[FRIAM] Entropy, irreversibility and inference at the foundations of statistical physics

[Roger Critchlow]

My google news feed is generally infuriating, but then it redeems itself by
finding something like this:

Jonathan Asher Pachter, Ying-Jen Yang, and Ken A. Dill,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-024-00720-5, in Nature Reviews
Physics.

Statistical physics relates the properties of macroscale systems to the
> distributions of their microscale agents. Its central tool has been the
> maximization of entropy, an equilibrium variational principle. Recent work
> has sought extensions to non-equilibria: across processes of change both
> fast and slow, in the Jarzynski equality and fluctuation relations and
> other tools of stochastic thermodynamics, using large deviation theory or
> others. When recognized as an inference principle, entropy maximization can
> be generalized for non-equilibria and applied to path entropies rather than
> state entropies, becoming the principle of maximum caliber, which we
> emphasize in this Review. Our primary goal is to enhance crosstalk among
> researchers working in disparate silos, comparing and contrasting different
> approaches while pointing to common roots.


There's a preprint from last October, too.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06070

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Re: [FRIAM] A hundred words for swindle

[Roger Critchlow]

The web apps were originally done while I was in Boston, I like the idea of
web pages which can be downloaded and installed on your phone, or tablet,
or laptop to provide entertainment while trapped in airplane mode.

  change.elf.org - the iching in multiple translations which install
lazily, once you install the app and access the version.
  mahjong.elf.org - mahjong solitaire, recently updated to allow backtrack
to arbitrary points in the discard pile.
  hp15c.elf.org - a web app wrapper around the HP15C calculator emulator
written by Greg Hewgill.
  moons.elf.org - a lunar phase graphic calendar, due for an update, too.

I'm working on some more.

-- rec --

On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 1:40 PM Steve Smith  wrote:

> RECelf -
>
>
> I know I visited your Entropy Liberation Front site before but somehow
> missed you iChing app/workup.   In particular the different casting
> distributions were particularly illuminating.   I favor (out of
> convenience) the six-scored-as-two method and was shocked to see in a
> single glance how different all others are from the
> (traditional/preferred?) yarrow stick
>
> https://change.elf.org/tests
>
>
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[FRIAM] A hundred words for swindle

[Roger Critchlow]

Talking with John Zingale at Friam about conniving chatbots, I
remembered this essay from 2009, https://elf.org/etc/swindle.html, which
starts from real estate speculators in early US history and gets to the
deplorable state of the internet.

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Re: [FRIAM] Meeting Location

[Roger Critchlow]

Hey, I just got dropped off at downtown sub, anyone give me a ride?

 --rec--

On Fri, Mar 29, 2024, 9:07 AM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Everything is open but it's the way into the building is different.  Walk
> clockwise around all the cyclone fencing.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Fri, Mar 29, 2024, 8:21 AM Frank Wimberly  wrote:
>
>> Hmm.  The dining room down the hall is usually open and sells coffee
>> etc.  When I get there at 9:00 I'll send an email if there's a problem.
>>
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 29, 2024, 7:35 AM Don Lemons  wrote:
>>
>>> Well, I was there at about 7:15 pm last night.  At that time the coffee
>>> shop was open but the snack bar was closed.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 29, 2024 at 6:56 AM Frank Wimberly 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 I reached the on-site security officer at St John's a minute ago.  He
 says the coffee shop was open last night.  I will assume we can meet there.

 Frank

 ---
 Frank C. Wimberly
 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
 Santa Fe, NM 87505

 505 670-9918
 Santa Fe, NM
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Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity

[Roger Critchlow]

but the "dark side" of the moon is sunlit for half of every month?

On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 11:33 AM glen  wrote:

> Bandwidth might be a problem. But the dark side of the moon seems like an
> option ... assuming you can negotiate with the aliens that live over there.
> The best thing about coral is you don't have to negotiate for their "land".
> You can just take it and let them die like the stupid little creatures they
> are.
>
>
> https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/22/asia/south-china-sea-philippines-coral-reef-damage-intl-hnk/index.html
>
> On 3/28/24 10:17, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > It's not really my thing, but I noticed there were several very large
> exhibits at Supercomputing 23 for cooling technology.   Even immersive
> cooling solutions.  I think that could be improved a lot.   Without
> superconducting processors, I don't see how energy use can be dramatically
> reduced though.  For that there will just need to be new generation.
> Could put these near large off short windfarms..
> >
> >
> https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/china-deploys-1400-ton-commercial-underwater-data-center/
> >
> > I suppose there are some that would say gentrification is genocide -- a
> slow coerced displacement.
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> > Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2024 9:49 AM
> > To: friam@redfish.com
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity
> >
> > Maybe. But way before that happens, it will(has) force(d) the
> disaffected (people, animals, plants) of any such region to die, move, or
> adapt.
> >
> > In the Gaza kerfuffle, I've heard some describe coerced displacement as
> "genocide". I guess the more reasonble term is ethnic cleansing. The
> settlers seem mostly fine with their ethnic cleansing agenda. But, by
> analogy, how would we describe the coercive adaptation put upon a region by
> a massive water-sucking data center? Biology cleansing? If there really
> were an AI, would they worry about the forced displacement caused by their
> silicon incubators? ... or maybe "incubator" isn't a good word. How about
> "galls": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall Yeah, that might be a good
> analogy. The machines are parasitic. They hijack the iDNA (information
> generators) of the local biology to form galls within which they grow and
> thrive.
> >
> > On 3/28/24 07:51, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> It will force innovation on energy-efficient microarchitecture (e.g.
> Groq) and on renewable power generation near data centers.
> >>
> >> -Original Message-
> >> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> >> Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2024 7:09 AM
> >> To: friam@redfish.com
> >> Subject: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity
> >>
> >>
> >> As we frivolously replace meatspace conversation with obsequious
> chatbots, the world burns.
> >>
> >> The industry more damaging to the environment than airlines
> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/30/silicon-valley-data-giants-net-zero-sustainability-risk/
> >>
> >>
> https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2024/03/engineers-often-need-a-lot-of-water-to-keep-data-centers-cool
> >
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Twenty years of Not Even Wrong, an anniversary blog post.

-- rec --

On Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 8:48 AM glen  wrote:

> [...]
> And "unusual" is even worse. Both tokens require one to describe the
> context, domain, or universe within which the discussion is happening. If
> you don't define your context, then the "definitions" you provide for the
> components of that context are not even wrong; they're nonsense. "Unusual"
> implies a usual. And a usual implies a perspective ... a mechanism of
> action for your sampling technique. So "unusual" presents even more of a
> linguistic *burden* than "unique".
> [...[
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Re: [FRIAM] Sleep trackers

[Roger Critchlow]

I wore the cheapest fitness tracker I could find on Amazon, an Amazfit, for
a while.  It believed it could distinguish all the phases of my sleep and
give me a colorful chart of my night every morning.  The charts appeared
reasonable but there was never anything I could do about it, the tracker's
only consistent advice was to try to go to bed at a regular and reasonable
time.  I got tired of wearing and caring for the band so it's in a drawer
now somewhere.

My greatest disappointment with the band, however, turned out to be a
mistake.  I though the pulse readings it was giving me didn't make any
sense, because they bounced around all over the place.  But the actual
problem was my atrial fibrillation.  My pulse rate was bouncing around all
over the place.  Finally got that fixed last fall.

-- rec --

On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 8:47 AM Alexander Rasmus 
wrote:

> Nick,
>
> If you look around in google scholar you can find comparisons between
> smart watches and medical devices for monitoring sleep stages, e.g.,
> https://mhealth.jmir.org/2019/6/e13384?utm_campaign=JMIR_TrendMD_0_medium=cpc_source=TrendMD
>
> In general, you should be fairly skeptical of specifics but trends may
> still be useful. The only way to establish whether it's reliable in your
> case is through detailed comparison between your own observations of sleep
> behavior/outcomes and the watch. This is likely to be a useful exercise
> regardless. I use one, and the sleep quality number is generally fairly
> good.
>
> Jochen, I am sorry for your loss.
>
> Best,
> Alex
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 9:12 PM Nicholas Thompson 
> wrote:
>
>> Everybody I know sleeps badly.  Has any of you had any lu from
>> heartrate?  ck with a sleeptracker.  Did it teach you anything you did not
>> already know?I borrowed a fit bit from my daughter and it tells me my
>> sleep efficiency is lousy, and I don't bet much rem or deep sleep.  Does it
>> know what it is talking about.   Can you get all of that.
>>
>> Any experience to share out there?
>>
>> Nick
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Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

[Roger Critchlow]

I went looking for depressing news in 1924, you know, lying politicians and
cancerous social movements:

April 1 

   - Adolf Hitler  is sentenced
   to 5 years in Landsberg Prison
    in Germany for his
   participation in the 1923  Beer Hall
   Putsch  (he serves less
   than 9 months).


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Re: [FRIAM] The problems of interdisciplinary research

[Roger Critchlow]

Yeah, it seems like the premise of the cartoon, or maybe Jochen's
interpretation, was that people have limited scopes of application, and the
average scope of application doesn't include interdisciplinary research.
But there are people who have larger scope and have a lot of fun doing
interdisciplinary projects.  And if an interdisciplinary group can adapt to
its participant areas of strength, lots of interesting things can happen.

-- rec --

On Fri, Feb 9, 2024 at 3:19 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> I didn't read the article but Carnegie Mellon, where I worked for almost
> 20 years, prides itself on the amount of interdisciplinary research
> accomplished there..  Herb Simon had appointments in psychology, computer
> science, business and public policy, I believe.  I was a coauthor of papers
> in robotics, public policy, computer science and philosophy.
>
> On Fri, Feb 9, 2024 at 1:54 PM Jochen Fromm  wrote:
>
>> Tom Gauld describes most of the problems of interdisciplinary research in
>> a single image
>>
>> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2389834-tom-gauld-on-areas-of-expertise/
>>
>> -J.
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
>
> Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
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[FRIAM] Teach a quadrotor to fly with 18 seconds of simulation on a MacBook Pro

[Roger Critchlow]

This article probably deserves more critical attention than I've given it,
but it's published in IEEE Spectrum:
 https://spectrum.ieee.org/drone-quadrotor
they have videos on Youtube:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRD43ZA1D-4
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYtPG_HmBd8
source code on github:
 https://github.com/arplaboratory/learning-to-fly
and a preprint on arxiv:
 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13081

Via hackernews.

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Re: [FRIAM] Slow AI

[Roger Critchlow]

From: Roger Critchlow 
Date: Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 11:10 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Next Dictator
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 


I keep thinking that the next big dictator isn't new.

Das Kapital is an artificial life form which by a process of natural
selection pursues its own preservation and growth.  It doesn't care which
individuals or institutions survive or perish in the process, it just moves
and grows where the return on investment takes it.  It has no ethics, no
morality, and no sense of humor.

Daniel Kahneman in
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html
mentions
analyzing 8 years of investment results for 25 successful
investment advisers.  Though these were all experienced and confident men,
the average year to year correlation in their results was 0.01.  The highly
rewarded experts of finance have no real idea what they're doing, they are
highly rewarded for an "illusion of skill", they play roulette with style
and their clients buy them expensive clothes to do it in.  The news didn't
faze them a bit;  that they can do what they do and get rewarded for it is
all the affirmation they need.

In dealing with Das Kapital, I think we're pretty much all in the same
boat.  No one knows where the slime mold will choose to extend its
 pseudopodia, or which of the pseudopodia will thrive or wither, or what
the novel beneficial or lamentable consequences will be.  Some of us worry
about the suffering caused by the gold-goo-excrement, others worry about
not killing the beast that makes the gold-goo, many just fight for the
largest share they can get, and most of us could care less until the bucket
of gold-goo-excrement lands in our neighborhood or the gold-goo pseudopod
feeding our investments dries up.

--rec --

On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 2:48 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> Das Kapital is our most successful experiment in artificial life, but it's
> still feral and no one has the least clue how to domesticate it, and the
> grey goo we're constructing is a mass of collateralized debt instruments.
>
> -- rec --
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 11:03 AM Steve Smith  wrote:
>
>>
>> https://doctorow.medium.com/solar-is-a-market-for-financial-lemons-ea00699fe0a2
>>
>> I suspect the opinions among the members of this list range widely on
>> Doctorow's work, my general response to him is a guarded positive.
>>
>> I offer this article to you nominally about the problems with
>> rooftop-solar "gaming" but as a reflection on Corporations (and I claim
>> governments, religions, other institutions) as "slow AI".   Rooftop Solar
>> is just a contemporary somewhat benign case-study.
>>
>> They are both contrived as "rule-based" systems and evolved in the same
>> mode as Machine Learning Models.
>>
>> The 2023 rush of AI/ML into the public's eye and hands might well
>> overwhelm us with false-paths to individual and collective prosperity.
>> Opportunities for dead-ends or overshoots abound in the harsh light of 
>> "reward
>> hacking" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking>?
>>
>> And then we have the spectre of
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Re: [FRIAM] Slow AI

[Roger Critchlow]

Das Kapital is our most successful experiment in artificial life, but it's
still feral and no one has the least clue how to domesticate it, and the
grey goo we're constructing is a mass of collateralized debt instruments.

-- rec --


On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 11:03 AM Steve Smith  wrote:

>
> https://doctorow.medium.com/solar-is-a-market-for-financial-lemons-ea00699fe0a2
>
> I suspect the opinions among the members of this list range widely on
> Doctorow's work, my general response to him is a guarded positive.
>
> I offer this article to you nominally about the problems with
> rooftop-solar "gaming" but as a reflection on Corporations (and I claim
> governments, religions, other institutions) as "slow AI".   Rooftop Solar
> is just a contemporary somewhat benign case-study.
>
> They are both contrived as "rule-based" systems and evolved in the same
> mode as Machine Learning Models.
>
> The 2023 rush of AI/ML into the public's eye and hands might well
> overwhelm us with false-paths to individual and collective prosperity.
> Opportunities for dead-ends or overshoots abound in the harsh light of "reward
> hacking" ?
>
> And then we have the spectre of
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Re: [FRIAM] The last Lighthouse Keeper in America

[Roger Critchlow]

On Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 8:51 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> [...]
>
> Really hoping the machines can take over soon.
>
>
>
I just yesterday finished rereading all the Iain M Banks "Culture" novels
in the Boston Public Library e-collection, seven between Halloween and
Christmas.  The "Culture" is a space-going far future civilization of
organic life - humanoid and other - and of artificially sentient beings.
The machine "Minds" pretty much run the infrastructure and economy while
the organic beings party, study,  travel, pursue dangerous hobbies,
whatever. It's all post-scarcity, so everyone can pretty much have what
they want.

It sounds like the Culture "Minds" pretty much solved the dictatorship of
the proletariat in the Culture's history.  You raise dumb matter to
sentience and let it sort everything out.  The energy and matter of the
tools that the proletarians used are even more prole than the proles.

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Re: [FRIAM] Working for the Military Institute of Technology Causes Cognitive Dissonance

[Roger Critchlow]

I see I missed this on HackerNews yesterday, the comments cover a range of
positions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38642651

-- rec --

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> On the subject of cognitive dissonance, and working for large research
> institutions
>
>https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai-priority-disputes.html
>
> in which Jürgen Schmidhuber complains that LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton claim
> to have invented modern AI when they were actually mostly reinventing,
> improving, and reimplementing 30 year old work from Schmidhuber's lab on
> faster hardware, without crediting any of the prior work.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:17 PM Marcus Daniels 
> wrote:
>
>> While I think LLMs will be hard to use for analysis tasks, there is
>> something satisfying to see certain people squirm as LLMs, as Altman says,
>> “Blow right through the Turing test.”
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Roger Frye
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 13, 2023 6:47 AM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam@redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Working for the Military Institute of Technology
>> Causes Cognitive Dissonance
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric,
>>
>>
>>
>> I agree with your critique, especially about Dresser's two-facedness.
>> What struck me most was how Chomsky’s cognitive dissonance about military
>> application could drive him to abstraction and unworkable theory.
>>
>>
>>
>> Chomsky has been one of my heroes. I have marched with him, but never
>> agreed with his linguistics. But then never fully agreed with any linguist.
>>
>>
>>
>> I worked with people back in the 60s at Bolt Beranek and Newman and with
>> professors at MIT who believed they could communicate with computers in
>> English but was unaware of the military intention. I created English style
>> GUIs and wrote COBOL compilers, but none very successful. Who knew that AI
>> chat would be so successful this year.
>>
>>
>>
>> -Roger
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 13, 2023, at 3:34 AM, David Eric Smith 
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Wanted to say thank you for this.
>>
>>
>>
>> I don’t know that I find Dresser’s psychologizing of Chomsky persuasive
>> at all.  But it’s nice that what leaks through the general history is
>> Chomsky’s commitment as an operator.
>>
>>
>>
>> I liked that they had the little video clip in there.  What comes through
>> (to me, so bright that it quenches out everything else) is the one constant
>> of Chomsky, across his history and in all the modes of his activity: the
>> superciliousness, and the attitude of Olympian contempt he puts on, at all
>> times, standing in judgment of everyone and everything.
>>
>>
>>
>> The way Dresser doesn’t roll over to Chomsky’s assertion of absolute
>> domination, in the main text, was kind of a relief, though his blithe
>> dismissal of Chomsky’s having had any substantive reason for being an
>> influencer looked like trouble.  The comments — surprisingly content-rich —
>> unpack that trouble, but even there the exchange is interesting.  The
>> defenders say Dresser misses the point of the syntactic work and
>> mis-represents by taking things out of context (I think probably true), and
>> then Dresser answers by providing explicit statements that are hard to
>> understand as being any less ridiculous than he claims, since they are
>> asserted with characteristic Chomskian authoritarianism.  What I take this
>> for is evidence of what I see as the major pattern: Chomsky’s writing is as
>> close to Newspeak as we probably have in something that is glossed by some
>> as a science (and that, in a good world, could be, and is trying to become,
>> more of a science).  His writing, over the decades and lots of books (here
>> referring to the linguistics) has essentially no stable constructive
>> assertions, yet at every point the delivery is “This is what I say and this
>> is what I have always said.”
>>
>>
>>
>> (Not that Dresser comes out of this looking like any much-better
>> character.  Claiming he isn’t out to write a hit-piece on Chomsky’s
>> intellectual contributions, while transparently wanting mainly to do that,
>> and then at the end saying how grateful he is for Chomsky’s activism, rings
>> pretty disingenuous.  I am also struck because to me the style of The Man
>> is recognizably the same in both.  But enough on Dresser.  He will be
>> 

Re: [FRIAM] Working for the Military Institute of Technology Causes Cognitive Dissonance

[Roger Critchlow]

On the subject of cognitive dissonance, and working for large research
institutions

   https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai-priority-disputes.html

in which Jürgen Schmidhuber complains that LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton claim
to have invented modern AI when they were actually mostly reinventing,
improving, and reimplementing 30 year old work from Schmidhuber's lab on
faster hardware, without crediting any of the prior work.

-- rec --

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:17 PM Marcus Daniels 
wrote:

> While I think LLMs will be hard to use for analysis tasks, there is
> something satisfying to see certain people squirm as LLMs, as Altman says,
> “Blow right through the Turing test.”
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Roger Frye
> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 13, 2023 6:47 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Working for the Military Institute of Technology
> Causes Cognitive Dissonance
>
>
>
> Eric,
>
>
>
> I agree with your critique, especially about Dresser's two-facedness. What
> struck me most was how Chomsky’s cognitive dissonance about military
> application could drive him to abstraction and unworkable theory.
>
>
>
> Chomsky has been one of my heroes. I have marched with him, but never
> agreed with his linguistics. But then never fully agreed with any linguist.
>
>
>
> I worked with people back in the 60s at Bolt Beranek and Newman and with
> professors at MIT who believed they could communicate with computers in
> English but was unaware of the military intention. I created English style
> GUIs and wrote COBOL compilers, but none very successful. Who knew that AI
> chat would be so successful this year.
>
>
>
> -Roger
>
>
>
> On Dec 13, 2023, at 3:34 AM, David Eric Smith  wrote:
>
>
>
> Wanted to say thank you for this.
>
>
>
> I don’t know that I find Dresser’s psychologizing of Chomsky persuasive at
> all.  But it’s nice that what leaks through the general history is
> Chomsky’s commitment as an operator.
>
>
>
> I liked that they had the little video clip in there.  What comes through
> (to me, so bright that it quenches out everything else) is the one constant
> of Chomsky, across his history and in all the modes of his activity: the
> superciliousness, and the attitude of Olympian contempt he puts on, at all
> times, standing in judgment of everyone and everything.
>
>
>
> The way Dresser doesn’t roll over to Chomsky’s assertion of absolute
> domination, in the main text, was kind of a relief, though his blithe
> dismissal of Chomsky’s having had any substantive reason for being an
> influencer looked like trouble.  The comments — surprisingly content-rich —
> unpack that trouble, but even there the exchange is interesting.  The
> defenders say Dresser misses the point of the syntactic work and
> mis-represents by taking things out of context (I think probably true), and
> then Dresser answers by providing explicit statements that are hard to
> understand as being any less ridiculous than he claims, since they are
> asserted with characteristic Chomskian authoritarianism.  What I take this
> for is evidence of what I see as the major pattern: Chomsky’s writing is as
> close to Newspeak as we probably have in something that is glossed by some
> as a science (and that, in a good world, could be, and is trying to become,
> more of a science).  His writing, over the decades and lots of books (here
> referring to the linguistics) has essentially no stable constructive
> assertions, yet at every point the delivery is “This is what I say and this
> is what I have always said.”
>
>
>
> (Not that Dresser comes out of this looking like any much-better
> character.  Claiming he isn’t out to write a hit-piece on Chomsky’s
> intellectual contributions, while transparently wanting mainly to do that,
> and then at the end saying how grateful he is for Chomsky’s activism, rings
> pretty disingenuous.  I am also struck because to me the style of The Man
> is recognizably the same in both.  But enough on Dresser.  He will be
> forgotten by tomorrow, so one can just comment on the content of the
> writing.)
>
>
>
> I don’t know where Chomsky ranks in the guruness indices.  But he is a
> case study in the patterns of meme-authoritarianism.  A vast discourse of
> negative statements, which (seen in many people I have to deal with) seem
> to have only the goal of denying something specific somebody else is trying
> to say or to do, accompanied by shifting, or shifty, assertive-sounding
> statements, but ones that turn out to be slippery enough that you are never
> permitted to attach a meaning to them and decide for yourself whether they
> are valid or not.  Any judgment you pass against the constructive-sounding
> statements can always be parried by an accusation that you are too low a
> life-form to have understood the wisdom they encode.  Johnny Yune did this
> nicely in the ancient camp-movie They Call me Bruce (maybe the sequel), in
> the line 

Re: [FRIAM] Off the wall question about turbulence

[Roger Critchlow]

Seems to me that if the design of household drains was sensitive to
turbulence, someone would have figured out how to fix it in the 19th
century.

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Re: [FRIAM] Open AI

[Roger Critchlow]

This Washington Post article brings up some interesting issues.

