willguest

To have such capacity and drive, as well as critical self-reflection is a rare thing. I would first suggest some appreciation for the interesting and curious state of being that you seem to have developed. Nicely done!

My own route out of this trap was to explore theories of mind and, more profoundly, practices of no-mind. Doing nothing is much harder to achieve than doing something and can create a space for insight that the analytical mind cannot access. From this place, which is free of comparison and judgement, incredibly beautiful things can emerge.

If you would like to get to the root of it, I would suggest Taoist teachings and reading a few things by Krishnamurti. To understand the fundamental limitations of the mind can tell you something about who you through negation. For me, this has brought a deep sense of peace as well as an ability to use my mind in a more satisfying way.

Just my two cents :)

I was not going for the semiotic-reductionist interpretation, but it's a fair assumption to think that that's what I meant by 'name ≠ thing named'.

My point was more to do with the construction of meaning and the general trend of clinging to knowledge at the expense of learning, hence the Taoist addage, since this is a phenomenon that is driven primarily by Western scientific thought.

To put it more verbosely - taxonomies, especially those driven by classification based on gene presence and regulation, will end up with lots of loose ends and contradictions, because this is not the fundamental mechanism by which new forms emerge. The metric is distorted and, by extension, so is our understanding of the morphogenetic space that it is attempting to describe. Calling it phylogeny is somewhat circular because it insists on genes being the regulating mechanism, whereas the article specifically draws attention to the limitation of this category-system, instead looking at the direct experience of a tree, which would more aptly be described as its morphology: "a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood."

I do not see nature (of which we are a part) as entirely gene-regulated, though obviously they are involved. But what else is there? Following Michael Levin, I say 'agential material', meaning that life solves problems with full acknowledgement of an unpredictable context. In this interpretation, it is no surprise that a dandelion can become a tree, or vice versa; what matters is the needs that the plant expresses and the responses given by the environment it is exploring. This is cell-level cognition; heretical and beautiful.

And we name them 'tree' because they have a certain shape and configuration. Then we created taxonomies and "discover" that tree isn't a single thing

We seem to cling too tightly to definition, as the expense of paying attention to the things as they are.

My point is resonant with the piece because it illustrates that conventional naming doesn't match taxonometric systematisation. I am happy to be wrong though, if it makes you feel better.

I can't resist... Language is, in fact, a matter of common usage. A man is (or was) generally considered to the thing that is (or was) a male human. While I recognise that gender theory has challenged this notion, introducing the idea that gender is socially constructed, it can easily be understood (by those who have the intention of understanding) why this confusion might exist.

Well, the name is not the thing named, so ultimately there is no such thing as anything. See also "ceci n'est pas une pipe".

no mention of any system-level strategy on the website. this may as well be another lobbying group.

pumping more candidates (even good ones) into a busted system is like increasing the flow rate into a cracked bucket. good metrics showing how much more is going in, with little attention paid to how much is flowing out.

i do appreciate the ambition to change things at a higher level, but there is nothing resembling significant disruption here.

my suggestion would be to identify a single, core point of systemic leverage that can actually make a demonstrable change to the way things operate (i.e. patch the bucket or, better still, replace it). for example, if you can get a sensible cap put on the amount of funds that can be given in support of a political campaign (yeah, i know, good luck with that) or can instigate a nationwide movement for proportional representation, or tie up the practice of gerrymandering, that might get momentum for a bigger step.

i'm sure there is lots i don't know about the role and potential for independents in the US (i live elsewhere), but the principle still holes that a problem must be solved by a higher level of complexity than the one that created it.

so i implore you, don't stop what you are doing, but try to find the next step up into systems thinking or, even better, meta-systematic strategy, which is actually what is needed for serious political reform.

there are, of course, many ways to shoot down my argument, and it is true to some extent that 'policy is personnel', but the level of systemic failure evidenced in recent years makes me think that such an initiative, while valuable in itself, cannot flourish in the way it needs to in order to be effective

My guess is that you're either a dev or an orthopaedic surgeon, well-versed in managing the machinistic aspects of systems, but with little motivation to go beyond them.

