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kleinbl00  ·  139 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Silicon Valley’s Big, Bold Sci-Fi Bet on the Device That Comes After the Smartphone  ·  

    Looks dumb, but I'm a hater and haters are gonna hate, I guess.

Naaaah dawg. My accountant just spent two emails and a phone call trying to make me feel guilty for taking ERTC so I'm going to indulge in a little self care? I'm gonna show you some HATE. You know. For me. And like I'm going to pause every now and then and save a draft and get back to work and come back to this because it's too delicious and I can tell I'ma spend two hours just straight loathing on this fucking Concorde Moment of tech journalism.

because this is the dumbest fucking shit I have ever seen.

I mean, let's start with the endless loop of a hand trivially grasping nothing. Pinch your fingers three times to pause the world's most insipid playlist. "Imagine staring at your empty hand with a logo projected on it." Down to the Sanskrit wedding ring - fuckin' McSweeney's couldn't write this article better. I'ma need that title image as a gif 'cuz this one takes too long:

And it is just so chockablock with cheesy goodness that I'ma have to go inline because holy fucking shit this is self-parody so incising and adept that if it were anywhere but the New York Times, I would accuse them of trolling. But it's the New York Times so naah, it's Principle Skinner And The Children.

____________

A brief aside, though: ever thought much about space helmets?

I have. See, I wrote a short film with a prominent space helmet in it. It's pure science all the way and we hit it out of the park and I'm really pleased with it and so has everyone else been and one of the "a ha" moments of making a movie with a space helmet in it, as a fan of science and technology, is you go "well of course we're not going to project blinding fucking lights on the actor's face like every other film because that's super dumb." Except as soon as you shoot a single frame of an unlit space helmet you realize that the camera doesn't read your actor's facial expressions and the emotion drains right the fuck out of the scene and you run to 7-11 to buy a half-dozen keychain flashlights to gaff tape around the viewport because fuckin' hell you do not have a movie without facial expressions, I'm sorry, and yeah - the actor can no longer see shit and yeah - this is absolutely not what NASA or anyone else would do in this situation but you know what? It's a movie, and what matters is the audience.

Think about that next time you see some jackass flashing gang tags to dismiss their text notifications. Who is the audience here? 'cuz that whole "fuck haptics let's mime" approach that the tech industry loves? They love it because they are the audience, watching their shit up on the big screen, popping a boner over how fyooooooooochur it looks without sparing a single fucking thought of what it feels like to fucking use it. VR helmets, Marcel Marceau moves, those stupid Playmobil creations that Kroger now thinks are their customers? 100% "fuck yeah my shit looks good on someone else." This is why, incidentally, Neal Stephenson will always be a grasping idiot while William Gibson will always be a fucking genius: Gibson invented cyborgs who were fashionable. Stephenson invented "gargoyles" covered in Borg laptops. Everyone wants to be Molly Millions, everyone hits the cons like gargoyles.

And "my shit looks good on someone else" changes with the times. Take the first Star Trek. Phasers that looked like guns, walkie talkies that looked like walkie talkies. Take the second Star Trek. Phasers that looked like hand massagers, walkie talkies that look like lapel pins. The Federation in '66 was a bunch of gunslingers with belts full of domination, the Federation in '86 was a bunch of grief counselors taking in the complexities of the universe in their pajamas. Federation '66 was about giving the actors props to get them into the zone, Federation '86 was about making the actors look good in the minimalist chic your average '86 coke addict thought the future would look like.

So let's get back to the Graspersons:

______________

    Inside a former horse stable in the San Francisco neighborhood of SoMa, a wave of gentle chirps emerged from small, blinking devices pinned to the chests of employees at a start-up called Humane.

Douglas Addams could do no better: "Far Out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

    It was just weeks before the start-up’s gadget, the Ai Pin, would be revealed to the world — a culmination of five years, $240 million in funding, 25 patents, a steady drumbeat of hype and partnerships with a list of top tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce.

That's right - we're a quarter billion dollars into ugly brooches. Take it from a jeweler - the only people who wear brooches are postmenopausal grandmothers and they favor rhinestones.

    Artificial intelligence “can create an experience that allows the computer to essentially take a back seat,” Mr. Chaudhri said.

What the fuck do you think Youtube is by the way

    They’re billing the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. It can be controlled by speaking aloud, tapping a touch pad or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand. In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on A.I. to help answer questions (“What’s the best way to load the dishwasher?”) and can summarize incoming messages with the simple command: “Catch me up.”

The first appearance of the space helmet: "wouldn't it be cool if some dipshit who didn't know how to load a dishwasher could stare at it like a moron, his hands full of greasy plates, and beg the heavens for guidance? Fuck yeah Sequoia would be all in on that shit." Let's pause to reflect, before moving on, that your average normie doesn't want to take a picture without the ability to look at it. But in the product video we'll just superimpose a perfect snap over his haplessness without having to worry about the fact that generally people want a modicum of QAQC.

    The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

"Hey Siri how much of a dumpster fire is Alexa" "Hey Alexa How are things going at Google" "Hey Alexa how is Siri generally regarded"

    To tech insiders, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a sci-fi fantasy.

Or, and I'm just spitballing here, it's the ultimate "if we build it they will come" circlejerk.

    Humane will begin shipping the pins next year. It expects to sell around 100,000 pins, which will cost $699 and require a $24 monthly subscription, in the first year. (Apple sold 381,000 iPods in the year after its 2001 launch.)

For $399. With no monthly subscription! And a pretty compelling use case! By 2009, there were 385,000,000 music players sold by Sony alone! "It's like a walkman but it doesn't skip, lasts twelve hours and holds 50 hours of music" is not a hard sell. "It's like a phone but you can't watch videos, scroll Facebook or call people, also

    For the start-up to succeed, people will need to learn a new operating system, called Cosmos, and be open to getting new phone numbers for the device. (The pin comes with its own wireless plan.)

..."People will need to learn a new operating system," the NYT said blithely, without the slightest acknowledgement of the simple power of blue bubbles.

    They’ll need to dictate rather than type texts and trade a camera that zooms for wide-angle photos. They’ll need to be patient because certain features, like object recognition and videos, won’t be available initially.

Wait wait wait they're expecting this thing to replace your fucking phone? "new phone who dis also don't confuse my AI"

    Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in an interview that he expected A.I. to be “a huge part” of how we interact with computers. He has invested in Humane as well as another A.I. company, Rewind AI, that plans to make a necklace that will record what people say and hear.

For the record, Microsoft abandoned that shit more than ten years ago. Their whole focus was alzheimer's patients. They were winding it down when Google announced Glass because ten years of trying failed to find a use for the fucking thing.

    Ms. Bongiorno, 40, and Mr. Chaudhri, 50, have a marriage of contrasts. He shaves his head bald and speaks with the soft, calm voice of a yogi. She sweeps her long blond hair over one shoulder and has the enthusiasm of a team captain. They both dress in Jobsian black.

Let's call it what it is, though - Theranos Black. It's what you wear when you're trying to make people think you're Steve Jobs, not when you're Steve Jobs. See, Dieter Rams also wore all black. So did Karl Lagerfeld. So does Helmut Lang. When Steve Jobs wore all black? He was aping designers to make you think he was a designer rather than a tech nerd. When everyone else wears all black? They're aping Steve Jobs to make you think they aren't grifters.

    They met at Apple in 2008. Mr. Chaudhri was working on its human interface, defining the swipes and drags that control iPhones.

In other words, the absolute worst aspects of iOS.

    Ms. Bongiorno was a program manager for the iPhone and iPad.

In other words, a bureaucrat.

    A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno had developed concepts for two A.I. products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they share the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." Also, Brother Spirit's real name is Denpok

    Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

    Humane’s goal was to replicate the usefulness of the iPhone without any of the components that make us all addicted — the dopamine hit of dragging to refresh a Facebook feed or swiping to see a new TikTok video.

"Like a phone, except you can't see or hear anything"

    The device’s most sci-fi element — the laser that projects a text menu onto a hand — started inside a box the size of a matchbook.