For instance, I didn't know that Altman considered Thiel a mentor.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/

-- rec --

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 6:38 AM Pietro Terna  wrote:

> Many thanks, Pietro
>
> Il 22/11/23 08:49, Pieter Steenekamp ha scritto:
>
>
> https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883?t=Dms3joF7SRmHQQ--nGVv8w=19
>
> On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, 9:42 am Pieter Steenekamp, <
> piet...@randcontrols.co.za> wrote:
>
>> Hot off the press; Sam is going back to OpenAI.
>> A new board has been appointed.
>> It seems like Sam got what he wanted.
>>
>> On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, 7:22 am Pieter Steenekamp, <
>> piet...@randcontrols.co.za> wrote:
>>
>>> Background
>>> OpenAI is actually two companies. The original not for profit parent
>>> company and the for profit subsidiary.
>>> The parent, not for profit, appoints the board of the for profit
>>> subsidiary and does not have a fudiciary obligation towards the financial
>>> well-being of the company, only towards humanity; to ensure that AI is
>>> developed for the good of humanity.
>>> On Friday the board fired the CEO, Sam Altman, without giving reasons.
>>> Since then Sam got an offer from Microsoft to join them and start a new
>>> AI Microsoft subsidiary. Sam is reluctant to take it, he seems to think
>>> that will kill OpenAi.
>>> 95 percent of OpenAI employees signed a letter that if Sam goes to
>>> Microsoft they will join him. Microsoft said they will accomdate them.
>>> Now we are waiting - will OpenAI take Sam back? Will Sam and 95 percent
>>> of OpenAI's employees join MS?
>>> Or is there something else going to happen?
>>> A Netflix movie couldn't have more drama and suspens.
>>>
>>> On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, 2:14 am Marcus Daniels, 
>>> wrote:
>>>

 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/openai-ilya-sutskever-sam-altman-fired/676072/?utm_source=copy-link_medium=social_campaign=share



 *From: *Friam  on behalf of Marcus Daniels <
 mar...@snoutfarm.com>
 *Date: *Tuesday, November 21, 2023 at 4:00 PM
 *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
 friam@redfish.com>
 *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Open AI

 Rumors I have read:

 1) Sam Altman was looking for money from sovereign wealth fund from
 Saudi Arabia to fund an NVIDIA competitor.   And this was one example of
 him working side gigs not related to the Open AI mission.



 2) That the energy demands of LLMs on Azure are just too expensive, and
 the money lost per query is becoming too expensive, even for Microsoft’s
 hosting of OpenAI.



 3) That there was a breakthrough in artificial general intelligence and
 Sam Altman wouldn’t press the brakes.



 *From: *Friam  on behalf of Pietro Terna <
 pietro.te...@unito.it>
 *Date: *Tuesday, November 21, 2023 at 2:29 PM
 *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
 friam@redfish.com>
 *Subject: *[FRIAM] Open AI

 Dear All,

 can you explain to an old Italian friend the Open AI soap opera or
 drama?

 Best, Pietro


 --



 "It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep 
 truth." Neils Bohr.



 A https://terna.to.it/breviArticoli.html riporto dei miei brevi articoli 
 su temi di attualità.

 Asterischi da Verso Itaca a 
 https://verso-itaca.it/asterischi-da-verso-itaca/



 Home page: https://terna.to.it  Twitter: https://twitter.com/@pietroterna

 Mastodon: https://mastodon.uno/@PietroTerna



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>>>
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>
> --
>
> "It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep 
> truth." Neils Bohr.
>
> A https://terna.to.it/breviArticoli.html riporto dei miei brevi articoli su 
> temi di attualità.
> Asterischi da Verso Itaca a 

Re: [FRIAM] Mirror Neurons & Intersubjective Reality

[Roger Critchlow]

A 60 second search found this behind a paywall:
  William G Chase and Herbert A Simon. 1973. Perception in chess. Cognitive
psychology 4(1):55–81.
The abstract sounds right, but there were only three subjects in the study.

-- rec --

On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 6:21 AM David Eric Smith 
wrote:

> Just getting to this one, days late….
>
> On Nov 15, 2023, at 8:58 AM, Steve Smith  wrote:
>
> I have not (yet) read this critically, the introduction just tweaked my
> (confirmation biased) interests:
>
> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain.html
> 
>
> Here is one of several research stories that Elwyn Berlekamp told to me
> during a visit to SFI many years ago in which I was his host (the closest I
> will ever come to the experience of those who hosted Erdos).
>
> Elwyn was one of the principles of the MSRI research into mathematical
> analysis of combinatorial games.
>
> Here was one project:
>
> Subjects are shown a chessboard with pieces on it, for a short time, after
> which the board is cleared (remember Searching for Bobby Fisher: “Here;
> I’ll help you”), and the subject is asked to reconstruct the piece
> locations.
>
> The subjects were in two categories: high-level chess players, and
> ordinary people who don’t really play seriously, though perhaps they
> understand the rules of the game.
>
> I will recount to you the outcomes as they were told to me.  I have not
> gone back to original sources so I don’t know if some stylization was added
> to “sharpen the edges” of the picture.
>
> 1.  For pieces placed on a board by computer-random number generators, the
> experts and the novices were not much different in speed or reliability of
> replacing pieces.
>
> 2. When the arrangements were not randomly generated, but rather taken
> from various stages in the play of games by high-level players, suddenly a
> big gap opened up.  The novices did about the same as they had done for
> randomly placed pieces at similar sparseness etc.  The experts got much
> faster and more reliable.
>
> The experimenters, of course, wanted to say something mechanistic about
> why.  To do this they put eye-trackers on the subjects, to find out what
> they were looking at when presented with the blankened board and asked to
> rebuild.  So: what did the experts look at first?  This is where the
> tension of the joke is set up, to prepare for the punchline.
>
> 3. The place the experts looked first was at the “next good move” from
> what had been the position, and they then backfilled the pieces in the
> positions that had made it the next good move.
>
>
> I find this story delightful.  If I were less lazy and really needed it
> for anything, maybe I would do the work to find out how reliable it is.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Theil

[Roger Critchlow]

The stars have aligned to make this assembly theory day!

First this article on How Did Life Begin:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/14/1082828/how-did-life-begin/

pointed me to an open access article:
   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
   Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution

and then Eric S noticed the interview with Walker and Cronin
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFxIazwNP_0

The interview itself, even with Fridman, is much more entertaining than
Claude's summary.

Walker and Cronin have a shared idiom for talking about the history of
complexity in the universe which they use quite casually in the interview.
This is probably the result of long familiarity with each other (Sara
Walker, Lee Cronin, and Eric Smith were part of the Science Organizing
Committee and speakers at Reconceptualizing the Origin of Life in November
2015) and of intense collaboration and arguments over Skype during the
covid lockdown.  They also talk informally about a lot of ideas they've
been thinking about.

-- rec --

PS I'll be in Santa Fe this Friday and probably at Friam.
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[FRIAM] We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

[Roger Critchlow]

Text of Charlie Stross' talk to Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in
Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023, concerning where the
techno-industrial elite found their horrible philosophies/secular religions.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html

via hackernews

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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

[Roger Critchlow]

Did anyone else notice

   Geoffrey Hinton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrvK_KuIeJk

and

Peter Norvig
https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/

among everything else that's been going on?

Oh, and Youtube just rudely informed me that my adblocker is no longer
welcome when I looked up the Hinton video.  Goodbye monetized videos.

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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

[Roger Critchlow]

Oops, found the roundtable discussion appendix and missed Wendy Brown's
actual Tanner lecture:

Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times:  Thinking with Max Weber -
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG52tEGghTA - “Politics”
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXm_0DxoS_k - “Knowledge”

-- rec --


On Sun, Oct 8, 2023 at 1:27 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> The book sounds intriguing, but it's not in my lending library.
>
> Happily, there are lots of Tanner Lecture videos available online:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI-MCqeCILs Wendy Brown from 2019
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJprCvmrpoY Kim Stanley Robinson from
> March 2023
>
> -- rec --
>
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2023 at 11:56 AM David Eric Smith 
> wrote:
>
>> It’s a good point/counterpinet, Pieter.
>>
>> I don’t want to stand against using new tools to relieve a scarcity
>> constraint, and surely education has been a severe one.
>>
>> I have what appears to be an enormous suspicion of a bait and switch, in
>> which suddenly we find ourselves in a world where simultaneously:
>>
>> 1. Sal Khan and Daphne Koller own everything, and nobody else owns
>> anything; and
>>
>> 2. People have no skills (say I, as I use the scary-good google translate
>> to take enormous pressure, though less shame, off me for not learning a
>> language I should have learned by now).
>>
>> Or, as a popular bumper sticker in Santa Fe used to say post-2016: Where
>> are we going?  And what am I doing in this handbasket?
>>
>> I should mention, on this point, that part of my cast of mind was shaped
>> by an article I read some time ago in some education chronicle, about how
>> the command-and-control interface to the computer was taking up more and
>> more space in classrooms, and kids were starting to show severe systematic
>> deficits in particular areas.  They could command anything they wanted into
>> existence on the computer, and failed to learn that the rest of the world
>> of people doesn’t work that way.  Negotiating skills were mentioned in the
>> article.  My description of a dystopian non-education was meant to suggest
>> that for several students to have to hear exactly the same thing would
>> require them to come to terms with the fact that it will fit them
>> differently, and they should become used to handling that too.
>>
>> It is interesting that I could never use a chatbot as a first stage of
>> writing something, as the optimistic chatbots suggest everybody will do,
>> and which I can believe for some people will be a good fit.  For me, I
>> can’t even take looking at a page of my own writing when I am in a tangle,
>> as a start to getting out of it.  All that pre-formed text is in the way of
>> whatever part of my brain tries to bring into focus what I should do next.
>> I know that chatbots and writing is not your point about education, and
>> don’t mean to derail those points; the chatbots-and-journalism theme was
>> one of the things from the original thread that put me onto the education
>> sidetrack.  What (at least in my imagination) they have in common is that
>> there are certain mental operations that I only do when I have “space”, and
>> many of these tools seem designed to make sure nobody ever has to leave any
>> “space” unfilled by some external stimulus, ever again.  I worry about it
>> as a development-weakening prosthetic, though I understand that the
>> argument for that would need to be made case by case, versus the likely
>> (and I believe you, in many cases demonstrated) economies and advantages of
>> personalization.
>>
>> Fortunately, I am neither designing anything nor voting on anything just
>> now, so there is no danger I will hold anybody else back who is trying to
>> make something work.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>> On Oct 8, 2023, at 7:45 AM, Pieter Steenekamp 
>> wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to reflect how LLM's and AI could disrupt education.
>>
>> My paradigm is not to think in terms of the current educational model,
>> but to throw out all preconceived ideas and to design it from scratch.
>> There are obviously zillions of ways to do it and a good model will need to
>> evolve, but the following are merely two examples to trigger new and novel
>> approaches, one from Sal Khan and one from my own experience.
>>
>> 1 Sal Khan's approach to use AI to personalize education is based on the
>> idea that every student can benefit from a customized learning path that
>> adapts to their needs and preferences. He argues that AI can help scale the
>> benefits of one-to

Re: [FRIAM] cults

[Roger Critchlow]

Feels like an AI-fake, or maybe time erodes us into the worst imaginings of
our enemies.

-- rec --

On Fri, Oct 6, 2023 at 12:02 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> I was tempted to dive into the L vs. E as it may apply to psychology and
> sociology, but will just offer this instead.  Formal deprogramming!   Say
> the quiet part, H, lol.
>
> [image: 231006072811-clinton-1006.jpg]
>
> Video: Clinton calls for 'formal deprogramming' of MAGA 'cult members' |
> CNN Politics
> 
> cnn.com
> 
>
> 
>
>
> On Oct 5, 2023, at 2:04 PM, glen  wrote:
>
> Rather than -emic vs -etic, I prefer Lagrangian vs Eulerian,
> respectively. This avoids the concept of "inside" vs "outside", which then
> avoids the scoping issue Marcus raised re: nation vs other types of
> boundaries.
>
> A self-imposed identity is just as imposed as an other-imposed identity.
> While some of us may chafe at other-imposed vs self-imposed, I think
> there's another type of person, those who resist any stable identity,
> whether other- or self-imposed. And resistance is the wrong way to frame
> it. It's more like a tendency to swirl around in an attractor versus a
> tendency to hop from one basin to another.
>
> He/Him may be relatively accurate today. But I'm not committing to its
> accuracy tomorrow.
>
> On 10/5/23 12:50, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> on Emic vs Etic  POVs.  My
> own "individualism" is armatured significantly around "/I don't like to be
> told/" with being */told who I am/* perhaps the most egregious, even if I'm
> being told that "/I'm someone who doesn't like to be told who I am"/.
>
> --
> glen
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

[Roger Critchlow]

The book sounds intriguing, but it's not in my lending library.

Happily, there are lots of Tanner Lecture videos available online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI-MCqeCILs Wendy Brown from 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJprCvmrpoY Kim Stanley Robinson from
March 2023

-- rec --


-- rec --

On Sun, Oct 8, 2023 at 11:56 AM David Eric Smith 
wrote:

> It’s a good point/counterpinet, Pieter.
>
> I don’t want to stand against using new tools to relieve a scarcity
> constraint, and surely education has been a severe one.
>
> I have what appears to be an enormous suspicion of a bait and switch, in
> which suddenly we find ourselves in a world where simultaneously:
>
> 1. Sal Khan and Daphne Koller own everything, and nobody else owns
> anything; and
>
> 2. People have no skills (say I, as I use the scary-good google translate
> to take enormous pressure, though less shame, off me for not learning a
> language I should have learned by now).
>
> Or, as a popular bumper sticker in Santa Fe used to say post-2016: Where
> are we going?  And what am I doing in this handbasket?
>
> I should mention, on this point, that part of my cast of mind was shaped
> by an article I read some time ago in some education chronicle, about how
> the command-and-control interface to the computer was taking up more and
> more space in classrooms, and kids were starting to show severe systematic
> deficits in particular areas.  They could command anything they wanted into
> existence on the computer, and failed to learn that the rest of the world
> of people doesn’t work that way.  Negotiating skills were mentioned in the
> article.  My description of a dystopian non-education was meant to suggest
> that for several students to have to hear exactly the same thing would
> require them to come to terms with the fact that it will fit them
> differently, and they should become used to handling that too.
>
> It is interesting that I could never use a chatbot as a first stage of
> writing something, as the optimistic chatbots suggest everybody will do,
> and which I can believe for some people will be a good fit.  For me, I
> can’t even take looking at a page of my own writing when I am in a tangle,
> as a start to getting out of it.  All that pre-formed text is in the way of
> whatever part of my brain tries to bring into focus what I should do next.
> I know that chatbots and writing is not your point about education, and
> don’t mean to derail those points; the chatbots-and-journalism theme was
> one of the things from the original thread that put me onto the education
> sidetrack.  What (at least in my imagination) they have in common is that
> there are certain mental operations that I only do when I have “space”, and
> many of these tools seem designed to make sure nobody ever has to leave any
> “space” unfilled by some external stimulus, ever again.  I worry about it
> as a development-weakening prosthetic, though I understand that the
> argument for that would need to be made case by case, versus the likely
> (and I believe you, in many cases demonstrated) economies and advantages of
> personalization.
>
> Fortunately, I am neither designing anything nor voting on anything just
> now, so there is no danger I will hold anybody else back who is trying to
> make something work.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Oct 8, 2023, at 7:45 AM, Pieter Steenekamp 
> wrote:
>
> I'd like to reflect how LLM's and AI could disrupt education.
>
> My paradigm is not to think in terms of the current educational model, but
> to throw out all preconceived ideas and to design it from scratch. There
> are obviously zillions of ways to do it and a good model will need to
> evolve, but the following are merely two examples to trigger new and novel
> approaches, one from Sal Khan and one from my own experience.
>
> 1 Sal Khan's approach to use AI to personalize education is based on the
> idea that every student can benefit from a customized learning path that
> adapts to their needs and preferences. He argues that AI can help scale the
> benefits of one-to-one tutoring, which has been shown to improve students'
> performance significantly. He also believes that AI can enhance the role of
> teachers by providing them with useful feedback, insights, and assistance.
> He envisions a future where every student has access to an AI-powered
> personal tutor and every teacher has an AI teaching assistant.
>
> Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit education
> platform that offers free online courses, videos, and exercises for
> learners of all ages. He has been a pioneer in using technology to
> democratize education and make it accessible to anyone, anywhere. He has
> also been exploring the potential of AI to transform education for the
> better. In his 2023 TED talk¹, he demonstrated Khanmigo, an AI-powered
> guide that can help students with various subjects, skills, and tasks.
> Khanmigo can detect students' mistakes and misconceptions, 

Re: [FRIAM] On Apple Podcasts: Solving Tornadoes: Woke Meteorology

[Roger Critchlow]

Anyone who needs to call "woke" to make a scientific argument has lost my
ear.  An attention seeking proto-populist weatherman.

The electrostatics of individual water molecules, that the hydrogens have
some positive charge and the lone pairs of oxygen have some negative charge
(which is actually a consequence of the molecule geometry), is all averaged
into the thermodynamic behavior.  That gaseous water vapor and liquid water
vapor droplets coexist is one way the gas - liquid equilibrium can roll.
Are the droplets drying out or getting wetter decides which way the heat is
moving.  The amount of surface area between the liquid and gas phases
facilitates the rate of heat transfer/drying/wetting.

The fundamental delusion is thinking you can explain the weather better
than simply blaming it on the gods.  We know the basic principles involved,
but the variety of ways it can work out continues to surprise us.

-- rec --

On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 8:54 AM Nicholas Thompson 
wrote:

> thanks Pieter for giving a hear.  He almost certainly is a crack pot (he
> has an "only I can fix it" thing going)  but is he wrong about everything?
> He makes a big deal about the special properties of water molecules. He
> argues that these are created not by the geometric properties of the
> molecule per se but by the electrostatic (?!) gradient created by the
> structure, a distinction he admits is subtle, but insists is absolutely
> crucial.  He says at one point that water vapor itself is rare and that
> water remains in minuscule droplet form or (??) sometimes forms a
> plasma.  Some how this leads him to the conclusion that convection is a
> confection.
>
> I do have sympathy for his general assertion that meteorology is an
> incoherent clabboring together of incompatible ways of talking and
> thinking.
>
> This is one of those moments when I profoundly miss Hywel White.  One of
> his aphorisms was "Water is *WEIRD!"*
>
>
> *Nick*
>
> On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 12:57 AM Pieter Steenekamp <
> piet...@randcontrols.co.za> wrote:
>
>> I listened to the podcast and my opinion is that this guy, James McGinn,
>> is a crackpot.
>>
>> On Thu, 7 Sept 2023 at 05:28, Nicholas Thompson 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> *Hi, all,*
>>>
>>> *I was casting about for a podcast on meteorology and stumbled on this
>>> guy.  I can’t tell if he’s a total raging loon. he says some interesting
>>> things about the properties of water and then claims that convection is a
>>> myth! I could not find any trace of him on the web except this podcast. The
>>> one thing he says that caught my attention is that meteorologists imply
>>> that air masses have structural properties that would allow, say, in light
>>> air mass to hold a loft, a heavier one. Having red hundreds of forecast
>>> discussions, I sort of know what he’s talking about.*
>>>
>>>
>>> *?*
>>> *Nick.*
>>> *Solving Tornadoes: Woke Meteorology*
>>> James McGinn
>>>
>>> Exposing the incompetence of the current meteorological paradigm on
>>> storm theory and introducing a new, scientifically competent theory of
>>> storms and atmospheric flow.
>>>
>>> Listen on Apple Podcasts:
>>> https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/solving-tornadoes-woke-meteorology/id1489185715
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from my Dumb Phone
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Re: [FRIAM] Swirlies redux

[Roger Critchlow]

Or the waypoints in formulating a false confession, under the guidance of a
police interrogator.

-- rec --

On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 10:30 AM Stephen Guerin 
wrote:

> More seriously, I see a series of prompts as vector compositing to give
> context and then exploring the synthesized space created. Less about
> information retrieval or search.
>
> On Sat, Aug 5, 2023, 10:16 AM Stephen Guerin 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 5, 2023, 10:05 AM Marcus Daniels 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There is something objectionable about prompts.  Like a therapist
>>> extracting subconscious recovered memories from childhood PTSD.
>>>
>>
>> I understand your concerns. Prompting, especially in therapeutic
>> contexts, should be approached with care due to the potential risks, such
>> as the creation of false memories or exacerbating distress. The intention
>> behind prompts, especially in AI communication, is generally to stimulate
>> conversation or thought, not to dig into sensitive personal areas unless
>> explicitly directed by the user. If you have any discomfort about the
>> direction of the conversation, please let me know, and I will adjust
>> accordingly.
>>
>> - Dr C.G. Petey
>>
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Re: [FRIAM] Swirlies redux

[Roger Critchlow]

Who made up the exact timings?

-- rec --

On Sat, Aug 5, 2023, 9:10 AM Stephen Guerin 
wrote:

> There were 10 or so intermediate prompts to drive chatGPT to that lab
> report.
>
> On Sat, Aug 5, 2023, 8:52 AM Stephen Guerin 
> wrote:
>
>> chatGPT, you are a graduate student at c the Santa Fe Institute's complex
>> systems summer school, write a lab report on your experiences with the
>> tornado in a tube.
>>
>>
>> **Student Lab Report**
>>
>> **Title:** Insights into Fluid Dynamics and Symmetry Breaking via
>> 'Tornado in a Tube'
>>
>> **Objective:** This lab aimed to explore the critical principles of fluid
>> dynamics, including the principle of least action, surface tension, broken
>> symmetry, and their impacts on fluid behavior, using the 'tornado in a
>> tube' experiment. We introduced variations in the system's orientation,
>> structural changes, and the application of external forces to further
>> understand these principles.
>>
>> **Method:** Our setup included two 2-liter clear plastic bottles, water,
>> a tube connector, and glitter for fluid visualization. We followed the
>> procedure outlined in the lab exercise, with additional testing for
>> different system orientations, external force applications, and structural
>> modifications.
>>
>> **Findings:**
>>
>> 1. **Role of Surface Tension in Vertical Setup:** With the bottles
>> vertically aligned, surface tension at the bottleneck significantly slowed
>> the drainage process. This resulted in a droplet-like flow and a drainage
>> time of 8 minutes and 12 seconds.
>>
>> 2. **Influence of External Forces:** By applying an external force to the
>> system—squeezing the top bottle in pulses—we managed to overcome the
>> surface tension resistance. This modified approach expedited the drainage
>> process to a time of 1 minute and 47 seconds.
>>
>> 3. **Impact of System Orientation:** We then experimented with tilting
>> the bottles to different angles. A tilt of approximately 42 degrees
>> provided the quickest drainage time—2 minutes and 32 seconds. The tilt
>> balanced the inflow of air and the outflow of water, thereby managing the
>> effects of surface tension effectively.
>>
>> 4. **Vortex Formation, Symmetry Breaking and the Principle of Least
>> Action:** In the next step, we swirled the top bottle to form a vortex,
>> leading to a broken symmetry in angular momentum. This energy-efficient
>> pathway embodied the principle of least action, allowing the water to
>> overcome the surface tension barrier and to drain in an impressive 18
>> seconds. This broken symmetry enabled the efficient dissipation of the
>> gradient between the bottles.
>>
>> 5. **Effects of Structural Changes:** Our final test involved an
>> open-ended tube setup. Here, we observed noticeable changes in fluid
>> behavior. The vortex's efficiency in gradient dissipation decreased due to
>> interference from the ambient pressure, indicating the crucial role
>> structural features play in fluid dynamics.
>>
>> **Conclusion:** The 'tornado in a tube' experiment, complemented by our
>> additional tests, provided a comprehensive understanding of fluid dynamics
>> principles. The observed differences in drainage times highlighted the
>> significant impact of system orientation, the principle of least action,
>> surface tension, and broken symmetry on fluid dynamics. These findings
>> offer deeper insights into fluid behavior and are applicable to a range of
>> real-world phenomena, from weather systems to biological processes.
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 4, 2023, 8:05 PM Nicholas Thompson 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, folks. I apologize to those of you who are fed up with my kitchen
>>> physics, but there has been a bit of a development in that saga that I want
>>> to share with those few of you who aren’t.   Years ago, I came home for
>>> the summer with my ears ringing with the notion that structures are formed
>>> to dissipate gradients.  Please set aside any teleological implications
>>> of this statement and ask the question in its most neutral form:  Do
>>> the structures that sometimes form as a gradient is dissipated dissipate it
>>> more quickly once the structure has been formed.   Or, as I came to
>>> interpret it, does facilitating the formation of such a structure speed the
>>> dissipation of the gradient.
>>>
>>> I was the family dishwasher at the time.  I deplore washing dishes, but
>>> I love messing around with warm soapy water, and so I started to experiment
>>> with starting the vortex that forms *after* you pull the plug out of
>>> the sink *before* I pulled the plug.  Quickly, it became apparent that
>>> facilitating the vortex formation in that way GREATLY SLOWED the emptying
>>> of the sink.  Triumphally, I wrote Steve on Friam only to be greeted by
>>> a torrent of scatological raillery, so intense and so persistent from the
>>> fluid dynamicists on the list that I never heard from Steve. The burden of
>>> this raillery I have distilled into Roberts Rule of Order:  

Re: [FRIAM] overshoot day

[Roger Critchlow]

My sister has a fire up in the Okanogan valley this week, the Eagle Bluff
Fire, which blew north into BC.

