For many years, long ago, I did a similar project called One Minute Vacations, archived here: https://www.quietamerican.org/vacation_1.html
There are about five years' worth, organized by year; little album covers function as tabs of a sort.
1,140 karma · joined June 11, 2014
There are about five years' worth, organized by year; little album covers function as tabs of a sort.
Serious comment: 20+ years ago, Burning Man taught me this. Back then it was closer to its founding anarchic ethos and in a pre-social media, pre-starlink, pre-cell phone world, provided an large-scale social experiment in constructing an artificial and temporary bubble of post-scarcity society, within which commerce and status relocated from the obviously economic, into other modes of competition and hierarchy-finding.
In specific, social status recentered on a spectrum of predictable values including durable ones such as charisma and appeal, but also more altruistic ones, such as the nature of the gifts one provided (experiential and environmental, more than tangible). Status through the "gift economy" is how this was described.
It was, frankly, glorious to inhabit: at least, for a week...
I have wondered idly where in the space of possible social structures humanity would find itself, in a post-scarcity world, as it became further decoupled from "contemporary capitalism" as we know it.
That is: was the "natural" social ordering that emerged at Burning Man, an accurate view of what a prototypical post-scarcity humanity would tend toward?
Or was it "merely" the one that emerged when all the participants were entirely inculcated in and hence prone to recapitulating the hierarchical arrangements of the quotidian world on which the fantasia of Burning Man was built?
My assumption is that human nature (in all layers of its stack) makes social hierarchy inevitable, and if we don't need literal currency, we'll find a coin to trade in, hoard, envy, and pursue.
But I would assume that, being a product of contemporary capitalism, with little ability to distinguish natural law from cultural constructs in my own intuitions, wouldn't I?
Regardless, I hope I get to find out.
- Ximm's Law
It is a bad product, and it is pathological in the way all degraded social media platforms are bad.
But it's also worse than those others, in well documented ways; and it's long past time anyone with integrity found alternatives.
The failure of the "AI" industry to do so is an indictment and serious red flag.
The threat is distributed; the problem is systemic. Social herd behavior is very real, and it's a probability space, not a certainty.
Similar case: climate change is without any question causing millions of deaths per year and may well kill billions, not to mention destroying ecosystems, and how may people do you know who have given up eating beef or flying...?
What's most important about this is that it's a case study of what happens when deeply evolved ecosystems are blown up by disruptive technology. The psychological and social and professional impacts and myriad and traumatic to be on the receiving end.
Mathematics is merely one of the first domains disrupted. It will be unique only for being among the first... absent disruption of the entire civilizational project as a result of the disruption being caused.
Woe for us that we try to navigate this degree of change at a moment when the very worst and ignorant and short sighted hold all the power, economic and political.
Woe.
Doesn't mean we should waste energy; it does mean that we have crossed a threshold beyond which energy concerns change shape.
Support click-and-spin with momentum: I clicked outside the mandala and quick-dragged horizontally, hoping this would spin the mandala.
You could support zero-friction and momentum, slowly stopping.
In either this unlocks a dramatically new aesthetic: clicking on the rotating surface draws splines. The mapping of gesture-to-line (hence mandala elements) changes completely.
There are some complications, intuitively one might expect "pottery wheel mode" where symmetry is not enabled... I think that would be "unlearned" however.
"both can be true."
There can be a quotidian benefit to existing leaders in friction.
There are also real costs of various kinds associated with data centers,
and, to the point in this case,
there are also real risks associated with the current AI trajectory.
That's also a useful smoke screen for the accumulation of dossiers on every user's every behavior, for consumption by those who sell not products but influence and push political behavior.
Get off every one of their products and delete them.
- prevent or more likely perform but withhold and deny existence of recordings of policing
- give police total access to "private" recordings
is ludicrous.
Meta is literally a surveillance company which as a side hustle addicts people to feeds which destroy their mental health and social relationships and sense of self worth, in service of keepting them docile, consuming, and politically steered.
I hope that's recognized and progress occurs.
will our institutions and infrastructure survive things getting worse until they get better?
That's part of what's being asked by https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/a-tur... which I find most useful not for its analysis or suggestions, but for the fact that is advancing the need for discourse around risk and devising—quickly—a process for having that dialog.
What that process is supposed to be, who is to have a seat, how decisions madehave teeth of any kind are not any clearer than the primary question, how are we to collectively manage risk.
"May you be born in messy times." A curse if there ever was one.
Friend asked, well, what will you do when it's crossed?
"Gather my family and go to the mountains" was my half-joking answer; there is little for an individual to do. But that's a line that when crossed will mark a phase transition IMO.
