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I really dislike these posts that are clearly written by someone unfamiliar with religion as a topic

I wonder how much academic familiarity one really needs to recognise the rather obvious vernacular effects. I've studied religion and mass communication effects somewhat as well as being a practising Christian, and as I see it the word "religion" commonly applies to the orthodoxy and its big, visible impacts that are social and psychological, rather than the personal, spiritual realm of gnostic metaphysical faith.

The OP seems right in the sense that the SV technology cargo cult has all the bad mind-narrowing sides of orthodoxy and none of the good. Observe; suspension of critical thinking, credulity, superstition, arcane symbolism, charismatic leaders, secret knowledge, obsessive rituals and tics, insularity, smug self-righteous and strident proselytising, attacking and denigrating "unbelievers", defensiveness, fear of exclusion, dehumanisation of others, mass hysteria....

Digital tech (smartphones plus corporate social media), as presently configured, presses all the same buttons for psychological and societal harm that cults have for millennia. Moreover, it so pitifully fails to offer any positive social benefits, like a sense of real community, shared values, comfort and stability, or certainty. Instead it overlays a shallow and unreal facsimile of those things. "Idolatry" is probably a great way to frame it.

Like historical religions it spawns a super-wealthy elite who exploit the confused masses. It has a small cadre of extremely vocal "true believers", disciples and acolytes, who cajole and bully along the enormous middle mass who are actually ambivalent "pretenders", technological agnostics who mostly can't be bothered to argue. They go along to get along, to avoid feeling persecuted ("left behind" - the modern equivalent of Hell).

Real religions may span thousands of years and have subtantial continuity, but cult-tech presents a flimsy facade of being "deep, essential, enduring and universal". In reality, any thoughtful computer scientist can tell you, it's a heterogeneous assemblage of the arbitrary or, as Graeber observed, a world we can "remake in any way we choose".

Working in cybersecurity, carefully observing genuine attitudes in peoples' unguarded moments - in contrast to their "official/professional" positions - makes me sure that were the entire telecommunications network of the planet to explode tomorrow, other than for food riots as payment and supply chains adjust, most people would have one bad week, shrug, and get on with the next thing. That's to say "it's all a game" but one that we're all very, very invested in trying to preserve... to the extent we're prepared to terrorise others into sharing our worldview to keep it so. Isn't that a sure hallmark of a religion?

Essay touches on an important point that I also discovered along my research journey; Much of the knowledge of experts is ineffable [0]. And so here's the problem with present "AI". It contains no ineffable knowledge, because that knowledge is never symbolically expressed and cannot be inferred from what is expressed. In fact the "official" narrative often disguises the real knowledge.

This is what the analytical elicitation stage of expert systems [1] was supposed to address (a now mature but presently unfashionable branch of "AI").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

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

Notable line:

"framing the narrative around the technology is far more important than the technology itself"

We're on the umpteenth cycle of this and we all seem very slow to learn the pattern. I tried to express it in "Chindogu" [0] but since then "AI" hype has taken the fake technological narrative to a whole new level.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/chindogu/

You claim the exact opposite of what the author wrote.

   " the reason I wrote this book was that I became frustrated with
   myself...  You write books to convince people of certain opinions
   and then you hope that some other people do the actual work of
   making the world better... I experienced this emotion that I
   describe as moral envy: You're standing on the sidelines and
   wishing, gosh, wouldn't it be awesome to be in the arena? To
   actually have skin in the game? "

Besides, I think these are foundational personality traits ... very difficult to "learn/add-on/fake" later in life. So I think the author wastes time appealing to "elites" already saddled by their shameless immorality. Those panged by deathbed "philanthropic" regrets, fretting on their "moral legacy" or place in eternity - having spent their whole lives shitting on the world to get ahead - are a tough, niche audience. Better to speak to younger people who are not yet soured, who have not yet become extremely fearful of taking social risk or jeapordising their "career". If you're under 25 and questioning what "successful" maens, this could be a life-changing book.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Roddick

Thanks for these links. You're right, I think computer-vision "sight reading" is now a fairly done deal. Very impressive progress in the past 30 years.

