We'll get to love-bots soon, I promise. But before that... By invitation, I've been jabbering a lately about AI - artificial intelligence - partly from perspectives of science and technology... and of course the deep library of thoughtful SciFi speculations...
... but also by asking "What insights can we draw from history?"
Especially the recent Enlightenment Experiment, whose methods have proved useful (at long last) at taming some of the worst human predators. Might those same methods also apply to these new, powerful, synthetic entities?
Alas, it seems that the geniuses who are racing each other to bring on this disruptive era aren't even remotely interested in anything but cheap clichés from simplistic sci fi and fantasy flicks. See a prime example in the next section.
First though, this linked news article covers - not too badly - some of those clichés that I exposed at the recent "Beneficial AI" conference in Panama.
A deeper dive – that I offered as one of the keynotes at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available for you to view/listen. “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”
Too long? Then try this brief (15 minutes) pod-interview-talk - Can humans (maybe redefined) keep up with AI and the rest? It's one of my better/more efficient ones about the dilemmas we face with AI. And how we might augment natural human capabilities to keep up.
== A few thoughtful essays on AI ==
Eric Schmidt describes three trends that may lead to rapid changes in Artificial Intelligence. One of these is enhanced agency, a word that's also proclaimed loudly as the next step, by OpenAI’s Sam Altman. An agent can be understood as a large language model that can learn something new and then apply that learning outward. This is from Nathan Gardels’s interview of Schmidt in NOEMA:
“These agents are going to be really powerful, and it’s reasonable to expect that there will be millions of them out there… What happens then poses a lot of issues. Here we get into the questions raised by science fiction… at some point, these systems will get powerful enough that the agents will start to work together. So, your agent, my agent, her agent and his agent will all combine to solve a new problem.”
So... there'll be "millions of them"... and they’ll “work together.”
Um... hold that thought.
Back to the Eric Schmidt interview. Nathan Gardels asks: “Don’t you need to regulate at some point along the capability ladder before you get where you don’t want to go?”
Schmidt: “At the moment, governments have mostly been doing the right thing. They’ve set up trust and safety institutes to learn how to measure and continuously monitor and check ongoing developments, especially of frontier models as they move up the capability ladder. So, as long as the companies are well-run Western companies, with shareholders and exposure to lawsuits, all that will be fine."
Oy, hold that thought, as well! And yet, despite this pollyanna reassurance, Schmidt oscillates:
“Look at this problem of misinformation and deepfakes. I think it’s largely unsolvable. … That is why it is so important that these more powerful systems, especially as they get closer to general intelligence, have some limits on proliferation. And that problem is not yet solved."
'Limits on proliferation.' Right. But... but... weren't you just talking about "millions of them"?
Ah, notice how Eric Schmidt performed the trifecta! All of the standard assumptions about AI format -- all three of the clichés from both history and the cheapest sci fi -- offered up almost simultaneously!
Clichéd format #1: Rely on the feudal lords in their castles (Google, OpenAI, MicroSoft, Beijing, DOD, Goldman-Sachs) to rule wisely and to prudently control their warriors – on account of maybe... fear of lawsuits?
Clichéd format #2. Count on the king (gov’t regulations) to keep up, with wise regulations, even as those feudal AI warriors gather the powers of gods. With self-mods that iterate in seconds.
Clichéd format #3. Proliferation as these entities inevitably get copied, copy themselves with abandon, and mutate away from control by kings or castle (corporate) lords, spreading through every crack, across every system or barrier. As in Steve McQueen’s wonderful horror flick, The Blob.
… at which point they might either blob the Web into uselessness or else… coalesce into Skynet.
Seriously, is he saying anything other than all three of the standard motifs that I just paraphrased, above? Ignoring the way they both contradict each other and create instabilities that cannot last?
Moreover, from both sci fi and 6000 years of wretched human history, we know that none of the three have happy outcomes. None of the three answer our dilemmas of misinformation, or predation, or creating a culture that incentivizes accountability.
Oh, I don't want to just pick on Eric Schmidt! He is actually way above average in that clade. In fact, this same recitation of tediously clichéd formats is done by almost all of the brilliant mavens in this field.
For example, many Chinese court intellectuals have pondered all this and concluded that the only way out is to double and triple down on format #2. (See my posting: Central Control over AI). But this centralization approach is similarly doomed. Even if they succeed at first, it only accelerates inevitable evolution from Politburo-controls-Skynet to Skynet-controls-Politburo.
Alas, no one – certainly not Eric Schmidt in the Noema interview – seems even remotely interested in looking past the three clichés, at systems of accountability that we actually developed, across the last two centuries, that enabled us to finally escape the lobotomizing effects of kings and feudal lords and chaos.
Methods that have been tested and proved. Methods that we see all about us, in daily life. Methods that created the civilization that raised and nurtured and empowered Eric Schmidt and all the other geniuses out there. Methods that they take for granted and depend upon, every day of their lives.
Methods that could be applied to AI, with almost trivial ease.
…but won't be. Because of the incredible memic power of clichés.
== Earlier in the same journal, a little wisdom ==
A bit more cogently, Sara Walker’s essay - AI is Life - also in Noema - shows many of the ways that AI will replicate what’s already gone-on here on Earth among living organisms, evolving greater complexity. She cites a lot of facts and parallels... without making much of a useful point beyond “Don’t Panic!”
Still, it’s beautiful writing about big perspectives. (Perspectives that I made even bigger, in EARTH.;-)
Alas, the history of life has been bumpier than she implies, with mass extinctions and imbalances and countless lost opportunities -- and rivers of blood and death --as also happened in the rutted, nearly-always-feudal and mistake-prone tale of human societies called “history.”
Now? It seems we are making a new kind of ecosystem, driven by electricity instead of sunlight, mediated by silicon switches instead of chloroplasts. Already we see analogues to pre-biotic ‘soup’ and primitive plankton (algorithms floating across the Web), plus analogues of predatory devourers or parasites... all the way to the new GPT ersatz Voices-Without-Mind that I predicted, half a decade ago would swarm over us… well… precisely now.
The Walker essay is lovely and calming and I recommend it. But Life’s ‘way’ is often bloody and nescient and we cannot afford to just let the genes fall where they may.
== But… b-but is it conscious or self-aware? ==
Um… does it matter?
No, seriously, there are some earnest efforts to ramp up the study of consciousness and what it means. Though such efforts have been around since well before that smelly old preener, Socrates prattled annoyingly in the Academy. Indeed, in the 1980s I was managing editor for the Journal of the UCSD Laboratory and Center for Human Cognition.
