tikwidd

This is great, congrats for shipping. It also reminds me a bit of Padlet in that there is no freehand drawing and the focus is more around connections between objects. Maybe it would be better to describe it as a corkboard or pinboard.

I do have some layout issues in Chrome, y is overflowing so I get two y-scrollbars.

The ROC also 'vows reunification' with the Chinese mainland. It's a standard line in the One China diplomatic framework which both states follow.

Edit: can we get the title changed to "Xi vows 'peaceful reunification' with Taiwan"? This better reflects the content of the article:

  BEIJING, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed on Saturday to achieve "peaceful reunification" with Taiwan, and did not directly mention the use of force after a week of tensions with the Chinese-claimed island that sparked international concern.

Imagine an ornithopter drone doing a vertical takeoff with the grace of the Dark Marathyssa.

I think you're right that it's mimicry, but I'd like to offer a more precise distinction about the difference between humans and GPT-3. Threads, network adapters, web browsers and primitive cells communicate too. What I think humans do uniquely is create thoughts, such as "X and Y are disparate things". Those thoughts might be for communication, or just thinking about something. But AI models are only trained on the thoughts that happen to be communicated. More accurately, they are only trained on the externalised side effects of the thought function, i.e. what gets written down or spoken.

It's like if you were building a physiological model of the human body using only skin and exterior features as training data. We would not expect the model to learn the structure and function of the spleen. By analogy we should not expect GPT-3 to learn the structure and function of thought.

You're describing any hegemonic power structure. But my point was not that Democratic/Republican parties are worse than the CCP (on domestic power at least - they are worse than the CCP on foreign policy, but I digress...). My point was that it is easier for Americans to make change in their own country. So why not start there? That's something Americans (and people from US-aligned countries, to some extent) can actually do something about. The CCP is much harder problem that requires international solidarity to overcome. We need to set a positive example for dissidents in China, beating the war drums will not help them.

Here's another weird one. One of the 9/11 hijackers [1] checked into a Florida hospital with apparent cutaneous Anthrax symptoms. After investigation of this incident, the FBI officially ruled out a link between 9/11 and the 2001 Anthrax attacks [2]. The main suspect in the Anthrax attacks, Bruce Ivins, committed suicide. A lot of unknowns remain and I'm still not sure if I believe the official FBI story about Ivins.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_al-Haznawi

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/24/terrorism.anth...

Why not start with the low hanging fruit? Be an inspiration for Chinese dissidents and topple the Business party (Republican/Democrat).

Another thing the US can do (and other countries that criticise China's human rights policies) is set a better example in international affairs. People in the US and US-aligned countries can organise opposition, for example to end the blockade of Cuba, take care of the disadvantaged, and end the illegal wars and terrorism. Meaningful action we can all take, utilising the freedoms and privileges we have to criticise the actions of our governments.

If the US or a European state signed a treaty with the UK under the conditions that the UK imposed on China, would you call for the US to be punished for breaking that treaty?

You seem to be referring to the South Australia Home Quarantine app [1]. There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about this app recently. I'd just like to clear up some things:

The app only applies to people that need to quarantine, not the general population.

The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.

It is a way for authorities to make sure people are quarantining correctly, and to follow up cases of contact if people break their isolation bubble. Police are not arresting people for failing to check in. (My guess is that they would reset your isolation duration, follow up contacts and/or move you into a managed quarantine).

[1] https://www.covid-19.sa.gov.au/home-quarantine-app

"Displaced by modernity" is such a wonderfully Orwellian description for what the colonisers did to Aboriginal Australians.

Isn't Australia showing the exact opposite, that you don't need CCP-style top down control to enact powerful surveillance laws? That's always been possible in a "free democracy".

The Australian government has explicitly aligned itself with the US and against China in the current tensions, as a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. In my view Australia (and New Zealand) are being seduced by US power above all else.

For example, in 2020 a Strategic Dialogue took place between the US and NZ, which was barely reported on. Items for discussion included "the strategic and economic architecture of the Indo-Pacific" and " the U.S.-NZ strategic partnership, including security cooperation"[1]. I bet you less than 1% of Kiwis know that this high level military dialogue took place - an impressive level of control over a population of a kind that the CCP could only dream of.

[1] https://2017-2021.state.gov/joint-statement-on-united-states...

And not all freedoms are equal. My freedom to drive on the wrong side of the road is lesser than your freedom to drive safely, so we restrict the former over the latter. Australians have chosen the freedom to live free of the virus over some temporary freedom of movement.

In Auckland (NZ) we are in probably some of the strictest lockdown conditions in the world, with schools and non-essential business closed, travel only permitted for exercise in a local area or visit to the supermarket, and mandatory isolation and testing for close contacts. Lockdowns are still viable here because we have been so vigilant and basically everyone understands the shared responsibility. That's how we earn that freedom.