I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.
neatly dodges literally everything that is interesting about what they do.
You to, friend, consume inputs and generate outputs.
What's interesting is how you do that, and, if you prefer to look at it through a technician's lens, whether or not what is done is reducible.
I don't mean quantizing the model, great, now you have a crankshaft with no oil. But the motion of the pistons and wheels is roughly the same.
What I mean is, to put it in plain terms, the only way you find out what a model is going to "predict" from a given input is to ask it.
If your mental model is still that LLM are "glorified overhyped giant markov chains" performing "parroting" you need to improve your understanding.
That doesn't count other consequences of his election interference, of course.
To an atheist, it seems very obvious that there is a intellectual whirlpool and cognitive error meta-pattern at work, which crudely summarized would be, "close attention to any subject and its context provides a fractal landscape within which infinite complexity and subtle relationships may be discerned" (the universe is reflected in a grain of sand; or, if you practice breath meditation, in the focus of breathing): this is interpreted as the signature of the divine. Because nothing we can produce with our human agency has such complexity. We are simple, serial, things; the world is parallel and multidimensional at every scale.
The world IMO is worthy of wondrous regard. But it's not because of design, not in any sense usually meant, bar those that Wolfram is pointing at with his "Rudliad" and the anthropic principle.
A deist is liable to say, ah ha, well, that is where the divine shows itself. But this is IMO the last of the gaps into which it might flee. Or, more charitably and ecumenically, one might say, this is where definitions of the divine converge for the atheist and the deist; what we mean when each say "the divine" is this, that the universe is wondrous and has deep orders and it betrays fractal similarity and order; and what a thing it is to be not just alive within it but aware of being so!
That is a cause for humility reflection and gratitude, for sure.
That's a neat summation of Biblical hermeneutics if I've ever seen one and more generally of religious hermeneutics.
What is being defended as a "close and thoughtful read" implicitly is from a more cynical view, a projection of nuance, complexity, and deep structure,
which is predicated and motivated by the axiom that the text must, definitionally, be subtle and its lessons profound. Because it is, you know, divine.
If you don't accept that axiom, the countervailing read is no, the characterizations are clumsy, the plots ridiculous, etc.; and it is precisely the gymnastic efforts one must go to, to find in them inspiration and divinity, that convince those who do of the ineffably mystery of the divine.
Sometimes a crude story succeeds on some merits and fails on others; when it is enshrined and glorified it creates a frankly dangerous social pressure to praise the emperor's clothes.
Consider the mid-life crisis, the white haired success who indulges their wealth chasing the things that comprised their half-remembered often superficial daydreams of decades ago.
That our culture derides these archetypes is a warning signal. There are healthier ways of coming to terms with the passage of time and what is lost through it.
Also? My dude, check in with "Felix" when you're both 45 and 55. Where is the source of value in a life? There is no right answer but I can tell you from observation that whatever combinations work for people, they are almost always not premised on stasis.
Popular culture, night life, preoccupation with the finest examples (or most trendy) of things like croissants, most especially, drinking drugs and the drive of libido—all of these are ephemeral pleasures.
Here in the Bay Area it's very easy to see the whole spectrum of life-choices and make a survey of the outcomes that results from different investment in career, pleasure, parenting, community, etc.
There's a subtext in writing like this: that what the author really wants, is to be frozen in a moment they regret is behind them; to forever be full of potential and on the cusp: well, it don't work that way I'm afraid, and neither your potential nor your youth nor the twinkle that come from being Young and Bright and Attractive last.
What I can say having made my own survey of outcomes is this: to the extent that your anchor sense of self worth and satisfaction in life on those ephemeral things (or worse, their pale social-media social-politics echos), you're gonna have a Real Bad Time getting older.
That does not mean you need to learn to love the bomb that is your kids. It does mean that you need to have insight and perspective on your own and other's psychology and manage to it.
Lots of traditions and cultures have evolved pretty solid ways for managing this shit. Insight meditation and investing in your community through volunteering and even hobbies are rightly popular. But family and friends (i.e your actual not online social network) are almost irreplaceable.
Stop chasing what was, no matter how eloquently you lament, you're not getting back to it or holding on. The river of aging and accumulating memory and the cummulative consquences of your behavior and decisions are inexorable, as they are for all. Even the rich. The young who are actually 24 just generally don't realize that yet. That's why they are who they are, as they should be.
Makes me wonder idly, - is this conceptually akin in some sense to a "universal grammar," and if so - with a broad enough training set, is there a latent durable universal grammar that might be similarly recovered and injected to the benefit of all training, - does that grammar go beyond morphological/syntactical/grammatical features, into e.g. semantics and pragmatics