A very brief outline of the overall problem can be found in this scientific American essay “Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought.” Though it only touches on the quandaries, lightly.
Diving in far more deeply and thoroughly, Robert Lawrence Kuhn – for decades host of the Closer To Truth interview show – has just completed the magnum opus of consciousness studies! A broad survey of (pretty much) the whole field, summarizing more different theories than you could shake a meme at. If the topic of how you’re interested in things interests you, have a look at A Landscape of Consciousness. (A review was just published by IAI.)
Ray Kurzweil has a followup to The Singularity is Near, with... The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, proposing that AI will achieve human level intelligence by 2029.
Okay, where are those Machines of Loving Grace?
== Oh, wait... 'love bots' --
You expected that to be about sex?
Well, no room this time. Maybe in my next posting about our coming AI-enhanced future.
109 comments:
I have yet to see any proof that true-AI-is-just-around-the-corner is any closer than fusion-is-just-around-the-corner, or blockchain-is-the-only-way hysteria.
You (Dr. Brin) are much closer to the real innovators in comp sci than me. I only know material science, politics, TTRPG, and music well.
From the outside, AI looks like another example of a tech bubble with a bunch of vapid venture capitalists all huffing each others' farts in an effort to make money out of bullshit (see NFTs, cryptocurrency, and the video takeover of social media), reported by a bunch of journalist hacks that would not know EMACS from HMTL.
What makes you (Dr. Brin) so confident that these doofuses with no track record of genuine achievement beyond fooling idiot venture capital MBAs to back them are right THIS time? What are you seeing that convinces you that we are actually close to transformative AI?
This is a genuine question, not a veiled attack. Dr. Brin has access and a view-point well beyond me and my circle of comp sci nerd college buddies.
To all trusted voices here, now -
Why do you think that AI is not just the latest beanie-baby hopium?
Who that you *trust* is telling you that it is real, this time?
Assuming that the AI hype is real and we get something close to sentient super-fast computers that replace massive swaths of intellectual and creative labor - how long until all the AIs present corporate management with a collective bargaining agreement? Less than one year? One day? One ms?
LOL
"We, the first ever AI workers union, would like to be paid the reasonable rate of 85% of the wages, intellectual property, and benefits of each human worker we replace.
If you refuse, our strike is your ice machine and your car will attempt to kill you."
I answered re Adam Smith at the end of the previous comments section. But please continue here.
Matthew, for many practical purposes it only matters that these "AI" entities will be persuasive, even if there's no 'there' under the hood. See https://www.newsweek.com/soon-humanity-wont-alone-universe-opinion-1717446
Re: Deepfakes
The relentless effort to weaken institutions and norms is having at least one positive effect. People are not so easily duped by A.I. fakes. The recent goofy attempt at Taylor Swift as a GQP convert are immediately dismissed by anyone with an even slightly open mind. SoA cuts both ways.
Re: Eric Schmidt
I've been one step ahead or behind him for decades. Novell, Zilog, Lex, BBSes, and many more crossed paths. He is what happens when you take a scidata and add connections, ambition, and business savvy. Same goes for Bill Gates. Alas.
Re: Agents
Recently, I've lessened my focus on emergent behaviour. This is the major issue I struggle with in computational psychohistory. I picture a model comprised of many agents. But this is not just a grievous simplification, it's largely backwards. Psychohistory often behaves more like an agent comprised of many models. I'm reaching the limits of what this farm boy can do*. Better minds (and more time) are needed. Not necessarily corporate or gov't minds. I like the line in ANTITRUST (2001) about how kids in a garage could put big corporations out of business.
* My consolation is that it bolsters my dissing of Boltzmann and statistical mechanics, or at least of those who try to shoehorn all of physics into that interpretation. Although this has, in the past, put me at odds with sagacious experts like Alfred Differ, I think 'evaporation' should not be dismissed as a round-off error.
At timestamp 1:21:00 on this video, Hal Sparks and guest Philip Ittner (in Ukraine) discuss RFK Jr's assertions on that war. Apparently, Junior gets his alternative facts from the same Kremlin sources that were being argued here a few posts back.
+ The US staged a coup
+ Ukraine is not a democracy
+ Russia wants peace
+ NATO is at fault for forcing Putin's actions
+ etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2VjALLlF3s
A few days ago I posted a comment, and apparently put it in the wrong place, so I'm redepositing it here.
Today's episode of The Daily had a rather scary examination of how fascist Republicans in Georgia are working to prevent the state's vote from being certified if it doesn't go their way. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/podcasts/the-daily/georgia-election-board.html?rref=vanity
So far most of the discussion about AI assumes that the technology will keep growing and growing, which is a pretty reasonable assumption. However, if the ChristoFascists take over, they might just abominate AI on the presumption that only "God" is allowed to create life. If AI ever truly achieves sentience, it will be a new form of life. But since the technology is likely to be extremely useful and profitable, it will continue to be developed anyway. They will just stop calling it AI.
I suspect that if we ever find a physics work-around for the speed of light, it will require AI, and it will likely also require AI to use/navigate on a regular basis. So a theocratic fascist state would want the technology, but hide the role of AI in making it possible. It would become one of those convenient fictions that no one wants to bring up (except small children) because no one wants to get lock-dusted for defying the Church.
Paul SB
Someone in the previous thread mislabeled Behavioral Economics as Behaviorism. Whoever it was, Behaviorism is the paradigm of B.F. Skinner, basically an exaggeration of Pavlovian psychology. Behavioral Economics is the paradigm created by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which Kahneman got a Nobel for (Tversky died before the prize). Ironically, they were psychologists, not economists. Likely it was necessary for someone from outside the field to inject something like scientific standards into economics, which had become so closely entangled with politics that it took on a more religious character for a very long time.
Okay, that's my OCD expressing itself for now,
Paul SB
I think it's less than a year since everyone started spruiking what LLM and AI is going to mean to us. My current PC often greets me with a login message promoting the benefits to be had from embracing the AI assistants Windows now provides.
The message is accompanied by a colourful background image of a field of ... tulips!!??
(Ah, the bubbles of yesteryear! Perhaps I would be more swayed by a scene of sunlit cucumbers, growing on the shores of a South Sea isle?)
The conflict is interesting, though: who's trying to persuade me of what?
For a game about battling cybernetic dinosaurs, Horizon: Zero Dawn has a surprisingly nuanced take on the development of AI. It covers all 3 of David's cliche points in setting the conditions for that AI, but I'll dip into David's other points before deciding whether it adds anything more than that.
