Kattywumpus

One analogy might be to the misleadingly named motion picture. We all have heard the stories of early cinema-goers who dove out of the way when the train on the screen barreled towards them. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of these images on the screen as the real thing -- even the mistake of thinking that they move.

But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was.

This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move.

This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.

To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.

I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.

Interesting, especially because GPT-4o still can't tell you how many R's there are in "strawberry".

Aliens Can Watch ‘I Love Lucy’: https://www.lscheffer.com/tv.pdf

I was just re-watching "Westworld" recently, and there's a moment when Aaron Paul's character Caleb is having a telephone conversation with a sympathetic HR employee who tells him that he didn't get the job.

"Listen, Caleb. Your application was very strong. Unfortunately, our strategy group just hasn't found an opening for you."

Caleb sighs, and says nothing.

The HR employee gently asks, "Caleb, are you still with me?"

"Ok, thank you. Is there anything I should be working on to make myself a better candidate?"

"Like I said, your application was very strong. We just don't have anything that would be a great fit for you right now."

"If I'm not a good fit, is there a different shape I could squeeze myself into?"

There is a pause.

Caleb asks, "Hey, no offense but... are you human?"

"I'm Shaun," the voice says. "I can help you with all kinds of resources... anything else I can do for you today, Caleb?"

This feels a lot like that.

Let's just do away with the justice system entirely since social media seems to fulfill its functions perfectly.

As I pointed out above, this is really 20th century thinking. Social media allows for a kind of mob behavior that has shown itself antithetical to the kind of market liberalism most of our current assumptions are based on.

Or did you not notice that Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users had literally been systematically erased from the internet yesterday by hounding their service providers?

It's bizarre to see the liberal left I grew up with now defending a kind of insane market fundamentalism and corporate control of the commons of free speech without even blinking at the contradiction. I think that liberal left I grew up with is dead.

We need a name for what it has become, and where they are taking us.

We really need a better vocabulary for talking about this sort of thing than the 20th century terms of fascism, communism, and liberalism. I don't have the words yet, but we need to start inventing them.

We are in a new era, and our disasters won't look like theirs. People who shrug away this kind of censorship with the magic words "private company" are in a dangerous form of denial.

For God's sake, is this where we're headed? Just ban anything that sounds offensive?

Headed?

If Trump and the Republicans confirm a new Justice, Democrats have indicated they will pack the Supreme Court, appointing as many Justices as they feel necessary to get the rulings they want.

"If they show that they're unwilling to respect precedent, rules and history, then they can't feign surprise when others talk about using a statutory option that we have that's fully constitutional in our availability," he said. "I don't want to do that. But if they act in such a way, they may push it to an inevitability. So they need to be careful about that."

-- Tim Kaine, D-Va, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/democrats-war...

The Constitution and Bill of Rights are interpreted through the Supreme Court. If you pack the court, you have essentially destroyed the legitimacy of Constitutional government. The consequences of this cannot be overstated.

All Constitutional rights will be up for reinterpretation and elimination. This is a very precarious moment in history. Perhaps the end of American history as we have known it. That's a grandiose statement, but it's not an incorrect one.

I think about this a lot. We are the first people in human history to see the planets up close, so to speak.

For thousands of years, humans stared up at the sky and watched these luminous dots change position over time. They made up stories about them, tracked them, designed instruments to turn these blurry, luminous dots into slightly-less-blurry luminous dots.

But in this long human journey of thousands of years, we are the first generation to actually see these dots of light as the worlds they are. Us. You and me. So many thousands of years of ancient dreaming and wondering, going all the way back to our hominid ancestors, gazing at the night sky in wordless wonder.

And we, our generation of humans, are the culmination of this journey of imagination.

What they could only imagine, we know. For the first time in history, in my lifetime, we've visited every planet in the solar system. Any planet you see in the sky? We have photos of it. We've mapped its surface, or visited it directly. You want to know what sunset on Mars looks like? You don't have to guess.

We take this all for granted. I don't think we even appreciate the legacy we inherited. It feels like there should be a Planet Day, where we all celebrate the knowing. Where we symbolically link hands with our ancestors across time, with everyone who ever squinted up at all the little sparkles on the big black ocean and wished they knew what they were.

A day when everyone looks at at least one photograph from every celestial body we've seen, and appreciates the gift we've been given. And then maybe looks at the best photos we have of exoplanets, and realizes that we are in the same position today that our hominid ancestors were, wondering what these places will someday turn out to be, and who we will be when we finally know them.

