lovely, glad that's settled.

NEXT!

Consider the inverse of efficiency, with a most extreme dynamic: infinite resource consumption yielding zero production. Operation is impossible, so adoption is zero, obviously.

Otoh, with infinite efficiency all demand can be satisfied and adoption can be unlimited.

It's intuitive that increased efficiency permits greater adoption per unit resource.

So where's the paradox?

Conservation is a wholly separate concern from efficiency.

"You're posting too fast"

Can't AI solve this?

Yes...

"You're posting too fast!"

Insane... Why do you hate AI Speed the f— up!

"You're posting too fast!"

  How happy is the blameless vestal's lot
  The world forgetting, by the world forgot
  Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
  Each pray'r accepted
  And each wish resign'd

Pa-a-a-t-r-i-c-k-k-k!

Whitepages listings? Sounds legit.

I feel one of the beauties of maturation is movement up this ladder of aesthetics, ethics and morality. McLuhan oft remarked that only the artist (in this mature sense) is able to know where he is and society must rely on the artist to be its guide.

> Illustration of thought. It is what most people believe they ask for, when they think "art". Something their brain will approve of, "recognise" as essence

Referring to the brain in the third person is a janky move of exposition. An undead heart is a sign of intellectual zombification.

AI is mechanized thought. Can art be created mechanically?

There's science demonstrating that the part of self awareness that experiences causality of one's own actions is delayed relative to the initiation of the action, along the lines that the initiation of choice and the awareness of choice are reversed, with the awareness lagging the action, even as it feels like the awareness must cause the action.

So there's a temporal gradient in the totality of the human nervous system with respect to attention.

Anyone can experience this directly by trying to listen to what you say as you say it. It is to one's sense of personal causality something like trying to gaze at yourself in a mirror, while hearing a recording of your own voice. Self gets mushy.

A case study for the bullshit asymmetry principle in the form of labor polemic.

What's cuckoo today is the world is made, and it's not just mysterious it's crazy.

The european intellect is looking like a disease, an aberration, like a maladaptation that's chasing itself seeking a correction, except the rectification is just a recursive continuation of the disease.

And there are very good reasons to anticipate that humanity may be exterminated by this pathology.

Painful to find that your capacity to recognize the malaise is the cause of the malaise.

But I have yet to hear any explanation of quantum computing where I feel the experts know what they're talking about.

The one who is sheparding the explanations along the graduations is mattering. If she understands what's going on she has no capacity to explain it.

In the last segment, at the highest level of this presentation, the old expert admits he doesn't understand it.

The routinely repeated explanation is that QC can factor in a way that destroys cryptography, and if this is possible, it's easy to understand why it's being sought.

But year after year, decade after decade, it's always in the future subject to vague criteria.

If someone here can explain QC in 800 words or less, at the level of a thesis like:

"a computer is a device that converts data into information under the control of an algorithm"

please make a presentation and illuminate the world with your insights.

This presentation, like every other presentation I've ever seen, fails at this basic imperative.

And if other presentations have succeeded, why is yet another presentation necessary?

If a machine can copy, why can it not also compose?

If a machine can work, why can it not also play?

If a machine can roll, why can it not also tuck?

If a machine can hammer, why can it not also tong?

If a machine can sew, why can it not also stitch in time to save nine?

If a machine can kidney, why can it not also beans?

If a machine can rumble, why can it not also grumble?

Oh, never mind