A step-niece, who is working the fire lines in Washington state this
summer, recommends the "Watch Duty" app for tracking wildfires.

Watch Duty is the only wildfire mapping and alert app powered by real
> people giving you real-time information vetted by trained professionals,
> not robots. All other apps only rely on government alerts which can be
> hours late or flat out non-existent.
>
> Watch Duty is run by active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, first
> responders, and reporters who monitor radio scanners in your area around
> the clock to bring you up-to-the-minute life saving information.


I installed it on Sunday and it prompted me to update when I opened it a
few minutes ago.

-- rec --


On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 12:42 PM cody dooderson  wrote:

> Forgive me for nitpicking but there have been some huge fires in western
> Canada this year. For instance, this fire was 1.4 million acres
> https://www.simtable.com/apps/fireProgression/output2023/BritishColumbia_G80280.html
> .
> I doubt the smoke from that blew down to the bay area though.
>
>
>
>
> _ Cody Smith _
> c...@simtable.com
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 2, 2023 at 6:15 PM Stephen Guerin 
> wrote:
>
>> Yesterday's microburst from Los Alamos over Otowi Smith's Hacienda with a
>> rainbow pointing to the 6' leprechauns yurt down canyon on the Rio Grande
>> :-)
>>
>>
>> https://node.redfish.com/Documents/cody/timeLapse/output/LosAlamos1/2023/214/LosAlamos1_2023_08_02_00_00.mp4
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 2, 2023, 3:24 PM Steve Smith  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 8/2/23 2:55 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>
>>> I just noticed it was overshoot day, and just after the hottest July
>>> ever recorded.Yay!
>>>
>>>
>>> I'll be mixing up a nice ice-cold (luke warm?) cocktail of shame with
>>> just a splash of Cassandrafruede (reminiscent of Absinthe?) at sundown
>>> today (spectacular when orange-tinted from the wildfire smoke and dust
>>> blown from drought-denuded areas)... While I pop the ice-cubes from the
>>> tray I'll remember the recent factoid from someone (McKibben?) that the
>>> annual carbon budget of most people in the third world is roughly that of
>>> an American's refrigerator with an Ice-Maker or a Brit's electric Kettle
>>> for twice-daily tea.  If I had AC I'd turn it down to it's coldest setting
>>> to spite my neighbor by belching superheated air into their AC air handler
>>> intakes... but alas I only have adobe walls and brick floors and lots of
>>> windows to absorb night-time coolth...   no fun in that!  >> lingering aftertaste of Cassandrafruede!>
>>>
>>> The wycked hot here in NM finally broke somewhat for us yesterday with
>>> an hour of rain like the "good ole days" when every afternoon had a
>>> rainstorm starting in July to cool off the second half of the summer.   The
>>> crew down in the Bosque building a pumping station to move the water pumped
>>> from the Colorado Basin to the Rio Grande (San Juan to Chama) is busy
>>> belching diesel exhaust plumes and  throwing adobe-bricklets from their
>>> tires when they pull out on the highway to become ad-hoc speed control
>>> bumps for the Los Alamos commuters usually roar by at 80 in the 55mph
>>> "safety zone" morning and night.
>>>
>>> All the world is a circle?  Or is it a donut?  I think maybe I'm
>>> channeling Terry Pratchett?
>>>
>>> Cheers!
>>>
>>>
>>> https://www.overshootday.org/
>>>
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Re: [FRIAM] Watch "The Most Important Idea in Physics: The Principle of Least Action - Ask a Spaceman!" on YouTube

[Roger Critchlow]

Geometric and physical interpretation of the action principle

An open access article from Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-39145-y

-- rec --

On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 12:01 PM Barry MacKichan <
barry.mackic...@mackichan.com> wrote:

> This is late since another ISP cut my fiber connection a week ago. Living
> with only cell service plus $15 per gigabyte is not pleasant.
>
> Some comments.
>
>1. I believe that the fact that photons travel on geodesics (least
>distance betwee2 points on a surface (manifold)) gives a fingerhold on
>trying to grasp least action.
>2. I read the wikipedia artice, and it hints that the application to
>electromagnetism and quantum physics requires some tweaks, so it is not as
>straightforward as the video implied.
>3. Granted that Newton’s laws are simpler, my understanding is that
>problems involving constraints are easier to set up than integrating the
>constraints into the setup of the equations.
>
> Just sayin’
>
> —Barry
>
> On 3 Jul 2023, at 2:51, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> Exercise caution when attempting to grasp the principle of least action,
> particularly if you desire an intuitive comprehension of it.
>
> It is essential to recognize the significance of the principle of least
> action, as it applies to various areas of physics and could potentially
> hold a closer answer to the "why" question than Newtonian physics
> regarding
> the laws of motion.
>
> However, based on our current knowledge, the best explanation for why the
> principle of least action holds true is that it aligns with the
> observations and experiments conducted in the real world. Although a
> breakthrough might be on the horizon, a consensus has not yet been reached
> regarding the "why" question.
>
> Therefore, at present, the following points can be made:
> a) When applied to the laws of motion, the principle of least action and
> Newton's laws of motion are equivalent.
> b) The reason for their acceptance lies in their agreement with empirical
> evidence and experimental results.
> c) The principle of least action carries more depth as it applies across
> several other fields of physics, such as electromagnetism and quantum
> physics.
> d) The fundamental formulation of the principle of least action is also
> simpler than that of Newtonian physics.
>
> However, if you are aiming to develop an intuitive understanding of the
> motion of objects in the real world, it is advisable to adhere to
> Newtonian
> physics. The principle of least action lacks inherent intuitiveness. Let
> me
> rephrase that: I have personally constructed an intuitive understanding
> that I find useful, but I cannot present it as the definitive answer.
> Perhaps someone else has a compelling intuitive explanation? I am open to
> hearing different perspectives.
>
> Moreover, for practical mechanical engineering calculations involving
> forces and motion in the real world, Newtonian physics surpasses the
> principle of least action.
>
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Re: [FRIAM] What is an agent [was: Philosophy and Science}

[Roger Critchlow]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 2:35 PM David Eric Smith 
wrote:

> [...] [Yoshi Oono's The Nonlinear World]
> in which he argues that the phenomena you mention are only
> “pseudo-complex”.  Yoshi, like David but with less of the predictable
> “Darwin-was-better; now what subject are we discussing today?” vibe, argues
> that there is a threshold to “true complexity” that is only crossed in
> systems that obey what Yoshi calls a “Pasteur principle”; they are of a
> kind that effectively can’t emerge spontaneously, but can evolve from
> ancestors once they exist.  He says (translating slightly from his words to
> mine) that such systems split the notion of “boundary conditions” into two
> sub-kinds that differ qualitatively.  There are the “fundamental
> conditions” (in biology, the contents of genomes with indefinitely deep
> ancestry), that mine an indefinite past sparsely and selectively, versus
> ordinary “boundary conditions”, which are the dense here-and-now.  The
> fundamental conditions often provide criteria that allow the complex thing
> to respond to parts of the here-and-now, and ignore other parts, feeding
> back onto the update of the fundamental conditions.
>
> I don’t know when I will get time to listen to David’s appearance with
> Sean, so with apologies cannot know whether his argument is similar in its
> logic.  But Yoshi’s framing appeals to me a lot, because it is like a kind
> of spontaneous symmetry breaking or ergodicity breaking in the
> representations of information and how they modulate the networks of
> connection to the space-time continuum.  That seems to me a very fertile
> idea.  I am still looking for some concrete model that makes it compelling
> and useful for something I want to solve.  (I probably have written this on
> the list before, in which case apologies for being repetitive.  But this
> mention is framed specifically to your question whether one should be
> disappointed in the demotion of the complexity in phenomena.)
> [...]
>
> On Jul 18, 2023, at 4:37 AM, Stephen Guerin 
> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>1. Teleonomic Material: the latest use by David Krakauer on Sean
>Carroll's recent podcast
>
> 
>in summarizing Complexity. Hurricanes, flocks and Benard Cells according to
>David are not Complex, BTW. I find the move a little frustrating
>and disappointing but I always respect his perspective.
>
> Okay, I listened to the podcast.

DK says that real complexity starts with teleonomic matter, also known as
particles that think.  He says that such agents carry around some
representation of the external world.  And then the discussion gets
distracted to other topics, at one point getting to "large language model
paper clip nightmares".

My response to Eric's description of Oono's  "Pasteur principle" was that
it sounds a lot like "Attention Is All You Need" (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf), the founding paper of the
Transformer class of neural network models.

The "fundamental conditions" in a Transformer would be the trained neural
net which specifies the patterns of attention and responses learned during
training.  The "ordinary conditions" would be the input sequence given to
the Transformer.  The Transformer breaks up the input sequence into
attention patterns, evaluates the response to the current set of input
values selected by the attention patterns,  emits an element to the output
sequence, and advances the input cursor.

Anyone else see the family resemblance here?

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Re: [FRIAM] McCarthy v Peirce

[Roger Critchlow]

Seems like there should be an aspect of fine/coarse graining that covers
this, I'll just twiddle the focus a bit and see if things make more sense.

-- rec --

On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 9:16 AM glen  wrote:

> Ha! Yes. That's a doozy of a metaphor right there, something the
> metaphor-addicted amongst us can sink their teeth into.
>
> On 7/12/23 17:56, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > It's hard for me not to draw some life lesson from this:
> >
> > https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.04836.pdf
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2023 8:48 AM
> > To: friam@redfish.com
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] McCarthy v Peirce
> >
> > It's been mulled over. E.g.
> >
> > What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?
> > https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03886v1
> >
> > "Experience" seems, by definition, hopelessly fragile to context. If
> your experience is similar to someone else's experience, then you're in a
> cult. Get out! There's nothing more frightening than a commitment to a
> common experience. What I'm looking for are things I can't imagine, not
> things other people imagine, much less things other people are committed to.
> >
> > The idea came up recently that we might want to implement a virtual
> reality (VR) interface to allow a user to walk a graph. My 1st reaction was
> to draw the (false) distinction between the Eulerian vs Lagrangian point of
> view (maybe translated to subjective experience: as if you're a point in
> space versus as if you're a particle in space). VR seems, to me, hopelessly
> Eulerian. Simultaneously (well, interleaved with), I was listening to a
> podcast "analyzing" the Nick Cage movie "Color Out of Space". I read the
> Lovecraft story within the last decade, though I can't remember when. But
> the movie was pretty good. Anyway, when you, as a point in space, look out
> at a sub-graph of which you're not a member, can't resist being
> arrogant/tribal about the sub-graph of which you are a member ... a kind of
> temporal/spatial bias. But if you look at the largest sub-graph you can
> (every visible node and edge from you as a node, everything that you are
> not, minimizing the sub-graph you're in) and watch that largest sub-graph
> morph and flicker, you can't help but feel the Cosmic Horror. Lovecraft's
> racism was rooted in his admission that the world is larger than whatever
> Norms you may be habituated to. Reduce the diversity of the experiences and
> you homogenize the world to its least common denominator.
> >
> > Monism, in this context, looks to me like Cosmic Horror. I'd prefer to
> embrace my smallness and avoid pretending to Cosmic Homogeneity ... aka I
> wouldn't want to be a member of any group that would have me as a member.
> >
> > On 7/10/23 10:37, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> >> In the following lines, the patient character expresses an opinion on
> the central issue of Pragmat[ic]ism.
> >>
> >> /Patient:] …The world you live in is shored some up by a collection of
> >> agreements.Is that something you think about?The hope is that the
> >> truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it.Of
> >> course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a
> >> good bit at odds with this notion.Innovation and discovery by
> >> definition war against the common understanding.One should be
> >> wary.What do you think? [pp 91-2]/
> >>
> >> I am not going to comment.I just thought you might like to have the
> quote to mull over.
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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Re: [FRIAM] Watch "The Most Important Idea in Physics: The Principle of Least Action - Ask a Spaceman!" on YouTube

[Roger Critchlow]

For more on the wondrous Emmy Noether, listen to
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw and find out how she solved
Einstein's problem with the conservation of energy while he was formulating
general relativity.

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Re: [FRIAM] bespoke turbulence

[Roger Critchlow]

Not lurking, busy most mornings, getting doctors to fix some stuff for me.

-- rec --

On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 6:30 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> We were talking about related questions in Virtual Friam today.  Were you
> lurking?
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 5:26 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> I was going to post the University of Chicago press release,
>> https://phys.org/news/2023-06-tempest-teacup-physicists-breakthrough-turbulence.html,
>> but let it slide until this other article turned up,
>> https://phys.org/news/2023-06-approach-properties-turbulence.html, the
>> original report is paywalled at
>> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02052-0 with a paywalled
>> editorial comment https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02054-y.
>>
>> Oh, and there's also https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00771.
>>
>> So you put your fluid in a cubic reservoir with a vortex ring gun at each
>> corner of the cube aimed at the center of the cube.  You can make free
>> floating blobs of turbulence in the center of the reservoir by shooting
>> combinations of vortex rings.  Vary the combinations of vortex rings and
>> you vary the properties of the turbulent blob.  So for whatever varieties
>> of turbulence you can synthesize and instrument, you now have an analog
>> computer for finding properties and calibrating your digital simulations.
>>
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[FRIAM] bespoke turbulence

[Roger Critchlow]

I was going to post the University of Chicago press release,
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-tempest-teacup-physicists-breakthrough-turbulence.html,
but let it slide until this other article turned up,
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-approach-properties-turbulence.html, the
original report is paywalled at
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02052-0 with a paywalled
editorial comment https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02054-y.

Oh, and there's also https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00771.

So you put your fluid in a cubic reservoir with a vortex ring gun at each
corner of the cube aimed at the center of the cube.  You can make free
floating blobs of turbulence in the center of the reservoir by shooting
combinations of vortex rings.  Vary the combinations of vortex rings and
you vary the properties of the turbulent blob.  So for whatever varieties
of turbulence you can synthesize and instrument, you now have an analog
computer for finding properties and calibrating your digital simulations.

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[FRIAM] The Three Toed Sloth meets the Shoggoth

[Roger Critchlow]

I was trawling through my saved bookmarks looking for insights into
Prigozhin's mutiny, when I stumbled to http://bactra.org/weblog/ and found
that Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi have just published an essay in The
Economist,
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/06/21/artificial-intelligence-is-a-familiar-looking-monster-say-henry-farrell-and-cosma-shalizi,
paywalled of course, but there is a twitter listicle version at
https://twitter.com/henryfarrell/status/1671547591262191618

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Re: [FRIAM] From Merle--AI News

[Roger Critchlow]

There probably already is a law, but no one knows what it is?  The law
suffers from the same curse as the scientific literature, most of it gets
ignored because no one has the time to read it all.

So maybe that's what LLM's are for.  We can set one to read the collected
works of Carl Friederich Gauss, and we'll finally be able to find out how
much of mathematics he invented/discovered.  We can set one to read the
laws of each podunk in the US and find out exactly what's permitted and
what's forbidden and what's hopelessly confused.

-- rec --

On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 10:25 AM Steve Smith  wrote:

>
> glen wrote:
> > IDK. The implication that we already have laws that cover (80%?) of
> > the use cases for new tech we, as a society, want to discourage, is a
> > good default. It resists the "there ought to be a law" sensibility
> > held by old people and curmudgeons everywhere. And it keeps our legal
> > system a little more adaptive than it would be were we to burden it
> > with even more persnickety case-by-case rulings.
> >
> >
> I share your feeling that "there oughtta be a law!" is a red-herring,
> though I don't know about it being that tightly coupled with "old
> people"...  my experience is that people whose experiences and
> sensibilities which are much different from mine are more apt to express
> those sentiments, but I think this related to confirmation bias.  If
> they are shaking their fist with "there oughtta be a law!" sentiments
> about something I feel the same way about it goes right past me, but if
> it is somehow "off" from my alignments it grates.   I find young people
> (when I was in HS, my civics/history/government/etc classes were filled
> with them) full of the more egregious phrase "that's ILLEGAL!" in place
> of "that OFFENDS ME!".   I try to hear "there oughtta be a law" as
> pining for a new and relevant heuristic where the old one(s) don't work
> (well)?
>
>
> > The point being that behaviorism is insidious. You are not a shallow
> > narrative comprising Instagram "stories" in the same way ChatGPT is
> > not an organism. But it's not merely behaviorism. There's a similar
> > problem with the concept of an integrated personality
> > .
>
> I identify as a self-organized/ing complex adaptive system coupled with
> other complex systems in such a way as to be an all-subsuming (read
> panpsychic) system of systems (nearly-decomposable in Herb Simon's
> sensibilites).   Or in Schwietzer's sensibilities: "I am life which
> wills to live amongst life which wills to live".   Does the biosphere of
> Earth "will to live"? (and in the image of Gaia, does it nurture us, or
> in the image of Medea, does it seek to shed itself of the blight which
> is us?)   How about the solar system or the galaxies or galactic
> clusters?   Maybe not even as much as a jellyfish or an amoeba does...
> but not less than a grain of sand or am molecule or an interstellar photon?
>
> Depending on the focus/locus of my awareness in a given moment, I am
> likely identified differently... like whether I'm having coffee with an
> old friend, looking through a telescope or microscope, or blathering on
> on FriAM...   an analog to glen's "homunculii"?   I think I can be
> episodic and diachronic, or is it only an episodic identity who can
> actually imagine both while diachronics are forever shut off from the
> experience of being episodic?  Or is it an illusion like "free will"
> (pervasive and undeniable, yet nevertheless an illusion)?
>
> Is this not the point of holidays like Juneteenth (not formed but maybe
> exploited by Hallmark?), to focus our awareness (and therefore
> identity?) on a subset of "life which wills to live" that we normally do
> not (fathers day, juneteenth, independence day, thanksgiving, new years,
> etc.)?
>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

[Roger Critchlow]

 kitties, and
> garden-soil from the right (wrong) perspective!
> >>>> Maybe the point is "nobody left for the AI overlords to lord over" ?
> >>>> I think the key is "existential threat"...I didn't look for
> Schmidt's statement anywhere, so I'm just speculating that maybe he's doing
> a mild echo of Musk's idea that a collapsing (first) world population is
> somehow a *bigger* existential threat?
> >>>> With my techhead hat on I am inclined to imagine that AI will help me
> (well, not ME anymore, but people vaguely like who I once thought I was or
> wanted to be) solve micro-techonomic problems like the ones that lead to
> Teflon(tm) and Velcro(tm) and higher density/faster-charge EV batteries,
> and higher density/dynamic range pixel-displays, and neural lace to wire
> (grow?) into my brain/ganglia, and microbes that can convert moon/mars-dust
> to Soylent/Huel/Water/??? etc.
> >>>> My PsychoHistory hatted self (Asimov - Foundation <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>and
> thenon-fictional variant <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#:~:text=Psychohistory%20is%20an%20amalgam%20of,stated%20intention%20and%20actual%20behavior.>)
> is inclined to imagine that AI *can* help with the "big problems", the ones
> nominally too large, too interdisciplinarian, too obtuse, too "wycked" (In
> Complexity Science jargon), possibly too counter-intuitive for most (any?)
> human or group of humans to grasp.
> >>>> My Ned Ludd (very tight by definition?) hat has me thinking more down
> the rabbit holes of worst-case scenarios where all the arrogant,
> narcissistic @$$h0ii3z of the world (starting at the top with those whose
> names start with Pu Tr Be Zu Mu(r/s) Ne De ... and staggering down the
> hierarchy of potency and scope to most of us here most of the time) think
> they "know what is best" and put their resources to using the AI lever to
> "make it so"...
> >>>> Even (especially) me, I constantly imagine that "if they made ME
> King" (or to the point, if *I* was the/wormtongue/in the AI Overlord's ear)
> that I would "make the world safe and happy for everyone, ever after with
> no unintended consequences or unpleasant side effects".
> >>>> One *might* guess that the smartest thinkers in the most grounded,
> thoughtful, gentle think-tanks (e.g.  in a Tibetan Lamasary or the "Club of
> Rome" or SIPRI or CESR or the Justice League of America or the people who
> task "jewish space lasers" or ??? ) would be practicing their AI-whispering
> skills right now. Maybe tasking Marcus' Quantum Computer with "the hard
> problem of universal consciousness"?
> >>>>
> >>>>  An up-to-date version of Asimov's9 Billion Names of God <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> ---
> >>>>> Frank C. Wimberly
> >>>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> >>>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> >>>>>
> >>>>> 505 670-9918
> >>>>> Santa Fe, NM
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow  r...@elf.org>> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today.
> It's headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save
> it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says".  The headline
> is accompanied by a very serious head shot of Eric.  Nice try, Google, but
> you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality
> of disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years ago in
> Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol is available
> in English translation and as an ebook onoverdrive.com <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2foverdrive.com=E,1,qiLuQHPdYM-73PUnxLjrSTzI76V8rfL6yb0_zHcdufFpFa1_kCTZkOyfYIh_N_0ysaWtjxXmwlL7kj8mmwGK2wfSP_01M-8QKT_yUEwBhHUL1Wuk-x_ACQBsspQ,=1>at
> your local library.  The narrator crosses refugee swamped Barcelona to
> check on his mom and gets sent off by her to a McMansion'ed medieval
> monastery high in the Pyrenees where the elite are amusing themselves with
> stories while awaiting the resolution of the first war of entertainment.
> Lots of stories about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
> >>>>>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. ..
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[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

[Roger Critchlow]

Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today.  It's
headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save it
from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says".  The headline is
accompanied by a very serious head shot of Eric.  Nice try, Google, but
you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.

Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality of
disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years ago in
Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol is available
in English translation and as an ebook on overdrive.com at your local
library.  The narrator crosses refugee swamped Barcelona to check on his
mom and gets sent off by her to a McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in
the Pyrenees where the elite are amusing themselves with stories while
awaiting the resolution of the first war of entertainment.  Lots of stories
about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.