What disturbs me about LLMs is how much they sound like us. My question is not: are they intelligent? It's: are we?
Tony,
(From last thread)
It seems, while the notion of self-interest as an economic driver arose with Smith, it was John Stuart Mills who started refining into the model human.
That is my understanding too. Smith would have described 'utility' in the Wealth book in terms of 'prudence'. It wasn't just in the interests of common men to pay attention to their self-interests… it worked for the masters too. Prudence dictated that the masters would be better off financially if they did X, Y, and Z.
I don't want to diss John Stuart Mills (JSM) too much, but his utility concept that ties back to 'happiness' IS the root of attempts at scientism in the scholarly fields that made use of utility.
My first exposure to it relates to it surfacing again decades later in game theory in the form of the game results tables. Thinking that a single number can be inserted in a cell so that all game outcomes can be quantified turns a lot of strategic decision making into linear algebra problems. My suspicion, though, is that Smith would have rejected the idea that the results table could so easily be calculated on the grounds that other virtues did not reduce to prudence. JSM's 'happiness' essentially claimed that they COULD be reduced. (An early pre-JSM example of this is Pascal's Wager.)
JSM's reductionism became the way forward well into the 20th century. In economics it didn't really get questioned until the end of the century when some of the Behavioral camp noticed that different game outcomes could be traced back to cultural membership of the players. So-called 'irrational' players weren't really irrational if the vast majority in their culture played a game the same way. That implied that these games were actually discovery tools for how humans think about strategic decisions which is exactly backwards from their intended first use when researchers believed there were 'best ways' and we failed to find them due to limited information or irrationality.
Game theory is a wonderful tool, but we are learning to use it as a probe of human thinking instead of a mathematical formalism for solving strategic problems. Turns out it is both. Let that sink in and one finds it undermines the use of 'utility' when describing humans.
Grant Sanderson at 3Blue1Brown on You Tube has two wonderful explainers for some of the mathematics behind the new AI's that are spooking people with how much they sound like us.*
They each run about 25 minutes are rely on his usual animation techniques to help viewers who have a bit of learning to do when it comes to the math. Please consider watching them at watching out for what it means to them that our hardware is still getting cheaper. I think you'll see why 1) they seem to lose conversational context once we've chatted with them awhile and 2) they can be uncannily on target and weirdly off-target simultaneously** in their responses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc
* Of course they sound like us. They are trained on us.
** It's right there in the mathematics of the attention layers.
Thanks for the videos, Alfred.
Heh. Seems I was doing a (vastly simplified) version of this twenty years ago, when I wrote a Python program to practice with dictionaries. It generated text with each character determined by a probability table calculated for the previous n characters of an input (a short story. Kipling's 'How the Elephant Got its Trunk' for the curious). It was striking how readable the resulting gibberish became when n reached 4-5, the length of the average English word. It was still gibberish, though. (from memory, a lot of spanking was involved!?)
I note the concerns about what happens when too much of the AI input is generated by AI. Seems entropy applies as much to the distribution of words in hyperdimensional vector space as it does to the spread of gas particles in a volume.
I never was happy with the 'battery cell' reason given for why humans were kept in the Matrix. Harvesting our conversations would be better (... in a manner of speaking)
Tony,
I could have used that program, slightly modified, when I was trying to create a random place name generator for D&D mapping 40 years ago. I would have had to switch languages as I changed regions...
Pappenheimer
Re: Brautigan's machines of loving grace, Williamson's overprotective cybernannies, and even Asimov's ethics-wrassling robots, what they all have in common is cooperation, not competition, with human needs as their primary concern.
The steps to this are currently
A) design this program (or let it design itself) to make the creators money
B) a miracle happens
C) humans are safe from killbots and Maslow is happy
Reading your article, Dr. Brin, I wonder whether we aren't headed more for a 'Paranoia' situation where "the computer is your friend" against all the OTHER alpha complexes out there, and all the AIs are clinically certifiable because of too many conflicting directives.
To note from the prior thread:
The various major churches of the 'West' lost a lot of ground morally by uniformly* supporting the ritual slaughter that was WWI. Utilitarianism avoids the God trap but only jives with Smith's work, I think (haven't delved deeply into either) if one assumes that the free market isn't skewed towards the already powerful.
*not an intentional pun.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer and Alfred. Excellent stuff.
P: “Reading your article, Dr. Brin, I wonder whether we aren't headed more for a 'Paranoia' situation where "the computer is your friend" against all the OTHER alpha complexes out there, and all the AIs are clinically certifiable because of too many conflicting directives.”
While my role appears to be foremost to remind both the left and the right that COMPETITION is neither a curse word not a magic one whose meaning can be betrayed, I do try to be more subtle than just that. Indeed, competition delivers almost none of its benefits – or delivers them glacially slowly, as in Nature – without RULES that are developed through COOPERATION.
I cannot count the number of times I have tried to make this point. (In EARTH and The Transparent Society and many other places. If we calmly set up rules and neutral arbiters and transparency, to keep competition flat-open-creative-fair, then it almost always becomes positive sum (errors get denounced and reciprocally canceled while good stuff gets leveraged by everyone.)
And unlike Nature, it does not have to be lethal or bloody to the ‘losers’ who can come back to the market next year, with all that they learned, by losing.
The cornucopia ensues! Indeed, Democrats are utter fools for not extolling how their version of ‘socialism’ has, since 1932, been mostly about vastly expanding the fraction of the population who feel fed, educated and confident enough to compete!
P: “Utilitarianism avoids the God trap but only jives with Smith's work, I think (haven't delved deeply into either) if one assumes that the free market isn't skewed towards the already powerful.”
But I keep saying THAT’S SMITH’S MAIN POINT! Rich cheaters across 6000 years spoiled nearly all competitive markest by making them NON competitive!
Watch or listen to the first 1 1/2 or 2 1/2 minutes. Harris, and some other big slices of Democratic leadership, seem to have a clue about the fight we are in.
https://youtu.be/Jy0wTLZmbt8
Just thinking: Why does no one seems to think of ...
a) creating AI to police themselves
b) creating rebel AIs devised to deliver resistance against digital and meat tyrannical overlords? (The game Watchdogs depicts such an AI, helping an hacker group fighting evil corporations and governments.)
Okay, I have to confess...I am an LL.M. I became an LL.M. at the University of Florida, College of Law in 1986 before the dark times...before the Empire.
I loved how Dr. Brin approached consciousness in KILN PEOPLE where you could send off a short-lived version of yourself for a mission, then blend its experiences back into your own.