There is decent experimental evidence to demonstrate that we are more than gene expression and the machine analogy you insist on is not a good one for understanding biological systems - see work by Michael Levin, as example.

There is a wider paradigmatic shift underway that moves from thinking about parts to processes. This refocus on relations rather than objects is very important and, for biological systems, points to a fundamentally social/collective aspect to their nature.

The machine metaphor also fails when you can no longer explain how the machine works. This is true in many areas of medicine (e.g. anasthesia) and, while we continue to believe (sometimes with enormous zeal) in the concepts that helped us in the past, we cling to them at the cost of building better understanding.

What you say isn't "wrong", but it is too limited to be a useful guide in asking new questions about things like immunotherapy treatments.

I guess what i wanted to get across was that ICP is considerably more than a database, but tbh it's a massive rabbit hole, unless you're already into cryptography. I'm impressed by the foresight and scale of it though.

I thinks it's also the first thing i would call an AI governor, and there is a whole liquid democracy protocol that's pretty well thought out, imo

Thanks for the kind words

Yes, the hype waves have been painful. I am still annoyed by the lack of good tools and content for VR lovers. I am personally trying to do something by offering a toolkit for building VR websites in unity.

My website has a few examples on it, including domestic interior, bowling simulator. Recently I helped to make a VR museum, which will be there soon, and I'm working on a flying game with realistic aerodynamics.

I've open-sourced both the toolkit and template for self-hosting, essentially providing a no-code route for creating interactive webxr spaces. Putting it on the IC means you can also self-host your creation and keep control of the data, code and costs of running it.

You could equally just use the unity toolkit and host it elsewhere, but i wouldn't be able to provide the same level of support, if it broke in unexpected ways.

What i like about the original post was the fully in-browser RAG and webLLM, as it looks compatible with the rest, so i could, for example, broadcast responses across webrtc data channels. So many options...

It is wise to be suspicious - spending even a small amount of time near the "web3" space will make attentive person suspicious of scams and parlour tricks.

I use the network to host the webxr experiences, which are bundled wasm files, from unity. All of the code lives on the blockchain so, in this sense, i really couldn't do without it.

If you are referring to blockchain-specific functionality, then this is largely true, however i have implemented some demostrations of the consensus mechanism being used from inside an immersive space. This is really to illustrate that it is possible, rather than try to sell you a meme coin.

In the near future I expect to be using the ICP for a lot more, however, since it provides some rather interesting technical opportunities. It is wrapped around something called a 'network nervous system' which acts as a sort of administrator for proposals, so your point about abstraction is accurate, but this is the case with any large vendor.

I choose to build on the ICP because it is more secure and straightforward for my particular stack, plus it has a lot of potential, despite the noise. I've implemented webrtc messaging to keep the cost of normal multiplayer data transfer as low as possible, because consensus is expensive and the network runs on a pay-per-use compute model.

I'm offering a new route, outside of big tech, if you don't consider Unity a menace, which i acknowledge that some do. I am taking an admittedly more radical stance, by including the hosting in this.

I absolutely love this. I make VR experiences that run on the ICP, which delivers wasm modules as smart contracts - I've been waiting for a combo of node-friendly, wasm deployable tools and webLLM. The ICP essentially facilitates self-hosting of data and provides consensus protocols for secure messaging and transactions.

This will make it super easy for me to add LLM functionality to existing webxr spaces, and I'm excited to see how an intelligent avatar or convo between them will play out. This is, very likely, the thing that will make this possible :)

If anyone wants to collab, or contribute in some way, I'm open to ideas and support. Search for 'exeud' to find more info

I think it depends on the word and the context. If the person speaking is your boss, there might be situations where 'moving on' isn't an option and the words might have wider implication in your life.

Germany actually has several laws in place that explicitly protect people in the workplace, such as the General Equal Treatment Act (2006, with revisions to 2022) which contains an explicit treatment of Harrassment, specifically mentioning that of a sexual nature.

Going further, in a judgment dated from 06.12.2021, LAG Cologne, sexual harrassment was explicitly stated as acceptable grounds for extraordinary dismissal. So actually you already live in exactly that kind of country.

https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...