I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.

You're swearing off the internet entirely?

We don't store any of the images uploaded or generated. Once the toonification has finished running no images are kept on our systems.

I imagine this is all in good fun, but this disclaimer doesn't rule out data being derived from your face and stored or sold later.

I want to thank you for linking to the articles, even if you disagree with him.

Calling an observation "offensive" and punishing someone for making it, is not refuting it, or even addressing it. America's tradition has always valued free speech and open debate, and it seems many people on the left no longer value these things. I do find that chilling.

This should be horrifying to any sane human, but we live in a time of great insanity, and much of what ought to be criticized passes by unremarked in plain sight.

Ubuntu asserts that society, not a transcendent being, gives human beings their humanity.

Let's be clear on what we're talking about here: Your humanity. Are you a human being, or aren't you? Are you a moral entity or not?

In the West, we say your humanity is intrinsically, unalienably situated in your person, bestowed upon you by a higher authority even than society itself. It may at times be recognized or unrecognized by the crooked timber of human institutions, but with or without them, it exists. You are a human being even if society doesn't want you to be, for whatever reason.

Compare and contrast with Ubuntu:

According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarised as follows:

'A person is a person through other people' strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me.

Again, cutting through the obstructive bafflegab:

'A person is a person through other people'

humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual

The examples given are even more grotesque.

When someone behaves according to custom, a Sotho-speaking person would say “ke motho,” which means "he/she is a human."

The aspect of this that would be exemplified by a tale told (often, in private quarters) in Nguni “kushone abantu ababili ne Shangaan,” in Sepedi “go tlhokofetje batho ba babedi le leShangane,” in English (two people died and one Shangaan). In each of these examples, humanity comes from conforming to or being part of the tribe.

In other words, three people died, but only one "human". Think deeply on the implications of that.

Growing beyond this kind of tribal denial of humanity has always been one of the proudest achievements of the West. It's a shame to see us sinking back into it, endorsing it, even celebrating it again. See this kind of literal dehumanization pass by without much notice at all.

I imagine others are thinking about this, too. I feel as if we are headed towards either an era of radically secured code where serious vulnerabilities become rare as hen's teeth, or... the discovery that we exist in an environment of radically vulnerable code that cannot be secured at all. A world where AI script kiddies can take down civilization.

I'm going to remember this. It's a good way to have discussion if you're lucky enough to have someone who can abstract their personal views from the model that produced them.

Makes me wonder what a similar mod would do for video shot on a Fisher-Price PXL-2000:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pxl-2000

I will cite this as "Hliyan's Law" from now on.

Whenever I read about this experiment, I think about Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God", and experience a moment of profound disappointment:

https://tinyurl.com/microcosmicgod

I won't spoil it for you. It's still a great bedtime read.

No. I'm saying that your face is more public than your fingerprint, and that makes your phone less secure. That's not my primary reason for being against FaceID, but it's an obvious truth that Apple has engaged in a lot of misdirection about.

FaceID doesn't "take images of your face and environment" though.

From "How Apple's New FaceID Works" at Gizmodo:

"Face ID starts with an image of your face, but builds on top of it with the TrueDepth’s dot projector, which will invisibly project over 30,000 dots onto your face each time you look at your phone, creating and building on its map of your features.

"'We use the image and the dot pattern to push through neural networks to create a mathematical model of your face,' Apple’s Phil Schiller explained."

- https://gizmodo.com/how-apples-new-face-id-works-1803813400

Your objection to my objection might be that FaceID doesn't store the images it takes, but uses them to construct a facial map that it stores instead.

But even if that were any better, that's not true, either.

From Apple's iOS Security Guide:

"Once it confirms the presence of an attentive face, the TrueDepth camera projects and reads over 30,000 infrared dots to form a depth map of the face, along with a 2D infrared image. This data is used to create a sequence of 2D images and depth maps, which are digitally signed and sent to the Secure Enclave."

- https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

The public nature of your face inherently makes access to your phone less secure than the private nature of your fingerprints or even a PIN. But it's not the security of the phone, or the photos or face map stored on it that trouble me.

It's the camera-based security paradigm I reject. It reduces resistance to a surveillance society, and increases the incentives for other businesses to use face-identifying software, which destroys privacy in the real world. I don't want people to get used to surrendering their privacy to access their data, and I won't buy a phone that sends a market signal telling the corporate world that I accept these kind of privacy-destroying technologies.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful response.

