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Clever title

Uncalled for riff on the synopsis:

The conundrum of forgetting comes seems to come down to a gradient of persistence, whereby new stimulus prevails over memories.

If it didn't, the organism sensorium would be a captive to memories, which once noted seems like an obviously maladaptive dynamic.

Resolved: Perfect memory would preclude your sensory awareness...

So the next question is why does the gradient of persistence have such a shape / slope?

The dynamic of knowing vs. perceiving looks like some tradeoff over persistence and speed of access (a la caching).

Are memories something like deferred stimuli?

Thought must be some other domain within this gradient, subject to other dynamics?

What structures of the blob of protoplasm which is the brain manifest as Euclidian geometry, phonetic language / alphabet, and Turing machines? How does something so mushy give rise to such rigidity... which in turn bizarrely can model mushiness. Almost like an error condition.

Stimulating, guess will have to read the paper!

AI boosters can help the world make better use of this tech by turning away come anthropomorphisms, such as the term "discover", which implies human agency, curiosity, and intellect, towards functionalisms, such as the term "uncover" which is a mechanical act.

It's a fact that AI is a tool and whatever it may do, it's under human guidance at the top level of control.

It's a common strong matter of opinion that were it possible to create sentient devices, it would be a crime to do so.

Anthropomorphisation is cartoonish, commonly borne of childish naiveté.

Such affectation is not appropriate in domains where life and livelihoods are at stake.

Computer security has been a nightmare since the advent of the Harvard architecture, due to stipulated indistinguishability of data and code.

AI architecture is extending this epic hazard towards infinity and beyond, where the construct of the prompt is hopelessly open-ended metadata over which security is meaningless, and agents, built on rusting perforated stacks, are prompting each other to do good knows what. No good is going to come of this.

So saying AI is "discovering" zero-days is cartoonishly tragic: AI is the right tool for the job; this work will never be done due to poor foundational designs.

One path back from the edge abyss is to drop the casual anthropomorphisms and at show a little more seriousness about chiding the path forward.

"Earned autonomy"...

These kinds of pareidolic, co-dependent projections emitted by today's AI cognoscenti will be studied a hundred years from now for clues about how the advent of television skrod a republic starting with Nixon and ending in Trump.

A McDonalds cheeseburger is what it was in 1948 in name only.

The word decline in this headline is utterly ambiguous.

- Hot and cold tenps lowered

- Hot lowered and cold rose

- Extremes were less significant

- Extremes were more spikey

Then there's the nonsense figure of speech "US climate sees"

Finally, what's significant about 1899?

When a headline invokes a litany of questions that confuse or betray it, you've encountered clickbait noise.

Try inverting the argument: The current valuation is a continuation and acceleration of epic investment fraud.

To counter this point, someone has to show literal productivity gains from this tech that greatly exceed the valuation of Anthropic.

But what is productive about synthetically generated media?

If you are in the c-suite for today's most valuable companies, your entire enterprise valuation is based on confusion of media with production of tangible wealth. Moreover, you don't want this distinction to be sorted out because your valuation collapses. So you don't actually know what's real.

This's the deep, yawning, cavernous nature of the fraud.

BTW, whatever happened to NFTs.

When valuation comes out of nothing and manifests as nothing, it can puff away and not be missed, because it was never really there.

Upside is server chips may be completely free within a couple of years.

Looking at this demo, my gestalt is of answers to begged questions superimposed into a hyper Warner Bros Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

What it demonstrates is that genAI is getting ever more powerful at emitting stuff that looks like other stuff, but the uncanny valley is deepening with each step, where now the Coyote has run off the edge of the void cliff, but isn't yet falling because he hasn't yet realized he's run off the edge.

On this forum, I routinely see the question "So what is AI doing that's real work"? The answer can't be "passing the otter test...", can it?!

When the writeup claims "I would have been very happy if this paper was the outcome of a 2nd year PhD project" my heart sinks and how meaningless doctoral work must be to say this without irony.

By the way, that harbor town model is not "beautiful" unless you think that any image with a color scheme of complementary gradients is beautiful.

As to the observation that this appliance will be great for making Powerpoint presentations...

(Zzzz --Huh? Oh is the presentation over? let's go to the pub!)

This story is insane.

Author seems to have demurred to the networking opportunity of a lifetime.