Projected haptics - championed by designers and eschewed by consumers since 1992

    It took three years to miniaturize it to be smaller than the size of a golf tee.

Huh, wow! Really impressive. Are you sure it took you that long to miniaturize a laser, Mr. & Mrs. Badhaptics Pointyhair? Or maybe it took you that long to negotiate prices on the one you want? cuz here's Forbes in 2012.

    Humane also retained Apple’s obsession with design details, from its device’s curved corners and compostable white packaging to the Japanese-style toilets at the company’s stark office.

LOL "what can we say about the office?" "it was... office-ey?" "no, no, something something design." "Well they bought Totos." "Fucking everyone buys Totos you can buy Toto at Home Depot now." "well what you got mister design" "shit I guess write about the toilets"

    Mr. Benitez Cong said he was “disgusted” by what the iPhone had done to society, noting his son could mimic a swiping motion at the age of 1. “This could be something that could help me get over my guilt of working on the iPhone,” Mr. Benitez Cong said.

allow me to show you something worse than swiping

    A haunting whoosh filled the room, and two dozen Humane employees, seated around a long white table, carefully concentrated on the sound. It was just before the Ai Pin’s release, and they were evaluating its rings and beeps. The pin’s “personic” speaker (a company portmanteau of “personal” and “sonic”) is critical, since many of its features rely on verbal and audio cues.

    Mr. Chaudhri praised the “assuredness” of one chirp noise and Ms. Bongiorno complimented the “more physical” sounds for the pin’s laser. “It feels like you’re actually holding the light,” she marveled.

    Less assuring: That whoosh, which plays when sending a text message. “It feels ominous,” Ms. Bongiorno said. Others around the table said it sounded like a ghost, or as if you made a mistake, almost. Someone thought it was a Halloween joke.

    Ms. Bongiorno wanted the sound for sending a text to feel as satisfying as the trash-can sound on one of Apple’s older operating systems. “Like ‘thunk,’” she said.

must...resist...lowhangingfroooooooot

    The device is arriving at a time when excitement and skepticism for A.I. hit new highs each week. Industry researchers are warning of the technology’s existential risk and regulators are eager to crack down on it.

    Yet investors are eagerly pouring cash into A.I. start-ups. Before Humane even released a product, its backers had valued it at $850 million.

You are now aware that Facebook has lost $28b on virtual reality.

    The company has tried to promote a message of trust and transparency, despite spending most of its existence working in secret. Humane’s Ai Pins have what the company calls a “trust light” that blinks when the device is recording. (A user must tap the pin to “wake” it.) Humane said it did not sell user data to third parties or use it in training its A.I. models.

Of course, that light has a name. And of course, you need users to sell their data.

    In September, in an echo of Apple’s fashion-friendly launch of its Watch, the supermodel Naomi Campbell wore Humane’s pin — barely noticeable without knowing to look for it — on a gray Coperni blazer on the runway at Paris Fashion Week.

FUCK YEAH FASHION CAFE

    Humane’s supporters have a pat way of dismissing skepticism about its prospects — they invoke the first iPod. That clunky, awkward device had just one use, playing songs, but it laid the groundwork for the real revolution, smartphones. Similarly, Humane envisions an entire ecosystem of companies building features for its operating system — an A.I. version of Apple’s App Store.

    But first, raisins. In a demo at Humane’s office of a feature that will be rolled out in a future version of the product, a software designer picked up a chocolate chip cookie and tapped the pin on his left breast. As it whirred to life with a beep, he asked, “How much sugar is in this?”

    “I’m sorry; couldn’t look up the amount of sugar in oatmeal raisin cookie,” the virtual assistant said.

    Mr. Chaudhri shrugged off the mistake. “To be fair, I have trouble with the difference between a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin.”

1) Smell it.

2) Look closely at it.

3) FUCKING PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH.

4) And also, read the fucking package.

Space helmet design, personified: "I would never do this, but as the audience I would watch somebody do this, and when it doesn't work I will plead idiocy because fundamentally, my customers are fucking idiots."

What we have here is an expensive device that can barely do the things we need, fails miserably at the things we don't need, but has the words "AI" "Apple" and "valuation" attached to it so of course, they're going to sell 100,000 of the fucking things. Thing about Juicero? At least you got juice. This, apparently, is for people who feel the need to ask the air about their cookies, which is all anyone uses their phones for anyway.

Art.

kleinbl00  ·  266 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”  ·  

LOL so OK

My wife was a midwife and naturopathic doctor in Westside LA. We're talking APEX woo. And we had a kid, and we were in with the Apex woo community, like "our friend the birth assistant was pretty much the impetus for Ricki Lake making a whole documentary about this nonsense."

So the kid needed baby swim lessons. How hard could it be? Well see there's "go to the YMCA in Compton" swim lessons but then there's "I think I can get you into Dolphinsgate" swim lessons. "I think I can get you in?"

Yeah. Turns out there's an interview process. You have to go to a "discovery session" with this weird Swedish or Austrian lady, at her house. And you don't get to do that unless you're vouched for. So... okay. We'll go to the "discovery session" at this lady's house. Which is in Venice, right there in the section where the houses are like two million dollars but the roads are dirt. It's fuckin' wild. You're a frickin' block off the Pacific Coast Highway and they've just never bothered to put down tarmac, and there's no parking, and there's like two dozen of you milling around because you were told to be here at ten on a Tuesday which is super convenient and it's twenty after and the weird Swedish lady opens the gate to the back yard and is that an above-ground pool?

So now we're all gathered around in a tiny back yard between the yurt and the Bubba Bucket and we're standing under a fig tree and no, we're not, we've been requested to form a circle and be seated and the weird Swedish lady has this giant embroidered Hindu pillow and you don't. And the singing bowl comes out and there's some sort of weird chant that we're all expected to participate in? And she's talking about some fuckin' discovery chakra thing and now we're going to talk about our traumatic birth stories?

Oh god. Yes we are. We're going 'round the circle while uncomfortable men hold their wife's hand while she nurses and tells you about how the trauma of having a baby in a room where the walls were a different color of taupe than what you had in your birth plan and we're just sort of riffing off each other and it's like noon? We've been talking about this shit for two hours? And hey, looks like we're done talking, I wonder if we can -

"And you? What is your traumatic birth story?"

Bitch is looking at me, not my wife? "yeah so my wife is a midwife and naturopathic doctor, we had the baby at home, it took like a couple hours, pretty much smooth sailing, sorry it sucked for everybody else?" 'cuz it's not like my wife can say shit, we've sat through 90 minutes of random strangers slagging on her competition? So I guess we drop the mic?

That was some awkward fuckin' silence, and the weird Swedish or Austrian lady just sorta stares? As if I'm somehow going to draw this out? She turns to my wife who just sorta shakes her head?

"So now it is time to watch the introductory video?" and she gestures us into the yurt and it's been two hours and now there's 20 of us squished into a 15-foot yurt and there's a thirteen inch CRT TV-DVD player combo in the Year of Our Lord 2014 and she slips in one of those purple "burned on my iMac" DVDs and John Tesh peals out and it's Nirvana's Nevermind cover for 20 minutes.

Naked babies. Naked babies everywhere. Nothing but naked babies. Yeah see Dolphins Gate teaches your kid how to swim successfully and safely by making them swim naked, none of that swim diaper bullshit here, just John Tesh and naked frolicking babies and then the credits roll and I'm doing my level best to keep my eyes in my skull and then Color by Technicolor crawls up and I am ALMOST LOSING IT and we somehow get out of there without me ROFLING myself into oblivion and I turn to my wife and say "well at least we don't have to worry about going there" because there is no. way. in HELL they'll let us in after that and frankly isn't that really for the best?

but no two days later we get an email telling us "we made the cut" and at this point I figure this is the most fuckin' LA Story experience we've had this year because fuckin' hell naked baby swimming in a bubba bucket in Venice is fuckin' amazing and since it's free because apparently my wife is all that sure this will make great stories. Color by Technicolor are you shitting me.