For small values of "music"? Really, no. But tbh, neither have more advanced "AI" composition experiments I've encountered over the years, Markov models, linear predictive coding, genetic/evolutionary algs, rule based systems, and now modern diffusion and transormers... they all lack the "spirit of jazz" [0]

[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e4/84/79/e484792971cc77ddff8f...

This takes me back. 1990, building Boltzman machines and Perceptrons from arrays of void pointers to "neurons" in plain C. What did we use "AI" for back then? To guess the next note in a MIDI melody, and to recognise the shape of a scored note, minim, crotchet, quaver on a 5 x 9 dot grid. 85% accuracy was "good enough" then.

Spoiler: Security Awareness Special Interest Group. We spoke to the founder. Interesting inights about sales and community based trust networks.

You have "epistemic integrity'.

I heard someone say "epistemic humility" the other day to mean fallibilism [0] and the conversation got interesting when we moved on to the subject of "what one can and should reasonably claim to know". For example: should cops know the law?

Not every programmer needs to be a computer science PhD with deep knowledge about obscure data-structures... but when you encounter them it's a decision whether to find out more.

Integrity is discomfort with "hand-waving and magical" explanations of things that we gloss over. Sure, it's sometimes expedient to just accept face-value and get the job done. Other times it's kinda psychologically impossible to move forward without satisfying that need to know more.

Frighteningly, the world/society puts ever more pressure on us to just nod along to get along, and to accept magic. This is where so much goes wrong with correctness and security imho.

[0] https://iep.utm.edu/fallibil/

As promised, here's an interview with Alt US Digital Service (AKA "We The Builders") with some eye opening talk about misuse of digital systems to harry and bully US citizens into "self-deportation".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43903037

What happened when DOGE gained access to US government servers? An exclusive interview with Alt US Digital Service (AKA "We The Builders") which HN readers might find interesting. Audio. 46 min.

Ah yes, ladder or lattice filters. If you don't mind old fashioned mailing lists there's still a few of hanging around in MUSIC-DSP@LISTS.COLUMBIA.EDU where code gets shared.

I thought it was phase synchronous overlap add, but I just checked and now I'm not so sure.

Has anyone got more details?

Never had the pleasure of a Sennheiser but when working in radio I got my hands on a lot of rack vocoders for doing branding, stings and idents. Funny how the number 9000 comes up a lot, like Roland VP9000 and Eventide H9000. 80 and 90s vintage ones like Korg VC-10 or Elektronik EM-26 had unique sounds, but tbh the modern digital recreations are amazing models. There's not a world of difference between vocoding, autotune, shifting, harmonising etc once you realise how all the fx are now based in FFT, convolution etc - just different variations on processing and control graphs - and so it's fun to create your own vocal effects in things like Max/MSP/PureData. Technically there's a distinction between "effects" and "processing" in terms of how much of the direct (parallel) signal is put through. Chers Believe is a yardstick for "effect", whereas a lot of what I hear with Daft Punk (and Air, Kraftwerk) is quite heavily processed as to disguise the original voice entirely - just letting a bit of top/sibilant through to define the stops and fricatives.

...and billions of taxpayer dollars, hundreds of years of European science, standing on the shoulders of giants, thousands of years of Greek, Arabic and Far Eastern mathematics.... The "self-made industrialist" sketch is funny when it's Monty Python, but when I hear whining SV bros claiming they built an empire from a rolled-up-newspaper, it's so avoidantly ungrateful. Like some kid "divorces" their own parents, disowns their lineage and declares themselves a unique and special self-creation. The US would do well to reconnect its Native American culture and have more respect for what got everyone here.

I associate May 1 with getting mashed in Helsinki as for many years I spent it in Finland, with amazing parties in the park for Vappu [0] the Spring Festival. It's a celebration of Spring, labour day, and also "education and industry" since people proudly wear their school colours, company badges and graduation caps. Quite an atmosphere!