He already understood Bezos as surrounded by those who want something from him: join the club! At least make sure Bezos and the gang know your name and your interests.

You can sprain a joint or get hives anywhere with anyone.

As you what was "learned"... what was learned? The rhetoric on Besoz might fit perfectly, and might be true, but it's invented context, not the consequence of some intimate moment with the man.

He probably ran away from the greeting because first and foremost he's on the spectrum with social moments, he's got nothing in common with the author, and the author's wife's injury set outside of any meaningful interpersonal moment looks to Bezos like a lawsuit and a settlement to a man who is notoriously not socially gifted.

As to the obscenely rich living in a world of few consequences, the quote from Trump sets the bounds of empathy: these people live in fear of their privilege, in which their lives are utterly dependent on a network of slavish others, they see everything is at the same level of distant (sur)reality, and they know they are becoming decrepit and will die.

When "everything is free" all you have is your ego, and that's a fragile rung on the social ladder to hang from.

"Why am I here?"

Isn't this the essential human pathos, affecting everyone, big ego and small?

The author didn't even bother to ask.

From the outset the term slop implied there's a quality range, and that it's subject to manner of application.

Jesus H. F-- Christ

comment tl;dr AI is sending us to hell, but maybe there's air-conditioning down there.

--

Sony news must be seen as incidental to a bigger movement in business.

26 years ago the corps would have fought this age thing tooth & nail, as a heinous government intrusion into their business practices and customer privacy without any clear social justification.

Then Facebook and Google showed that the public opinion can be directly monitored and controlled given sufficient surveillance and service capture, making these companies obscenely rich and politically powerful.

Now AI is set to expand this control and power by an order of magnitude.

All today's corps are pushing ahead of the age mandates because with AI they have the means to marry personal identification with the leverage of AI for exfiltration and integration of data over an ever-expanding range of population details, per service, per user, per page, per datum, across all services.

By placing networked AI agent within apps, they get behind the users' firewalls, where the agents can surveil from the position of the user's privilege across the entire spread of service consumption.

The AI-outfitted service provider can create a vise that continuously squeezes users via dark patterns from the outside while monitoring their reactions from the inside, all with a cybernetic dynamism.

Users can now be grafted onto services and guided in their behaviors with adaptive power and precision from cradle to grave.

We know all companies are pursuing this as the AI corps are going all out to build Sorcerer's Apprentice bucket brigade data-centers (paid for by service providers) at the enormous scale required to "serve" everybody in every business sector.

It's also obvious that if you have the power to haul in liquid data drawn up by AI from the deep well of the most personal, individual, intersectional information about users across all services, you will use that data to steer users towards dependent relationships with preferred providers.

To say that corps are striving to deploy the great eye of Sauron is not a hyperbolic analogy. It's a race to build the biggest most complete panopticon and lock everyone within it.

In a sense-- as difficult as this is to admit-- all the QAnon imbecilic raving about Bill Gates enslaving the world by putting microscopic RFID chips in vaccines is oddly true, but it's not being done with vaccines and RFID chips. It's oddly true in the same way that it's now known that there's a long-running elite cabal that been exploiting and consuming children for its own greed and pleasure, even though it wasn't literally running from pizza parlor basements, nor killing babies and harvesting their skin for beauty products.

Moreover, under Trump, the U.S. has made it crystal clear that it's a matter of national policy that the individual's freedom and independence are meaningless if you don't get along with Big Brother: you will be cast out, made homeless, deported and murdered.

You might think you'll get lucky add come out ahead, but just because your fate is seemingly randomly determinate to inscrutable factors aggregated to something like a social credit score, doesn't imply any inherent liberty to prevail under tyranny.

Through war, the U.S. has also made it clear that human life is worthless before the dictates of property.

So in a perverse inversion of the 20th century American ideal of freedom, every U.S. inhabitant is now implicitly also a something like an Iranian, existing as a superposition between free and coerced in the sense of something like Schrödinger's cat: It's a question of will the box you exist within be opened, thus fixing your status.

As dangerous as this era is becoming for all proles, it might be even more so for the very entitled class running this new AI paradigm. As they enjoy heretofore unheard of special rules, favors, and benefits from being executives and managers, they also exist within the panopticon, which can revoke their privileges at a moments notice.