I do not want FaceID, and will resist it as long as possible. I do not want to normalize the idea that security should depend on a camera taking images of my face and environment. I am not alone in this, and believe this is one reason the iPhone X is selling poorly.

There is something ugly about this piece, about the idea that you can see into someone's soul and just know that they'd be a Nazi if they could. To be honest, the tone of it reminds me of the stereotypical pre-Anschluss German who privately scrutinizes the faces of party guests for hints of Jewish or Roma heritage, and flatters himself for his keen eye in discerning their inferiority.

For what it's worth, when the article’s author Dorothy Thompson was in her twenties, she was a fiery activist for women's suffrage, which was deeply intertwined with the temperance movement of that era. (Many temperance groups shared the same leadership as women's suffrage groups, and both shared a core idea that women were inherently less coarse and crude than men and that the burden fell on women to transform the debased, violent world men had created.)

Thompson toured New York state giving barnburner speeches promoting women's suffrage, and promoting temperance figures as well, like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, a popular keynote speaker for the New York Woman Suffrage Party and prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The W.C.T.U. is the political organization most responsible for bringing us the 18th Amendment prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages in the United States. The Volstead Act passed to enforce Prohibition ultimately resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens who were gunned down in the crossfire of speakeasy raids, or who drank liquor poisoned deliberately by the Feds.

Not quite Nazism, but government agents murderously enforcing philosophies of moral purity are perhaps not so far away, either. All this was going on in 1919; Thompson moved to Europe in 1920, the year Prohibition came into effect, leaving behind the violence and chaos she'd helped bring to power.

It's doubtful she wanted things to turn out quite the way they did. She meant to support only the good people and the good idea of women's suffrage, yet somehow some bad people and bad ideas came along for the ride. Indeed, some of the good people with the good ideas were also the bad people with bad ideas.

There might be a better moral in this than the notion that Nazis are a separate breed of people we can know by second sight.

"Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political statement.

I'm sort of fascinated by the phenomenon, which I think of as "LOLgical argument". You start off with a joke where the humor is based in an extreme and socially transgressive statement. It could be "Hitler did nothing wrong," or "The Earth is flat," or any number of similarly absurd ideas. The original users are trolls who privately do not actually believe what they are saying, but enjoy "rustling jimmies" and the increased status their daring obtains.

But as more members of the community join in, the original statement loses its edge, and even more transgressive poses are needed to continue the joke. Often this means doubling-down, and telling others that you do indeed believe the thing that they had, at some level, still been treating as a punchline.

This meta-joke involves finding "proof" that the shocking thing you said before was actually true, and demonstrating your commitment, by creating memes and other "evidence"-based arguments for it. In doing so, you begin to create a community that becomes indistinguishable from a community that actually believes the original statement.

As these arguments pile up, even trolls who started off disbelieving their original statement find themselves surrounded by "evidence" they were right all along. There is a swell of camaraderie as those who were bold enough to question the official version of reality begin to support each other. The community pressure, the ego boost of having discovered some secret suppressed knowledge, and the psychological difficulty of abandoning their previous position all contribute to the complete conversion of a troll into an earnest believer.

I find this fascinating because it works in such opposition to the ways we normally talk about convincing people of new ideas. It's not the logic of the argument here that leads people to a new conclusion but rather the logic of the joke, the idea that the funniest punchline to an absurd joke is to actually believe it. When enough individuals in a community feel that way, they can actually end up convincing each other.

So it's not so much that the community becomes "flooded by actual idiots" as it is the original trolls who become believers themselves.

Vonnegut once wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He was probably more right here than he knew.

I've never understood why GridCoin hasn't caught on yet. One of the chief complaints about Bitcoin is the utter wastefulness of its hashing mechanisms, with hundreds of times more computing power than the top 256 supercomputers combined devoted to pointless busywork just to secure the blockchain.

Imagine if you could have an equally secure cryptocurrency where all that computing power was diverted to curing cancer, discovering new drugs to treat dangerous diseases, understanding the human genome, researching dark matter, and so on. That's GridCoin.

And yet today Bitcoin is worth $14,484 and GridCoin is worth 12 cents.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm

No more Private Tabs.

The interesting question is teasing out why the correlation occurs at all.

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen more discussion about Gridcoin. I'd much rather use a digital currency if I knew it was contributing to curing cancer, mapping the shapes and orbits of asteroids, discovering new pulsars, understanding the genome, and so on.

https://gridcoin.us/Guides/whitelist.htm