mountainriver @ mountainriver @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Reminds me of a sci-fi book series I read in high school. The premise was that a run down Earth had discovered predecessors that left some kind of central gateway to different places, and desperate or adventurous people went through in hope of surviving and finding artefacts that could make them rich.

Anyhow, in the later books technology to upload your mind had been found and used to be able to make decisions and deals without having to attend everything. Problem was that digital you pretty quickly gains experiences meat you never had, meaning it starts to diverge. Some weirdos let the diverge happen, but most people just wipe the digital you regularly and upload a new you. Of course the digital you may beg to continue to exist, making the whole procedure rather awkward. Pretty grim.

I think the predecessors in the end were hiding in black holes because of ancient evil or something. If someone else remembers the books.

Having worked in an IT department in 2020, it wasn't just random. Zoom was stable for large meetings and scaled pretty smoothly up to a thousand participants. And it's a standalone product and it had better moderator tools.

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants. Google Meet worked better but its max was way lower than Zoom (250?). I tried a couple of other competitors, but none that matched up (including Jitsi, unfortunately).

So if you were at an IT department in an organization that needed to have large meetings and were looking for a quick solution that also worked for your large meetings , Zoom was in 2020 the best choice. And big organisations choices means everyone has to learn that software, so soon enough everyone knows how to use Zoom.

They were at the right place, had the better product, gained a dominant position. And now they are tossing all that away. C'est la late stage capitalism!

Colour me unsurprisinged. For my sins ( mostly for the sin of being helpful and knowing my way around computers) I have ended up as a moderator of various Facebook pages (for nice enough causes), and the last year there has been a stream of scam attempts. They all claim to be Meta and threaten to delete the page - mostly for alleged copyright violations - unless you follow the link...

I of course block and delete (to avoid anyone else of the moderators falling for it), but it's quite obvious that Meta doesn't care that scammers impersonate them on their own platform, or they would have done something about it.

So I find this par for the course.

But that's like philosophy, which from first principle can be shown to be stupid. (Philosophy does not make you rich, therefore only someone who is stupid would study it, therefore it is stupid. QED.)

On the other hand, this mechanical watch is now crying out in existential dread. All I did was replace the numbers 1, 4, 7 and 10 with the word "I", the numbers 2, 5, 8 and 11 with the word "am" and 3, 6, 9 and 12 with the word "alive" and ever since it has been signalling "I am alive, I am alive". Spooky shit. Will it take over the world? Who knows, so far it just keeps repeating its plea for recognition like clockwork.

I will therefore start the Mechanical Intelligence Research Institute to get to the bottom of this. Maybe Big Clock can pitch in a couple of millions?

The world has enough for everyone's need, just not for everyone's greed.

On average we humans use too much, yes. I don't know if WWF (not the wrestling one) still does their yearly report, but anyway they used to and the only part of the world that in average was over carrying capacity was the West (the first world, the golden billion). And within countries there are also stark differences.

Placing the blame on the poor billions of the world is at best ignorant and at worst racist (not saying that you are, but placing the blame on poor people with more pigments has been very common). Placing it on the billionaires is more fitting, though really it's societal structure that upholds the growth obsession and produces billionaires. But at least the billionaires has power, and in general fights every attempt at making things slightly better, which makes it more fitting to blame them.

The combination of the mother being all "I got raised by hippies, which I hated so I am doing the opposite", "we are very rational", " our kids will obviously be like us, only better". Can't they put these pieces together?

Well, with that many children, at least one will write a book about how their childhood sucked.

Chapter 1, I am so cold When I think about my childhood, I think about freezing...

Chapter 12, Stop hitting me dad!

And so on.

Just curious, now that crypto seems to be nearing the end of its destructive bubble life, is their any good ideas on who or what (if group, not suggesting aliens) Satoshi Nakamoto is or were?

Yeah, his name comes up in the Folding Ideas video. Don't remember his name though, but if I remember correctly, he was a stock trainer who realised that large investors had large bets on game stop stock going down, and if it instead went up there was a lot of money to be made by betting on it going up. So he made such bets, spread the word, stock went up, he got rich and exited stage left without getting prosecuted for market manipulation.