To see this already in force, just look at overall business trends today as companies extract life essence from highly skilled workers-- who 25 years ago were themselves elites-- then firing them in order to give bonuses to "owners" and their executives.

Finance and the silicon valley set seem to sit well above the greater workforce, but they are as just as subject to being priced out of the neighborhood, imprisoned on an industrial scale, deported without recourse, drafted, and bombed to smithereens by the market or a kooky edict issued under this Federal administration's cheesily gilt facade of "power" and "prestige". The executive top side of this diabolical new AI era might even be most vulnerable to its control and machinations; a panopticon is inherently hazardous for its guards, who incarcerate themselves believing they have gained the ultimate control over the facility.

But maybe it's not all dread. For such reasons, and as is commonly the case for nature's ineluctable points of punctuation to any dynamic equilibrium, there's at least a dim prospect of surprising upsides for society in this new AI era. I just can't quite imagine what these might be...

Therefore Artemis is a vanity project. Call it science if you think extraordinarily convoluted and expensive confirmation of obvious human limits is science; if you think extreme sports are science.

To betray Sun-ra, 'space is not the place'.

We're not fit for space: there's nothing out there that's appropriate or suitable for our organism. The scale of space is absurd and insurmountable to our physics.

If by some apocalypse we could overcome these limits, to do so would be to betray our humanity; escape from human limits is implicitly beyond our scope. This contradiction is unavoidable.

If the ambition is to become not-human, we're much more likely to escape ourselves by careless environmental destruction.

And this observation exposes a fundamental inconsistency of any fantasy about an extraterrestrial evolution from a dying Earth: if we can't make it here on Earth, the planet of pre-conditions so favorable to our species such as to be the cradle of all life and giving rise to us, how do we survive in space under conditions infinitely less favorable to our organism? The conjecture that we will build it suit is insane.

This is all very well studied and understood: we are not grown from our own intentions; we do arise by any logic of causes and effects; the mind is emergent, not foundational. We don't live because we intend to, we live because we can.

A man that thinks his brain is in charge of his existence is a man with a brain that will soon be knocked off the pedestal of his own two feet.

This is why the Apollo missions ended with further exploration and studies application of telemetry and satellites.

Artemis is bulshittery-- unless it's regarded purely as an art project. But the physics are so risky it's like staging a dance performance of controlled self-immolation.

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This move to 2FA and phone mobile numbers is not about protecting users of central services, it's about protecting the corporations that run the central services. Individual users are a liability to central services. They are only important in the aggregate. These policies move risk around with indifference to the welfare of users (I don't say customer because the user is typically the product) in order to reduce risk for the service. Try thinking about mitigated risk like trying to keep things clean: you can't get rid of dirt you can only push it around. As a design can sometimes come from a clean slate, it's possible to keep things clean with good design. But the motivation of business is not hygiene, it's profit.

There's no need to separate; it would be an intellectual error to do so: terrorism is endemic to U.S. culture; the nation is founded on it and has doubled and redoubled its commitments to terrorism at every juncture of history.

This makes "scary" a fine word for the headline.

Another episode of AI psychiatrist:

- Please make yourself comfortable on this virtual couch and tell me about your problem...

- We've chosen AI for its deep knowledge and universal capability, yet it's sadly incompetent and delusional requiring constant supervision.

- And how is it trained?

- It's trained on all recorded human activity.

- I see...

...The art of effective AI is not in seeking solutions, but incanting the right prompts.

Let's meet again tomorrow.

That will be $50,000 in tokens

Painfully exhausting dictums... So much needs to be relearned every generation. If you're not tired of this stuff you're too inexperienced to be making such pronouncements.

If only AIs were managing the company... Problem solved!

It's a constant complaint from ex-Republicans that Israel controls the U.S. gov. and has a degree of truth, but not because there's a direct linear relationship between Israel and U.S. politics.

The first order of complexity is that control of petroleum in mid-east has been central to U.S. expansionism. Israel is foremost a proxy for this control.