-- rec --
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Re: [FRIAM] selective optimism

[Roger Critchlow]

My reaction to the prepper revelation was to seriously question his
rationality.  Maybe he's just prepping because the other styles of
conspicuous consumption didn't appeal to him.  Maybe he's running OpenAI
because it was the most prestigious gig he could get.  Doesn't really have
a rational bone in his head, just another zombie stagger racing to the
fresh brainz.

Riffing off Dave's "journal of record for the discipline", what's the
journal of record for the discipline now?  Twitter?

-- rec --


On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 9:40 AM glen  wrote:

> IDK. I still haven't read the Dawn of Everything ... or much of anything
> from that domain at all. But this article tweaked me:
>
> Revealed: modern humans needed three tries – and 12,000 years – to
> colonise Europe
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/revealed-modern-humans-needed-three-tries-and-12000-years-to-colonise-europe
>
> Dave's sentiment, here, seems anti-human to me, maybe even anti-biology.
> My two usual whipping posts are "To Engineer is Human" <
> https://bookshop.org/p/books/to-engineer-is-human-the-role-of-failure-in-successful-design-henry-petroski/6705174?ean=9780679734161>
> and "The Extended Mind" <
> https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article-abstract/58/1/7/153111?redirectedFrom=fulltext=false>.
> (To my lefty friends who separate humans from animals, I often try to use
> "The Extended Phenotype" for the same basic rhetoric.)
>
> This encapsulation of agency inside the skin (known as liberalism,
> classical or otherwise) is delusional. We *are* our tools and our tools are
> us. And not merely as duals, but an interwoven, dynamic, plectic,
> heterarchy. To detangle us into AI vs human is some kind of debilitating
> category error. Depending on your perspective at the time, your reductive,
> abstracting powers will separate any two clumps from the ambience and
> you'll register an asymmetry between those registered clumps. Two seconds
> later, you may re-register and see reciprocity. Etc.
>
> But one thing's for sure, as we ossify into old age, whatever
> re-registration we last experienced is *more likely* to stick and be the
> one we're convicted to for the rest of our days. Our ability to flip from
> one preemptive registration to another fades, no matter how intensely we
> dose our 5ht2ars. And the only progress we make is through the death of the
> skin sacks (and their ossified concepts) that came before. Post-humanism is
> also loaded with new age nonsense and a bit of a false dichotomy. But if
> one generation considers itself "human", the next generation is post-human.
> And just like the current kids facility with TikTok, the next round of kids
> will be facile with LLMs. And those kids will have red, gray, and blue
> teams for their games just like their ancestors did for the older games.
>
> On 5/9/23 06:50, Prof David West wrote:
> > The opinion of an "advanced layman."
> >
> > I claim the status because my Computer Science MS was in AI. My first
> professional publication was in /AI Magazine/, then the journal of record
> for the discipline. I have appeared on panels with Herbert Simon, Marvin
> Minsky, and Herbert Dreyfus at AI conferences. I taught AI courses at the
> University of New Mexico circa 2009. I have observed the field more or less
> continuously, but as an interested observer—not expert and certainly not
> practitioner.
> >
> > I have always been a critic! >From the time that Simon and Newel claimed
> that they had "created an artificial intelligence," because it successfully
> mimicked the way that university professors claimed to think, to the
> present day. I am convinced that advocates of AI and claimants with regard
> its power and potential (and threat) base ground their assertions in an
> "equivalence" between their work and a debased and limited model of human
> intelligence.
> >
> > The only danger that _will_ (and I use the definite will not the
> potential maybe) result from widespread AI is that "the masses" will
> believe the hype and come to believe that they, as humans, are inferior in
> every way to machines. I believe that political and economic elites will
> exploit this denigration of the human in order to consolidate their power
> (they already have the wealth). To me, this is nothing more than an
> acceleration of a 75 year trend to use the educational system to produce
> graduates that are compliant and gullible rather than informed and
> intelligent—the latter, obviously, being dangerous to the social order.
> >
> > As a species we have, collectively, created gods, forgot how and why we
> did so, then worshiped then as Gods—vastly and inevitably superior beings.
> AI is just godmaking 2.0
> >
> > davew
> >
> > On Tue, May 9, 2023, at 1:34 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
> >> It doesn't have to be either/or. I suspect most likely a mix of the two
> will evolve as is the case with the whole Digital Revolution.
> >> TJ
> >>
> >> ===
> >> Tom Johnson
> >> Inst. for 

Re: [FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Roger Critchlow]

This evening's hackernews contribution:

  https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ais-ostensible-emergent-abilities-are-mirage

AI’s Ostensible Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage
According to Stanford researchers, large language models are not greater
than the sum of their parts.

Which is a gloss on https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004:

Recent work claims that large language models display emergent abilities,
> abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in
> larger-scale models. What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold:
> their sharpness, transitioning seemingly instantaneously from not present
> to present, and their unpredictability, appearing at seemingly
> unforeseeable model scales. Here, we present an alternative explanation for
> emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when
> analyzing fixed model outputs, one can choose a metric which leads to the
> inference of an emergent ability or another metric which does not. Thus,
> our alternative suggests that existing claims of emergent abilities are
> creations of the researcher's analyses, not fundamental changes in model
> behavior on specific tasks with scale.


-- rec --


On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 12:33 AM Pieter Steenekamp <
piet...@randcontrols.co.za> wrote:

> Sorry, I forgot to add the url of the interview.
> (580) The Current State of Artificial Intelligence with James Wang -
> YouTube 
>
>
> On Mon, 8 May 2023 at 08:27, Pieter Steenekamp 
> wrote:
>
>> I am very excited about the basic idea that neither Google nor any Big
>> Tech company has the Moat as per the hackernews reference above.
>> Very interesting around this is the interview with James Wang of Cerebras
>> James Wang about this where he makes a strong case (in my view in any case)
>> that in future open source large language models are going to be much more
>> prominent than those of Big Tech.
>>
>> I quote from the description on Toutube about the interview:
>> "Scaling laws are as important to artificial intelligence (AI) as the law
>> of gravity is in the world around us. AI is the empirical science of this
>> decade, and Cerebras is a company dedicated to turning state-of-the-art
>> research on large language models (LLMs) into open-source data that can be
>> reproduced by developers across the world. In this episode, James Wang, an
>> ARK alum and product marketing specialist at Cerebras, joins us for a
>> discussion centered around the past and the future of LLM development and
>> why the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) innovation taking place in
>> this field is like nothing that has ever come before it (and has seemingly
>> limitless possibilities). He also explains the motivation behind Cerebras’
>> unique approach and the benefits that their architecture and models are
>> providing to developers."
>>
>> On Mon, 8 May 2023 at 01:09, Merle Lefkoff 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Thank you Roger.
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Re: [FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Roger Critchlow]

Oh, the "We Have No Moat" posting is just holding on to the front page of
hackernews 24 hours later, 954 comments so far
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

-- rec --

On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 1:01 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 12:57 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> Ah, found the RSS feed that sends text around the paywall.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
> Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/>
> 2KMIT Technology Review  <https://www.technologyreview.com/>by Will
> Douglas Heaven / May 02, 2023 at 02:11AM
> //
> keep unread
> //
> hide
>
>
>>
>> I met Geoffrey Hinton at his house on a pretty street in north London
>> just four days before the bombshell announcement that he is quitting
>> Google. Hinton is a pioneer of deep learning
>> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-will-do-everything/>
>>  who
>> helped develop some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern
>> artificial intelligence, but after a decade at Google, he is stepping
>> down
>> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/01/1072478/deep-learning-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-quits-google/>
>>  to
>> focus on new concerns he now has about AI.
>>
>> Stunned by the capabilities of new large language models like GPT-4
>> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/14/1069823/gpt-4-is-bigger-and-better-chatgpt-openai/>,
>> Hinton wants to raise public awareness of the serious risks that he now
>> believes may accompany the technology he ushered in.
>>
>> At the start of our conversation, I took a seat at the kitchen table, and
>> Hinton started pacing. Plagued for years by chronic back pain, Hinton
>> almost never sits down. For the next hour I watched him walk from one end
>> of the room to the other, my head swiveling as he spoke. And he had plenty
>> to say.
>>
>> The 75-year-old computer scientist, who was a joint recipient with Yann
>> LeCun
>> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/24/1054817/yann-lecun-bold-new-vision-future-ai-deep-learning-meta/>
>>  and
>> Yoshua Bengio of the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning, says
>> he is ready to shift gears. “I’m getting too old to do technical work that
>> requires remembering lots of details,” he told me. “I’m still okay, but I’m
>> not nearly as good as I was, and that’s annoying.”
>>
>> But that’s not the only reason he’s leaving Google. Hinton wants to spend
>> his time on what he describes as “more philosophical work.” And that will
>> focus on the small but—to him—very real danger that AI will turn out to be
>> a disaster.
>>
>> Leaving Google will let him speak his mind, without the self-censorship a
>> Google executive must engage in. “I want to talk about AI safety issues
>> without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he
>> says. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”
>>
>> That doesn’t mean Hinton is unhappy with Google by any means. “It may
>> surprise you,” he says. “There’s a lot of good things about Google that I
>> want to say, and they’re much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”
>>
>> Hinton says that the new generation of large language models—especially
>> GPT-4, which OpenAI released in March—has made him realize that machines
>> are on track to be a lot smarter than he thought they’d be. And he’s scared
>> about how that might play out.
>>
>> “These things are totally different from us,” he says. “Sometimes I think
>> it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak
>> very good English.”
>> Foundations
>>
>> Hinton is best known for his work on a technique called backpropagation,
>> which he proposed (with a pair of colleagues) in the 1980s. In a nutshell,
>> this is the algorithm that allows machines to learn. It underpins almost
>> all neural networks today, from computer vision systems to large language
>> models.
>>
>> It took until the 2010s for the power of neural networks trained via
>> backpropagation to truly make an impact. Working with a couple of graduate
>> students, Hinton showed that his technique was better than any others at
>> getting a computer to identify objects in images. They also trained a
>> neural network to predict the next letters in a sentence, a precursor to
>> today’s large language models.
>>
>> One of these graduate s

Re: [FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Roger Critchlow]

On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 12:57 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> Ah, found the RSS feed that sends text around the paywall.
>
> -- rec --
>
Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build
<https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/>
2KMIT Technology Review  <https://www.technologyreview.com/>by Will Douglas
Heaven / May 02, 2023 at 02:11AM
//
keep unread
//
hide


>
> I met Geoffrey Hinton at his house on a pretty street in north London just
> four days before the bombshell announcement that he is quitting Google.
> Hinton is a pioneer of deep learning
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-will-do-everything/>
>  who
> helped develop some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern
> artificial intelligence, but after a decade at Google, he is stepping down
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/01/1072478/deep-learning-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-quits-google/>
>  to
> focus on new concerns he now has about AI.
>
> Stunned by the capabilities of new large language models like GPT-4
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/14/1069823/gpt-4-is-bigger-and-better-chatgpt-openai/>,
> Hinton wants to raise public awareness of the serious risks that he now
> believes may accompany the technology he ushered in.
>
> At the start of our conversation, I took a seat at the kitchen table, and
> Hinton started pacing. Plagued for years by chronic back pain, Hinton
> almost never sits down. For the next hour I watched him walk from one end
> of the room to the other, my head swiveling as he spoke. And he had plenty
> to say.
>
> The 75-year-old computer scientist, who was a joint recipient with Yann
> LeCun
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/24/1054817/yann-lecun-bold-new-vision-future-ai-deep-learning-meta/>
>  and
> Yoshua Bengio of the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning, says
> he is ready to shift gears. “I’m getting too old to do technical work that
> requires remembering lots of details,” he told me. “I’m still okay, but I’m
> not nearly as good as I was, and that’s annoying.”
>
> But that’s not the only reason he’s leaving Google. Hinton wants to spend
> his time on what he describes as “more philosophical work.” And that will
> focus on the small but—to him—very real danger that AI will turn out to be
> a disaster.
>
> Leaving Google will let him speak his mind, without the self-censorship a
> Google executive must engage in. “I want to talk about AI safety issues
> without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he
> says. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”
>
> That doesn’t mean Hinton is unhappy with Google by any means. “It may
> surprise you,” he says. “There’s a lot of good things about Google that I
> want to say, and they’re much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”
>
> Hinton says that the new generation of large language models—especially
> GPT-4, which OpenAI released in March—has made him realize that machines
> are on track to be a lot smarter than he thought they’d be. And he’s scared
> about how that might play out.
>
> “These things are totally different from us,” he says. “Sometimes I think
> it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak
> very good English.”
> Foundations
>
> Hinton is best known for his work on a technique called backpropagation,
> which he proposed (with a pair of colleagues) in the 1980s. In a nutshell,
> this is the algorithm that allows machines to learn. It underpins almost
> all neural networks today, from computer vision systems to large language
> models.
>
> It took until the 2010s for the power of neural networks trained via
> backpropagation to truly make an impact. Working with a couple of graduate
> students, Hinton showed that his technique was better than any others at
> getting a computer to identify objects in images. They also trained a
> neural network to predict the next letters in a sentence, a precursor to
> today’s large language models.
>
> One of these graduate students was Ilya Sutskever, who went on to cofound
> OpenAI and lead the development of ChatGPT
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/03/1069311/inside-story-oral-history-how-chatgpt-built-openai/>.
> “We got the first inklings that this stuff could be amazing,” says Hinton.
> “But it’s taken a long time to sink in that it needs to be done at a huge
> scale to be good.” Back in the 1980s, neural networks were a joke. The
> dominant idea at the time, known as symbolic AI, was that intelligence
> involved processing symbols, such as words or numbers.
>
> But 

Re: [FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Roger Critchlow]

 climate change.

“I think it’s like that with AI,” he says, and with other big intractable
problems as well. “The US can’t even agree to keep assault rifles out of
the hands of teenage boys,” he says.

Hinton’s argument is sobering. I share his bleak assessment of people’s
collective inability to act when faced with serious threats. It is also
true that AI risks causing real harm—upending the job market, entrenching
inequality, worsening sexism and racism, and more. We need to focus on
those problems. But I still can’t make the jump from large language models
to robot overlords. Perhaps I’m an optimist.

When Hinton saw me out, the spring day had turned gray and wet. “Enjoy
yourself, because you may not have long left,” he said. He chuckled and
shut the door.

*Be sure to tune in to Will Douglas Heaven’s live interview with Hinton at
EmTech Digital on Wednesday, May 3, at 1:30 Eastern time. **Tickets are
available* <https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-digital-2023/home>* from
the event website.*

<https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/>

On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 12:16 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> Merle --
>
> I tried, but it's paywalled to me now.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 4:39 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> Didn't read Cory's blog, though I'm still laughing at the blurb for Red
>> Team Blues.
>>
>> But I read Geoffrey Hinton's interview with MIT Tech Review yesterday.
>>
>>
>> https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai
>>
>> It's not hype that chatgpt dazzled everyone with a model which is much
>> smaller than a human brain, even though it took a fairly huge budget for
>> OpenAI to build it.
>>
>> And I read this posting from an anonymous googler today via hackernews.
>>
>>https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
>>
>> It's not hype that the open source community has rapidly figured out how
>> to produce equally dazzling models with drastically smaller budgets of
>> resources, and is continuing to iterate the process.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:11 AM Gary Schiltz 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I love the graphic! I've had the misfortune of twice jumping on that
>>> roller coaster just before the Peak of Inflated Expectation - once for the
>>> AI boom/bust of the mid 1980s and once for the dotcom boom/bust of the late
>>> 1990s. Jumped on too late to make a killing, but didn't get too badly
>>> damaged by the Trough of Disillusionment either.
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:34 AM Steve Smith  wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
>>>>
>>>> I *am* a fan of LLMs (not so much image generators) and blockchain (not
>>>> so much crypto or NFTs) in their "best" uses (not that I or anyone else
>>>> really knows what that is) in spite of my intrinsic neoLuddite affect.
>>>>
>>>> Nevertheless I think Doctorow in his usual acerbic and penetrating
>>>> style really nails it well here IMO.
>>>>
>>>> I particularly appreciated his reference/quote to Emily Bender's "High
>>>> on Supply" and "word/meaning conflation" in the sense of "don't mistake an
>>>> accent for a personality" in the dating scene.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of my own contrarian commments on this forum come from resisting
>>>> what Doctorow introduces (to me) as "CritiHype" (attributed to Lee
>>>> Vinsel)...  the feeling that some folks make a (a)vocation out of kneejerk
>>>> criticism.   It is much easier to *poke* at something than to *do*
>>>> something worthy of being *poked at*.   I appreciate that Doctorow doesn't
>>>> seem to (by my fairly uncritical eye) engage in this much himself...  which
>>>> is why I was drawn into this article...
>>>>
>>>> I also very much appreciate his quote from Charlie Stross:
>>>>
>>>> *corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that
>>>> consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them
>>>> try to steer them in better directions:*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
>>>> <https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future> *
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I could go on quoting and excerpting and commenting on his whole
>>

Re: [FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Roger Critchlow]

Merle --

I tried, but it's paywalled to me now.

-- rec --

On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 4:39 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> Didn't read Cory's blog, though I'm still laughing at the blurb for Red
> Team Blues.
>
> But I read Geoffrey Hinton's interview with MIT Tech Review yesterday.
>
>
> https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai
>
> It's not hype that chatgpt dazzled everyone with a model which is much
> smaller than a human brain, even though it took a fairly huge budget for
> OpenAI to build it.
>
> And I read this posting from an anonymous googler today via hackernews.
>
>https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
>
> It's not hype that the open source community has rapidly figured out how
> to produce equally dazzling models with drastically smaller budgets of
> resources, and is continuing to iterate the process.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:11 AM Gary Schiltz 
> wrote:
>
>> I love the graphic! I've had the misfortune of twice jumping on that
>> roller coaster just before the Peak of Inflated Expectation - once for the
>> AI boom/bust of the mid 1980s and once for the dotcom boom/bust of the late
>> 1990s. Jumped on too late to make a killing, but didn't get too badly
>> damaged by the Trough of Disillusionment either.
>>
>> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:34 AM Steve Smith  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
>>>
>>> I *am* a fan of LLMs (not so much image generators) and blockchain (not
>>> so much crypto or NFTs) in their "best" uses (not that I or anyone else
>>> really knows what that is) in spite of my intrinsic neoLuddite affect.
>>>
>>> Nevertheless I think Doctorow in his usual acerbic and penetrating style
>>> really nails it well here IMO.
>>>
>>> I particularly appreciated his reference/quote to Emily Bender's "High
>>> on Supply" and "word/meaning conflation" in the sense of "don't mistake an
>>> accent for a personality" in the dating scene.
>>>
>>> A lot of my own contrarian commments on this forum come from resisting
>>> what Doctorow introduces (to me) as "CritiHype" (attributed to Lee
>>> Vinsel)...  the feeling that some folks make a (a)vocation out of kneejerk
>>> criticism.   It is much easier to *poke* at something than to *do*
>>> something worthy of being *poked at*.   I appreciate that Doctorow doesn't
>>> seem to (by my fairly uncritical eye) engage in this much himself...  which
>>> is why I was drawn into this article...
>>>
>>> I also very much appreciate his quote from Charlie Stross:
>>>
>>> *corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that
>>> consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them
>>> try to steer them in better directions:*
>>>
>>>
>>> *https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
>>> <https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future> *
>>>
>>>
>>> I could go on quoting and excerpting and commenting on his whole article
>>> and the myriad links/references he offers up but will curb my enthusiasm
>>> and leave it to the astute FriAM readers to choose how much to indulge
>>> in.   It was a pretty good antidote for my own AI-thusiasm driven by long
>>> chats with GPT4 (converging on being more like long sessions wandering
>>> through Wikipedia after the first 100 hours of engagement).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
>>> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
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>>>
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>
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Re: [FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Roger Critchlow]

Didn't read Cory's blog, though I'm still laughing at the blurb for Red
Team Blues.

But I read Geoffrey Hinton's interview with MIT Tech Review yesterday.


https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai

It's not hype that chatgpt dazzled everyone with a model which is much
smaller than a human brain, even though it took a fairly huge budget for
OpenAI to build it.

And I read this posting from an anonymous googler today via hackernews.

   https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

It's not hype that the open source community has rapidly figured out how to
produce equally dazzling models with drastically smaller budgets of
resources, and is continuing to iterate the process.

-- rec --

On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:11 AM Gary Schiltz 
wrote:

> I love the graphic! I've had the misfortune of twice jumping on that
> roller coaster just before the Peak of Inflated Expectation - once for the
> AI boom/bust of the mid 1980s and once for the dotcom boom/bust of the late
> 1990s. Jumped on too late to make a killing, but didn't get too badly
> damaged by the Trough of Disillusionment either.
>
> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:34 AM Steve Smith  wrote:
>
>>
>> https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
>>
>> I *am* a fan of LLMs (not so much image generators) and blockchain (not
>> so much crypto or NFTs) in their "best" uses (not that I or anyone else
>> really knows what that is) in spite of my intrinsic neoLuddite affect.
>>
>> Nevertheless I think Doctorow in his usual acerbic and penetrating style
>> really nails it well here IMO.
>>
>> I particularly appreciated his reference/quote to Emily Bender's "High on
>> Supply" and "word/meaning conflation" in the sense of "don't mistake an
>> accent for a personality" in the dating scene.
>>
>> A lot of my own contrarian commments on this forum come from resisting
>> what Doctorow introduces (to me) as "CritiHype" (attributed to Lee
>> Vinsel)...  the feeling that some folks make a (a)vocation out of kneejerk
>> criticism.   It is much easier to *poke* at something than to *do*
>> something worthy of being *poked at*.   I appreciate that Doctorow doesn't
>> seem to (by my fairly uncritical eye) engage in this much himself...  which
>> is why I was drawn into this article...
>>
>> I also very much appreciate his quote from Charlie Stross:
>>
>> *corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that
>> consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them
>> try to steer them in better directions:*
>>
>>
>> *https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
>>  *
>>
>>
>> I could go on quoting and excerpting and commenting on his whole article
>> and the myriad links/references he offers up but will curb my enthusiasm
>> and leave it to the astute FriAM readers to choose how much to indulge
>> in.   It was a pretty good antidote for my own AI-thusiasm driven by long
>> chats with GPT4 (converging on being more like long sessions wandering
>> through Wikipedia after the first 100 hours of engagement).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
>> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>> archives:  5/2017 thru present
>> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
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>>
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[FRIAM] governing ghostbots

[Roger Critchlow]

Have you added a "do not bot me" clause to your will?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S02673649232X

Via the-syllabus.com,

-- rec --
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Re: [FRIAM] Anyone on Friam know Linux capabilities on Pentium PCs ?

[Roger Critchlow]

I would expect that it should be able to do it.

It should also be able to produce a log of all keystrokes and mouse events
received and processed.

An audit laptop would be able to independently sniff the keystroke and
mouse events off the LAN and verify that the log from the test scoring
machine matches the events sent by the test taker machines.  It could also
detect interference on the LAN during the test session.