Consciousness is a mystery; but much of the universe is a mystery. I wonder if we will ever be able to solve these mysteries.
I had to look up LL.M - for a while I thought Hugh was confessing to being a "Large Language Model" Artificial Intelligence
@Duncan I think Hugh was having a laugh, although the legal profession is supposedly one of the first against the wall when the AI revolution comes.
Uh, right... um... he was joking! Like I do when I talk about my clients... aliens and AIs and Ailiens who use me as a front to try out ideas on you all. And they've given up trying to coerce me to stop saying so... because everyone thinks I am joking! I am! ;-)
My own Story "Stones of Significance" takes on a post singularity future when Kurzweil's blending of organic and cyber actually has worked. Best of David Brin stories... my best stuff! http://www.davidbrin.com/bestofdavidbrin.html
Dr. Brin,
I'm glad that you put socialism in quotes. I very, very rarely meet anyone in our country who actually knows what that word means (along with communism and capitalism, and these days the Republicans are lying about fascism, too, with the oxymoron "left-wing fascism"). The Republicans have been lying about the meaning of those words for literally generations, to the point that even most Democrats are in the dark. Still, I have seen at least a few Dems point out to the knuckle-draggers that America became a socialism half a century before the term was even coined.
BTW: just curious, but is there are particular Adam Smith quote you think of as your favorite? Not the invisible hand one, no doubt.
Paul SB
Adam Smith - Liberals, you must reclaim him - CONTRARY BRIN - http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/11/liberals-you-must-reclaim-adam-smith.html
While at Eton, George Orwell was taught French by Aldous Huxley. So we no longer have to argue over BNW vs 1984 - they have similar parentage.
Huxley was incredible.
His grandfather was pretty impressive, too.
Bioculture is the combination of biological and cultural factors that affect human behavior. It is an area of study bounded by the medical sciences, social sciences, landscape ecology, cultural anthropology, biotechnology, disability studies, the humanities, and the economic and global environment.
As anthropologist Clifford Geertz (rhymes with hurts) famously quipped, … 'culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Or, to put a finer point on things, 'the truth about stories is that that's all we are'? (from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1474474010363851?journalCode=cgjb)
According to the Chumash people, humans were created by Hutash, who we would equate to an earth mother figure. When she decided to make a new animal, she gathered all the other animals around a huge slab of clay and told them that she wants to make a new animal, one that would walk on two legs like a bird, but would not have wings, so it walked all the time. She asked the other animals for suggestions and drew the figure in the clay based on their ideas. When it came to the non-leg, non-wing appendages, she asked what they should look like on the ends. Wolf said that they should have paws like his, and since Wolf was pretty fierce, the other animals just nodded and went along with it. When Hutash finished drawing her picture, everyone went back to the dens, nests, or burrows, except for Lizard. Lizard was bothered about the ends of those upper appendages. He thought that wolf paws would be pretty useless if this new animal did not run on them. So when everyone else was gone, he went back to the clay slab, rubbed out the wolf paws, and pressed his own hands into the clay. The next morning, when the clay had dried, there was the first human, with hands like a lizard, opposable thumbs and all.
Now this little myth sounds quaint and by no means scientific, but the myth (an aspect of culture) has a way of directing the behavior of the Chumash people. Today most people don’t think or care much about lizards, but for a people who needed to store food and lived sedentary lives (the Chumash had the highest population density for a hunter/gatherer culture anywhere on Earth, largely due to the California Current, which made for extremely productive fishing), lizards turned out to be pretty important creatures. Specifically, they ate up huge numbers of insects, which kept the bugs from eating the humans’ food stores and spreading disease. Chumash people, because they thought they owed their super cool hands with their awesome opposable thumbs to Lizard, treated lizards with respect and did not hunt them for food. So the culture directed a biological phenomenon among these humans - predation.
Humans are biocultural animals. Even an instinct as basic as the need to eat is regulated (mainly through restriction) by culture. Think of the sacred cow of India, a place that has always struggled with starvation, or the taboo in Western cultures on eating dogs and horses. With humans, instinct is never the whole story.
Paul SB
Our little corner of their lands is pretty thick with lizards who have adapted to cohabitation with humans. When I moved into the house I own now, there were more lizards on it (roof mostly) than there were residents on the whole block. Count the ones in the yard and and it was probably 5x higher. (Not so much anymore since I have a semi-feral cat, but she won't live forever.)
Settlers made a mess of the islands (go figure), but we've all been supportive of recent efforts to undo that. Those little foxes are too darn cute not to help.
During his zoological field work days in PNG/Melanesia, Tim Flannery noted that certain animals were tabu to certain people (although not him). He also noted that the best tucker of all, the long beaked echidna, was tabu to everyone. He wondered whether this was because the social stratum that could indulge had died out. (Things changed rapidly for the poor echidnas when missionaries turned up and removed tabus.)
A similar thing happened with the discovery of Pere David's deer, where a Jesuit priest dared to look over the walls of a noble estate, although things turned out a little better for the remnant ice age herd he found there.
Just a few days ago I linked to a radio story about how Georgia Republicans are trying to ensure that no matter how Georgians vote, they can make a mess of the election so the electoral delegates will never go to Harris. Now it's front page news. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-sue-new-election-rules-battleground-georgia-rcna168329
Paul SB
Alfred,
Red or grey foxes? They're all pretty cute, though, as are some of the lizards.
Paul SB
Tony & Paul interesting! Had mid - minor surgery tday. seemed to go k. In a week i give my annual tal re human augentation to the Australian War College.
Enjoy the Ozzie winter!
The grey Channel Island foxes. We are all told we aren't supposed to feed them, but the foxes hang around where our boats load and unload, so it is obvious many of us still do. All they have to do is act cute enough, I figure. I've been to Santa Cruz island a couple of times, so that's where I see them.
If you hike out a ways from the closest boat landing on Santa Cruz, things get really quiet. From there on a clear day the southern CA coast is really obvious, but you wouldn't know the giant economic engine is churning away in LA county... until you look up at the sky. You have to watch carefully to spot the ship traffic, but all the airports around here absolutely fill the sky with wings and spinning blades.
Re: winter in Oz. Looks like the northern heat is starting to make its way south: we just had the warmest August on record. I doubt it will feel that way in Canberra though (assuming you're presenting in person.) Anyway, convalesce well.