The second order is that Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy was designed to help Republicans take votes from Democrats by hitching a wagon to the potent ideological forces of bigotry and religiosity of the post-Reconstruction southern vibe. This gambit required a delicate balancing act of racism, religion, progressive policy, and business which by 2000 fully manifest as antisemitic pro-Zionism. By promoting Israel as a reservation for Jews, the U.S. pride in conquest of the WW2 Axis could be channeled into the Jewish lobby, with no complaint from leaders of Christian fundamentalists, who built an ideological bulwark that all at once would let them: project divine compassion for the refugees victims of holocaust in terms of the rugged individualism of U.S. frontier settlers, assuage white bigotry by sending Jews them to a homeland that just so happens to be far, far away, and setting the ideological stage for the Second Coming, where Christian ex-pats would help settle modern Israel and later be on the frontline of Biblical Armageddon with God expunging semites of all stripes.

Israel has been ideologically calculated to continuously deliver on all these fronts and the results are stunningly successful for keep Republicans in the political game, when their policies are deeply antagonistic to the needs and wishes of an increasingly secular U.S. electorate.

If you listen to Republican strategists since the time of Nixon, they are clear that they design political dogma and take every possible step to secure and manage these forces across the electorate. And it pays very well.

Trump is the acme of this project: a corrupt, narcissistic, delusional blowhard who beats the electorate over the head with the bully pulpit, and sows so much confusion so fast that it's impossible to counter him politically. As his greed makes him he's incredibly easy to feed, and his debauchery is a continual scandal, the great colonial project of the U.S. can proceed with no internal resistance.

Israel is secure in this arrangement as long as U.S. can generate a steady supply of tribal ragheads to act as a foil for complete carving by Western business. When Trump says we're just taking the Iranian oil, he's not being hyperbolic.

The job of total conquest is nearly done, requiring one or two more generations to complete. While justification for this project relies on cultivation of Arab adversaries, they are become ever fewer as colonialism advances, so there's a countdown to the end of the project.

This looming end can be seen in today's news of Iranian tactics: when your tribal adversary fights back using your AI and your toys (Legos) as a centerpiece of its propaganda regime, the end of an era is nigh. Israel must now lurch beyond the memory of the holocaust to justify its policies and secure its place in history.

This means it's time to finish up and eliminate the last remnants of the indigenous tribes of Persia in the Mandate. And when this is complete, there will be no need for further direct aid as the occupation of the Mandate is synchronous with the entire mideast being assimilated into the "world order" (this is a reference to a comment made today by China's Xi).

Assuming your premise is meaningful, which is a stretch, if you find yourself in an age where you expect anything you dream up to be replicated, then isn't your onus to dream up the world as you want it to be? Are you wary of such power, or is your premise false?

Largely greek to me... But the assertion that any of this is about "consciousness" reads click-bait.

There's an incredibly big difference between any electronic computer and a brain: parallelism.

The computer is essentially a sequential device; only a very small portion of the machine's state is changing in parallel. Its cycle frequency is extremely high, several billions of Hz, but it's a few sequential processing units iterating over memory through tiny windows. Even the most powerful computer's parallelism on the order low 10^x where x < 9. For a desktop computer x < 3. So no matter that your neutral net is big and deep, it's being run with very little simultaneity of neuronal activations. This is fine for LLMs as the output is a low frequency stream of digits.

A nervous system (brain) is running with very high parallelism: all of its neurons are running in parallel. Its cycling frequency is low, say 10^2 Hz.

Further, there's a universe of difference in system complexity between biological systems and electronic systems. For example, there's no reported case of a brain conscious without a body, and the bodies are fundamentally not comparable to electronic computers in principle of operation, so it's absurd to simplify a nervous system to an equivalent neural net. For example, there is no principle allowing an electronic computer to manifest a child of itself by self-replication of one of its circuits. The term mitosis can't be applied to any aspect of a computers assembly.

Then there's the fact that biological neurons have elaborate substructures that allow for many orders of magnitude further complexity, and conjecture that quantum effects within these substructures may play a role in what cognitive science half-jokingly call the "bing" of conscious manifestation.

So this article presents a very convincing measurement of a property of consciousness if you are comfortable ignoring basically everything about computers and biology and smashing your view, reductio ad absurdum, down to a contrived definition called "Phi".

Idle Words - Argentina on Two Steaks a Day

https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day....

Tedious nattering:

When a computer is used v to simulate any process, it's never the case that the computer creates a world inside that contains the process.

When you experience a TV show or vid game, this isn't occurring because little people are living in a world inside the machine, any moreso than a seeing your own image in a mirror is an encounter with a duplicate mirror version of yourself.