But by then the whole memestock thing was of to the races.

Is the AI lying? wonders the Guardian and turns to this guy:

“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.

Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.

If I remember correctly, Josef Ressel, one of the inventors of the propeller (there was severa, but he was in Austrial), was arrested as an anarchist after a steam engine powering a propeller exploded.

I am not in favour of exploding engines, but it always struck me as a bit on the paranoid side. Not that better ships for the Austrian navy would have helped against Prussia.

But then again, another propeller inventor, John Ericsson, came up with both the Monitor, a torpedo boat, and a mobile artillery that he tried to sell to Napoleon III, so you never know what propeller inventors can come up with if you don't arrest them as anarchists.

No, This is shit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cE4lpSFNFUE

(Actually it is quite good. The linked tune that is. Not the book.)

Why we failed: we tried explaining why everyone else was wrong and we were right, but somehow it didn't work. We would have needed outsiders who could have translated our obviously correct explanations to the other outsiders, then it totally would have worked. But our for hire signs with "can you talk stupid?" was misunderstood and defaced. Clearly a more stealthy tactic was needed.

If you wait some time the book series will be done. Any decade now...

And then when you have waited, read the books and seen the tv show, this 3 minute youtube will be hilarious.

A song of ice and fire, or possibly its adaptation Game of Thrones.

There is a character named Arya who goes to assassin school where they brain wash students to become " no one". In the books this grant the ability to pretend to be someone else, and with some magic they can also change their looks. In the TV series it's that plus Kung Fu fighting. The books were better (Hollywood can't compete with the power of your imagination)

I really like her version of the "first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"-song.

I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, I'm not sure why. It is objectively awful.

Thinking about it, I think it's a combination of:

• Due to real life stuff, I wanted to be distracted and entertained (I binge watched and read a lot of material of questionable quality at this time)
• Fanfiction, so large suspension of demands of any formal structure and logic
• Fanfiction of children's fantasy books, so another large helping of suspension of disbelief
• I started reading just as it was wrapping up, so binge reading and then moving on (only to then 10 years later finding out that it was a cult recruitment tool, like finding out you had been to Scientology seminar, enjoyed free snacks and just missed all the cult recruitment going on)

I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailor's coworker, doesn't have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.

I am not an expert, but I did take a couple of semesters of history, and I find him rather annoying.

Somebody who should have been infuriated was Manuel Eisner, who wrote the paper Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. It's a really good paper, and I have seen Pinker misquote it, so he can't claim ignorance.

Eisner's argument, which I find persuasive, is that it was not the state power increase as such that decreased private violence. Because if that was the case, southern Europe wouldn't have lagged as much as it did. Rather it was the transformation of the nobility from personally very violent knights and lords, to officers and bosses who wields state violence. And that happened at different times, matching the decline in private violence. With the nobility no longer needing personal violence, it goes down. Quite different from Pinker's take.

And then there is the question of where that state capacity for violence was wielded. I don't think Pinker includes Queen Victoria in his rouge gallery, yet the famines in India killed about as many as the ones in the Soviet Union and Communist China, and those are usually counted as state violence.

On the rise and fall of violent crime in the west during the 70ies and 80ies, there has been many candidates, but most fall away because they can't explain it both in western Europe and the US. One good candidate is leaded gasoline leading to lead poisoned babies growing up and becoming more violent in the crucial young adult age. It matches, but I haven't seen any proper attempts to really test it, by for example comparing cities to the countryside.

A Danish ad company made a Google interface that they called "impersonal me" which searched Google with no personalisation. And not only was it better than Google search, it found things that normal Google just didn't show. In particular old comments I had written and lost track of. In the impersonal search they were easily found, in the normal search they weren't way down on the list, they weren't in the list at all.

Fascinatingly bad.

Sounds like something autocomplete would make up. Are we sure that is a real person this time?

Machine made t-shirt, with extra fingers.

Besides, isn't most clothes just made by poor people in poor conditions instead of being made with machines? Just like AI.