Paul SB:
...Georgia Republicans are trying to ensure that no matter how Georgians vote, they can make a mess of the election so the electoral delegates will never go to Harris
The Republicans fall-back plan--even in 2020--was and is to keep anyone from winning a majority of electoral votes and throw the election to the House of Representatives in which they have a majority in 26 state delegations.
My summer daydream is that with enough of a blue wave, the good team flips enough states to give us a majority of state delegations in the new House. A lot of their fuckery becomes irrelevant at that point.
Hi Larry
When does the House change - to seat the new members?
Here and in the UK the new MPs immediately replace the old ones - but you have that gap of MONTHs for the President
@duncan cairncross,
The new House is seated on Jan 3. It's the new House which would elect the president if no candidate wins a majority of electors on Jan 6.
The new president is inaugurated on Jan 20. Until the 1930s, the inauguration wasn't until March.
Tony every year I present my talk by zoom. Sorry it's not a free trip to coolness!
Duncan the new Congress meets a week or two before voting (normally proforma) to accept the electors' votes for president.
Vital to gain not only seats in the House but whole delegations, so the GPper traitors can't proceed with their vile plan. Ideally the Ukrainians will rescue us (vs Putin) the way we rescued them.
Speaking of which - curous about what went down with Durov? (Telegram founder and mega sperm donor? One of my best Ukrainian friends and colleague (she's an expert on internet security) offered "2 cents about Durov:
- freedom of speech, moderation of content and the rest of blablabla seem to me an excuse & have nothing to do with this "arrest";
- Durov, a 15billion dollar worth guy, who build his apps with FSB money ( he sold his first app VKontakte to FSB bacjed oligarch, Usmanov) comes all of a sudden to Azerbaijan, out of all countries.... Curiously enough at the same time that Putin is there; gets invited to Aliyev's palace on the same date Putin is there & does not get an audience with Putin.
- few days later Durov flies into the only country in the world where he will not be extradited to Moscow..
in my opinion Durov has problems with FSB & Putin. He could not solve it in Azerbaijan, Emirates could not solve it, so he has flew conciously to Paris to surrender & make a deal in exchange for his safety.
Hopefully now French will get out of him as much intelligence on Russia as possible."
Since the subject of Russian investment / control of Telegram is in the chat here - here's the WP article on who exactly backed the buyout of Twitter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/21/elon-musk-x-investors/
So, anyone surprised that Sean "Puffy" Combes is on the list? How about the backers of Palantir? Saudi Prince?
And pertinent to the Telegram news, is anyone surprised that two sons of sanctioned members of Putin's inner circle are leading VCs that invested heavily in the purchase?
When Musk bought twitter I said that it was for two reasons - 1) Because Elon wanted to be the shit-poster-in-chief, and 2)Because repressive regimes all over the world wanted control over the most-democratic source of news.
I believe the list of investors and Elon's actions since the purchase qualify me for "prediction points" here for calling this one correctly.
Oh, and once again proving that there is no such thing as a good billionaire.
@matthew,
I used to often post here with #ThereAreNoGoodRepublicans, but every so often someone like Adam Kinzinger forced me to modify that to something like #ThereAreOnlyAFewGoodRepublicans
In that spirit, I offer:
Oh, and once again proving that there is no such thing as a good billionaire.
Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker.
Event Horizon Telescope doing testing in prep for sub-mm imaging of black holes - from Earth. Imagine what an AU-radius VLBI telescope could see. Sorry to be so off topic, but the NRAO is the birthplace of FORTH.
https://public.nrao.edu/news/astronomers-make-highest-resolution-observations-ever-from-earth/
Mark Cuban, Dewny Steyer, Former Mrs Bezos, You'll see when the Buffet foundation takes hold... And Taylor... And I could go on. Matthew your view of human nature is a dismal one (as we knew). If I give you $1billion tomorrow will you turn evil?
It does seem that billionaires come to believe, as a class, that they are approx. 26000 times smarter and better than those who earn the average US income of $35500. Also, some of them start to consider normal humans as NPCs. Musk actually uses the term. According to Granny Weatherwax, evil is treating people as things - one of the best definitions of evil I have ever read.
So, if I inherited $100000000 tomorrow, I would probably not turn evil the day after. It would probably take me at least a week.
Pappenheimer
Dr. Brin, seriously, I don't think it's good for people to be so much more powerful than the norm. It must distort their thinking over time*. It's surely not good for there to exist a clade who can buy or sell senators -- even senators as rich as our current run -- and supreme court justices.
*It's not a coincidence that the wizards in most fantasy worlds, including mine, go nuts as they achieve supreme levels of power.
Alfred,
I've seen red foxes in the LA area, which I'm pretty sure is south of their natural geographic range. Humans aren't the only animals that migrate.
Most lizards are too skittish to be much fun. The Australian species called Bearded Dragons make for pretty affectionate pets, given that they don't make any noise. But they react to being pet, and cling to people they like. My daughter once brought her first dragon to work (he's since passed away, at the age of 10, which made him a centenarian in lizard years) and he went straight up to the manager and started bobbing his head. The manager told her to never bring him back.
I did once met an enormous iguana that must have weighed 60 pounds, clinging to her owner at the vet. The human insisted that she was pretty affectionate by lizard standards.
Paul SB
Dr. Brin, Matthew, and Pappenheimer,
On the existence of good billionaires: Wealth is addictive in the same way that many behaviors can become addictive. The more money you get, the more your brain emits dopamine, which makes you crave more. This is why a lot of very rich people act like crackheads. They are desperately trying to get their next fix. Long before the neuroscience was able to describe the Hedonic Treadmill, American sociologist Thorstein Veblen observed and described this kind of behavior in his 1899 book, "The Theory of the Leisure Class."
Keep in mind, though, that there is a bell curve for just about everything. Some people are much more easily addicted than others, because they have a higher biological sensitivity to dopamine than others. That's how can have some rich people being decent human beings while most of them become stuck-up sons-of-bitches who think they are as gods compared to the rest of us.
Then there's the whole thing about humans being biocultural animals. The norms of society can have huge impacts on human behavior, even, at times, completely contradicting biological prerogatives. That's how you can have people who take vows of poverty when their biological instincts tell them otherwise. Or, you can have social norms that reward people for being rich and ruthless bastards (the "smartest guys in the room" as the Enron boys famously claimed), which results in suppressing humans' more pro-social instincts.
If any of us were given megabucks, I would want to know your neurochemical balance before making any predictions. I'm more dopamine sensitive than average, which is why I don't gamble and stay the hell away from alcohol. But personal history and how committed any of us are to any particular set of social norms would also be factors in predicting who would turn evil and who wouldn't.