[0] https://en.biginfinland.com/vappu-spring-fest-finland/

My childhood was in the 1970s and 80s when the 'Troubles' [0] affected Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. There were a dizzying number of factions, paramilitaries, volunteer groups, splinter groups... In those times it was rather common for killings and other actions to be mis-claimed, or tactically denied, with specious bomb threats or actual terror acts blamed on a different group. It was a very complex situation, as smouldering war zones usually are. Eventually the leaders from various camps developed codewords and protocols, so that for example the IRA or UVF could message MI5 and have a bomb warning taken seriously, or properly attributed in reporting. Many things that happened in those days were not at all clear cut and remain unknown to this day who really did what. Based on this I would counter that clarity is the exception.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

I like the arts metaphor and enjoy the writing style. Understanding "AI" as a component in an ecosystem of materials, tools, techniques, plans, abandoned attempts and final products is helpful.

The essence of the article is a topic of concern, but is expressed rather lightly in TFA. End runs around security happen at the edges. From the bottom; by undermining hardware, or code libraries, supply chains. And we're now seeing "decapitation attacks" right at the top. Our "western" security models have a weakness, with their roots in Prussian military organisation and bureaucratic technical management, by default they trust up. The whole DOGE caper (what I would call a Dr Strangelove scenario - variation of insider-threat) exposes this as actually very vulnerable.

Cybersecurity services that operate as MSPs (the acronym variation where S is for security) hit a fundamental problem. A managed security provider becomes a bigger and juicer target since all of its clients are implied spoils. If they in turn defer-to/buy-from bigger actors up the food chain, those become juicer targets too.

This a frequent chestnut when we interview cybsersecurity company CEOs. Although it resurfaces the old "Who guards the guardians?", there is more to it. One has to actively avoid concentrating too much "power" (non-ironically a synonym of vulnerability ... heavy lies the crown) in one place, but to distribute risk by distributing responsibility for building trust relations (TFA mentions this). I expect we'll see more and more of this sort of thinking as events unfold.

Praise inefficiency! It actually seems a really useful garbage collection mechanism. And such a lame tool to abuse, if indeed the points made about "weaponising" it are accurate. I'll post link to the episode here when it's out.

Very far from confirmed. I just finished reading [0,1] accounts of atmospheric heat anomalies being touted as a cause - alongside speculation about cyber-attacks. Something to remember about terrorist groups and propaganda merchants, is that they'll claim "responsibility" or otherwise misattribute acts immediately to gain attention. Often the first thing reported is what sticks in the public mind.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-p...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830946

This is about Microsoft, a corporation so giant and unaccountable that it's able to hide behind complexity. The OP's email issues may even be a non-malicious expression of that complexity. Nonetheless, the result is opaque power, from which European tech must rapidly divest dependency.

But there is a larger pattern to acknowledge here. It's about unaccountable digital privilege and the ability to wield technology for capricious harm.

This week I've been interviewing US government tech workers about the misuse of the SSA "master death file". If you're in this file you're digitally "deleted from society", after which all credit cards are automatically cancelled, bank accounts frozen, so one cannot get paid, see a doctor, travel or function in US society. DOGE are actively working to consolidate and centralising systems to make it "easier" to nudge undesirables to "self-deport".

In order to do this, huge amounts of illegal activity are already afoot, but most people, including judges, are not technically able to comprehend what is being done or what technofascism looks like.

If we want a "Bill of Bytes", it is going to need some very wise and far sighted thinkers who understand the nature of digital harms, and it will need to apply as much to governments and individuals as to private enterprise.

Existing "cyberlaw", including things like "computer misuse" are looking decidedly stone-age in the face of 21st century "layer-8/9" threats.

Last part of ZTW2025. Interviews with KnowBe4 and TryHackMe on training labs and how to boost infosec education.

Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of "particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"), TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for speech as more than just words.