So I take the kid to her first swim lesson. Which is super-ultra-culty because parents aren't allowed to hang out it kills the vibe? And bitch is always late and the other person who showed up early and I are talking and I compliment her baby carrier because this is what you do and we talk a little bit and I mention that my wife has been looking at stuff and there's like this weird baby carrier culture in LA where women are paying like $1800 for a frickin' used baby carrier and the lady says 'this one cost me $3500' and I really have nothing to say to that but we soldier on because she showed up in an AMG somethinghuge and i'm driving a '95 Dodge and then the gate opens 15 minutes late and i get to stay long enough to "initiate" my kid through the singing bowl dolphin chant and then I have to leave? And come back when they're done?

And the kid is like 2 so you can't really ask her how things were but you try and she says "bobby pooped." And she gets an ear infection, and you treat it. And you get into this weird-ass routine of abandoning your naked baby in a bubba bucket off a dirt road in Venice in front of AMGs and hearing about someone else pooping and that can't be right, how much are they changing the damn water, that's gotta be expensive and she gets another ear infection, and you treat it, and isn't it nice that Mr. High Priced Crazy Pediatrician is comping you all your care because apparently your wife is all that and then your wife

reads on Facebook

That Austrian-Swedish lady is having to shut down Dolphinsgate because the Venice Health Department found dangerous levels of e.coli in the water and every time your daughter says "x pooped" plays back in your head and you take your kid to the Compton YMCA where she's one of two white people and she learns to swim and never has another ear infection ever again but goddamn your two best LA stories are Dolphinsgate and Goat Yoga and you think I'm joking about all this but Constanzia will still take your money.

kleinbl00  ·  400 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stephen Wolfram: What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?  ·  

    Particularly over the past decade, there’ve been many advances in the art of training neural nets. And, yes, it is basically an art. Sometimes—especially in retrospect—one can see at least a glimmer of a “scientific explanation” for something that’s being done. But mostly things have been discovered by trial and error, adding ideas and tricks that have progressively built a significant lore about how to work with neural nets.

Some history: chatGPT and neural nets got a real kick in the ass when Robert Mercer decided to apply Markov chains to high-frequency trading. Markov came up with his theories shortly before being blackballed by the University of St. Petersberg for refusing to rat his students out to the Tsar. Mercer, for his part, basically figured out that Markov chains would allow his hedge fund to reverse-engineer the trading decisions of other dark pool trading bots and front-run them. This made him a lot of money, that he didn't want to pay taxes on, so he hired Cambridge Analytica to destroy the world. All that and he only delayed the inevitable.

    In earlier days of neural nets, there tended to be the idea that one should “make the neural net do as little as possible”. For example, in converting speech to text it was thought that one should first analyze the audio of the speech, break it into phonemes, etc. But what was found is that—at least for “human-like tasks”—it’s usually better just to try to train the neural net on the “end-to-end problem”, letting it “discover” the necessary intermediate features, encodings, etc. for itself.

In other words, the blacker the box, the better the performance. This is important because we're talking about training a model - a representation of reality. There is no part of neural networks or markov bots that attempt to explain that model, their sole purpose is to ape it, input to output. They will give you what you have, and hopefully allow you to predict what you'll get... assuming the future matches the past.

My sound world is governed and defined by Fourier transforms.. This is applied math stuff that argues that any function, no matter how random and chaotic, can be modeled as a series of sine waves. It's a curve fit and for most things it's good enough. You talking into your phone becomes a collection of bits through liberal application of Fourier transforms. And most of the time it works and the world continues in its orbit but sometimes the normies can't tell if it's yanny or laurel at which point we need experts who can explain, in no uncertain terms, that it's fucking laurel, that the normie confusion about it is due to their inexperience with codecs gone bad, that when the curve fit no longer fits the curve the philosophical "what does green even mean, maaaaaan" discussion is fine for Medium but if you're prepping a legal brief it is generally accepted to mean 495-570nm, full stop.

    And, similarly, when one’s run out of actual video, etc. for training self-driving cars, one can go on and just get data from running simulations in a model videogame-like environment without all the detail of actual real-world scenes.

All well and good unless your video game doesn't include bicyclists at night where there are no crosswalks.

    And what one typically sees is that the loss decreases for a while, but eventually flattens out at some constant value. If that value is sufficiently small, then the training can be considered successful; otherwise it’s probably a sign one should try changing the network architecture.

Had an interesting insight while still talking to my mother. Medicaid was paying for her physical therapy. She got "better" much faster than me or my sister anticipated - although her therapists never used the word "better." They kept using the phrase "return to baseline." At one point I asked what, precisely, "return to baseline" meant. The lead therapist cleared her throat, put on her lawyer hat and stated that for purposes of Medicaid reimbursement, "baseline" is determined to be that level of performance at which improvement plateaus such that qualitative measures improve no more than twenty percent over the course of X sessions where X is dependent on the qualitative measure.

"What you're telling me," I said, "is that 'baseline' is not 'where was she before' but 'where does improvement stop.'"

"For purposes of Medicaid reimbursement, that is correct," she said.

Now - my mother left their tender care with a walker. She was good for 20 steps, with assistance, before being winded and in pain. Prior to the accident she was getting around without assistance. "Flattens out at some constant value" does not mean the problem is solved, it means the model can't get any closer. Yeah - "if that value is sufficiently small, then the training can be considered successful" but who is determining the value? "Our self-driving model has avoided running over imaginary bicyclists for 2 million runs, it'll be fine in Phoenix."

    In the future, will there be fundamentally better ways to train neural nets—or generally do what neural nets do? Almost certainly, I think.

Yeah but are we good enough? Remember - ELIZA was created to show what a bad fucking idea all this bullshit is IN 1965!

Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, running the DOCTOR script, was created to provide a parody of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview" and to "demonstrate that the communication between man and machine was superficial"

    Or put another way, there’s an ultimate tradeoff between capability and trainability: the more you want a system to make “true use” of its computational capabilities, the more it’s going to show computational irreducibility, and the less it’s going to be trainable. And the more it’s fundamentally trainable, the less it’s going to be able to do sophisticated computation.

And at some point, someone will decide that tradeoff is good enough - Microsoft figured Bing was ready, Google figured Bard was ready. To do that, they performed a sleight-of-hand that Microsoft didn't pull with Tay, but which underpins all this bullshit:

large language models are trained to talk. Search engines are supposed to provide ANSWERS.

This is a great article that I would badge if I had any left. Stephen Wolfram is a straight shooter in my experience and he's done a great job of explaining what the chatGPT is doing - it's chatting. It's not "AnswerGPT." "I'm sorry but you're mistaken, Avatar isn't out yet because the year is 2022" is a stellar answer for a chat bot. It's fucking garbage from a search standpoint.

This is bad enough when we're looking up showtimes. Complications ensue when we're making staffing decisions.

    Why does one just add the token-value and token-position embedding vectors together? I don’t think there’s any particular science to this. It’s just that various different things have been tried, and this is one that seems to work.

This is very much like how Google made their AI marginally less racist by deleting gorillas from the model.. That one sentence "I don't think there's any particular science to this" is why the whole thing is going to crash and burn in an extremely ugly way after doing a fuckton of damage.

"Please explain for the jury, Doctor Scientist, how your program determined my client's position should be terminated due to her work performance, rather than her inability to thrive in a racist environment:"

    But anyway, here’s a schematic representation of a single “attention block” (for GPT-2):

"Thank you, Doctor Scientist. No further questions."

    (As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output of published material has been a bit under 3 million words, and over the past 30 years I’ve written about 15 million words of email, and altogether typed perhaps 50 million words—and in just the past couple of years I’ve spoken more than 10 million words on livestreams. And, yes, I’ll train a bot from all of that.)

Title VII? 13,000 words. The theoretical, scientific underpinnings of Markov chains and neural networks will severely limit any LLM from accurately reproducing law, let alone parse it.