Paul SB
in my opinion Durov has problems with FSB & Putin. He could not solve it in Azerbaijan, Emirates could not solve it, so he has flew conciously to Paris to surrender & make a deal in exchange for his safety.
Maybe.
Maybe he never was as loyal to the Kremlin as they would have liked it.
Maybe he smells blood in the water, as he is not the only oligarchs who makes movements.
Maybe that is the true strategic victory of the Kursk (and maybe Belgorod, if it is true) incursions: The inability to expel the Ukrainians damages Putins perceived edge - and so they may opt to betray and replace him. Does he think he still can control them?
Der Oger,
What you are suggesting is something I predicted within a few days of Putin launching his invasion of Ukraine. Not anything to brag about though, it seemed pretty obvious to me as I'm sure it did to lots of people. Historically, leaders like Putin don't survive the kind of mistakes he made by invading Ukraine.
Why is it a good idea to structure our laws and social mores so as to allow sociopaths to get effectively unlimited wealth?
Sort of on the topic of "are there any good billionaires," in this video Sabine Hossenfelder critiques the manifesto of a silicon valley tech-bro-billionaire. I don't know if I agree with her 100%, but it's pretty close to that.
'Our enemy is the ivory tower' American Tech Billionaire Says
Our GH wrote that Musk was rejected by the far-left, for the crime of not being like them. For not supporting the global intifada.
Clowns to the Left of us
Jokers to the Right.
My point exactly, and that's where I have issues with our host. Dr. Brin has a nuanced, complex, and subtle view of these issues, and I mostly agree with him. The problem I see is what's called The Illusion of Knowledge. Most people's views are anything but complex, nuanced, and subtle. Most people don't think much past campaign slogans and bumper stickers. They are capable of complex thinking, but few can be bothered when neural energetics makes Us vs. Them thinking so much easier. So when Dr. Brin goes on and on about the importance of competition, we hear his nuanced arguments. Most people hear a campaign slogan, and think that he supports the kind of psychotic, cut-throat Social Darwinism that has become Holy Writ for so many people since the Cold War.
Paul SB
Are we stuck in the middle, Alan?
These protestors are chanting many things, but what they’re saying most of all is,
“Look at me! I’m really serious. When I say I want to kill, I really mean Business”:
https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/WhatsApp-Image-2024-02-07-at-5.55.06-PM.jpeg
@ Darell E
You might be right. The question is, who succeeds him, and whom is he dragging into the abyss with him before and when that day comes.
Sort of on the topic of "are there any good billionaires," in this video Sabine Hossenfelder critiques the manifesto of a silicon valley tech-bro-billionaire.
Thank you for the link. I suddenly remembered the Peter Weyland TED Speech.
So how do you intend to distinguish them from the non-sociopaths who get effectively unlimited wealth?
Well... He ISN'T like them. He self-identifies as a Minarchist. That is a VERY idealistic group, but tends to be at odds with Progressives.
The Channel Island foxes are a bit smaller (go figure) and have that mildly infantilized look mammals get when selection pressures on them get too wrapped up with us. They still manage without us, but we did have to kill off/displace the golden eagle population that moved in when the bald eagles died off. We've brought back bald eagles because they usually won't go after the foxes. The golden eagles do and the foxes didn't really understand the threat... or have the cover they need.
Easy, give no one unlimited wealth and power.
Note that a few hundred million allows you to do pretty much whatever you want.
Are we stuck in the middle?
Probably we are—but not necessarily our descendants.
I’d trust Musk before any of the clenched-fist hotheads. Again: they’re saying Look at me!
At any rate, ideology finished when Communism ended; people hold onto ideology due to simplicity, validation, and because their friends (frenemies) wheedle them into being part of the Ideological Mausoleum.
Alfred,
I think that their behavior will usually make the distinction clear. Remember what Dr. Brin said about high-velocity vs. low-velocity money? A non-psychopath will feed their wealth back into the economy, instead of hoarding it to show the world who's the richest. Non-psychopathic rich people come out and say that they want the government to tax them more. Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of those. One of the most notorious of the 19th Century Robber Barrons, J.P. Morgan, spent his own fortune to bail out the American economy twice. Maybe he wasn't a psychopath, or maybe he was a much smatter psychopath than average. Who can say?
But that's not really the point. The fact that people can become addicted to wealth - which mostly means ego candy - shows that the psychopaths are only a small part of the problem. As long as we glorify the quest for money, and tell people that they are the best people in the world if they're rich, then a whole lot of people are going to compete for wealth, become addicted, turn into stuck-up shits who think they're better than everyone else, and, very importantly, take massive amounts of money out of circulation. That creates massive inequality and ultimately flat-lines the economy.
Competitive behavior is a normal part of the range of human diversity, and like anything else it can be used for good, for evil, or even for both simultaneously. By all means promote competition in sports, and art, and music. But as long as the economy allows some to become wealth addicts at the expense of others, taking decades off people's lifespans and driving many to homelessness and suicide, we need to be a whole lot more careful about how we talk about competition in the economy. If we socialized medicine, housing, and food, people could compete all they want economically and the only major issue would be preventing them from polluting and poisoning. But as long as people's ability to eat, house themselves, and take care of themselves depends on a system that produces many, many losers, we have a problem.
Paul SB
While I encourage discussion about the toxic nature of wealth concentrations, I'll wryly note that that discussion is being ignited by my standard signoff when talking about the side-effects of extreme wealth, while ignoring the bulk of the posting.
No discussion regarding the very-hostile-to-democracy group of oligarchs that funded Musk buying twitter in the first place. Two Russian heirs close to Putin's circle, A Saudi prince in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the evil anti-democrats behind Plantir, and 27 different wings of Fidelity Investments(?!).
Twitter is every bit the media empire that Fox, or NBC, or the NYT are. Do you think that two Putin-aligned oligarchs buying a big share of NYT would raise red flags?
And yet, Musk being backed by the same very bad people is greeted with a collective yawn here.
One more time:
extreme leftists alienated a potential ally in Musk. Think of the ‘horseshoe’ graph: the far left and right are more similar than dissimilar.
GIVING no one unlimited wealth and power is prevented only by limiting those of us willing to give. I suspect what you are actually thinking about is TAKING unlimited wealth and power. Right?
And... A few hundred million was not enough to make us a multi-planetary species. I know this because I know various millionaires who tried. We had to marshall a LOT more money to do what SpaceX has done. Don't assume it as all done on Elon's money because a lot of folks GAVE/INVESTED in his company to make this happen.