Nick Bostrom screwed with the minds of an entire generation by conflating simulation with re-creation.

Can a headline more perfectly capture the racket that is the U.S. stock market?

Alpine hiking is a strenuous (by today's standards) and hazardous activity that requires some preparation, is done in relative isolation, demands collaboration from partners, and must be seen-through once started.

It's also sometimes confused by the initiated but perky partners with merely taking a long walk.

These features add-up to a test that may break any relationship.

When the discomfort of the exertion is regarded alongside the common tendencies of co-dependency which attend couples, such as dominance and submission, domestic friction, control issues, boundary issues, resentments, and neuroses are mixed with physical stress disorientation, fatigue, exposure and/or confusion/fear/anger, the challenge might become mortal for the relationship.

The risk is attenuated by couple's typical tendencies towards group-think: over-familiarity and dismissiveness, co-joined planning and reactions, emotionalism, unresolved bones of contention and/or sequestered stresses/alienations that distort a merely risky situation into a life-threatening one.

In more basic terms, undertaking an unguided travel challenge with a mate will lead to trenchant discovery of one's interpersonal limits, and this may include a relationship apocalypse. Such activities are a good test between amorous partners who are considered marriage: if you get along well during an ordeal, you may have what it takes to make a life together. If you don't get along through an ordeal, that's good to know early so you don't overcommit.

The moon missions taught us: There's no place like home

But why is NASA rehashing this 60 years after the fact?

1969: Rocks... We got rocks!

2026: We orbited rocks!

Congrats, dipshits

Babbling

Hypernormalisation - A. Curtis (2h46m)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dUhVN0UpyH4

//[a story of how] governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex real world and instead established a simpler fake world for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. The film was released on 16 October 2016//

Curtis' signature style is to propose a thesis and develop it entirely via BBC News video archive segments arranged as an impressionistic, editorial montage. The news segments are bound together by V.O. (or text) narrative, and punctuated by a soundtrack of esoteric pop music to impose a personal perspective and stimulate a gestalt critique.

Curtis' impressionistic style follows an approach popularized by H. Marshall McLuhan that McLuhan termed "probes" and gestalt, which combines the classically Greek intellectual features of the trivium with the tactile sensitivities of an artist to find a whole out of parts.

The probe approach allows an interlocutor to transcend rational (Aristotelian) thought without abdicating the powerful tools of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The intellectual gesture utilized is Hegelian "aufheben": the transcendence of contradictions (thesis vs. antithesis) through a lifting-up into a higher order that accounts for the conflict and places the antagonistic precepts into a position of reconciliation (synthesis).

Gestalt is the human capacity to perform aufheben over the entire range of our sensorium and thus perceive a whole that is at once made of parts and greater than the parts.

Cutis applies a probe / gestalt approach with the BBC news archive to develop a thesis that although subject to the tribal zeitgeist of 20th century electronic media, lifts the news artifacts into a synthesis of a theory of corporate political power. His quandary is democratic. He states this in the form of a quote from David Graeber: "The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently"

Curtis' is sometimes derided or dismissed as manipulative for his artistic approach, under an observation that propaganda works on the same probe and gestalt principles, but this isn't a serious criticism because the sociological pathos being examined (in this case a question begged by the thesis of hypernormalization) is ideological by nature, and if a more rigorous linear comprehensioned had generated the sociological features under examination, there should have been be no pathos to examine.

Curtis is aware that the creation of (fake) reality is both the social malaise and its cure.

For example, the fact that Newton's celestial mechanics are incomplete according to relativistic and quantum features doesn't preclude a manned moon mission organized according to Newton's laws. But did Artemis really get to the moon?!

The late social critic Mark Fisher, who coined the term "capitalist realism", applied critical theory and post-modernist philosophy to create influential analysis adjacent to Curtis. Fisher also nodded to esoteric TV and pop music to amplify points about corporate ideology and lifestyles, and routinely evoked personal anecdotes about his own work life as probes.

See:

Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia - Jonas Čeika (11m)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg

The suggestion that "hires" won't be human is so offensive; the greatest hazard of AI is the continuing of a 500-year program of chattel enslavement of people. But go ahead, but your little menagerie a virtual pizza party and tell them how important they are to your firm's success— "Our most important asset is our..." robots.