    So how is it, then, that something like ChatGPT can get as far as it does with language? The basic answer, I think, is that language is at a fundamental level somehow simpler than it seems.

Sure - but what we do with it and how we make it isn't, QED. The problem here is now and has always been pareidolia. We see something that talks and we presume it has a soul. The better it talks the more soul we assign to it. The more soul we assign to it, the more value it has and the more value it has the more we let it trample humans. Until, that is, we've trampled enough that they threaten to tear down society.

The fact that there's a lot more news about ChatGPT sucking than chatGPT succeeding is on the one hand heartening but on the other hand deeply discouraging. Neither Microsoft nor Google care. There is no bad news. Fuckups and how they respond just allow faceless corporations to show how much they care. And the Markov bots only operate on a time horizon of a few milliseconds anyway so we're looking for a derivative of a derivative of a derivative of a signal in order to juice the stock price.

"Dr. Wolfram, can you please explain whether these 'large language models' can separate meaningful language from meaningless gibberish?"

    ...is there a general way to tell if a sentence is meaningful? There’s no traditional overall theory for that. But it’s something that one can think of ChatGPT as having implicitly “developed a theory for” after being trained with billions of (presumably meaningful) sentences from the web, etc.

"In other words, Dr. Wolfram, flawed data will produce flawed responses?"

    The basic concept of ChatGPT is at some level rather simple. Start from a huge sample of human-created text from the web, books, etc. Then train a neural net to generate text that’s “like this”. And in particular, make it able to start from a “prompt” and then continue with text that’s “like what it’s been trained with”.

"Thank you, Dr. Wolfram. Your Honor, the prosecution rests."

_______________________________________

A fourier transform will allow you to process an analog signal digitally. It rounds the corners off square waves but then, so does physics. It's "good enough" for what we need most of the time - you listen to Spotify at 128kbps VBR, I mix at 48kHz 32-bit floating point unless I need 96kHz or 192kHz. Even then, it tells you what is, not what will be and the whole of what we want LLMs to do is tell us what will be.

Large language models are improvisational LUTs. LUTs are great so long as you don't wander off the map. In the case of office racism, the AI knows what a stereotypical employee should do in a stereotypical environment and anything that deviates from the stereotype is statistically rounded off.

Ergonomics and biomechanics are governed by the "5% human" and the "95% human." Your cars, your bicycles, your scissors, your coffee mugs are designed around 90% of humanity and the other 10% cope for better or worse. I've long said that any schlub can do 80-90% of any job, it's that last 10-20% that keeps you employed.

AI is gonna be great for the stuff that requires no expertise. Unfortunately, expertise involves knowing when expertise is required and AIs suck at that.

Google was gonna have their self-driving cars on the road by what, 2018? This is the problem marketing always has: they don't understand the difficulty of complex problems and they don't want to. Google is usually smart enough not to let marketing steer the ship while Tesla is the opposite of that. Results were predictable. Unfortunately for big stupid tech companies, Western law has sided with "wronged individual" over "faceless corporation" every time the faceless corporation can't prove they were abiding by the law.

And the achilles heel of AI is that the more sophisticated it is, the less you can prove.

bhrgunatha  ·  513 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab  ·  

CCP has everything locked down so tightly, outsiders generally will never know the extent of censorship and totality of clampdown exerted. There were no results searching for mentions of Sitong Bridge Beijing on weibo or anywhere inside the great firewall recently. There are hundred or thousands or more police posted on bridges across China...

And anyone who's spent time in China will be aware of the pervasive chàbuduō attitude.

A mixture of a very pragmatic response to a situation, combined with meh, good enough, but it goes a lot further. It's also a very sharp, double edged sword.

Cable won't reach? Drill a hole in the door, feed it through... very pragmatic|meh good enough. Can't afford to buy and process vegetable oil, gutter oil..., so pragmatic|meh good enough.

Can't be bothered to follow to strict chemical/biological waste disposal procedures, dump it in the sewer.

chàbuduō also means if you can get away with it, you definitely should.

Now I'm not saying they were so slapdash with their attitudes, that a dangerous virus being experimented on for gain of function, funded by the US (because they aren't allowed to) - only co-incidentally the very virus that caused a worldwide pandemic killing millions - could have been exposed to the outside world accidentally because some fuckwit threw a virulent bat's carcass in the dumpster out back that one time because Joe Chao mixed up the labels on the infected/uninfected cages, or someone tore their protective clothing, or spilt a vial and just used a mop to clean it up because ... chàbuduō.

But that is exactly what happened.

Then the CCP machinery kicks in to cover it all up, now no-one will ever know the difference ... chàbuduō | meh good enough

veen  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Californians asked to cut power use as extreme heat approaches  ·  

I'm off for three days and you guys start talking about EV charging. Literally doing 1200km in two days in a 66kW Hyundai. A few points to add to the discussion:

1) you charge where you park. You top up in quick breaks when you need to go further. Nobody wants to fastcharge, so we expect it to become a much smaller part of driving than gas stations are now. Over here we expect just 13% of all EV charging to be at (highway) fast chargers. Imagine if you could fill up your car with water. Would you really opt to fill it up at a random industrial parking lot you could also drop a hose in it on your own driving lane and at work for half the price? How about your employer realizing they could make money by offering you free charging when you allow them to use your car as a battery storage? Opportunity charging, which is that you charge when your car is standing still anyway, is the inevitable way forward.

2) The US is dearly lacking in both fast and destination chargers. Range anxiety disappears once those two are remotely reliable - I know this from first hand experience and from a bunch of studies done on the Dutch charging station network, which happens to leave every other country in the dust. As soon as it's a common sight for there to be a charger in a parking lot, people stop complaining. Because I already have the luxury of a dense and reliable network of destination and fast chargers, I almost never have to worry, and I also almost never fastcharge. Colleague of mine has a charger at home and at work and he's never even used a fastcharger. Because if you leave full and can charge at your destination, that's two charging stops eliminated. So a <car range> mile trip both ways is made possible by just one charger at my destination, that happens to also be a decent way to make money for businesses with a large energy connection. Tesla drivers love their Superchargers, but normal people will avoid them if they can. And if you do need them - for most people, as soon as your EV can do 100+ kW of fast charging, which is "most new models and probably whatever first model upper class people will buy", nobody minds the stops because you'll be ready to drive another 150-200 miles right when you're done taking a piss or grabbing a coffee. Especially when you factor in that charging is cheaper per mile than gas.

3) What will drive the change in chargers? Well, the business case for EV destination chargers is decent. The case for rapid chargers is VERY good as soon as you hit a certain level of daily users. There is less overhead and less insurance than a gas station. It never needs refills, and you can basically just plop one down and wait for your investment to pay off. Even a small station can draw traffic, or can boost sales. The number of rapid chargers that aren't Tesla has doubled in less than eighteen months over here. We fully expect every supermarket, DIY store, McDonalds and Starbucks (any place that you will park at for more than 20 minutes and that owns the land it's on) to follow suit.

4) Smart charging capabilities have been made mandatory on all public slow charging stations here. The collective energy use of EVs will be a hit on the grid, but it's in the form of "small spikes in many places", which is something that grids are in theory perfectly capable of handling if dimensioned correctly. The real problem that will fick things up are heavy vehicles. They consume a factor 10-15 more energy than cars per km and require near 1MW chargers if you want to top them up along the way. The energy use of industrial zones can easily increase by TWh's if adopted widely, which is not the case of personal vehicles. And the TCO, which is nearly always the main driver of any EV adoption rate, however is good enough that the trucks will be here before the infrastructure is upgraded.

5) I still dream of a V2G system of energy brokerage whereby we can delay daily power use with cars and home batteries. The realities are complicated, and the rise of EVs seems to be going just a bit too fast for V2G to catch up. My city is one of the first to realize what you guys are theorizing about.

But it's the result of one incredibly entrepreneurial dude who's been at this problem for 8 years. Wider adoption... I don't know. I hope so.

user-inactivated  ·  882 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 27, 2021  ·  

Cumol is the slickest ‘skian to ever grace this site.