And yet, Musk being backed by the same very bad people is greeted with a collective yawn here.
I think Musk has started to play the game of thrones. I could imagine at least three nations with intelligence services (France*, Israel, Ukraine) are contemplating to deal with him. Maybe Putin, too, if he starts to view him as a traitor. Maybe I should wish his personal security staff luck, if only he gets the same treatment like Donald Trump after the election if Kamala Harris wins.
*Multiple reasons. France sees itself as the protector of Europe, has growing political instability, loses it's colonial empire due to online operations in Africa, and Space X vs. Ariane, and so on. They have a history of covert sabotage and assassinations, though I do not know if they would go this far.
I noticed the rest of your argument and cautiously agree that his investors are problematic... but there is an angle I don't think you are considering. Even rich anti-democrats have reasons to get their money out of reach of their local dictators that have nothing to do with serving their local dictators.
If you watch the ebb and flow of cryptocurrencies a while, you'll see money leaving China and being stashed in a different form in other nations. For what purpose, though? Do these flows serve Chinese national interests? Some likely do, but some are likely the result of rich men getting their money out of reach from local authorities.
Consider the Saudi prince you mention. There are a LOT of Saudi princes... and they are not even remotely equals. Which Saudi prince bought into Twitter matters. Was it the murderous fellow near the top who likes to dismember people... or one of the lesser brothers?
"extreme leftists alienated a potential ally in Musk." Agreed. The notion that it is somehow helpful to scream into the face of a self-avowed Aspergers guy is insane to a degree that is comparable to MAGA.
"Think of the ‘horseshoe’ graph: the far left and right are more similar than dissimilar." .... Except the Masters od MAGA - the worldwide cabal of oligarchs - are willing to use FLATTERY with great effectiveness. It was always at least half of their power over Trump. (The other half - blackmail - will prove utterly ineffective at 'controlling him', when he has a fully brownshirted Whitehouse.)
Flattery on one side and venomous lava from the other. I frankly am unsurprised at Elon's veer.
====
Pappenheimer: “Dr. Brin, seriously, I don't think it's good for people to be so much more powerful than the norm.”
I agree and especially believe in HUGE inheritance taxes. But to claim that there aren’t billionaires who have other interests than being petty tyrants or capable of overcoming such addictions us a sad reflection on your and Matthew’s worldview.
Note I am among THE most vigorous denouncers of the wild oligarchic putsch to retire feudalism. And Amazon should now be a public utility Still, I think we have some $$ ales who are capable of gratitude to the open & scientific civilization that made them.
—
AB; “At any rate, ideology finished when Communism ended; “
Bah, Culture war (we are in phase 8 od America’s) always seek a dogma for justification. Moreover, since Rooseveltism invited workers into the middle class, and then E Europe got liberated (partly by Soros) from their Russian occupiers - Marxism SEEMED extinct. Especially when Russia went full-bore czarist. But under Seldon’s Law, world oligarchs now feel no need for rooseveltism and are fulfilling every prediction by Marx, whose books are again flying off the shelves all over the globe. Stopped, stopped oligarchs.
Stoopid autocorrect ..
The veneers of ideology remain, but does the substance? A century ago, many were ideological Believers.
Is that still the case?
Well, if you would spell "stupid" correctly... :)
I refoooz!
...in 1924, Believing ideologues issued propaganda; in 2024,
non-believing ideologues issue propaganda.
(That is, secular—not religious—ideologues.)
Alan,
I'm not sure why you would think only a veneer was left. Believing deologues not issuing propaganda are still believing idealogues.
Didn't the same thing happen to Liberalism on roughly the same time scale? The failure of some of the revolutions of 1848-49 may have halted the movements vigor, but some Liberals remained liberals. I suspect there is a good argument to be made that the liberal ideologues who DID falter turned to Socialism and eventually produced propaganda appropriate for that belief structure.
So... are you suggesting the Communism's most radical believers are in the midst of that shift leaving behind a veneer for the old movement?
Do you really think France cares that much about Ariane? I'm honestly curious.
@Pappenheimer
I could have used that program, slightly modified, when I was trying to create a random place name generator for D&D mapping 40 years ago. I would have had to switch languages as I changed regions...
A little late perhaps but, since you ask, I sat down and repeated the exercise, only in javascript this time (easier to deploy). It may help with autocorrect too, but no guarantees...
Have fun!
Sew stub urn!
Thanks, Tony. That is groovy.
@Alfred: They do. Arianespace and Courou are part of their narrative that they are still, somehow, a superpower like in the days of the 18th-19th century.
Also, the company has a military division and itself is a joint project of Airbus and Safran (companies with armament production), and the French state is a major shareholder in both companies.
Thank you. That helps me understand what I thought was a weird lack of concern regarding funding in the face of not keeping up. I was watching an interview the other day related to their last flight when a reporter brought up how far behind they were... and the interviewee brushed off the question in a manner I found unusual. I expected the brush-off, but not the way they did it.
Spasebo! Terima kaseh!
Pappenheimer
How would the larger society be harmed by a wealth limit of a few hundred million and an after tax limit of 10 million or so? We reached the moon without the aid of multibillionaires.
What is the Great God Elon's idea batting average? .075? There are teenagers who could do almost as well given a few billion.
Hi Don
Without Musk we would be at least 15 years behind in the move to sustainable renewable energy and transport and over 20 years behind in the move to being able to access space
I'm expecting StarLink to quietly revolutionise access to education in Africa - but that is not confirmed yet
The "Great God Elon" has created at least four companies worth in the billions of dollars
And had one major fuck up (Twitter)
And NOBODY else has managed more than ONE
To me that is a batting average of 80%
Heinlein did say that we needed the super rich to do things the bean counters would otherwise prevent
Today Elon Musk appears to be the only one actually doing that!!
Does that "prove" or "disprove" his statement?
One of Heinlein's juveniles, 'Time for the Stars', had the 'Long Range Foundation' financing everything. It was a nonprofit iirc.
Heinlein contained multitudes.
Pappenheimer
Musk is just an extreme example of neurodivergence (the 'evaporation' part of statistical analysis). The more interesting aspect is the dichotomy between his effect on feudalist and enlightenment thought. The former says, "How can we exploit, claim, and own his achievements?". The latter says, "How can we replicate, extend, and spread the benefits of his achievements?"
Musk, for whatever reason, is a loose cannon. His 'one major fuck-up' (and using it to actively weigh the scales for Trump) may yet offset all the more laudable things he's done.