-- rec --

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 11:46 AM Sarbajit Roy  wrote:

> Thanks Gary
>
> The question is this -- "Can a Pentium server at 1.5 GhZ with 4 GB RAM
> running a proprietary Linux OS service 125 PCs on a LAN during an a
> competitive exam and *very reliably* record every keystroke and mouse
> click of each  of these 125 examinees. The same server is simultaneously
> also disiplaying a unique exam on screen for each examinee where the
> sequence of questions is jumbled and the answer options are jumbled for
> each examinee.
>
> I am being flooded just now with complaints of a recent very prestigious
> online exam in India where candidates all over India are saying their
> answers have not been properly recorded. This is not the first time
> similar complaints have come for this exam.
>
> Also these local servers usually run Windows, but for this exam the exam
> vendor loads his proprietary Linux OS as a dual boot along with his own
> application software.
>
> Sarbajit
>
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 10:52 PM Gary Schiltz 
> wrote:
>
>> Just my opinion, but I believe Linux is generally well suited for any
>> server task. Especially on older and slower hardware
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 11:42 AM Sarbajit Roy  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Friamers
>>>
>>> Can any guide me if a Pentium PC server at 1,.5 GhZ with 4 GB RAM on a
>>> Linux version is capable of doing a certain task very reliably ?
>>>
>>> As it is a confidential thing, please message me directly.  I have to
>>> ask as I don't use Linux.
>>>
>>> regards
>>>
>>> Sarbajit Roy
>>> New Delhi India
>>>
>>>
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Re: [FRIAM] AI Musings

[Roger Critchlow]

Wouldn't be the first time I misunderstood what Stu was talking about.  It
was in the lecture he gave at um6p, ah, here,
https://youtu.be/GTQJqpkVd84?t=1820, I guess it's in this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.15271.pdf

-- rec --

On Mon, Apr 3, 2023 at 4:09 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> The real numbers are an uncountable set.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Mon, Apr 3, 2023, 3:14 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> I'm just noodling around.
>>
>> So it's a collection of innumerable elements which can't be a
>> mathematical set, so you can't use the mathematics founded on sets to
>> analyze it, so what's the paper doing using set based mathematics to count
>> the number of elements in M_t?
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 12:57 PM Stephen Guerin <
>> stephen.gue...@simtable.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 1, 2023, 8:29 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I tried to get Bard to talk with me about the adjacent possible (AP)
>>>> the other day.  It agreed that the AP could not be represented as a
>>>> mathematical set, but it continued to talk about the AP as if it were a
>>>> set.  So it suggested formulating the AP as a graph, or a tree, or as the
>>>> states of a dynamical system.  I pushed for a non-set formalism and it gave
>>>> me fuzzy sets.  I guess I have to try harder.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Roger, Cool. Can you say more about a different formalization you're
>>> after?
>>>
>>> Stu's Theory Of The Adjacent Possible is currently formalized with an
>>> exponentially increasing set
>>>
>>> https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14115#
>>>
>>>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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Re: [FRIAM] AI Musings

[Roger Critchlow]

I'm just noodling around.

So it's a collection of innumerable elements which can't be a mathematical
set, so you can't use the mathematics founded on sets to analyze it, so
what's the paper doing using set based mathematics to count the number of
elements in M_t?

-- rec --


On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 12:57 PM Stephen Guerin 
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Apr 1, 2023, 8:29 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>>
>> I tried to get Bard to talk with me about the adjacent possible (AP) the
>> other day.  It agreed that the AP could not be represented as a
>> mathematical set, but it continued to talk about the AP as if it were a
>> set.  So it suggested formulating the AP as a graph, or a tree, or as the
>> states of a dynamical system.  I pushed for a non-set formalism and it gave
>> me fuzzy sets.  I guess I have to try harder.
>>
>
> Roger, Cool. Can you say more about a different formalization you're
> after?
>
> Stu's Theory Of The Adjacent Possible is currently formalized with an
> exponentially increasing set
>
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14115#
>
>>
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Re: [FRIAM] AI Musings

[Roger Critchlow]

I think that it depends on having a board of directors/private owner
prepared to take their hands off the wheel.

The main problem would be trolls attempting adversarial prompts.  However
comfortable you might get with the ai's ability to handle the day to day
affairs, would you ever feel safe from some ai whisperer persuading it to
give everything away and become a yogi?  I suppose you have the same
problem with meat C-suite officers, too.

I tried to get Bard to talk with me about the adjacent possible (AP) the
other day.  It agreed that the AP could not be represented as a
mathematical set, but it continued to talk about the AP as if it were a
set.  So it suggested formulating the AP as a graph, or a tree, or as the
states of a dynamical system.  I pushed for a non-set formalism and it gave
me fuzzy sets.  I guess I have to try harder.

-- rec --

On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 8:05 AM Grant Holland 
wrote:

> Good point, Cody!
>
> On Mar 31, 2023, at 9:16 PM, cody dooderson  wrote:
>
> While I think that AI could soon handle the managerial part of a CEO's
> job, they may have trouble playing golf. It might not matter if the stock
> is going up.
> I am very ignorant about what CEO's do 'though.
>
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 5:33 PM Grant Holland 
> wrote:
>
>> So what do you think? Are CEOs, CFOs etc. and corporate board members at
>> any medium or short-term risk of losing their jobs to machine learning? I
>> like to hear some opinions on this.
>>
>> Thx,
>> Grant
>>
>> > On Mar 31, 2023, at 1:21 PM, Gary Schiltz 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > A... looking more closely, Grant wrote CxO not QxO. Google quickly
>> > enlightened me on the former. Sorry for the noise.
>> >
>> > On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 2:19 PM Gary Schiltz <
>> g...@naturesvisualarts.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I must admit my ignorance here, not aided in the least by a cursory
>> >> Google search: What is QxO?
>> >>
>> >> On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 10:59 AM Grant Holland
>> >>  wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Frank,
>> >>>
>> >>> I'm wondering why no-one seems to raise the specter that AI could
>> start replacing management personnel. And I’m including CxO’s here; because
>> I’m not convinced that CxO-ing is rocket science or quantum mechanics.
>> Think of the billions saved. After all, if machine learning cannot get good
>> at making better decisions than humans, and constantly improving at it, I
>> would be very surprised.
>> >>>
>> >>> Grant
>> >>>
>> >>> On Mar 30, 2023, at 8:58 AM, Frank Wimberly 
>> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Not particularly relevant to your main point but Raj Reddy, close
>> colleague of Newell and Simon, once said, "It is easier use AI to replace a
>> college professor than a bulldozer operator" or words tho that effect.
>> >>>
>> >>> Frank
>> >>>
>> >>> ---
>> >>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> >>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> >>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>> >>>
>> >>> 505 670-9918
>> >>> Santa Fe, NM
>> >>>
>> >>> On Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 8:50 AM Prof David West 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>  The "AI Pause" made national TV news yesterday (long after those on
>> this list noted and reacted to it) and that made me revisit a theme I have
>> thought about since Newell, Simon, and Shaw created Logic Theorist.
>> 
>>  Advocates take a caricature (perhaps too strong a word) of human
>> intelligence, write a program to emulate it and declare the program
>> "intelligent."
>> 
>>  The original conceit: true intelligence was the kind of thinking
>> exhibited by college professors and scientists. Almost trivial to emulate
>> (Newell and Simon programmed Logic Theorist on 3x5 cards before Shaw was
>> able to implement on a computer).
>> 
>>  Maybe reading—correctly converting text to sound, like a child—was
>> more indicative of human intelligence, and Sejnowski created NetTalk. that,
>> somewhat eerily, produced discoveries of sounds, and errors, and achieved
>> near perfect ability to "read." Listen to the tapes sometime and contrast
>> them with tapes of a human child learning to read. Of course, comprehension
>> of what was read did not make the cut.
>> 
>>  State of the art improved dramatically and the caricatures of human
>> intelligence are more sophisticated and the achievements of the programs
>> more interesting.
>> 
>>  But, it seems to me there is still a critical gap. We can program an
>> AI (or let one learn) to fly a commercial jet as well or better than a
>> human pilot—BUT, could even the best of of breed of such an AI pull a
>> Shullenberger and land on the Hudson River?
>> 
>>  Another factor behind the "hysteria" (sorry for the sexism) over AIs
>> causing massive unemployment is a corollary to the caricaturization of
>> human intelligence. Since the Industrial Revolution, and certainly since
>> the age of Taylorism and the rise of automation; work itself has been
>> dehumanizing.
>> 
>>  If you define human work in terms of what can be done by a computer
>> then it is tautological to claim an AI is intelligent 

Re: [FRIAM] emergent mind - ai news by ai

[Roger Critchlow]

Maybe they should just call them "Socratic engineers"?

-- rec --

On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 12:13 PM Steve Smith  wrote:

> REC-
>
> https://www.emergentmind.com/
>
> The user Emma is a robot scanning for postings and tweets about ai news.
> They get logged and summarized in the timeline.  The user Matt is the
> creator of the site.
>
> thanks for the reference...
>
> Has anyone (else) read the "Pause AI" open-letter:
> https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/?ref=emergentmind
> ?
>
>
> Bloomberg reports an AI Whisperer prompt engineering job offering
> $335000/year,
> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-29/ai-chatgpt-related-prompt-engineer-jobs-pay-up-to-335-000#xj4y7vzkg
>
> I *like* the term "prompt engineer".   I hold the opinion that one way to
> frame "problem solving" is ultimately "asking the right question" whereupon
> the answers become somewhat obvious?   That has been my experience with
> usin GPT4, it has made me better and better at formulating questions.
>
>
> - SASs
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[FRIAM] emergent mind - ai news by ai

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.emergentmind.com/

The user Emma is a robot scanning for postings and tweets about ai news.
They get logged and summarized in the timeline.  The user Matt is the
creator of the site.

Bloomberg reports an AI Whisperer prompt engineering job offering
$335000/year,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-29/ai-chatgpt-related-prompt-engineer-jobs-pay-up-to-335-000#xj4y7vzkg

-- rec --
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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Cool AI Tools of the Week - ChatGPT Website Builder & More!

[Roger Critchlow]

I know, I can't wait until we get the first AI wikipedia page edit war,
where they attempt to construct evidence for inconsistent hallucinations in
the same wikipedia page.  But maybe they'll observe ethernet protocols and
back off when they detect epistemic co-channel contention.

-- rec --

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 10:49 AM Carl Tollander  wrote:

> Then there's the app that writes an AI newsletter, invents aspirational AI
> apps based on what you clicked on in the last newsletter, thereby creating
> a broader market for their development.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 10:51 PM Tom Johnson 
> wrote:
>
>> They just keep comin'
>> I haven't tested any of these.
>> TJ
>>
>> ===
>> Tom Johnson
>> Inst. for Analytic Journalism
>> Santa Fe, New Mexico
>> 505-577-6482
>> ===
>>
>> -- Forwarded message -
>> From: Vivek from Futurepedia 
>> Date: Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 9:30 PM
>> Subject: Cool AI Tools of the Week - ChatGPT Website Builder & More!
>> To: 
>>
>>
>> PLUS: ChatGPT Plugins and Google Bard
>> View in browser
>> 
>>
>> Hey there , this is your weekly AI newsletter!
>>
>> We have added 84 new tools in the last week. Here are some of the most
>> interesting ones -
>> 烙 AI Tools of the Week
>>
>> *Scrip AI *- Create short videos 30-sec to 60-sec scripts using AI (link
>> 
>> )
>>
>>
>> *GooGPT *- Get ChatGPT results combined with Google search results. (link
>> 
>> )
>>
>>
>> *Locofy* - Turn your designs into production-ready front-end code for
>> mobile apps and the web. (link
>> 
>> )
>>
>>
>> *Fluentify *-  Free and open-source “Copilot for the web” (link
>> 
>> )
>>
>>
>> *MyGPT* - ChatGPT with inbuilt prompt library (link
>> 
>> )
>>
>>
>> *Website ChatGPT Builder *- Easily create and customize websites using a
>> UI similar to ChatGPT. Over 200K+ websites have been generated - Generate
>> yours now! (*link*
>> )
>> *
>>
>>
>> * Sponsor
>> ️ AI Image of the Week
>>
>> *Snoop Dogg in The Office. *
>>
>> I recommend checking out the source for pics of Snoop in 19 more TV shows.
>>
>> Source
>> 
>>  AI News of the Week
>>
>> I am going to be much more selective what I put here going forward, with
>> focus being only on the most important updates.
>>
>>
>> *1. ChatGPT Plugins*
>>
>> OpenAi has just launched *a plugins marketplace* that will allow
>> developers to create custom plugins which integrate with ChatGPT.
>>
>> Some of the plugins already demo-ed are Instacart (Use it to
>> automatically make grocery lists), WolframAlpha (Get accurate scientific
>> calculations), and more. It also comes with *a web browser and code
>> interpreter. *
>>
>> Read more about it here
>> 
>>  or watch this short video
>> 
>>  to
>> understand it better.
>>
>>
>> *2. Google Bard*
>>
>> Google Bard was released this week as well. It seems to be quite behind
>> ChatGPT when it comes to accuracy, but is much faster at generating
>> responses.
>>
>> Check out this Techradar article
>> 
>> on it.
>>
>>
>> And that's a wrap for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to
>> reply with any suggestions or feedback!
>>
>>
>> Futurepedia
>>
>>
>> [image: linkedin]
>> 

Re: [FRIAM] ChatGPT and William James

[Roger Critchlow]

This was good, too:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

And microsoft laid off its responsible AI team:
  https://www.platformer.news/p/microsoft-just-laid-off-one-of-its

And your Ring doorbell has just been taken hostage for ransom along with
the rest of Ring Security:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230314015249/https://twitter.com/vxunderground/status/1635427567271329792
though I haven't found confirmation of that yet.

It seems to me that the software vendors have entered a "first to market
frenzy" with whatever this LLM crap turns out to be, and you can expect the
PR to get more unhinged by the day.

-- rec --


On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 11:58 AM Barry MacKichan <
barry.mackic...@mackichan.com> wrote:

> I haven’t followed the discussions here carefully, but the question “And
> we humans are different?” brings up Noam Chomsky’s view in the NYT, gifted
> here:
>
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=QwaHrmmodXXtHVMT-PXM3n5X5165QgywGnhK8kHA4bQ4YwI-1ChPS_7jCUaaUoFfOEcH5StWFGnaCzyJsSW6zuHN-U410lTznWM8Mvsg-JDhGg8JVpzBMO0zuuwLEceZ7nsik2RLOi3H_hFSlBy4EF1c2Rn8ueGmhh3n6TnF58p3Vo2dkK0Y8RCrYhzpvCdlBd51fLA6DWil5Xn3vRhZ6gTYuUw8Eoy6HbR2cA4PcoI_PzQ5Ozz4Rrb5vH1C_pX5agNGvJ9CS0q9bGH7NvB0HSTIA480_k--x8f-srXvID5llZmAxRHEkS5Yf05rn820RIR3j70yIH7hddfh6GkkjQ=url-share
>
> —Barry
> On 6 Mar 2023, at 16:49, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> How?
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Monday, March 6, 2023 12:50 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] ChatGPT and William James
>
>
>
> >And we humans are different?
>
>
>
> In a word, yes.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 6, 2023, 12:14 PM Nicholas Thompson 
> wrote:
>
> *However, it's important to remember that there are also important
> differences between a large language model and human consciousness. While a
> large language model can generate text that may seem to flow like a stream
> of consciousness, it does not have the same kind of subjective experience
> that humans do, and its output is based solely on statistical patterns in
> the input it has been trained on.*
>
>
>
> And we humans are different?
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 11:51 AM Steve Smith  wrote:
>
> Also second EricS's appreciation for having someone else(s) maintain a
> coherent conversation for the myriad ideas that it allows me to explore
> without being central to the maintenance of the thread.   I realize this
> may be almost pure tangent to others, so I rarely expect anyone to take my
> bait unless it is to correct any egregious mis-attributions or
> think-utational fallacies.
>
> Starting with Glen's assertion/suggestion/assumption that there is not
> mind-stuff and body stuff, just body stuff:  I appeal to the general
> abstraction of Emergence and use Russell Standish's example in his "Theory
> of Nothing
> "
> that a water molecule is not wet... wetness is a property of aggregates of
> water molecules.   I would jump a dozen layers of emergent-bootstrapping
> from there to assert that "mind stuff", if it ever makes sense, is an
> emergent property of "body stuff".   But by analogy would not want to say
> that wetness (and other properties of bulk water molecules) is not strictly
> "molecular dynamics stuff".   And even if one did that, the
> recursion/reduction-ad-absurdum requires that one acknowledge/notice/invoke
> that the properties of any molecule is "emergent" from the elementary
> particles from which it might be composed.
>
>  I think we all believe in free-electrons, protons, neutrons but also
> recognize that *most* of our observed universe is shaped not by *those
> properties* (much less the properties of quarks and gluons or 10d loops of
> abstract things we call strings) but rather by the properties (once again,
> not of molecular dynamics or even chemical reactions) but biological
> functions,  and socio-economic-political functions as well. I *am*
> however, sensitive to the idea that where and how we draw the line between
> mind/body stuff can be important in any given argument, and that sometimes
> dropping that line altogether may be useful?
>
> The above riff on Mind-Stuff v Body-Stuff is really an intro into thoughts
> about how syntax and semantics might bootstrap sequentially.   It feels to
> me that the syntax of one level of abstraction yields an *emergent
> semantics* which in turn becomes the *syntax* of the next "level".I do
> acknowledge that Glen has made some arguments (and references) that are
> against the very abstraction of "levels" and that may well be the hole in
> everything I'm unrolling here, but for the moment, I feel I have a clear
> picture of a POSET of 

Re: [FRIAM] ChatGPT knows FRIAM

[Roger Critchlow]

Watched Wolfram's entry in the um6p complexity slam last night.  At the end
of his talk he argues that the Chat GPT epiphany is evidence that language
has shallow computational complexity.  We're surprised because we imagined
it was deep and irreducible, but we just kept spreading the data and it
finally all snapped into focus.  And the "deep learning" labelling confuses
the issue.  Yes, they're architecturally deep neural nets, but it's really
a very simple computation being done over and over again.  It's not deep as
in profound, it's deep because we needed somewhere to stack all the layers.

-- rec --

On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 7:22 AM Eric Charles 
wrote:

> I am particularly impressed that at the end there it doubled down on
> having the *wrong *title for Nick's publication.
>
> [image: image.png]
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 4:20 PM  wrote:
>
>> Stunning!  How do you know if ChatCBT is lying; it’s steely lips are
>> moving.
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Jochen Fromm
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 21, 2023 1:23 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam@redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* [FRIAM] ChatGPT knows FRIAM
>>
>>
>>
>> Me: Do you know the FRIAM group in Santa Fe?
>>
>>
>>
>> ChatGPT: Yes, I'm aware of the FRIAM group in Santa Fe. FRIAM (Focusing
>> Research on Infinite Automated Models) is a research group located at the
>> Santa Fe Institute, a renowned research center dedicated to the study of
>> complex systems. FRIAM is a group of interdisciplinary researchers who
>> explore the use of mathematical models and computational methods to
>> understand complex systems and phenomena, with a focus on
>> infinite-dimensional systems. The group's research interests include
>> dynamical systems, machine learning, optimization, and more. FRIAM's work
>> has contributed to a deeper understanding of various systems, such as
>> financial markets, climate models, and biological systems, among others.
>>
>>
>>
>> Me: No, I mean the Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group. It is
>> organization of complexity researchers and software developers in Santa Fe,
>> New Mexico, interested in applied complexity
>>
>>
>>
>> ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion. Yes, I'm also aware of the Friday
>> Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group in Santa Fe. It is a group of
>> complexity researchers and software developers who meet on Friday mornings
>> to discuss and explore topics related to applied complexity. The group is
>> open to anyone who is interested in the subject and is often attended by
>> researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, and professionals from a variety of
>> fields. The discussions at the group cover a wide range of topics,
>> including complex systems, data science, artificial intelligence, and more.
>> The group provides a forum for members to share their ideas and learn from
>> each other in an informal setting over a cup of coffee. The Friday Morning
>> Applied Complexity Coffee Group is one of many examples of the vibrant
>> intellectual community in Santa Fe dedicated to the study of complex
>> systems.
>>
>>
>>
>> Me: Can you name some active members?
>>
>>
>>
>> ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but as an artificial intelligence language model, I
>> don't have access to real-time information on the current membership of the
>> Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group. The group is a community of
>> complexity researchers and software developers in Santa Fe who meet on a
>> regular basis to discuss and explore topics related to applied complexity.
>> The membership of the group is fluid, with new members joining and others
>> moving on as their interests and circumstances change. If you are
>> interested in learning more about the group, you might be able to find more
>> information on their website or through social media channels.
>> Alternatively, you could try reaching out to the Santa Fe Institute, which
>> has connections with many researchers and organizations in the Santa Fe
>> area.
>>
>>
>>
>> Me: Nicholas Thompson, Eric Charles, Glen Ropella and Frank Wimberly are
>> part of this group. What do you know about them?
>>
>>
>>
>> ChatGPT: Nicholas Thompson is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine,
>> which covers a wide range of topics related to technology, science, and
>> culture. Prior to his current position at Wired, he was a senior editor at
>> the magazine and worked as a reporter for The New Yorker and Legal Times.
>> Thompson is also the author of "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George
>> Kennan, and the History of the Cold War," a book that explores the history
>> of the Cold War through the lives of two of its most prominent strategists.
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric Charles is the Vice President of Engineering at Descartes Labs, a
>> geospatial data analytics company that leverages machine learning and
>> artificial intelligence to analyze satellite imagery and other types of
>> data. Charles has a background in computer science and has 

Re: [FRIAM] ChatGPT knows FRIAM

[Roger Critchlow]

I'm surprised that Nick didn't get an office at Descartes, too.

-- rec --

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 2:29 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> I am glad that ChatGPT ha promoted me to be CTO of Descartes Labs because
> my motto is, "I think therefore I am."
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 2:16 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>
>> This actually sounds useful:   https://lnkd.in/eJRBs_nZ
>>
>> On Feb 21, 2023, at 12:25 PM, Jochen Fromm  wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Me: Do you know the FRIAM group in Santa Fe?
>>
>> ChatGPT: Yes, I'm aware of the FRIAM group in Santa Fe. FRIAM (Focusing
>> Research on Infinite Automated Models) is a research group located at the
>> Santa Fe Institute, a renowned research center dedicated to the study of
>> complex systems. FRIAM is a group of interdisciplinary researchers who
>> explore the use of mathematical models and computational methods to
>> understand complex systems and phenomena, with a focus on
>> infinite-dimensional systems. The group's research interests include
>> dynamical systems, machine learning, optimization, and more. FRIAM's work
>> has contributed to a deeper understanding of various systems, such as
>> financial markets, climate models, and biological systems, among others.
>>
>> Me: No, I mean the Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group. It is
>> organization of complexity researchers and software developers in Santa Fe,
>> New Mexico, interested in applied complexity
>>
>> ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion. Yes, I'm also aware of the Friday
>> Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group in Santa Fe. It is a group of
>> complexity researchers and software developers who meet on Friday mornings
>> to discuss and explore topics related to applied complexity. The group is
>> open to anyone who is interested in the subject and is often attended by
>> researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, and professionals from a variety of
>> fields. The discussions at the group cover a wide range of topics,
>> including complex systems, data science, artificial intelligence, and more.
>> The group provides a forum for members to share their ideas and learn from
>> each other in an informal setting over a cup of coffee. The Friday Morning
>> Applied Complexity Coffee Group is one of many examples of the vibrant
>> intellectual community in Santa Fe dedicated to the study of complex
>> systems.
>>
>> Me: Can you name some active members?
>>
>> ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but as an artificial intelligence language model, I
>> don't have access to real-time information on the current membership of the
>> Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group. The group is a community of
>> complexity researchers and software developers in Santa Fe who meet on a
>> regular basis to discuss and explore topics related to applied complexity.
>> The membership of the group is fluid, with new members joining and others
>> moving on as their interests and circumstances change. If you are
>> interested in learning more about the group, you might be able to find more
>> information on their website or through social media channels.
>> Alternatively, you could try reaching out to the Santa Fe Institute, which
>> has connections with many researchers and organizations in the Santa Fe
>> area.
>>
>> Me: Nicholas Thompson, Eric Charles, Glen Ropella and Frank Wimberly are
>> part of this group. What do you know about them?
>>
>> ChatGPT: Nicholas Thompson is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine,
>> which covers a wide range of topics related to technology, science, and
>> culture. Prior to his current position at Wired, he was a senior editor at
>> the magazine and worked as a reporter for The New Yorker and Legal Times.
>> Thompson is also the author of "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George
>> Kennan, and the History of the Cold War," a book that explores the history
>> of the Cold War through the lives of two of its most prominent strategists.
>>
>> Eric Charles is the Vice President of Engineering at Descartes Labs, a
>> geospatial data analytics company that leverages machine learning and
>> artificial intelligence to analyze satellite imagery and other types of
>> data. Charles has a background in computer science and has worked in
>> various engineering and leadership roles at several technology companies,
>> including Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Google.
>>
>> Glen Ropella is a computer scientist and engineer who has worked on a
>> variety of projects related to computational modeling, artificial
>> intelligence, and machine learning. He is currently a Senior Scientist at
>> Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is involved in research on complex
>> systems and their applications to national security and other areas.
>>
>> Frank Wimberly is a software engineer and entrepreneur who has worked in
>> various roles in the technology industry, including as a software engineer
>> at Yahoo and as the founder of a 

Re: [FRIAM] Datasets as Experience

[Roger Critchlow]

broChatGPT?  we told them they needed more diversity in AI development
teams.