Don’t @ me.

RIP the West.

kleinbl00  ·  894 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Work Dissatisfaction Driven by Early-Career Workers Looking for Higher Pay and Remote Options  ·  

Believe it or not, I'm sanguine bordering on ebullient... long term. Short term?

So that graph says two things without you even really needing to know what it's graphing: (1) "holy shit" (2) "that can't continue." There's an aphorism in commodities markets: "the cure for high prices is high prices." We're all in the commodities market now, bubba.

You and I have talked about this at length for several years now: automation is coming and that right soon. There's been a steady pressure to unstaff. Hey, great! They're letting you work from home! That means you're now competing against the entire goddamn world for your job. Which means if they can fob it off on a bot rancher from Bangalore to save 20%, they'll do it. And now everyone who could barely afford Silicon Valley is looking at Nowhere Gulch and dreaming of owning serfs, and he'll happily pay for the house with a check because this'll be easier if the wife and five-year-old can get settled in before school starts.

Food? You're literally asking "what happens if Democrats cut entitlements for some reason" and they ain't. They ain't ever. They learned that shit under Clinton - when you fuck with poor people you get Newt Gingrich. Which isn't to say every Republican governor out there isn't going to try on every possible variation of "fuck poor people" because it's "important to their base." Performative evil - that's where the Right is right now.

I used to say "there's opportunity in the Delta." Now I say "It's just the Churn." I was in the music industry when MP3 happened, the movie industry when Netflix happened, and tried to write a book when all the publishers sued Amazon. Before I ran off to join the circus, I interviewed with every acoustical consultancy in Seattle. When I came back, the only one still in business was the one I left.

We knew this. We saw it coming. We looked at the graphs, we looked at the lines, we looked at the empty streets and restaurants and we knew it would be seismic. Now? Now we're all trying to pretend COVID is over as if that fundamental a crash isn't going to leave some deep and lasting scars.

But look.

Michael Lewis wrote an entire book about the skeletonization of the federal government under Donald Trump. Any semi-competent bureaucrat was able to evaluate that there was no room for competence in government, so they left or retired. This was also documented by Bob Woodward in Peril - there was literally zero vaccine distribution plan by the Trump white house. None.

Trump knocked over the sand castle. Dude three-finger-saluted the entire goddamn government for us. 'cuz I tell you what: opportunistic hangers-on don't hang on after the opportunity is gone. Which left an entire ecosystem open to exploitation by pie-eyed, opportunistic Lefties driven by mission.

And now? Now every crisis is gonna be an "add moar socialism" moment.

- Student loans. The Biden administration can literally forgive all of it through executive order. They won't, but they'll definitely fuck with it. They'll wait until things are really painful, though, so that they "won't have a choice."

- Medicaid. Can be expanded aggressively to anybody who got any pandemic assistance whatsoever under emergency proclamation, which is over when Biden says it's over. I'm currently paying $2 a month for healthcare because I cashed an unemployment check. I believe that rate is good for a calendar year at least, and that's only because nobody's pushed it out further. I'm effectively on nationalized healthcare and the Republicans didn't even notice.

- Housing. They've already started murdering the flood insurance subsidies. They could come after the mortgage interest deduction, too. They could also dump money into rural broadband to improve work-from-home feasibility.

- Food. Republicans have been picking away at SNAP for decades but the pandemic gives the Democrats an excuse to expand it, keep it expanded, and nationalize its management. Every state that fucks over its poor people is a poster child for "government overreach."

Don't get me wrong. Everything - everything - is gonna get worse before it gets better. A whole lotta lives gonna get destroyed. Personally? I've already mourned them. This was evident in the data eighteen months ago. All these disruptions are going to fuck up some lives, and I say that with 700,000 dead.

The people flying the plane actually care about the passengers and have actual flight hours under their belt. It's not a state I'd want any of us to be in, but we're here, and I feel like we're looking at the least worst option.

I've been kinda shellshocked since this.

That bill? Right there? Was the first time the Republicans went "actually we don't have the juice to block socialism anymore." They fucking gave up every principle - BEFORE Trump lost! because they knew in their very bones that small government market capitalism would go up like flash paper in a national emergency. Every bill since has been small, un-speechable death-by-a-thousand-cuts socialism and they haven't had shit to say about it because the kinds of guys who really just want Trump to be president because he's Trump are going to cock their heads quizically at some Buckley National Review diatribe against the risk against innovation by subsidized broadband as if they were Jack Russell terriers hearing Their Master's Voice. it's over their heads, man. The "base" barely believe in the gospel of Number Go Up. What they know is their grandsons are doing better with Gamestop puts, whatever they are, than they are with their social security.

I think this has a happy ending. I think it has a happy ending the way Game of Thrones has a happy ending in that a lot of people are gonna die, a lot more are gonna get fucked, everyone with a short attention span is gonna be mad that they didn't see it coming but the world will be a better place and generally-good people will get a generally-good outcome but it's still a happy ending.

We just gotta be among the survivors.

kleinbl00  ·  1057 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How much does Post Malone/Taylor Swift/The Police/BTS actually make on royalties?  ·  

    We have based our algorithm on the data from this article from Soundcharts.

    Once we have the number of monthly streams from Spotify, we multiply the price-per-stream of each platform by the number of Spotify streams.

"Elon Musk walks into a pipefitter's union hall. The average wealth shoots up by a billion dollars per plumber."

So... the "this article" referenced has numbers. Those numbers don't match up to anyone else's numbers and everyone else's numbers don't match up to anything either. There's this need to believe that you can simply figure out how much money someone makes off of Spotify because then we can continue to feel good about paying a pittance to listen to our favorite artists over and over and over again. Your link:

    Another major streaming player is Amazon Music.

    As the other platforms, Amazon, don't publicly share the price-per-stream. This value approximates to $0.01196.

    Taken into account this value, 83K monthly streams are needed for reaching the $1000 mark, the lowest so far, but still high!

The link they took their data from:

    In full detail: Amazon Music Unlimited, Napster and Tidal got the top-3 rates at $0,0119, $0.0106 and $0.0099 respectively. However, don’t get too excited about Amazon’s numbers. The lion’s share of the tech giants subscribers are in fact over at Amazon Prime bundled streaming service — and for Amazon Prime, the average rate came to just 28% of the Unlimited’s payout, or $0,0034.

I worked with a guy who made his revenue entirely off of Youtube. He broke the economics (for him) down quite simply: any video with less than a million views earned him nothing. Did not even show up on his invoices. Any video with more than a million views made him about five thousand dollars. Each subsequent million views earned him about a thousand dollars. But those numbers were really wiggly and I guarantee that's what Youtube was paying him.

Look - a plane ticket from Seattle to Los Angeles used to cost about $300. I've probably bought a hundred of those. The least I've paid is $29 (no airline miles or other nonsense used - Delta was trying to assassinate Alaska Airlines). The most I've paid is $437. The most I've seen, however, is $5998.

And flight prices are hella easier to scrape than Spotify royalties.

kleinbl00  ·  1127 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "Dare Mighty Things"  ·  
uhsguy  ·  1324 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: In Historic Pick, Joe Biden Taps Kamala Harris To Be His Running Mate  ·  

Vote for president Harris I guess. I have no idea where she stands on issues but I’m sure nobody else including her knows either

Devac  ·  1528 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why the world is waiting for Betelgeuse to go supernova  ·  

I need to correct myself and point out that the values I got were wrong.

Formulae:

  t = sqrt(x²/c² + 2x/g) - time measured on Earth

t' = (c / g) * asinh(gt/c) - time measured by ship's crew

Numerical values:

  c = 3.00E8 m/s

g = 9.81 m/s²

x = 4.3 ly = 4.07E16 m

Time from the perspective of people on Earth (t): 1.63E8 seconds = 5.18 years.

Time from the perspective of people on the ship (t'): 7.27E7 seconds = 2.31 years.