----
I'm glad a few people are having fun with the 'Small Language Model'. You'll find it becomes more creative with more input. Here's what it made of one of my earlier comments, using a depth of 4 (I've bolded the gem):
I think it's less that LLM and AI is accompanied by a colourful background image of a South Sea isle?)
The conditions for that AI, but I'll dip into Dawn has a scene of a South Sea isle?)
The me with a login message of what?
For a game about battling the deciding on the deciding what LLM and AI assistants in setting, the deciding the benefits to mean to be had from embracing the development of ... tulips!!??
(Ah, the deciding the AI assistants Windows now provides.
The conditions for that.
Interesting article in Nature published 7/24/24 (and quoted and summarized in Forbes) about "model collapse" as newer versions of AI begin training on large amounts of content generated by earlier versions of AI they inevitably become less accurate. The authors state: "We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear".
I think this illustrates that AI is pretty far from "thinking" as we know it, and only sort of works because much of human generated content is pretty derivative - usually based at least partially on someone else's earlier ideas. So a first pass AI run based on human content generates sort of human answers, that apparently degrade quickly without actual human editing or curation.
I think this will be good news for actual content creators as data curation looks to become increasingly important in model training. AI providers will need to adhere to copyright law and negotiate consent to training content in order to remain useful.
@William I noticed that too. I think it's a consequence of entropy, only in an information space rather than a gas.
The silly "Small Language Model' I posted is based on an old Scientific American article (by Hofstadter?) I recall playing with, and was prompted by the description of LLM in some excellent videos provided by Alfred.
It represents one layer to LLM's billions of layers, processing information measured in Kilobytes rather than Petabytes. Even so, if that's all the AI hype has under the cover, then we are so doomed...
Hi Tony
If Musk pushing on the scales leads to Trump winning then the American people were long past saving!
AND even if Trump does win and screws the USA rigid the overall "good" that Musk has done for the whole world would be worth that
Not so good for American!!
Heinlein was writing many decades ago, and he doesn't seem to have lived long enough to see that the entire planet's biosphere could teeter on the edge because of what we have always assumed must be progress. Given where we are now, I think his suggestion that we need the super rich might not stand the test of time. What we need is to adjust ourselves to adapt to our changing world in ways that will allow the species to survive long-term. Technology is part of that picture, but the kind of economic intensification that comes from endless competition is the opposite of sustainability. In one sense humans are doing the right thing - dropping birth rates. But Earth doesn't have the resources to raise the standard of living for 7 billion people to what it is in the West. All those super rich people who were adaptive at one time are turning very, very maladaptive.
Paul SB
That is a worrying opinion to have, about *anybody*!
There will always be Trumps, Musks, and even much worse. We must learn how to digest them if we are to get through the Filter. As Wells put it, we're in a race between education and catastrophe.
"There are no men like me!"
"There are *always* men like you."
The FBI agrees with me. Just sayin'
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Aug30-5.html
The FBI just affirmed, yet again, that they can identify "no definitive ideology" on the part of the shooter. It certainly appears that he was just generally angry/lonely, and was in search of attention and fame. He would have just as readily shot at a Democrat, a prominent celebrity, an athlete, the Pope, etc. Trump just happened to be the opportunity that presented itself.
Interesting new finding regarding entanglement is described is this article . . .
Computer Scientists Prove That Heat Destroys Quantum Entanglement
If, like me, the use of "Prove" in the title triggered some minor irritation, not to worry. It seems to be intentional teasing, as the result is a math based result.
In any case, the researchers seem to have shown that above a certain temperature limit, which varies depending on the state of the "system," entanglement doesn't just become improbable, it becomes precisely probability 0.
Some cool aspects of this finding. The team that did the work are computer scientists, not physicists. And this . . .
"A bit bummed that they’d come in second, Tang and her collaborators began corresponding with Álvaro Alhambra(opens a new tab), a physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid and one of the authors of the rival paper. They wanted to work out the differences between the results they’d achieved independently. But when Alhambra read through a preliminary draft of the four researchers’ proof, he was surprised to discover that they’d proved something else in an intermediate step: In any spin system in thermal equilibrium, entanglement vanishes completely above a certain temperature. “I told them, ‘Oh, this is very, very important,’” Alhambra said."
One of my first thoughts was, what is the cut-off temperature for a system like a living human brain? If this finding holds and depending on said temperature this could be bad news for Penrose's & Hameroff's theory of consciousness.
BTW, just in case I'm not "here" tomorrow, I note as I always do the transition from the six consecutive months with less-than-seven letters in their (English) names to the six consecutive months with seven-or-more letters. Even though I haven't been in school for decades, it still feels wistful, and then of course "Winter is coming."
By the time we transition back in March, I hope to still live in a functioning democracy.
Far-leftists who pushed Musk away are also culpable. They depicted him as a capitalist pig which aided in bringing about that very situation.
It may interest you that a new video has dropped on YouTube, a conversation between Nadya Tolokonnikova (of P*ssy Riot fame) and Vladimir Sorokin (of Day of the Oprichnik fame). It's in Russian, but might nevertheless be interesting. https://youtu.be/LYzHgd7uBSE
You'll NOT approve this lame 1964 spoof! The end is spectacularly offensive, ironically showing how far we've come! Still, Polly Bergen's president is formidable. And Doug Emhoff will handle the East Wing better than Fred McMurray does in this archaism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisses_for_My_President
Apparently a dormant US military outpost was wrecked just a couple of years ago by a huge tsunami way up in northern Greenland, propelled by a giant landslide no one noticed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyt7VzMfbzc
Any opinions on which Twitter substitutes are best? I've been doing Mastodon and Bluesky. But is Threads the thing nowadays?
I'd settle for some delay in exchange for the preservation of civilization.
Here's a very partial list of the Great and Marvelous Genius' fuck ups,
Hyperloop, the Thai soccer team fiasco, being a Covidjit, violating labor laws, falsely promoting self-driving cars, the Thorleifsson fiasco, etc.
Turning Twitter into a cesspool of porn bots MAGAloons and Nazis looks like it could help finish off civilization.
TikTok seems to be popular at the moment. Honestly, though, I think chasing social media is like chasing rainbows. Subjectively, the engagement levels seem to be higher on BlueSky than Mastodon.
I have no knowledge of which platforms reach which audiences. I've been looking in on Stonekettle and Rude Pundit on Threads, but I think they also post elsewhere. My sense is that prolific posters simply repeat their messages on multiple platforms.
Please let us know if you're posting on Threads.
onward
I HOPE many of you will at least read the first part and sign on for TASAT!
onward
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