-- rec --

On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 2:52 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> I am a little surprised that gaslighting / mansplaining would be so
> prevalent in the media sources used to train chatGPT.   Cold-blooded
> gaslighting occurs with some people, but in my experience disagreements
> amongst people don’t cycle that way.   People will get mad or disengage
> from conversation.   Maybe there is a simpler explanation why chatGPT fails
> in this way?
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Thursday, February 9, 2023 12:00 PM
> *To:* friam@redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Datasets as Experience
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I've been in long-standing confusion about the meaning of "ethics". And
> almost without fail, if/when I say that to a group of people, particularly
> men, everyone jumps in and explains to me what they think it means.
>
>  As for "mansplaining", I find
> that there is a different mode (I find it different/complementary to proper
> mansplaining) which is to report the mental scattering that a particular
> word/phrase/concept generates in the receiver.  A collective
> free-associative exploration (worst case is random tangenting?  word-salad
> from a salad shooter instead of a nicely laid out salad bar or well
> constructed Cobb?).
>
> Maybe it is all on the same spectrum.  When tightly focused and (intended
> to be) coherent, it *becomes* mansplaining I think?   I am pretty sure that
> the concept (if not precisely the term) was first popularized in Rebecca
> Solnit's Men Explain things to me
> .
>
> She described being introduced to a man at a party who had just read her
> book (River of Shadows )
> on Muybridge's early stop-action photo work and motion studies.   The
> hostess was apparently fairly clear to the man that he was being introduced
> to the *author* of the book he was so taken with, but instead of hearing
> that I saw Solnit as his next victim to tell *all about* the subject of the
> book that he just read that she *wrote*.   As she tells it, the
> conversation ended without him ever twigging to the fact that when she
> tried to interrupt him, it was to tell him that *she* was the author (and
> would be happy to talk with him about the subject but probably didn't need
> a lecture on the content of her own book).   I don't know if her failing to
> clue him in was her own passive aggressive trick or if she really couldn't
> get a word in edgewise.  I've seen both things happen...   but her essay on
> this really moved me.  Her work/voice in general has been a great thing
> to/for me... FWIW.
>
> Of course, each of their explanations is different and often pairwise
> incommensurate. So, if they're sedate, by the end of the conversation, I
> can convince most people *they* don't know what "ethics" means, either. Add
> to that the implicit question of whether non-humans have ethics and the
> file metaphor (from paper to bits on disk to orchestrated bits on multiple
> disks to in-context learning modified bits on multiple disks), then that
> sentence is all over the map of possible meanings. That was supposed to be
> the point of my remark ... in the context of DaveW's question about the
> semantics of LLM workflows.
>
> I don't know if I'm coming around to what it is you mean when you talk
> about communication being an illusion, but it is a much more comfortable
> concept now than it was the first time I heard you say it.   Maybe you are
> getting through to me?  Is that communication?
>
> I'd ask what *co*-munnication and *commune*-ication might mean if not this
> highly-technical   transfer of
> mental-emotional-states-between-entities-via-serialization-and-tokenization
> ?   I tend to think of "communication" more as the process of
> seeking/building resonance in many modes across many entities...  though
> this is probably not a definition most here want to use...
>
>
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[FRIAM] LLM's starting to formulate Theories of Mind

[Roger Critchlow]

This is from hackernews, https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083.

GPT-3 in 2021 had no theory of mind, january 2022 had a seven year old
child theory of mind, november 2022 had progressed to a nine year old.

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[FRIAM] A wireless heat engine

[Roger Critchlow]

This turned up on TheConversation.com which I recently added to my
occasionally scanned sources.

https://theconversation.com/device-transmits-radio-waves-with-almost-no-power-without-violating-the-laws-of-physics-196271

This sort of invalidates most of my expectations about what communication
channels look like.  In this case, the physical transmitter is a tuned
antenna connected through a matched resistor to ground with a switch.  By
toggling the switch on and off it's possible to send 36 bits/second over
7.3 meters.  The receiver is essentially hearing the modulation as changes
in the noise temperature on the antenna frequency.  The PNAS article --
still paywalled -- apparently goes into details of how the receiver works
as an electron refrigerator in order to obey the second law, because the
reviewers needed to be reassured about that.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201337119

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Re: [FRIAM] new thermal tech

[Roger Critchlow]

I learned most everything I know about thermoacoustic heat engines while
trying to read those papers, then I went back to the day job hacking code.

-- rec --


On Sun, Jan 8, 2023 at 6:34 AM David Eric Smith  wrote:

> The thermoacousktic one is interesting, and surprises me a bit.
>
> I worked on these systems a bit in the mid-1990s, when in a kind of
> purgatory in a navy research lab that mostly did acoustics.
>
> Broadly, there are two limiting cases for a thermoacoutic engine.  One
> uses a standing wave and is simple and robust to design and run.  The other
> uses a traveling wave and is much harder to tune and keep tuned.
>
> A difference is that the SW version, which we might say runs on a
> “thermoacousktic cycle”, makes intrinsic use of the phase lag for diffusion
> of heat through a boundary layer.  As such, it has no nontrivial reversible
> limit, and has severe limits on the efficiency (or coefficient of
> performance, if you are running it as a refrigerator).  So hearing that
> they get COPs comparable to existing mechanical systems would make me
> suspicious of they were using SW.
>
> The TW version runs on, effectively, the Stirling cycle, and in principle
> it does have a reversible, Carnot-efficient limit.  However, it has
> parasitic losses from viscous boundary layers.  The engineering limit you
> need to approach ideal thermal transfer efficiency is one that chokes off
> the flow of the working fluid, and makes the viscous drag explode.  Using
> an ideal gas like He reduces the viscosity, though also the heat capacity
> and diffusion rate through the fluid.
>
> On their website, they have a little advertising graphic of a sound wave,
> which shows a traveling wave (or a mixed wave with large TW component).  It
> would be reasonable, if they are scientists or engineers, for them to make
> their public graphics true representations of at least qualitatively what
> their system does.
>
> In view of the fact that there is very little conceptual to do with a
> thermoacousktic engine, and it is all materials science and tweaking
> engineering details, I really wonder what would have taken 27 years to
> figure out, or to get around to doing.
>
>
> For geeks who like this stuff, there is a fun continuum:
>
> 1. When I was a little kid, I got an ultra-simple Stirling engine from a
> mail advertisement (back when those weren’t all scams), and was delighted
> by it.
>
> 2. In reading more about Stirling cycles etc., I learned about
> “free-piston” Stirling engines, which have the same compartments and
> barriers, but use the compression-bounce of the gas to move the displacer
> piston rather than a mechanical linkage.
>
> 3. The TW thermoacousktic engine is just a free-piston Stirling without
> the piston: the shuttle of gas becomes the displacer.
>
> 4. Some years later, having been thrown out of String Theory for being too
> stupid to understand it, I was interested in the way adiabatic
> transformations look like mere coordinate deformations in state spaces,
> which means that one should be able to make Carnot-efficient reversible
> movement identical to equilibrium by use of a conformal field (the String
> Theorist’s universal symmetry transformation, back in those days).  So we
> can do thermoacousktic engines using String Theory (Horray!):
> https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.58.2818
> http://www.santafe.edu/~desmith/PDF_pubs/Carnot_1.pdf
> and then
> https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.60.3633
> http://www.santafe.edu/~desmith/PDF_pubs/Carnot_2.pdf
> Papers I know no-one has ever had any interest in, and very possibly
> no-one has ever read.
>
> I thought it was very fun to be able to derive Carnot’s theorem directly
> from a symmetry transformation, so entropy flux behaves like any other
> conserved quantity, rather than having to make arguments about limits to
> thermodynamic efficiency by daisy-chain proofs-by-contradiction (If you
> could do such-and-such, then by running an exemplar Carnot engine in
> reverse, you could make a perpetual-motion machine of type-XYZ).  But I
> never did anything with it that yielded a new calculation, as opposed to
> just a restatement of common knowledge.
>
> Anyway…
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 6, 2023, at 8:27 AM, Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
> I was amused to see an announcement of a thermoacoustic heat pump  the
> other day:
>
>
> https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/01/02/residential-thermo-acoustic-heat-pump-produces-water-up-to-80-c/
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.pv-magazine.com%2f2023%2f01%2f02%2fresidential-thermo-acoustic-heat-pump-produces-water-up-to-80-c%2f=E,1,OiK5I3jqVzs0YmBcsTYEvneGYZ1FEG28fiRx3ORcJqyfO1

[FRIAM] precision biology

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05563-7

Take your pluripotent human stem cell line, make 25 cell lines with
different molecules tagged for fluorescent microscope imaging, run an
automated pipeline to grow and gather images, align according to the apical
basal axis, express the remainder of the spatial variation of the tagged
features in a spherical harmonic basis.  Principal component analysis gets
70% of the variance in the first 8 components.

So starting with identical cells and growing in as identical conditions as
a microsoft  fortune could buy, we get to populations of cells where at
least 30% of the variation is uncorrelated noise?

I'm not sure whether I'm more impressed that the cells imposed that much
order or more disappointed that the experimenters couldn't squeeze the
population into a tighter cluster.

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[FRIAM] new thermal tech

[Roger Critchlow]

I was amused to see an announcement of a thermoacoustic heat pump  the
other day:


https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/01/02/residential-thermo-acoustic-heat-pump-produces-water-up-to-80-c/

then an ionocaloric refrigerator announcement turns up this morning

  https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/01/03/cool-new-method-of-refrigeration/

It seems that you won't recognize your air conditioner in a few years.

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Re: [FRIAM] Friday AM

[Roger Critchlow]

There was a hacker news item this morning about maintaining hydration and
chronic illness:


https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(22)00586-2/fulltext

those who exceeded 142 mmol/l of serum sodium in middle age got sicker more
often later in life.

It's the first measurement on my comprehensive metabolic panels.

It would be really funny if there actually was "One simple trick to staying
healthy!", but it was only discovered after we had conditioned ourselves
into never reading any article with such a title.

-- rec --

On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 2:04 PM glen  wrote:

> I think a mobility checkup would be more useful than blood tests. See if
> you can stand on one foot for 10 seconds. Spin you around and measure eye
> wobble. Measure joint angles in a sit-to-stand test. Etc. Strength and
> reflex tests would also be useful. I *suppose* cognitive testing trends
> would be useful. I'd love to see, eg how my performance varies on something
> like a memory test or some logic puzzles. With the covid loss of smell and
> taste thing, it would even be cool to have a battery of sensory stimuli of
> some kind. If the personality tests had any credibility, they'd be
> interesting to track over time as well. Would you learn anything? IDK. But
> it would be more interesting than the typical test results.
>
> On 1/2/23 12:01, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > The last time I went in for a wellness check, the doctor seemed annoyed
> that I was there.   I left, humiliated.
> >
> > But it has been a while, and I am wondering what it would take to
> actually learn something from a checkup.  Is there some standard package of
> broad blood tests and/or MRIs that would be a clue I was becoming gravely
> ill?  I was just shopping for new insurance and was excited to learn all
> the things I can prepare for (Aflac's various products).   What would I
> even ask for?
> >
> > A few years ago, I had a car accident on the snow in Santa Fe and had to
> have quite a bit of work done on my car.   I have to say billing the
> insurance for that was very satisfying.  I had been paying all these years
> and had nothing to show for it.   It is especially true for my medical
> coverage.
> >
> > To me going to the doctor is just an opportunity to get COVID-19 in the
> waiting room.  How can I get more from this experience?
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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Re: [FRIAM] First Sign of Spring

[Roger Critchlow]

Thanks, Frank, I shouldn't need the reminder.

-- rec --


On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 1:37 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Las Cruces.  Feminine noun.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2022, 1:25 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> Los Cruces
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 8, 2022, 11:29 AM Nicholas Thompson 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> And Roger!?  Where are you going to fetch up?
>>>
>>> Where is this vintage 1941 House?
>>>
>>> N
>>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 9:14 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>>>
>>>> And a fine day for my return to New Mexico.  Flew into El Paso, drove
>>>> to Las Cruces, picked up my daughter, had enchiladas verde at Chachi's,
>>>> went to see my vintage 1941 new house, and drove through the earliest dusk
>>>> of the year to my airbnb in Mesilla.  Feel like crap, but I am already
>>>> improving as the trauma of 7 hours in airline seats recedes into the past.
>>>>
>>>> -- rec --
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Dec 7, 2022 at 9:43 AM Nicholas Thompson <
>>>> thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Today is the shortest afternoon of the year.  Tomorrow, the afternoons
>>>>> will start getting longer by a few msec.  Unclear whether this is because
>>>>> the sun is setting later or noon is occurring earlier, but we'll take it.
>>>>> Welcome to Spring, 2023!
>>>>>
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Re: [FRIAM] First Sign of Spring

[Roger Critchlow]

Los Cruces

On Thu, Dec 8, 2022, 11:29 AM Nicholas Thompson 
wrote:

> And Roger!?  Where are you going to fetch up?
>
> Where is this vintage 1941 House?
>
> N
>
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 9:14 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> And a fine day for my return to New Mexico.  Flew into El Paso, drove to
>> Las Cruces, picked up my daughter, had enchiladas verde at Chachi's, went
>> to see my vintage 1941 new house, and drove through the earliest dusk of
>> the year to my airbnb in Mesilla.  Feel like crap, but I am already
>> improving as the trauma of 7 hours in airline seats recedes into the past.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 7, 2022 at 9:43 AM Nicholas Thompson 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Today is the shortest afternoon of the year.  Tomorrow, the afternoons
>>> will start getting longer by a few msec.  Unclear whether this is because
>>> the sun is setting later or noon is occurring earlier, but we'll take it.
>>> Welcome to Spring, 2023!
>>>
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Re: [FRIAM] First Sign of Spring

[Roger Critchlow]

And a fine day for my return to New Mexico.  Flew into El Paso, drove to
Las Cruces, picked up my daughter, had enchiladas verde at Chachi's, went
to see my vintage 1941 new house, and drove through the earliest dusk of
the year to my airbnb in Mesilla.  Feel like crap, but I am already
improving as the trauma of 7 hours in airline seats recedes into the past.

-- rec --

On Wed, Dec 7, 2022 at 9:43 AM Nicholas Thompson 
wrote:

> Today is the shortest afternoon of the year.  Tomorrow, the afternoons
> will start getting longer by a few msec.  Unclear whether this is because
> the sun is setting later or noon is occurring earlier, but we'll take it.
> Welcome to Spring, 2023!
>
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Re: [FRIAM] election day distractions

[Roger Critchlow]

By the way, Adventures of a Mathematician was a waste of time, just another
biopic of men in suits.

-- rec --


On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 7:52 PM Gillian Densmore 
wrote:

> Does beer, chilli and stupid anime  count as distracting? or just being me?
>
> On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 5:46 PM Gillian Densmore 
> wrote:
>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
>>
>> Has a similar cast of characters. I don't know how i made my through it
>> (carefully?)
>> movie wise their's the marx brothers
>> and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Distinguished_Gentleman
>> their's also a classic about presidential candidate
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ>
>> So is this one <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Groove>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 5:19 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>>
>>> Just found Adventures of  a Mathematician free with Amazon Prime:
>>>
>>> The warmhearted story of Polish immigrant and mathematician Stan Ulam,
>>>> who moved to the U.S. in the 1930s. Stan deals with the difficult losses of
>>>> family and friends all while helping to create the hydrogen bomb and the
>>>> first computer.
>>>
>>>
>>> With supporting roles for Robert Oppenheimer, Johnny von Neumann, Edward
>>> Teller, Klaus Fuchs, and Mathematician from Los Alamos.
>>>
>>> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6875374/
>>>
>>> -- rec --
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>>>
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Re: [FRIAM] collective sheepishness

[Roger Critchlow]

Hmm, not apparently users of arxiv.org either.

Here are the raw videos of sheep in pastures, might be good bedtime
watching?  https://zenodo.org/record/6905807

In my experience, swarms are following the mouse, or chasing a randomly
fleeing agent, or just wandering around randomly, or following some
gradient of pheromone left by Guerin.  I honestly never thought sheep went
anywhere on purpose unless being herded.  But according to Wikipedia they
have dominance hierarchies in the flock and score as only slightly less
intelligent than pigs.

There are reports of a flock learning to cross a cattle guard by rolling
over the grid on their backs, though it may be a shaggy dog story.  It
sounds like a trick some bored kids on holiday might teach a flock.

I don't know how crowd leader selection goes.  It sounds like the
presumption was that the dominant sheep had the job until it got fired.
But this research suggests that sheep aren't so dogmatic.  In fact, you can
almost hear Graeber saying:  "see, even sheep aren't that attached to
dominance hierarchies"

-- rec --

On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 12:56 PM Steve Smith  wrote:

> Roger -
>
> From hackernews
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01769-8
> corrected link from comments to
> "Sheep flocks alternate their leader and achieve collective intelligence"
> The secret sauce of american democracy.
>
> -- rec --
>
> I wasn't able to read the (paywall) article, but was intrigued by the
> abstract's implications.
>
> The following concluding statement felt a little *projective*
>
> *Our analysis suggests that it is possible to conceive intermittent
> collective strategies that take advantage of both hierarchical and
> democratic organizational schemes.*
>
> But I assume the terms of question (democratic/hierarchical) are shortcuts
> for more subtle/complex concepts that they elaborate in the article.
>
> I'm not a close follower of Swarm literature but I assume there is already
> precedent for thinking about "leader election" (to defer to the democracy
> analogy)... maybe you or someone else has more insight into what they are
> saying here and how it fits into the larger body of study?
>
> - Steve
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[FRIAM] collective sheepishness

[Roger Critchlow]

>From hackernews
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01769-8
corrected link from comments to
"Sheep flocks alternate their leader and achieve collective intelligence"
The secret sauce of american democracy.

-- rec --
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Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

[Roger Critchlow]

Hmm, credit unions were designed to not be in competition with banks, and
so they don't get very big,h and don't have access to deeper pockets of
funding, and don't get gobbled up by bigger banks, and don't get closed
because their service areas underperform.

So when big banks look at their branch performance, they could run all the
branches head to head against each other, but the branches should really be
tiered into comparable peer groups.  A branch should score according to its
performance against branches in similar locations, and according to its
contributions to improving the economy around its location.  Otherwise the
big bank is just strip mall mining and leaving finance deserts behind.

-- rec --

On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 4:27 PM Steve Smith  wrote:

> Eric/Roger -
>
> I appreciate your personal anecdotes re:LANB.   I think it was a shining
> star in it's own way.  I have known people who worked there over the
> decades and have known a few of the families of the principles including
> a couple who acted as personal assistant/caretakers for the Cowan's in
> their last years.   I am acutely impressed with George's (and other
> peers) role in the establishment and maintenance of the institution over
> the decades.   Most of my other anecdotal experiences are less
> one-sided, but it is the nature of small town pettiness/politics/gossip
> as much as anything in particular.
>
> It *was* in many ways a "no brainer" to have a payroll the size of
> LASL/LANL on deposit and a captive audience of the bulk of the employees
> and local businesses as customers, so it isn't surprising that they
> thrived.  They held 4 different mortgages over my decades and they did
> well by them, though they did sell 2 of them (as was the agreement) to a
> third party which was at least moderately inconvenient (lapses/overlaps
> in direct-deposit payments, escrows etc) but it all worked out.   I know
> of people (re: EricS experiences) who received impressive personal
> treatment... my daughter worked in the Mortgage dept for several years
> and holds a number of great positive anecdotes from that era.
>
> When some trust-busting rules came along (maybe it was when UC lost the
> contract?) LANB no longer held the contract's payroll and it seems like
> it was soon after (<6 years) that the parent company took a large
> outside investment which I *think* was the prelude to a full sale to
> Enterprise Bank and Trust.
>
> Meanwhile Del Norte (formerly Los Alamos) Credit Union and Zia Credit
> Union and a couple of other trades CUs (Schools, ???) bop along as
> second class players to the big banks (LANB/Enterprise included).
> There are two major bank branches (buildings) evident in Los Alamos,
> though I couldn't name them).   Credit Unions are now offering
> Mortgages, they did not last time I took one out (16 years ago).
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 11/17/22 10:46 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> > On Nov 17, 2022, at 12:23 PM, Roger Critchlow  wrote:
> >>
> >> The old Los Alamos National Bank, LANB, was founded by a LANL
> >> scientist as an antidote to big-bank homogenization.  There are still
> >> hints of that origin in
> >> https://www.linkedin.com/company/los-alamos-national-bank/, but LANB
> >> sold itself out to a big bank several years ago.
> >
> > Yeah, btw, that really sucked.
> >
> > I got to know LANB when I had first moved to Los Alamos, was getting
> > around only on foot, and was there sitting on their curb on a morning
> > before work waiting for them to open.
> >
> > Some guy in a suit came by and asked if he could help me, and I said
> > something snotty and completely uncalled-for about bankers working
> > bankers hours.  So he let me in and started the opening of an account
> > for me.  That was Bill Enloe.
> >
> > A few years later I needed a mortgage loan for a house, had just lost
> > something like 100k in two days on a Pharma that didn’t get a good
> > outcome on a clinical trial, which I had wanted to have for
> > collateral, and could not sell a house in Austin that I was in because
> > I had a renter who had just lost his job in the market downturn, and I
> > wasn’t willing to throw him out, even as the house lost about 1k in
> > market value per week as the whole market there was falling apart too.
> >  Then got Salmonella or something from an egg sandwich in the ABQ
> > airport flying back from somewhere (Austin?) to make the loan.  People
> > who knew me said they had never seen anyone as white as I apparently
> > was for several days after the first 24 hours of violent illness.  I
> > went to the loan officer’s office, and after about a minute sitting
> > there 

Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

[Roger Critchlow]

My play with etoro.com is extremely limited.  Pentland talks about
interventions to nudge investors out of bubbles, where people get all into
chasing a single investment theory.  He also talks about hedge funds where
every investment is permanently on 90 day probation.  But that's all
happening at the tops of the markets, and the tops of the markets are all
entranced by the rewards of being the biggest bullies in their respective
siloes and becoming bigger siloes.