Derivation was OK, had four other people check it for me and can show the work. It's not a new result anyway. Regardless, sorry for the mistake.

am_Unition, ButterflyEffect, nil - you also shared that post, so I'm shouting out just in case it has any relevance for you guys.

kleinbl00  ·  1611 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours  ·  

Devil's advocacy: most people never needed it anyway

The MP3 revolution was interesting to watch as both a music fan and as an audio professional. On the one hand, people with no storage always opted for the lowest possible quality so they could maximize their quantity. On the other hand, people who had a handful of CDs would download thousands of MP3s. They also wouldn't back up, they also wouldn't duplicate across devices (because then you have to manage dupes!) and when they lost all their files to hard drive failure, they made no attempts to resurrect their collections.

I watched a futurist lay things out for upper-level media execs at a closed conference in 2010. "That kid with 800,000 MP3s. Guys, do you really think he represents a million lost sales? Do you really consider him to be a threat to your business model? He's not collecting, he's curating and he's curating for the sake of possession, not the sake of consumption."

The torrent kids weren't the customers of Spotify. Spotify is for people who know some music, don't have anything weird and aren't at all interested in alphabetizing their CDs. Those people listen to the radio, watch MTV and had a shelf with 20 albums on it before they could pay $7 a month to never worry about it again.

It's not that files have gone away. It's not that Dropbox is gone. It's that the people who never had a use for it in the first place have now been lured away by services designed for people who never got file structure in the first place.

Dropbox is an excellent example. It's a version control plugin. Where Dropbox made their money was by realizing that version control was useful for people who had no idea how to open a git repository. Where dropbox failed was in not understanding that even then, most people have no use for version control. The ultimate use case for Dropbox? Five people working on a group project who never work with other people and who were told by a nerd sick of dealing with them that if they just put the project file on Dropbox nobody has to worry about who has the latest version. The ultimate failure of Dropbox? Nobody understanding Dropbox, and someone deleting the file out of their dropbox, and everyone else screaming at the heavens "WHO DELETED THE DROPBOX" without understanding how to log into Dropbox to see the version control.

You see, most people never needed files anyway. They wrote a resume a few years ago, they have a list of babysitters, there's a spreadsheet with all the phone numbers in their carpool and that's it. The reason their desktops were miasmas of assorted documents is because they never need to find that shit anyway. Their desktop runs an unpatched version of XPSP3 because they bought it in 2007 and haven't used it to do more than TurboTax since 2013.

Bill Gates wanted a computer in every house because he saw the utility of ubiquitous PCs. Everyone put a computer in their house because they heard the hype. But what everybody really needed was a thing to do Youtube, Facebook and SMS. It's still just a fuckin' television, it just fits in your pocket now. Fundamentally, most people use technology as an asymmetrical pipeline of undifferentiated culture dispersion. This is why they store everything in their email inbox: emails are the most official thing in their lives, gmail makes it virtually impossible to delete anything and text is easily indexed so whatever they really need they can find by fumbling a word or two in the importantbox.

We're constantly upbraided about the "service economy." Really, the past 25 years of software development have been about creating services. "You're too stupid to do this yourself, let me give you the 5% of the functionality that you actually use, wall off the other 95% and charge you $70 a year so you can curate your own dick pics, sincerely, Dropbox." People, including myself have lambasted Yahoo for failing to achieve with Flickr what Instagram achieved by being a cheap, shitty version of Flickr. Thing is, though? Flickr was created for photographers sharing photos with people who like photography. Instagram was created for Kardashians sharing photos with people who like to eat paste.

The computer revolution was founded by people who knew that if they built it, an entire generation of artists and thinkers would use the tools to build a better tomorrow through the miracle of access and technology. The computer revolution was paid for,, however, by people who only wanted to sell each other Beanie Babies and watch each other eat Tide pods.

A quote of a quote:

    “The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.

Two decades ago you would have fired up Internet Explorer which would have broken a few links, insisted that your Flash was out-of-date and rendered things pretty-sorta-OK at 1024x768. But two decades ago we would have considered this "perfect" because things had to run on Explorer with updated Flash at 1024x768. Now? Now I need all the content indexed for Google, capable of rendering landscape or portrait and be usable on Android and iOS through the same URL. Which - yes - means your espresso stand menu now relies on eight Wordpress plugins to be legible on seven different versions of iOS. Microsoft lost the mobile battle by presuming that a soccer mom waiting in line would put up with constantly patching her browser in order to know the price of a latte. Apple won by knowing they were selling devices to people who wanted a Swarovski panda on the back of it.

So I get it. The geeks who grew up being told that theirs was a shiny future of egalitarian brilliance prompted by the boundless promise of ubiquitious computing are slowly realizing that the Kick Me In The Balls Channel wins on content.

But you can't blame the technology and you can't blame the people profiting from it. Most of humanity has no goddamn business fucking around with file structure, and most of humanity knows it. The idiots were the people who tried to force them to adopt one even when it could only do them harm.

_refugee_  ·  1612 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thoughts on sympathy and empathy  ·  

I agree with the idea that empathy, in any given person, exists as a limited commodity.

I believe that a person is by nature a limited being; there are bounds to all dimensions of experience, feeling, etc. Once a person gets into the appearance of having unlimited any-quality-within-the-self, it seems to me like we are now talking about gods or fictions. Or narcissists, I suppose.

I have read that our daily ability to self-discipline is limited; that it shows a decline in performance over time when taxed. (Yes, I've also read articles that decry those same studies; seems like the jury is out on this topic. However, I've never seen a study demonstrating a human's unlimited quantity of -- well, anything.) I know for a fact that attributes of mine, such as patience or anger, certainly feel and appear limited as I engage in or with them. My general level of intelligence is limited by my brain and genes. My stamina and physical endurance are limited, as I begin to feel exhausted halfway through a 6 mile run. I can't even sleep forever; the body wakes me up when it's hit that particular limit, with no input from me on whether I agree.

I think the thankful antidote or defense to this limited experience and limited mental/brain-i-al resources that all persons experience is the ability to switch off: when I recognize my empathy has reached a limit, I can switch gears from empathizing, perhaps, to trying my best to listen, or learn. When I am out of patience, I can divert my attention to something less trying. When I am out of reason because, perhaps, my emotions are too high -- I can realize this, consciously decide to stop engaging analytically (or to stop allowing myself to turn to 'logic' or overthinking) and practice letting go, or accepting that not everything can be proven, defined, known -- can be mathematic in nature, I'd like to say.

There are limits to empathy, just like any other human trait or ability; knowing what our personal limits are allows us to recognize when we have reached them and to stop trying to wring a dry sponge, or get the car going by flooding the engine. It is useful to know when a given approach may no longer be viable due to resource constraints so that then, we can either admit this limit and step away from the task, or we can admit the limit and begin to try other, potentially also-valuable approaches.

kleinbl00  ·  1660 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What happened when a venture capitalist told the truth about a Mark Zuckerberg-backed start-up  ·  

If this guy:

    Prior to his current role, Jason served as Deputy Director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, leading postsecondary innovation efforts to improve the outcomes of disadvantaged college students by investing in colleges, universities and entrepreneurs pursuing digital and adaptive learning, student coaching and advising, financial aid innovation, and employer pathways. Prior to the Foundation, Jason founded and grew three investor-backed technology and services companies before holding a series of executive positions at Microsoft, SchoolNet, Kaplan and StraighterLine. At Kaplan, Jason led three education businesses as general manager or president, in addition to founding and leading the company’s venture capital effort.

doesn't "get it" then "it" shouldn't be gotten. If your business is investing in educational technology and you aren't allowed to point out educational technology that shouldn't be invested in, this whole artifice needs to come down, man.

These guys should be allowed to comment. If you're following them on Twitter, it's because you want to know what they think about stuff. A Zuckerberg and Thiel-funded libertarian spankbank that eats shit to the tune of $250m? We need the world to talk about that shit.

kleinbl00  ·  1685 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. - The New York Times  ·  

Nope. Not buyin' it. Many of the excesses of capitalism can be traced to indentured servitude prior to slavery and many more can be traced back to penal servitude prior to indentured servitude. The excesses of capitalism were imported directly from England, which wasn't a standout in Europe for feudal brutality by any measure.