I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood, excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven into their speech.

Philosopher kings != democratic representants. Professional politicans in the most basic sense know their craft and their field of expertise well

Indeed. What we see though is a decline in the quality of representatives who are forced to skew toward immodest grandiosity and media theatrics instead of statecraft. They forced into a race to the bottom to present a veneer of "expertise" in everything, and pontificate confidently.

Our societal complexity is a result of our cultural evolution and not caused by political failure.

I'll hold my position here; Culture and politics are not separate. If politics is the project to attain a "good life" (Aristotle), then managing complexity is part of that. There is no "perfect" society that is such a burden on its people it's unfit to live in (Tocqueville).

Corruption, etc. is not a contradictor of professionalism.

Your pragmatic slant maybe, but it is not a definition of public office I recognise or respect. Integrity and professionalism are bedfellows in my take.

That said, why should randomly selected people be better and not get corrupted or misinformed?

This is a very good question. The question, indeed.

I don't think I've even thought about it, but simply started from the clear perspective (one that I've arrived at reluctantly through observing the world) that a random person could do no worse than those who seek power today.

Maybe that's what the "anti-elite" populists wanted to achieve - a devaluation of politics itself. Ready to offer up their "technical solutions".

civic duty and democratic literacy falls on all of us, and right now,

How do you think real professionals and experts, who are being excluded from the decision making arena, can be effective in exile?

Working with these guys [0] recently I see the emerging idea of a functional government in exile ready to "restore from backups" after DOGE crash the system.

[0] https://www.wethebuilders.org/

That sounds like the last few universities I taught in. (quite seriously).

Yup, I recall Atari ST (68000) and BBC Micro (6502) having unbuffered and interrupt access to 6402 UART - which I used to C/ASM to fire MIDI bytes to and from.

our world is getting more and more complex,

I'll counter that. The argument that complexity somehow itself justifies anything is a retreat to the folly of philosopher kings that Plato wrote an entire work against (you all have heard of "The Republic" - which careful, thorough readers of political science understand is a rejection of such simplicity. Indeed all philosopher kings, like Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc... fail horribly and cause misery and death)

Furthermore, incumbent conditions foster complexity. Complexity is a symptom of political failure as much as a cause.

professional politicians

We are surely seeing that these two words do not belong together in 21st century society. Most of our "politicians" are the antithesis of "professional", being vain, shallow, corrupt and immoral.

It is surely clear that any randomly selected mature person could fare better, with minimal training/induction.

With communication technology and "AI" as their new weapons, the present cadre of egotist politicians are an ever more dangerous breed. As the OP rightly says, that's because of a corrupt and captured mainstream and social media landscape that they learn to play rather than engage in listening, thinking and policy making.

We will have no fair politics or justice until the "lies machine" is utterly destroyed along with those that ride on it. It's not that we haven't had lies-machines all along, but part of ur political/civic duty is to tear it down and counter it - something we have failed to do in the Internet age.

Real experts, who are quiet civil servants and scientists are being attacked and displaced precisely because they are ones able to manage complexity and to communicate rationally. Almost all of these people, who form the real government, are driven by duty, or pursuit of truth, not base ambition.

(some light edits)

The world is filled with brilliant people.

My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.

Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band name or whatever.

I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters, and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.

So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public information. They're hardly household names.

If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.

And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps the show running.

We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of this blindside.

Notation matters in how we explore ideas.

Indeed, historically. But are we not moving into a society where thought is unwelcome? We build tools to hide underlying notation and structure, not because it affords abstraction but because its "efficient". Is there not a tragedy afoot, by which technology, at its peak, nullifies all its foundations? Those who can do mental formalism, mathematics, code etc, I doubt we will have any place in a future society that values only superficial convenience, the appearance of correctness, and shuns as "slow old throwbacks" those who reason symbolically, "the hard way" (without AI).

(cue a dozen comments on how "AI actually helps" and amplifies symbolic human thought processes)