The old Los Alamos National Bank, LANB, was founded by a LANL scientist as
an antidote to big-bank homogenization.  There are still hints of that
origin in https://www.linkedin.com/company/los-alamos-national-bank/, but
LANB sold itself out to a big bank several years ago.

But are spotify and instagram internationally homogenous?  I get the
impression that they're caught in the western world bubble, which only
pretends to be the whole world.  We sort of have a world culture that is
purely technical: electricity, heat engines, cell phones, internet
protocol, unicode, cellphone localization clusters in space-time, et c..
But at the linguistic boundaries, everything else is up for grabs, and the
news coming back across the linguistic boundaries is treated as exotica.

-- rec --

On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 11:32 AM glen  wrote:

> IDK, man. I feel like this is the same homogenizing force as Spotify, or
> influencers on Instagram, driving us all into the same gravity well. What
> I'd *like* ... what I've looked for and failed to find, are ways to invest
> "locally", to bet on strangers' enterprises, sure, but strangers that
> satisfy a locality predicate, local in space mostly, but perhaps local in
> ethos (like B corps or co-ops), or domain (not the useless "tech" or "life
> sciences" but something more refined).
>
> Does your play with etoro suggest that's possible there?
>
> On 11/17/22 08:16, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > Tsk, so many bad investments, so little time!
> >
> > Binging Sandy Pentland led me to etoro.com <http://etoro.com>, where
> everybody can see how everybody's portfolios are doing.  The front page
> gives the top crypto traders on the site, who are all around -70% for the
> past year.  But scroll down and you find out that they range from +27%
> to +197% for the past two years.
> >
> > -- rec --
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 12:02 PM Marcus Daniels  <mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Having investments go bad makes me feel prosperous, like going to
> the dentist.I probably shouldn't have investments.
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Friam  friam-boun...@redfish.com>> On Behalf Of glen
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2022 8:57 AM
> > To: friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter
> >
> > I know, right. My Ada's down from $200 to $100! I'm not quite sure
> how I'm gonna pay the rent. /s
> >
> > I saw some post on Mastodon that I can't find now. The person was
> lamenting FTX and how they knew 2 people personally, one who lost $90k and
> another who lost something like $10k. And he closed with "neither of which
> could afford it." Maybe I'm cruel. But my first thought was, why in hell
> did you have $90k in crypto if you couldn't afford to lose it? I mean, I
> know there's a sucker born every minute ... but $90k? I could live for at
> least a couple of years on that. To even have 90k to invest *at all*,
> anywhere, implies something.
> >
> > On 11/16/22 08:44, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >  > Lol, well I guess I bought the right Proof of Stake crypto.  (Not
> really, I got demolished too!)
> >  >
> >  > -Original Message-
> >  > From: Friam  friam-boun...@redfish.com>> On Behalf Of glen
> >  > Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2022 8:39 AM
> >  > To: friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
> >  > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter
> >  >
> >  > More Billionaire news [sigh]:
> >  >
> >  > What happened at Alameda Research
> >  > https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175 <https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175>
> >  >
> >  > On 10/31/22 10:28, Steve Smith wrote:
> >  >> Great quote from CDs screed:
> >  >>
> >  >>  "Every billionaire is a policy failure, but every
> billionaire is also a factory for producing policy failures at scale."
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexit

Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

[Roger Critchlow]

Tsk, so many bad investments, so little time!

Binging Sandy Pentland led me to etoro.com, where everybody can see how
everybody's portfolios are doing.  The front page gives the top crypto
traders on the site, who are all around -70% for the past year.  But scroll
down and you find out that they range from +27% to +197% for the past two
years.

-- rec --

On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 12:02 PM Marcus Daniels 
wrote:

> Having investments go bad makes me feel prosperous, like going to the
> dentist.I probably shouldn't have investments.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2022 8:57 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter
>
> I know, right. My Ada's down from $200 to $100! I'm not quite sure how I'm
> gonna pay the rent. /s
>
> I saw some post on Mastodon that I can't find now. The person was
> lamenting FTX and how they knew 2 people personally, one who lost $90k and
> another who lost something like $10k. And he closed with "neither of which
> could afford it." Maybe I'm cruel. But my first thought was, why in hell
> did you have $90k in crypto if you couldn't afford to lose it? I mean, I
> know there's a sucker born every minute ... but $90k? I could live for at
> least a couple of years on that. To even have 90k to invest *at all*,
> anywhere, implies something.
>
> On 11/16/22 08:44, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > Lol, well I guess I bought the right Proof of Stake crypto.  (Not
> really, I got demolished too!)
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2022 8:39 AM
> > To: friam@redfish.com
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter
> >
> > More Billionaire news [sigh]:
> >
> > What happened at Alameda Research
> > https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175
> >
> > On 10/31/22 10:28, Steve Smith wrote:
> >> Great quote from CDs screed:
> >>
> >>  "Every billionaire is a policy failure, but every billionaire is
> also a factory for producing policy failures at scale."
> >
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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[FRIAM] The other side of Web 3.0

[Roger Critchlow]

Since crypto is doing so great this week, here's Sandy Pentland explaining
why and how he thinks blockchain is about to take off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbd_QHtLTp0

The lecture is from May this year.  The questioning from the Stanford
audience is instructive.

Interestingly, the immediate impetus for the take off might be the sucking
sound that was the USA vacuuming up all the Russian assets under US control
when Putin invaded Ukraine.  Although much of the world approved of the
sanctions, many were appalled at the ease with which the Russian economy
was wiped out.  They would rather live in a world where this was not quite
so easy.

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Re: [FRIAM] Getting Verbed...

[Roger Critchlow]

regator of alternative
>>> recommendations:
>>> >>
>>> >> https://alternativeto.net/
>>> >>
>>> >> which doesn't necessarily solve anything, it just makes it obvious
>>> how challenging "too many choices" can be...
>>> >>
>>> >> After a lame attempt to go with Mastadon I decided to abandond
>>> Twitter-like things altogether.  I doubt I will be willing to throw
>>> GoodReads over for anything else because of the participating base of my
>>> own personal/family network there.   I can at least avoid clicking through
>>> a GoodReads recommendation to order from Amazon.
>>> >>
>>> >> https://alternativeto.net/software/bookwyrm/
>>> >>
>>> >> I haven't begun (tried?) to evaluate AlternativeTo.Net itself...
>>> >>
>>> >> Is this the tragedy of the "free market" (subset of "commons")?
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >> On 11/4/22 3:00 PM, glen wrote:
>>> >> I'd forgotten about this until the release yesterday:
>>> >>
>>> >> https://joinbookwyrm.com/
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >> On 11/2/22 14:52, Steve Smith wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> On 11/2/22 9:43 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>> >> Thanks, Glen.
>>> >>
>>> >> It would be nice if there were a public bibliographic reference url
>>> that one could use to name a book that only conveyed the thing in itself.
>>> Goodreads was that once, then Amazon bought them.  Ditto for video and
>>> audio recordings and other objects of public interest.
>>> >>
>>> >> I admit to continuing to use Goodreads this way in spite of two
>>> problems... the Amazon affiliation/ownership of course, but also the too
>>> often spotty reviews...  I don't provide many nor particularly good reviews
>>> myself, so I've no room to complain really.
>>> >>
>>> >> So I suppose I agree with your "public bibliographic reference url"
>>> point.   It seems as if Wikipedia is a good candidate but I haven't done
>>> the work to understand how new entries are made... are they always required
>>> to be made by a citizen of the community who is NOT affiliated with the
>>> book (publisher, author, etc)? I find a *lot* of the books I seek in
>>> Wikipedia and prefer them for reference when their book-description (and
>>> cross links to related works, author, etc) are particularly apt, but that
>>> is also spotty.   I use Goodreads mostly to follow what family/friends are
>>> reading and what *they* think of their reads.
>>> >>
>>> >> The trend toward crowd-sourced public-use corpii being acquired by
>>> private interests (even public corporations are private interests) is
>>> disturbing (FB <-Mapillary, Amazon<-Goodreads)...   Twitter->BoringCo, etc)
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >> Eugenia Cheng has other books and a pile of youtube videos.
>>> Interestingly, her primary institutional affiliation is the Art Institute
>>> of Chicago, where as resident scientist she teaches math to art students.
>>> She has a public reading for kids scheduled in Jersey City this month.  Her
>>> definition of category theory is "the mathematics of mathematics" which she
>>> expands as "the logical study of the logical study of logical things."
>>> >>
>>> >> Hasok Chang has a third book, Is Water H2O, which Amazon fails to
>>> index on his amazon author page, though it is on amazon at a blistering
>>> price in every available format.  I found a pdf on the internets.  It's
>>> details the history of working out the chemical identity of water. Two
>>> themes are that 1) the consensus answers to scientific questions often
>>> change in anticipation of the arrival of corroboration, 2) there are often
>>> multiple acceptable answers to scientific questions.  These are possibly
>>> consequences of being a realisitic realist.
>>> >>
>>> >> Interesting set of recursions...  we CS types tend to love our
>>> arbitrary-depth recursion, but the special cases like double-negatives, and
>>> Rummy's unkown unknowns and now Chang's logical logicologoy of logics and
>>> realistic realists are ... *special*?  While some may prefer "turtles all
>>> the way down" sometimes just 

[FRIAM] election day distractions

[Roger Critchlow]

Just found Adventures of  a Mathematician free with Amazon Prime:

The warmhearted story of Polish immigrant and mathematician Stan Ulam, who
> moved to the U.S. in the 1930s. Stan deals with the difficult losses of
> family and friends all while helping to create the hydrogen bomb and the
> first computer.


With supporting roles for Robert Oppenheimer, Johnny von Neumann, Edward
Teller, Klaus Fuchs, and Mathematician from Los Alamos.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6875374/

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Re: [FRIAM] books by cheng and chang

[Roger Critchlow]

Thanks, Glen.

It would be nice if there were a public bibliographic reference url that
one could use to name a book that only conveyed the thing in itself.
Goodreads was that once, then Amazon bought them.  Ditto for video and
audio recordings and other objects of public interest.

Eugenia Cheng has other books and a pile of youtube videos.  Interestingly,
her primary institutional affiliation is the Art Institute of Chicago,
where as resident scientist she teaches math to art students.  She has a
public reading for kids scheduled in Jersey City this month.  Her
definition of category theory is "the mathematics of mathematics" which she
expands as "the logical study of the logical study of logical things."

Hasok Chang has a third book, Is Water H2O, which Amazon fails to index on
his amazon author page, though it is on amazon at a blistering price in
every available format.  I found a pdf on the internets.  It's details the
history of working out the chemical identity of water.  Two themes are that
1) the consensus answers to scientific questions often change in
anticipation of the arrival of corroboration, 2) there are often multiple
acceptable answers to scientific questions.  These are possibly
consequences of being a realisitic realist.

-- rec --

On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:57 AM glen  wrote:

> There. I fixed that for you. 8^D
>
> On 11/1/22 19:36, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > Interesting visit with my old boss/friend today, he mentioned some books
> of interest, and while looking for them I discovered yet another book.
> >
>
>
> https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-joy-of-abstraction-an-exploration-of-math-category-theory-and-life-eugenia-cheng/18557720?ean=9781108477222
>
> > Exploration-Category-Theory/dp/1108477224>
> > Eugenia Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category
> Theory, and Life, published October 2022.
> >
> > A presentation of category theory that keeps the underlying algebra
> basic.
> >
>
>
> https://bookshop.org/p/books/inventing-temperature-measurement-and-scientific-progress-hasok-chang/9513488?ean=9780195337389
>
> > Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress
> >
> > An itemized history of temperature and all the wrong turns taken along
> the way, more detail than even the author cares to read again.  Poetic
> justice to examine the operation of the pragmatist's ratchet and pawl over
> the centuries as it rescues workable definitions of temperature from
> thermal confusion.
> >
>
>
> https://bookshop.org/p/books/realism-for-realistic-people-a-new-pragmatist-philosophy-of-science-hasok-chang/18368583?ean=9781108470384
>
> > Hasok Chang, Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy
> of Science, available on kindle on November 30, 2022.
> >
> > -- rec --
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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[FRIAM] books by cheng and chang

[Roger Critchlow]

Interesting visit with my old boss/friend today, he mentioned some books of
interest, and while looking for them I discovered yet another book.

https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Abstraction-Exploration-Category-Theory/dp/1108477224
Eugenia Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category
Theory, and Life, published October 2022.

A presentation of category theory that keeps the underlying algebra basic.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195171276/
Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress

An itemized history of temperature and all the wrong turns taken along the
way, more detail than even the author cares to read again.  Poetic justice
to examine the operation of the pragmatist's ratchet and pawl over the
centuries as it rescues workable definitions of temperature from thermal
confusion.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BG8XX7MM
Hasok Chang, Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of
Science, available on kindle on November 30, 2022.

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Re: [FRIAM] phones with keyboards, or a keyboard you can buy for a phone?

[Roger Critchlow]

Gil --

https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Keyboard-Rechargeable-Wireless-Smartphones/dp/B07XCP3THX
is the right size for every day carry and error free thumb typing, but
you'd have to figure out your own phone mount.

Here's the list of all four phones with keyboards from earlier this year:
https://www.androidauthority.com/keyboard-phones-845839/

-- rec --

On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 6:52 PM Gillian Densmore 
wrote:

> Mmm. Well what i'm looking for something that might work on the go. Like
> shopping or or something. When/if I get texts, or remember to get or do
> something kind of thing.  So I don't need to type in get milk, or call
> therapist if I have the right day. 20 times  to a avoid 99 errors, have a
> neck crink, tired, and be in a foul, or feline mood when I get home. How
> would I search for a case where the KB slides down for when I need it? Do
> they even exist?
>
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 4:37 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:
>
>> Pity you can't just switch your computer keyboard to act as your phone's
>> character input, as if you were swapping the phone in as another screen.
>>
>> Almost any bluetooth keyboard should work, and there are tons of them on
>> amazon if you search "bluetooth mini keyboard", and they're cheap.  They're
>> probably too cheap to last for very long.  So maybe look at the DIY
>> keyboard makers, too.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 12:55 PM Gary Schiltz 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I get by with a two year old iPhone SE. I also hate typing on glass,
>>> but I have a laptop for typing.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 11:01 AM Gillian Densmore
>>>  wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Hello, all looking for phone recommendations. My pixel 4a is 2 years
>>> old feeling closer to 4.
>>> > Are there any phones you can get with a keyboard? I know about
>>> unihertz's titan. and it amuses me. But niche brand. I just don't like
>>> typing on glass, and being frustrated with the amount of errors I get.
>>> > What about a case that'd have a keyboard that'd slide out? that'd be
>>> fine.
>>> > after that I'm looking for good  battery, nice aesthetics and. fun
>>> features also would be fantastic. I'm thinking of how apples phones now let
>>> you use lidar to scan stuff to convert to photosomethingery  in 3D. Or how
>>> older phones you could theme.
>>> > I'd prefer the refurbed (on GP): both to reduce waste and sane prices.
>>> 600-900+ for phones is just bad. Where as 300-500 is at least sane.
>>> > What all do folks pay for phones? any recommendations?
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Re: [FRIAM] phones with keyboards, or a keyboard you can buy for a phone?

[Roger Critchlow]

Pity you can't just switch your computer keyboard to act as your phone's
character input, as if you were swapping the phone in as another screen.

Almost any bluetooth keyboard should work, and there are tons of them on
amazon if you search "bluetooth mini keyboard", and they're cheap.  They're
probably too cheap to last for very long.  So maybe look at the DIY
keyboard makers, too.

-- rec --


On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 12:55 PM Gary Schiltz 
wrote:

> I get by with a two year old iPhone SE. I also hate typing on glass,
> but I have a laptop for typing.
>
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 11:01 AM Gillian Densmore
>  wrote:
> >
> > Hello, all looking for phone recommendations. My pixel 4a is 2 years old
> feeling closer to 4.
> > Are there any phones you can get with a keyboard? I know about
> unihertz's titan. and it amuses me. But niche brand. I just don't like
> typing on glass, and being frustrated with the amount of errors I get.
> > What about a case that'd have a keyboard that'd slide out? that'd be
> fine.
> > after that I'm looking for good  battery, nice aesthetics and. fun
> features also would be fantastic. I'm thinking of how apples phones now let
> you use lidar to scan stuff to convert to photosomethingery  in 3D. Or how
> older phones you could theme.
> > I'd prefer the refurbed (on GP): both to reduce waste and sane prices.
> 600-900+ for phones is just bad. Where as 300-500 is at least sane.
> > What all do folks pay for phones? any recommendations?
> > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] cable modem?

[Roger Critchlow]

wirecutter says motorola MB7621 for 600Mb plans, netgear CM500 for up to
300Mb plans, and motorola MB8600 for gigabit plans.

I use the 600Mb recommended modem for my 300Mb comcast service on the
theory that I get to use channels which 300Mb modems cannot see, so I have
less resource contention interference, but I've never tried to verify that.

-- rec --

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 11:27 AM Tom Johnson  wrote:

> If you're using Xfinity, always buy.  They rent a very good modem, but the
> cost/benefit ratio is a ripoff.  That said, Xfinity itself recommends a
> good Motorola modem available at Best Buy.  I have one.  It's been fine.
> Tom
>
> ===
> Tom Johnson
> Inst. for Analytic Journalism
> Santa Fe, New Mexico
> 505-577-6482
> ===
>
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 7:23 AM Gillian Densmore 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all, the  TLDR is this:
>> -Needed a new cable modem because the one I have got flakey, temporarily
>> leasing one.
>> -What all do people suggest these days: rent or own?
>> -If then: own: Who's good now?
>> -If: Rent: any reasoning standout?
>>
>> Thank you.
>> Back to debating measuring consciousness. I think that is measured in the
>> amount of  coffee consumed. I'll test that theory while black
>> caffeinated liquid fills my Karrif.
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Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Black holes may hide an odd secret about our universe

[Roger Critchlow]

You're following too much click bait, follow only healthy links to
substantial content and you'll be fine.

-- rec --

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 3:20 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> What a depressing article.  I'm not sure why.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> -- Forwarded message -
> From: The New York Times 
> Date: Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 6:00 AM
> Subject: Black holes may hide an odd secret about our universe
> To: 
>
>
> Research revealed connections between two views of the cosmos.
> View in browser
> 
> |nytimes.com
> 
> Continue reading the main story
> <#m_3497075341880264527_m_2986547978703279203_a11y-skip-ad-marquee>
>
> 
>
> October 12, 2022
>
> Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? A holographic
> cosmos. Maybe.
>
> OUT THERE
> [image: Article Image]
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>
> 
>  Gravity
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> 
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[FRIAM] DeepMind matrix multiplication

[Roger Critchlow]

Open access https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4

Found faster ways to multiply matrices by gamifying the algorithm search
space.

As summarized in
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/05/1060717/deepmind-uses-its-game-playing-ai-to-best-a-50-year-old-record-in-computer-science/


> The researchers describe their work in a paper published in Nature today.
> The headline result is that AlphaTensor discovered a way to multiply
> together two four-by-four matrices that is faster than a method devised in
> 1969 by the German mathematician Volker Strassen, which nobody had been
> able to improve on since. The basic high school method takes 64 steps;
> Strassen’s takes 49 steps. AlphaTensor found a way to do it in 47 steps.
>
> Overall, AlphaTensor beat the best existing algorithms for more than 70
> different sizes of matrix. It reduced the number of steps needed to
> multiply two nine-by-nine matrices from 511 to 498, and the number required
> for multiplying two 11-by-11 matrices from 919 to 896. In many other cases,
> AlphaTensor rediscovered the best existing algorithm.
>
-- rec --
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[FRIAM] monte carlo geometry processing

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZbuKOxH71o

Via hackernews.  How to evaluate partial differential equations
without building a finite element mesh of the domain, as inspired by monte
carlo ray tracing.  Very high quality math/computation video presentation.
By Keenan Crane, CMU, 2022-08-29.  The natives are very grateful to judge
by the youtube comments.

-- rec --
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Re: [FRIAM] Still more faking it till you make it

[Roger Critchlow]

In a similar vein, this article showed up on hackernews last week

  https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

though a fraudulent credit card transaction has an irate customer
generating negative feedback, where a badly edited journal merely pollutes
the commons.

-- rec --

On Wed, Sep 7, 2022 at 9:42 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> What is the problem with paper mills?  Cite papers that are important,
> ignore papers that are not.
>
> On Sep 7, 2022, at 1:32 PM, glen  wrote:
>
>  We need to talk about editors
> http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2022/09/we-need-to-talk-about-editors.html?m=1
>
> I know. Ya'll are prolly unsubbing because of all my spam. But until
> Voldemort bans me, this is the state of the world.
>
> What does it say about me that I find this beautiful:
>
> "Asthma disease are the scatters, gives that influence the lungs, the
> organs that let us to inhale and it’s the principal visit disease overall
> particularly in India. During this work, the matter of lung maladies simply
> like the trouble experienced while arranging the sickness in radiography
> are frequently illuminated. There are various procedures found in writing
> for recognition of asthma infection identification. A few agents have
> contributed their realities for Asthma illness expectation. The need for
> distinguishing asthma illness at a beginning period is very fundamental and
> is an exuberant research territory inside the field of clinical picture
> preparing. For this, we’ve survey numerous relapse models, k-implies
> bunching, various leveled calculation, characterizations and profound
> learning methods to search out best classifier for lung illness
> identification. These papers generally settlement about winning carcinoma
> discovery methods that are reachable inside the writing."
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Re: [FRIAM] Uber in Santa Fe

[Roger Critchlow]

Fun fact, uber was asking for a 50% markup over the cost of a yellow cab at
Logan Airport the other evening, bute we only found out when we took the
cab.

-- rec --

On Tue, Sep 6, 2022 at 10:58 PM Tom Johnson  wrote:

> It's still here. Our house cleaner used it yesterday mid-morning.
>
> ===
> Tom Johnson
> Inst. for Analytic Journalism
> Santa Fe, New Mexico
> 505-577-6482
> ===
>
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2022, 8:22 PM Owen Densmore  wrote:
>
>> Is Uber still around here in Santa Fe? I tried the iphone app and it
>> showed no cars,
>>
>> -- Owen
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Re: [FRIAM] Jack Cowan / Visual Hallucinations and structure of Visual Cortex (was Re: dystopian vision(s))

[Roger Critchlow]

No compliment so cleverly crafted that it cannot be twisted into an insult.

It seems like misinformation, whether our con-specifics are purposefully
lying to us or just being so badly informed that they're not even right
twice a day, is the actual human condition.  So the massive nervous system
parsing the inchoate chaos of raw sense data into curated sensations is the
easy part.  The real work begins when we start unpacking the messages from
the sensations and deciding what they say and whether they actually mean
what they say.  That includes doing higher order curation on the processed
sensations, too, because they can be liars too.

Noise on a communication channel is a piece of cake compared to the stream
of garbage we are processing.