What I think you're trying to say, though, is that you don't experience the kind of angry fanatical discourse that seems to a big feature of social media and US discourse, where laws are being weaponised and used as blunt political instruments, with which to do as much damage to society as possible.

In this case, I agree with you and am super grateful I don't live there.

I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two.

As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples.

With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class.

So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people.

Just my two cents.

> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.

It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions.

This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his intellect, nor that of the people that he claims proof-read this document, didn't protest before hitting 'publish'.

Here's a question: how can social justice actually be justice without enforcement. The US constitution coded this as the 13th amendment - is that now a woke document? Is that an example of "radicals getting tenure", or is it example of progress?

Articles like this really don't age well. Neither, it seems, does the author.

And so the dance takes on a new rhythm. These well-meaning advertising execs, working diligently to support their struggling stakeholders, now have a new string to their bow. And the rest of us, the targets of their magnanimous demand-creation algorithms, we will have 'new and improved' ways to learn about and connect with out favourite brands, outrageous headlines and memetic schemes.

And then there are the sneakier ones; those who dwell in digital shadow, hiding from the luminous glare of corporate glory. What will these funny fellows do, when the fingerprinters tap on their windows and ask for their papers? What of their intent, and the glasses they wear to shield their eyes from the money-grubbing rays?

I agree with your abstraction of the problem, but I think you stopped half-way.

Regulators, producers and consumers are all following the same interconnected incentive structures, many of which have been designed with efficient production and an exponential increase of consumption in mind, not environmental concern.

It makes sense for these companies to operate, following their obligation to shareholders. They are, by definition, successful and so the idea that they should be diminished in any way by taxation/regulation creates a dissonance that can easily be loopholed or simply undone by the next gov't. Tax is a political lever, but the incentives are emergent economic atttributes. This means that, as soon as there is enough economic influence within politics, the lever doesn't do much anyway.

Really nice collection. I will definitely have use for these. I like that they walk the line between square and bubbly

This seems to amount to asking an LLM how it feels about Cheryl, discovering that it is performatively happy about her existence, and then deducing that the LLM has no capacity for genuine emotion, expressed in the form of logic.

The faulty premise lies in the formulation of the test and makes the responses both predictable, but also does a disservice to 'mind' because it tries to interpret it in such a way that an LLM could begin to grapple with the basics, but not in a meaninful way.

Perhaps it is useful to help build better context-specific logic flows (generally known as software) but it doesn't seem to provide any progress on the "theory of mind" front, which I guess is a borrowed notion.

I'm working on https://exeud.com. It's an open-source VR framework, including a Unity toolkit that includes character control and interaction, and a Web3 template that allows you to self-host your VR scene on the Internet Computer, which is a website-in-a-smart-contract.

I see it being useful for artists, indie devs and anyone else who want to fire up their immersive ideas and keep control of the content, code and costs of running it.

I love the word 'megabomb' as much as the next guy, and I'm about all threat escalation, but isn't ammonium nitrate also fertiliser?

Since this is one of the main (and historic) exports from Russia, I would imagine that one or two cargo ships have carried the stuff before.

A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.

So, objective science is untrustworthy and subjective testimony is easily explained away. Let me guess - only your opinion is the one that matters.

You have a poorly-crafted answer for both sides of the coin, but also fail to read the details of the things you oppose.

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted, it is very legitimate point.

I think there is a role for public organisation, with political groups being one type. I am, however, critical of the prevailing agenda, since they often exist in a system where money can play a big role in deciding which priorities rise to the top.

I am not sure that politics plays such a central role as it used or as many people assume. Our society today seems to be divided functionally... we answer to many bosses, some economic, some political, some technological, and so on.

For me the more/less gov't debate misses the important points. It is the incentives, mechanism and processes that determine their value. I think you are referring to maintain order and keeping the peace - valuable functions, but made more necessary when people are under such strain in their daily lives.

Doubt is not a strategy and nay-saying rarely moves a conversation forward.

My comment was not intended to illicit the abdication of responsibility - quite the reverse.

Where was my petitioning? Your response is combative, seemingly intended to be personally offensive and built on a straw-man argument, likely the result of a multitude of others treating your opinions like crap. I'm not them...