More than that, we fought a war against slavery and it's not like things got better for everyone after the elimination of slavery, nor were things fine and dandy in the North where slavery was abolished. Most of the worst aspects of capitalism arose during the Gilded Age where wage slavery was an essential part of the economy and where industrialists thought it was fine and dandy to hire private armies like the Pinkertons to murder union sympathizers and organizers.

American capitalism is brutal because America, Britain and the other "neoliberal" countries of the world cast capitalism and socialism as Manichean absolutes whereas the rest of the world saw them as poles on a spectrum. Once the Tsar fell, the world spent a hundred years realigning itself on that spectrum. Those forces that were most directly oppositional to communism ended up with the most free-market excesses; those that were most directly oppositional to capitalism ended up with the most excesses of a command economy.

The non-aligned movement allowed nations that were not directly required to kowtow to one ideology or another to pick and choose the market characteristics that they wanted without adhering solely to one pole or the other. This is why countries like France have many free-market aspects and many socialist aspects. The effects are masked in other nations by graft, corruption and cronyism but by and large, the rest of the world uses socialist aspects where they make sense and capitalist aspects where they make money without crushing everyone. The problem is that cronyism destroys socialism eventually while it buttresses and strengthens capitalism.

American capitalism is brutal because for 60 years we were able to point at the Soviet Union and China and Cuba and Vietnam and Cambodia and Nicaragua and Venezuela and say "WE DON'T WANT THAT AND IF YOU DO YOU ARE THE ENEMY." Up until 2016, "socialist" was an epithet in American political discourse. Up until 1989, "socialist" was part of the title of our greatest enemy. Therefore, anything that sniffed of socialism was un-American by definition and anything capitalist was desirable.

Survival of the fittest, bitchez.

kleinbl00  ·  1699 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Labor Econ Versus the World  ·  

I've been thinking about this comment for a while. From my perspective, Hubski has become a lot more polite than it used to be. "I disagree with you, and you're dumb for thinking this way" is an appropriate response when your counterpart is espousing ideas that are demonstrably wrong.

But then, I've been having online debates since before you were born. My first "internet" experience was using an acoustic coupler to dial into the University of Colorado to play a MUD on a terminal whose only output was a daisywheel printer. I missed being OG "eternal September" by a year. And what I've noticed over the past ten years (but not the past twenty, and not the past 25) is the retreat of anyone over 30. It didn't used to be this way. It started when GenZ hit college.

Because here's the thing: you can be wrong. People are wrong all the time. And when they're wrong, and they're asking questions as to whether they're right, they need to be told they're wrong. When they're holding opinions that you judge to be harmful and toxic, they need to be told they're wrong in such a way that the toxicity is front-and-center. This has been accepted social conversational doctrine my entire life; it was the basis of every single-camera and multi-camera sitcom going back to I Love Lucy. It's the core of Nancy Reagan's Just Say No. It's the basis of Dennis Leary's career.

But a funny thing happened about 2010, 2011. Conversations on the internet started demanding that both sides are always right, and that if one side has absolutely all the facts, they still need to politely assert that they don't have all the facts lest the other side stop listening because their feelings are hurt.

I didn't really grasp why until I'd been back to college, until I'd seen my kid start school, until I had reason to explore the pedagogy of education in these United States and what I discovered is that a doctrine of exploration and self-education has, in most school districts, become an insistence that no one is ever wrong. Whatever ideas you may have, they automatically have merit through the simple act of holding them and if those ideas are to be discounted, they must be discounted by the holder, on the holder's terms, for reasons that are valid only to the holder.

For my part, I came to Hollywood in 2007 and was immediately sheep-dipped into a culture where the people who are wrong are wrong immediately, they are wrong incontrovertibly and the sooner we can get things right the less money we lose because there are 28 people and millions of dollars of gear waiting on your mistake. You can get over your butt-hurt later because we've got shit to do. Your assessment of the world is not the core issue here, it's the broader context and your place in it is entirely optional because there's a long line of people behind you who will do your job without getting wrapped up in whether or not you were right to have your feelings hurt. Likewise, my wife's profession involves life safety and regular discussions with emergency rooms and aid cars. She is surrounded by students who have opinions, who have their knowledge, who have their confidence, and are not going to be walked through whether or not an iron level of 18 should go to the ER "in their opinion" because somebody could die and somebody else has the expertise to answer the question.

And you can't fight the tape. The world is definitely heading towards safe spaces where we never confront each other over our racism or ageism or anything else because that's not the sort of shit you do face-to-face and person-to-person, you see, if you want to strike a blow for social justice you do it by ratioing Twitter threads. You do it by regramming. You do it through in-jokes and memes that Vice will wring their hands over obliquely. Actually telling someone they're wrong? In a conversation? Perish the thought.

So those of us who remember? Those of us who know? We're left with a choice - figure out how to tell you that you're wrong in such a way that your feelings aren't hurt... or find something better to do.

One of the things that bugged the shit out of me when I was your age was people who said "when I was your age." What bugged me more was people who would say "you'll understand when you're older." It's intellectually lazy. It's an appeal to authority based on nothing more than hang time. It's "respect your elders" without any underpinning justification. But it's also a cry for help - it's a statement that "I don't know why you're wrong, but you're wrong, fucking listen to me because I've been around the sun a couple dozen more times than you have and that ought to count for something."

I maintained then and I maintain now that an idea needs to stand on its own, regardless of who puts it forth. What I've learned by growing gray hairs, however, is that it's an instinct borne of the knowledge that simply being ass-in-seat for longer will teach you something, even if you can't elucidate it, even if you can't share it, even if you can't describe it. "Respect your elders" is ultimately based on the same sentiment as Neils Bohr's quote "an expert is someone who has made every mistake there is to make in a narrow field." You might not be able to explain why your opinion is right and their opinion is wrong based solely on the fact that they're half your age, but prejudicially speaking, at least, you've had longer to change your mind.

A lot of people don't have the patience to constantly reframe an argument in their opponent's terms. "You're right, but also impolite about it" has become the most common refrain I've seen over the past ten years whereas the 20 years before that were full of "you're full of shit, let me count the ways, asshole." I'll take the profanity, thanks; it doesn't immediately shift the conversation to whether or not the information was presented in the proper tone of voice.

Most people? Given the choice between having a conversation at a tenor that satisfies the other person no matter how wrong they are or silence? They'll pick silence. And that's how a whole new generation of kids are growing up with the idea that unions are useless, that public school doesn't matter, that feminism is irrelevant, that you're entitled to believe measles is better than measles vaccines. Because those of us who can argue the opposite have given up the effort of explaining it to you because you reject that there can be one right answer. Have given up on defending our certainty of knowledge because we've had this fight since you were born. Have given up on educating the youth because the youth don't want to be educated, they want to be patronized.

Because if the only people you're willing to listen to are the ones who are speaking in your approved tone of voice, the only people you'll hear are the ones you agree with.

katakowsj  ·  1965 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dubai Police start training on flying motorbikes  ·  

Hey Dubai, caveat emptor. What does this say about the ideals of Dubai Police if some dude sitting on four open air, super-sized, vita-mix blenders is certain to ensure the public safety?

OftenBen  ·  2165 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Kleinbl00's Red Pill Reading List: Geopolitic  ·  

Well, I just realized I finally finished this list.

goobster  ·  2176 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 11, 2018  ·  

We all have doubts about ourselves. If we didn't we'd all be dicks like Trump.

Doubt isn't a bad thing in and of itself. But it shouldn't hang around. Don't feed it.

Look it in the eye, evaluate it with a clear head, learn what you can from it, and then discard it. Doubt is a reminder to look inward from time to time, and make sure you are who you think you are.

Doubt is a fortune cookie fortune: Interesting in the moment, but useless in the long run.