It's called a lockdown...

Even if we can get rid of the repetitive programming tasks, that still leaves a lot of software development work to do. Someone needs to specify the behavior of the code, either by writing tests or some other way. Those people will need to understand the technical and human environment the software runs in so they can specify the right behavior.

There is a built in coaching system in DOTA 2.

What this discussion is missing is Chomsky's distinction between I-language and E-language. I (individual/internal/intensional) language is the knowledge of an individual native speaker. E-language represents the body of external knowledge about language such as corpus data and mass statistical models.

Study of I-language looks at idealised individual speaker's internal language capacity, which can generate an infinite array of structured expressions from finite pieces. From the internalist perspective, E-language is a dead end because it represents only part of the knowledge of an individual, that which happens to be externalised. Many of the most interesting and revealing linguistic are barely reflected in corpora but can be elicited in experiments with individual speakers.

"E-language" approaches, like statistical models of language, do lead to practical and useful results. But using E-language approaches to seriously study the human capacity for language is about as useful as doing physics experiments in GTA.

Reminds me of a Google translation of "bass" to Chinese as "low frequency fish"

So far it's working well on my LC III (68030 with 36mb ram)!

I'm writing this comment from the LC III using w3m over ssh :)

I would love to read your writeup if you get around to it.

Neat! I just have an LC III, SE and Powerbook 1400 running at the moment. Always wanted to find a NeXT...

> Rather than run a bunch of Ethernet cables all over the place I put little Ethernet to Wifi bridge adapters on them. Works great.

That's genius, thanks for the tip.

For classic macs with ethernet ports, the simplest method I have found is to host a basic FTP server on another computer (e.g. you can set one up easily enough on a Raspberry Pi) and use an Ftp client such as Fetch on the mac side. I use this method to get files to and from my LC III, which also functions as a bridge baby to the really old macs via the Appletalk serial port.

As a proponent of biolinguistics, my bet is that as we study those neural substrates more closely, we'll probably just learn more about the sensorimotor systems (which we largely share in common with other mammals) that have been coopted for expression of language in humans.

We already have a useful pathway for investigation: data from speech/sign of a speaker of a particular language. In fact this already yields a kind of overabundance of data. The tricky part is finding the right kind of data via careful experimentation and organising it, by building explanatory theories of language that meet the conditions of evolvability and learnability.

(Which is not to say that cognitive sciences can't shed any light on this, but studying the brain independently of linguistic experimentation is a dead end IMO. Brain imaging studies coupled with linguistic studies have yielded interesting results - see Andrea Moro's work on "impossible languages").

Yes, we have sophisticated digital systems that interface with our (analogue) sensory systems - a screen and keyboard are examples of this. Maybe these sensory interfaces involve some machine learning (maybe they don't). In the future, we might stimulate the sensory systems directly. But with any advances in technology in this domain we won't get closer to understanding the "logic between input and output" as you put it - i.e. what are the atoms of thought, how do they combine, and how these internal thoughts relate to external language. We can only meaningfully tackle these questions by linguistic theorising and experiments.

That is not what is happening in this study, which is tapping into the motor system that controls the muscles used in speech. That is part of the externalisation of language, not the system of thought (which we know very little about).

I'll take a knife crime problem over a gun crime problem.

Up until around the time gmail was first released, it seemed like all the innovation and 'cool stuff computers can do' was in operating systems. Customisation was super popular, people were sharing screenshots of their linux desktops and there were all kinds of theming features in Mac OS 9 and Windows 98. In Windows 98 you could have an HTML page as your desktop background. Stuff like Winamp skins were popular in desktop apps. I imagined that the internet would be woven into the OS in the future, and everything would have a customisable aesthetic. Also that we would have more advanced file explorer UIs.

The US prison system is an ongoing act of violence. Destroying and replacing them with humane systems should reduce violence.

I had a little play with Solana to see if it would be appropriate for a game I'm building, to use as an (after)marketplace for players to trade in-game items. It's quite easy to install the Solana command line tools, create a wallet and create your own fungible or non fungible tokens with a few simple commands (and some Sol). The reason I was looking at Solana was because the transaction costs are extremely low (and if the marketing is to be believed, should stay that low even if Solana had the market cap of bitcoin).

However you can't add any metadata to non fungible tokens at present (some dev told me on discord that this feature was coming very soon), which limits its usefulness. Also a reliable and user friendly marketplace for Solana tokens is still lacking (startup opportunity for someone?)

> Alison Killing conducted this reporting with a grant and further assistance from the Open Technology Fund.

The Open Technology Fund was previously part of Radio Free Asia [1], and continues today as a project of the US Agency for Global Media (the Orwellian name given to the US' external propaganda networks) [2]. Given the current US-China tensions, it is hard to imagine how this work could not be extremely biased.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media