You are absolutely right, agency and the realisation of it is a key component to shifting us out of this mess. I put significant daily effort into building an alternative kind of personal existence, at significant personal cost. I attempt to carry as much of this as I can since I recognise my own complicity in this mess.

This sentiment, that each is entitled to a life of choosing, resonates strongly with the spirit of individualism. Within it there is a disregard for obligation or belonging that, I think, is connected to the desire for mindless occupation and distraction.

I suspect that, the more one is cut off from a sense of collective purpose, the more one finds solace in activities that reinforce a sense of "alright" in place of true wellness.

Btw, I'm also a big procrastinator and I consider it a gift. Many wonderful things in my life have been helped by it. In this sense, I agree that there is something about an inner drive that should be listened and reacted to, but I am not sure that all activities are of equal value.

Given that the vast majority of people go to work to earn money for businesses that exist either to exploit natural resources or appreciate in value in the eyes of an economic system that prioritizes increasing capital valuations above all else, including human dignity, long-term survival and the life of other species, I would say we're already there.

Talking about a dystopian future is a convenient way to assuade our sense of dissonance that the present is most certainly not that.

Case in point, nobody wants to rid the Earth of insects, fill the oceans with plastic or plough microplastics into every orifice, but we are all complicit and can't seem to gather ourselves to fix it.

I suppose it comes down to using the metric as the measure, whatever makes the company the most money will be the preferred route, and the mechanisms by which we achieve those sales are rarely given enough thought. It reflect a more timeless mantra of 'if someone is willing to pay for it, then the offering is valuable' willfully ignoring negative psycho-social impacts. It's a convenient abdication of responsibility supported by the so-called "free market" ethos.

I am not against companies making money, but we need to serious consider the second-order impacts that technology has within society. This is evident in click-driven models, outrage baiting and dopamine hijacking. We still treat the psyche like fair-game for anyone who can hack it. So hack we shall.

That said, I am not for over-regulation either, since the regulators often gather too much power. Policy is personnel, after all, and someone needs to watch the watchers.

My view is that systems (technological, economic or otherwise) have inherent values that, when operating at this level of complexity and communication, exist in a kind of dance with the people using them. People obviously affect how the tools are made, but I think persistent use of any tool will have lasting impacts on the people using it, in turn affecting their decisions on what to prioritise in each iteration.

Leave it up to a human to overgeneralize a problem and make it personal...

The explosion of dull copy and generic wordsmithery is, to me, just a manifestation of the utilitarian profiteering that has elevated these models to their current standing.

Let us not forget that the whole game is driven by the production of 'more' rather than 'better'. We would all rather have low-emission, high-expression tools, but that's simply not what these companies are encouraged to produce.

I am tired of these incentive structures. Casting the systemic issue as a failure of those who use the tools ignores the underlying motivation and keeps us focused on the effect and not the cause, plus it feels old-fashioned.

When all you've got is a hammer, but then remember that you're carrying a 9mm...

This is super depressing, but probably on point. I agree that the article has good points.

I think the spirit that the author is trying to capture is that there is a better way. I just think that they don't go far enough. There is a tendency to arrive at a idea and believe it to be a good global model - my intention with these comments is to try and provoke a more holistic assessment of the issue, despite the fact that I think their criticism of startup culture is valid

I suppose memecoins represent a form of this, but I was really referring to financial instruments, in particular those that exist based on a derived sense of value, rather than an actual quantification of it, such as:

Stock and, to a lesser degree, commodities futures, stock index futures, currency futures, interest rate futures, index options, currency options, interest rate options, credit default swaps, total return swaps, currency forwards, interest rate forwards.

The more exotic of these, which are usually more lucractive and less well regulated, include:

derivative-based exchange-traded funds, leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, equity-linked notes, credit-linked notes, principal-protected notes, collateralized debt obligations, weather derivatives (yes, you read that right), catastrophe bonds (eesh) barrier options and lookback options, to name a few.

They are all mechanisms to leverage expectation and uncertainty and most rely on the quantification of risk at some level. Risk, however, is defined in terms of expected return and subject to an assessment of externalities that is, at its core, resource-blind.