(And by the by... the "sad panda" visual that appeared in my head almost made me spit out my coffee, it was so funny! Thank you for that!)

kleinbl00  ·  2241 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 7, 2018  ·  

I had an epiphany maybe three, maybe for years ago. I was running, as always. Up the dune, as always. A mile into my 3-4 mile run, as always, same as it ever was, as I have been doing since 1988.

This dude smoked me. Trotted right on by like I was standing still. Made me feel like shit. Then I thought about it and realized that I was old enough to be his dad. I'd been running longer than he'd been alive.

I was faster when I was younger. But I'm still going. I'm doing pretty goddamn well, thankyouverymuch, and all the shit that holds me back isn't bad enough to hold me back much. I'm healthier than my parents were at my age; I'm healthier than my grandparents were at my age, I'm healthier than my friends at my age.

I'll take it. In the end, we're only competing with ourselves, and we only get to win until we lose. I'll take every win I can get.

WanderingEng  ·  2261 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 17, 2018  ·  

While I have no background that qualifies me to judge art, I love your drawings. I hope you keep doing them and sharing them.

tacocat  ·  2273 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Post a Datsun  ·  

tacocat  ·  2322 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Colin Kaepernick will not be silenced.   ·  

I'm proud of what he's done and I think he's an awesome dude. But he's not an upper echelon quarterback. BUT the Dolphins signed Smokin Jay Cutler out of retirement so Kaepernick is a whole lot better than some starters in the league now. And now I have to politely ignore a bunch of conversations about how much Kaepernick is a spoiled whiner who sucks.

I hate everyone.

lil  ·  2326 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: This is my tarot  ·  

OK, to answer your question

Position 10: The Ace of Pentacles. This card suggests that we will keep going

We may get cut down, but like the tree stump in this card, it is still alive with new branches growing from it. We don't know what has become of the old tree? All that remains are its many rings - it was old, but not wise enough to sustain itself.

The glow in the centre of the stump keeps it alive leading to the new growth.

Stay grounded, leave the light on in your heart.

kleinbl00  ·  2370 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mapping’s Intelligent Agents: Autonomous Cars and Beyond  ·  

    What I'm apparently failing to explain is that I want more consideration, not less.

What you're explaining loud and clear is that you feel the people responsible for the truth on the ground are not giving it the proper consideration. When I called you out for arguing (as a grad student) that you knew better than the law, you doubled down:

    That's not my luminary genius insight but professor after professor after professor has taught me.

I took one (1) acoustics class. It was taught by the two acoustics Ph.Ds at UW. And we started the class with one of the profs explaining the measurement rig he had pointed out the window: see, the buses outside were loud, but it was spring and soon the trees would be covered in leaves and it would be much quieter. et voila. Acoustics.

We believed him - I mean, I was 22 and the actual math of the attenuation of a shit-ton of leaves is intensive. Nonetheless we never did end up comparing beginning and end. Once I started working in the field I relayed this story to my boss and she laughed uproariously and showed me the B&K chart listing attenuation on the x and "meters of forest in hundreds" on the y.

These are acoustical professors with Ph. Ds prestigious enough in their department to fund a boat that flips on its tail for sonar studies. And we learned all sorts of great stuff about nodal analysis, resonance, deep channels and the like which provided a fundamental basis for the practical knowledge that I then picked up in the field. Because "practical knowledge" wasn't their thing - they were busy rewriting the theory. And for environmental acoustics, the theory was laid out by a dude a hundred years dead.

We'll disregard my profs' erroneous assumptions about the way environmental acoustics work. We'll even disregard the fact that when they were busted, they shined it on as if it never happened. We'll focus instead on their attempts to broaden the body of knowledge that we all benefit from and thank them for it. We'll even spot them the assumption that if my boss were to walk into that room and give them a lesson on the acoustical isolation of leaves, they'd listen interestedly, ask intelligent questions and have a rigorous debate about the mathematics at play.

Because nobody comes out ahead when we assume everyone else is a fucking idiot.

FIIC. Field Impact Isolation Class. A two-digit number that takes two trained professionals two days and ten thousand dollars worth of equipment to arrive at. Lucrative, no? I mean, we couldn't roll one for less than $3k. Which means we didn't get to roll them nearly often enough. And we spent a day burning through the math in custom bullshit Excel spreadsheets that sucked and that wasn't any fun either. So when we were presented with an opportunity to test some composite floors so we could build up some better mass law models, my boss paid me to schlep concrete and sand up to the 4th floor of a condo for six weeks so we could do our own testing. Contribute our own models. Put in our own research.

I billed out at $150 an hour, dude, and she sank 240 hours into it.

So I'm glad you're "all worked up." You should be. You "want the underlying assumptions, biases and structural issues unearthed and discussed" which can only mean you think they aren't. You "want to know in which context they work and in which context they don't" as if you think people don't fight over this shit every goddamn day. And I've been trying to say this a dozen different ways and you aren't hearing it, probably because it's offensive, and because it assails your worldview:

The experts in the field know more than the people they measure.

That's it. That's my beef. That's my fundamental observation, that in any esoteric body of knowledge, the practitioners of that knowledge know more about that knowledge than the people who encounter that knowledge glancingly. No matter how broad your evaluation of mapping and GIS, it will never be as focused as the mid-level bureaucrat in some forgotten town who has jurisdiction over where roads go in his township.

The argument put forth in your essay is that the experts are fucking idiots. When I tried to find something about objective vs. relational you came back with "no, it's that the experts are fucking idiots." When I came back with "you know, the experts I've worked with seem to know their shit" you came back with "they don't know it nearly enough because research." So yeah. I'm fucking offended. Your argument hinges on the idea that the practitioners of a science are incurious about the theory of the science, which is the argument people always make, so often that you actually whipped out

    So you sound to me like yet another arrogant engineer who thinks their numbers are always a good enough substitute for the truth.

Dude.

DUDE.

The "arrogant" engineers are the ones that know they know more than you and are sick of having to explain it. They're the ones whose knowledge is called into question because somebody just did a study somewhere. They're the ones being forced to (temporarily) rewrite their entire code of behavior because some expert somewhere in another unrelated field has better PR.

These are Assistive Listening Devices. They cost about $300 each, plus about $1000 for the transmitter. And thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, if you have an auditorium that holds more than a hundred people you have to have enough of them for five percent of the audience. That means if you have a school somewhere with a gym that seats 300 people, $5500 is going to be spent on shitty FM radios that nobody ever listens to... rather than band instruments, rather than gym equipment, rather than art supplies.

This happened because a well-meaning audiologist argued back in the mid-80s that deaf people were being left out of public events because they couldn't hear, and a lot of them couldn't afford hearing aids, so clearly any public building should be forced to pay to bring them in so that they would be "handicapped-accessible." And none of them ever get used - you wanna stick someone else's grody earthing in your ear? - but they're mandated by law and building inspectors across the US have to count the fuckers every time there's a permit issue. Millions of these things, mouldering away in closets.

Repeat for in-class reinforcement, smartboards, etc. What usually happens next is some journalist gets a bug up their ass to investigate waste and comes after whatever the it-thing is and administrators are pilloried for wasting money on that thing that only has one study to back it but ALS has hung on for three decades because the ADA was written by the Pope, effectively, so here we are. But fundamentally? People who don't know telling people who do know bones it for everybody.

My argument, simply put, is it's dangerous and offensive to assume that the people doing the majority of the work are in the knowledge minority. And the fundamental argument put forth by this argument - and by you - is that if we have a number, and everybody agrees on it, it reflects calcified thinking and oppression of the populace.

    I don't want to paradigm shift my way to glory, I want people to stop and think about the values and methods they pick.

The only way you could want this is if you hold deeply the idea that "people" aren't already doing it.

And fuck right off with that shit.

steve  ·  2417 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: If someone gives you a badge, can you then give it away?  ·  

I think that badges don't go to "you" per se... they go to the post. So this post has been badged, not you.

There is a secret sauce algorithm that determines when you earn badges to spend (posts, comments, shares, etc). That algorithm might include a factor of having your content badged... That I don't know.

I hope that helps.