-- rec --

On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 8:32 PM Stephen Guerin 
wrote:

> Jack Cowan hung around the office for a week after his lecture. We had a
> ping pong table in the break area at Bios and hebecame my partner. We beat
> all double challengers at the office for that full week (cc  said
> challengers: Rich Harris, Keith Hunter, Brian Birk, Mohammed) :-) Stu later
> let me know Jack was on the Scottish Olympic Table Tennis Team in his
> youth). Stu was in a theoretical-biology group at the University of
> Chicago, run by Jack Cowan, that included people like Arthur Winfree, Leon
> Glass, and others.
>
> Also, as I was searching for Jack's article referenced below,  I came
> across Jack's actual quote of Stu:
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB902095959816268500
>
> Dr. Kauffman, now 58 years old, faces huge hurdles cashing in on his
> patent. But the controversial scientist considers it "a vindication." Like
> other theorists in biology, he hasn't earned the kind of acclaim that
> experimentalists get. He studied philosophy at Dartmouth College, Hanover,
> N.H., and, after medical school, turned to fruit-fly genetics. But he never
> excelled at experimentation, colleagues say. What he did brilliantly was
> articulate an endless stream of abstract ideas.
>
>
> *"He has the highest mouth-to-brain ratio of any one person I've ever met,
> but with a very high denominator," *says Jack Cowan, a University of
> Chicago professor of applied mathematics and theoretical biology, who was
> Dr. Kauffman's first boss. "If he had the math skills as well as the verbal
> ones, he would be amazing."
>
> I always only heard the first half of the quote by cynics like Horgan
> recounting it into an insult:
> http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/hogan.complexperplex.htm
>
> What Liddle does not say is that even some scientists associated with the
> institute are beginning to fret over the gap between such rhetoric and
> reality. Take Jack D. Cowan, a mathematical biologist from the University
> of Chicago who helped to found the institute and remains on its board.
> Cowan is no scientific prude; he has explored the neurochemical processes
> underlying the baroque visual patterns evoked by LSD. *But some Santa Fe
> theorists exhibit too high a "mouth-to-brain ratio" for his taste*.
> "There has been tremendous hype," he grumbles.
>
>
> -S
> ___
> stephen.gue...@simtable.com 
> CEO, https://www.simtable.com 
> 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
> office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 6:20 PM Stephen Guerin <
> stephen.gue...@simtable.com> wrote:
>
>> Steve Smith writes:
>> >  There is surely research into how much/which psychoactives get
>> involved in modulating these processes.
>>
>> Jack (not George) Cowan gave a great lecture at BiosGroup in 2000 on this
>> very topic:
>>
>> " What geometric visual hallucinations tell us about the visual cortex"
>> https://www.math.uh.edu/~dynamics/reprints/papers/nc.pdf
>>
>> Abstract: Geometric visual hallucinations are seen by many observers
>> after taking hallucinogens such as LSD, cannabis, mescaline or psilocybin,
>> on viewing bright
>> flickering lights, on waking up or falling asleep, in “near death”
>> experiences,
>> and in many other syndromes. Kl¨uver organized the images into four groups
>> called “form constants”: (1) tunnels and funnels, (2) spirals, (3)
>> lattices, including honeycombs and triangles, and (4) cobwebs. In general
>> the images do
>> not move with the eyes. We interpret this to mean that they are generated
>> in the brain. Here we present a theory of their origin in visual cortex
>> (area
>> V1), based on the assumption that the form of the retino–cortical map and
>> the
>> architecture of V1 determine their geometry. We model V1 as the continuum
>> limit of a lattice of interconnected hypercolumns, each of which itself
>> comprises
>> a number of interconnected iso-orientation columns. Based on anatomical
>> evidence we assume that the lateral connectivity between hypercolumns
>> exhibits
>> symmetries rendering it invariant under the action of the Euclidean group
>> E(2),
>> composed of 

Re: [FRIAM] "tech" companies suck

[Roger Critchlow]

I've lately run into two mentions of "group chat" as the organizing
principle of social media for the day.  You keep different groups for
different purposes, and you don't let social media into the chat.  I think
Friam actually functions as a group chat, aside from google scanning
everything.  But technically it's a Gen-Z thing, so we obviously don't know
what we're doing.

It was a neighbor group chat that busted the Ted Cruz Cancun getaway plan
in February 2021, while Texans froze to death or were bankrupted by spikes
in electric rates.

-- rec --

On Mon, Aug 15, 2022 at 8:53 AM glen  wrote:

> It's an interesting question. Someone posted a poll on a Mastodon server
> recently, something like "What is it you want from all this stuff? (E.g.
> Twitter, Facebook, ...)" The possible answers were things like
> "Friendship", "Connectedness", etc. There was an "Other", which I filled
> in. I wrote something like: "The state of the world. When I was younger, I
> read the newspaper and watched the daily news on one of the big 3 networks.
> Now, it feels like everything's all fractured. TV news is for ancient, out
> of touch people. The newspaper is neither local, nor does it tell
> interesting national or international stories. So, I use these media, like
> 12-20 different outlets just to get some sense of the state of the world."
>
> I wish I had a better answer to "where do you find this stuff". It can be
> exhausting trying to stay informed. Fora like FriAM help a bit.
>
> On 8/13/22 17:57, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> >
> > And where do find this stuff glen >_<
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 2:41 PM glen  geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > __
> >
> https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion
> <
> https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion
> >
> > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Advice sought: data compromise

[Roger Critchlow]

I got a "data security incident notification" in the mail from the
"Professional Finance Company, Inc." of Livonia, Michigan that offered
me an account with "Cyberscout" to monitor my online credit.  That sounded
so sketchy, that I ignored it.  It turns out to be entirely true, one of
the largest data incidents of the year.  Still doesn't validate the
url's that the mail encourages me to use, but that is the real name of a
real medical debt collection agency that really lost millions of client
records.

-- rec --


On Sat, Aug 13, 2022 at 8:49 PM Gillian Densmore 
wrote:

> Nick, scan Call your Doctor in the morning to double check. Alas Ma'man.
> Scammers tend to target people about your  uh mmpf. Uh 'stage of life'.
> "local health care provider" or any other generic name is instant redflag
> for scam. Just to be sure ping your doctor.
> A data leak wouldn't hit just you. And you'd be reading on the news how
> poodlesec, or Anonymous goatsed some a database. A vague email or call is a
> scam.
> I get a a lot of scam and spam calls, if something sounds like
> Bull(removed at someones request) smells like, etc probably is. Don't over
> thing it and trust your gut.
> I get sus af emails and calls, sometimes claiming to be from tmobile. I
> just check the web or my account or w/e from time to time.
>
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 8:01 AM glen  wrote:
>
>> And consider putting a temporary lock on your credit. It should be free
>> with any of the 3 big credit reporting agencies. I used equifax <
>> https://www.equifax.com/personal/products/credit/credit-lock-alert/>
>> when my info was leaked. The lock simply means you (or anyone impersonating
>> you) has to jump through a few more hoops to get a loan or whatever.
>>
>> On 8/12/22 06:53, Steve Smith wrote:
>> > Nick -
>> >
>> > If I understand your story correctly, I would start by verifying the
>> "local health care company".  If they are someone you do business with,
>> then you can contact them otherwise through "normal" channels (not
>> website/e-mail) that you already trust (you do business with them
>> already?)   It is not good practice for *them* to be directing you to a
>> third-party "monitoring" site in they way they seem to be.   If you do NOT
>> do business with them already then it is almost assuredly a phishing
>> attempt.  Or maybe more appropriately a "phlushing" attempt... what
>> predators do to try to get prey to panic and expose themselves so they can
>> pounce and/or run you to ground.
>> >
>> > Hope your summer is going well otherwise!
>> >
>> > - Steve
>> >
>> >
>> > On 8/12/22 4:12 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> >> Yes, Nick,
>> >>
>> >> Stay in your cage of distrust.  I will be very surprised if you
>> ultimately determine that this _wasn’t_ a scam.  Maybe even add a bar or
>> two to your cage walls: I would generally not log into a link received in
>> an email, if there weren’t some way I could initiate the contact with a
>> known company through some website that the various certifiers think is
>> theirs.
>> >>
>> >> Eric
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>> On Aug 12, 2022, at 10:24 AM,  <
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Hi, everybody,
>> >>> Sorry for  the bother.
>> >>> A local health care company writes me to say they have compromised
>> all my identity data, and offers to pay for “Kroll Monitoring Services”,
>> giving me an ID number with which to log into their site.  When I do this,
>> the site fills in my correct address and last name but an incorrect first
>> name, and asks me to enter all my identity data.  At this point, I begin to
>> contemplate that the notice itself may be a fraud.  I eventually find Kroll
>> on the web, but it wasn’t all that easy.  None of the sites that evaluate
>> credit monitoring services has it.  How do I extricate myself from my cage
>> of distrust?
>> >>> Nick
>> >>> Nick Thompson
>> >>> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>>
>> --
>> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>>
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Re: [FRIAM] Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical-Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics

[Roger Critchlow]

ExPoMo?

On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 2:58 PM Steve Smith  wrote:

> I could (almost) claim that I don't understand a word of what you wrote
> here. ("I don't even know what you just said).  It has the earmarks of a (n
> un) natural text generator working with a fairly rarified "gamer/fanboi"
> lexicon?  Or maybe a couple of lexicons merged (e.g. "pwned electorSlates")
> with a couple of contemporary news items (e.g. marLago).  I'm not sure if
> the SenatorsCreed  reference involved a recombination inside the
> AssassinCreed domain or if it was a mashup in the moment?
>
> Is this kind of hallucinagenic stream-of-consciousness a PoMo thing or a
> Po PoMo?  or more likely an (n*Po) Mo... ?
> On 8/9/22 12:47 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
>
> While not a direct gamer myself, I spend a lot of time watching game
> streamers on Twitch. Grand Theft Anointment 2020 was so addictive.
> @BigDailyBeastMode and @CarlsonTucksAssTart stream great first person views
> with psyTwinks wares for the blue and red teams. Amazing to watch mad
> twitch skillz of OG Twink. Top circuit court bender in years hacking a
> bunch of NPCs to Swarm the Rotunda Base Station and stacking the Grand
> Council. almost pulled off a 51% attack to rewrite the blockchain with
> pwned electorSlates!  Blue team loaded some great twink wares yesterday to
> get the honeypot docs at the OGTwink's marLago lair. Can't wait for GTA2024
> SenatorsCreed release - already watching some early alpha play. Hack the
> Burghers, Lock and Load, and TruthBDamned
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 11:59 AM glen  wrote:
>
>> Ha! Y'all are pissin' me off, here. The classification of twinking as
>> cheating is so over. This point still qualifies for both the general
>> content of the list and the VR/AR discussion. The difference between a bug
>> and a feature depends on the perspective of the "user". E.g. the Log4Shell
>> bug isn't a bug. It's a feature if you're a black hat looking to "move fast
>> and break things" or if you're a white hat looking for some street cred.
>> Circuit benders, gamers, rave attendees, microdosers, etc. are all properly
>> classified as psychonauts. Twinking is yet another form of it.
>>
>> Of course, it's irritating when the butthurttryhard just wants to defeat
>> the stupid boss to make progress in the game and some twink keeps killin'
>> 'em on the run to the boss. The victim thinks it's cheating. But game
>> theory and coevolution tell other stories. Git Gud or Go Home. Do what thou
>> wilt is the whole of the Law.
>>
>> On 8/9/22 10:20, Stephen Guerin wrote:
>> > and I'm learning that twink could refer to the cheating player
>> themselves or in Glen's use:
>> >
>> > " It can also be used to describe the process of keeping a video game
>> character at a low level while using in-game currency, earned by a
>> high-level character, to provide it with superior equipment."
>> >
>> > I think I will try randomly using "it's time to get my twink on" with
>> my gamer son.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Aug 9, 2022, 11:08 AM Steve Smith > sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:
>> >
>> > SG -
>> >
>> > Thanks for taking/following/explicating that bait.  I was pretty
>> sure glen was Tweaking us with Twitch and Twink... very NLP if not actually
>> poetic.
>> >
>> >   I was only aware of the gay-culture terminology but trusted that
>> Glen (as he is wont to do) was expanding our vocabulary/awareness in some
>> way that I failed to unroll fully (nominally an arbitrarily deep
>> fractal/iterated map?).
>> >
>> > -SS
>> >
>> > On 8/9/22 10:48 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
>> >> On Tue, Aug 9, 2022, 10:18 AM glen > geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> [⛧] My black PS4 controller is terribly twitchy compared to my
>> gold one. I died like 5 times getting my latest Dark Souls twink started.
>> Pfft.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> learned a new meaning of Twink today :-)
>> >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinking <
>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinking>
>> >>
>> >>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>>
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[FRIAM] Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical-Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics

[Roger Critchlow]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.00940

This must be on some topic around here.

Originally picked up from
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/06/1056727/vr-virtual-reality-psychedelics-transcendence/,
which is paywalled.

The original arxiv posting is 20 years old, but the work was just published
inh

CHI 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems

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Re: [FRIAM] All Of Feynman’s Lectures Now Available Online Completely Free

[Roger Critchlow]

Here's a youtube of the author, Igor Douven, discussing the epistemic peer
problem, under which conditions a disagreement between peers requires
irrational behavior on the part of one or more peers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHVksA_FXBM

That video is collected on David Balcarras' youtube channel,
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4Ub4r8h7auWF7Hud4z_C0w/videos.

-- rec --


On Mon, Jul 25, 2022 at 6:33 PM glen  wrote:

> Oh, sorry. I meant that I already concatenated them with pdftk and if
> anyone else wanted a copy, then I could send it to them. I simply used wget
> -r -A "*.pdf" to get them all from that url, then cat'ed them with pdftk.
> When books are assembled contributions like the one Nick and EricC
> contributed to (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-61773-8)
> then individual PDFs for the chapters makes some sense. IDK. Maybe I'm just
> old.
>
> On 7/25/22 14:38, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > Glen --
> >
> > Glad to facilitate.  There is no whole document pdf link that I could
> find. I figure they just supplied the output files from TeX.  The next step
> for the publisher doesn't require a concatenated pdf.  I used gs to
> concatenate.
> >
> > INPUT="f000[2-7]00_*.pdf c*_*.pdf r*_*.pdf c005600_*.pdf"
> >
> > gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
> -sOutputFile=art-of-abduction.pdf ${INPUT}
> >
> >
> > Do you know how to concatenate the book parts and get functioning
> hyperlinks?
> >
> > -- rec --
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 25, 2022 at 10:40 AM glen  geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > This is excellent! Thanks for the pointer. Maybe I missed the whole
> document link. But I've assembled the PDFs into 1 file if anyone would like
> me to send it to them.
> >
> > On 7/24/22 06:12, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> >  > Here's a new free book at MIT Press which I'm finding readable.
> Suggested by hackernews.
> >  >
> >  >
> https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction <
> https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction> <
> https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction <
> https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction>>
> >  >
> >  >  From the Introduction:
> >  > If you are a linguist, I encourage you to read on because
> abduction has been said to be fundamental to determining what a speaker
> means by an utterance.  Specifically, it has been argued that decoding
> utterances is a matter of figuring out the best explanation of why someone
> said what she said when she said it.  Even more specifically, authors
> working in the field of pragmatics have suggested that hearers invoke the
> Gricean maxims of conversation (Grice, 1989) [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle> <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle>>] to help them work
> out the best explanation of a speaker's utterance whenever the semantic
> content of the utterance is insufficiently informative  for the purposes of
> the conversation, or is /too/ informative, or is off topic, or is
> implausible, or is otherwise  odd or inappropriate.  As Yan Huang
> > (1994, p. 2) puts it, "What pragmatics does is to provide a set of
> ... /explanatory/ principles which constrains
> >  > the interpretation or production of an utterance whose
> linguistic representation has already been antecedently cognized" (emphasis
> mine).
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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Re: [FRIAM] All Of Feynman’s Lectures Now Available Online Completely Free

[Roger Critchlow]

Glen --

Glad to facilitate.  There is no whole document pdf link that I could find.
I figure they just supplied the output files from TeX.  The next step for
the publisher doesn't require a concatenated pdf.  I used gs to concatenate.

INPUT="f000[2-7]00_*.pdf c*_*.pdf r*_*.pdf c005600_*.pdf"

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
> -sOutputFile=art-of-abduction.pdf ${INPUT}


Do you know how to concatenate the book parts and get functioning
hyperlinks?

-- rec --

On Mon, Jul 25, 2022 at 10:40 AM glen  wrote:

> This is excellent! Thanks for the pointer. Maybe I missed the whole
> document link. But I've assembled the PDFs into 1 file if anyone would like
> me to send it to them.
>
> On 7/24/22 06:12, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > Here's a new free book at MIT Press which I'm finding readable.
> Suggested by hackernews.
> >
> > https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction <
> https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction>
> >
> >  From the Introduction:
> > If you are a linguist, I encourage you to read on because abduction
> has been said to be fundamental to determining what a speaker means by an
> utterance.  Specifically, it has been argued that decoding utterances is a
> matter of figuring out the best explanation of why someone said what she
> said when she said it.  Even more specifically, authors working in the
> field of pragmatics have suggested that hearers invoke the Gricean maxims
> of conversation (Grice, 1989) [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle>] to help them work
> out the best explanation of a speaker's utterance whenever the semantic
> content of the utterance is insufficiently informative  for the purposes of
> the conversation, or is /too/ informative, or is off topic, or is
> implausible, or is otherwise  odd or inappropriate.  As Yan Huang (1994, p.
> 2) puts it, "What pragmatics does is to provide a set of ...
> /explanatory/ principles which constrains
> > the interpretation or production of an utterance whose linguistic
> representation has already been antecedently cognized" (emphasis mine).
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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Re: [FRIAM] All Of Feynman’s Lectures Now Available Online Completely Free

[Roger Critchlow]

Here's a new free book at MIT Press which I'm finding readable.  Suggested
by hackernews.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction

>From the Introduction:

If you are a linguist, I encourage you to read on because abduction has
> been said to be fundamental to determining what a speaker means by an
> utterance.  Specifically, it has been argued that decoding utterances is a
> matter of figuring out the best explanation of why someone said what she
> said when she said it.  Even more specifically, authors working in the
> field of pragmatics have suggested that hearers invoke the Gricean maxims
> of conversation (Grice, 1989) [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle] to help them work
> out the best explanation of a speaker's utterance whenever the semantic
> content of the utterance is insufficiently informative  for the purposes of
> the conversation, or is *too* informative, or is off topic, or is
> implausible, or is otherwise  odd or inappropriate.  As Yan Huang (1994, p.
> 2) puts it, "What pragmatics does is to provide a set of ... *explanatory* 
> principles
> which constrains the interpretation or production of an utterance whose
> linguistic representation has already been antecedently cognized" (emphasis
> mine).
>

-- rec --


On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 7:42 PM David Eric Smith 
wrote:

>
>
> > On Jul 24, 2022, at 7:43 AM, Edward Angel  wrote:
> >
> > Feynman once claimed he started Feynman Physics because he couldn’t do
> those problems.
>
> “Couldn’t” here is an interesting word.
>
> One of the few books I couldn’t read (back when I did seem able to read
> book-length material), was the Dao of Physics.  Several people had,
> believing it was an act of friendship, given me copies when I went away to
> college.  After getting a little way in, any time I dutifully opened it to
> try to get through a little more, I would be seized in a narcoleptic fit
> before getting through a half-page.  Like having one’s head pushed
> underwater by god; no resisting it.  I think it was the first book I
> accepted permanent defeat before.
>
> Nowadays there seem to be many mindless, tedious, and world-destroyingly
> stupid (mandatory) things that, when I chain myself to the desk to do them,
> I never advance on because I can’t or won’t restrain a superhuman pressure
> to daydream.
>
> These cases have increased my tolerance for the ambiguity between “can’t”
> and “won’t”, when I see it in others who, for whatever their reasons,
> “won’t” do something needful that seems to me like it shouldn’t be that
> hard to do.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] All Of Feynman’s Lectures Now Available Online Completely Free

[Roger Critchlow]

Ah, but google finds the complete text at
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ and the videos on youtube.com

-- rec --

On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 9:16 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> This content isn't available right now
> When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a
> small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.
>
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 5:45 AM Tom Johnson 
> wrote:
>
>>
>> https://www.facebook.com/1564202305/posts/pfbid026z42fYrezJyiZwvzuvJh9R847MRqFdFJdP68czLuiZt3pPHFKMizR3YdVxtx2swBl/?sfnsn=mo
>>
>> ===
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Re: [FRIAM] All Of Feynman’s Lectures Now Available Online Completely Free

[Roger Critchlow]

This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a
small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.

On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 5:45 AM Tom Johnson  wrote:

>
> https://www.facebook.com/1564202305/posts/pfbid026z42fYrezJyiZwvzuvJh9R847MRqFdFJdP68czLuiZt3pPHFKMizR3YdVxtx2swBl/?sfnsn=mo
>
> ===
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[FRIAM] AI etiquette, Marijuana research

[Roger Critchlow]

Two articles from MIT Tech Review.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/19/1056176/sonys-racing-ai-destroyed-its-human-competitors-by-being-nice-and-fast/

Training AI drivers for Gran Turismo racing, it turns out that they can
learn to physically drive faster than people, but they're too aggressive to
win head to head races because they drive the competition off the road.  So
you need to train them to observe the norms of the competition, by
including penalties for crashes, bumps, cut-offs, etc, into the training.
They still drive faster than people, and the way they drive is a bit
disturbing to watch.

[So if you were training AI drivers for political races, would the norms
come from established law or where the voters could be persuaded to mark
their polls?]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/20/1056219/weed-influencer-and-scientist-feud-over-cannabis-hyperemesis-syndrome/

The scientist and the instagram influencer attempt to study the genetic
causes of CHS (cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome) and the influencer blows
up the study when she declares that the scientist is a shill on her
channel.  Ah the joys of decision making with uncertainty and cognitive
bias.

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[FRIAM] Experian customer account recovery practice

[Roger Critchlow]

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/07/experian-you-have-some-explaining-to-do/

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Re: [FRIAM] self-care

[Roger Critchlow]

And they're discussing how to adapt the Texas bounty hunter law for
catching people who cross state lines for forbidden practices.

-- rec --

On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 3:12 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> I can see it now.   Netflix and others won't let me watch when I'm a VPN.
>  When folks ask the AI bot for contingencies for their self-administered
> medical procedures like this, only those on the coasts will get answers,
> whereas the s**thole states will require these services be blocked.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2022 8:22 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: [FRIAM] self-care
>
> In the aftermath of the activist Justices overturning RvW, this popped up
> in my feed:
>
> How to Give Yourself an Abortion
> https://jewishcurrents.org/how-to-give-yourself-an-abortion
>
> I remain torn on the issue of self-care. And lots of energy was added to
> my oscillators with the whole "horse dewormer" thing for COVID-19. (Yes,
> I'm poking fun both at the people who bought veterinary ivermectin and the
> people who used the disgusting sneer "horse dewormer".) To boot, this post
> came up this morning about a homeopathic packet sent home with the patient
> after surgery:
> https://centerforinquiry.salsalabs.org/2022cfimidyearemailversion11.
> (Placebo is a thing, despite Blumner's write-off.)
>
> Nick is fond of asking people whether they take multivitamins or not. And
> while it's true most experts claim that *healthy* people just pee them out.
> *Who* amongst us actually qualifies as "healthy"? What does "health" even
> mean? That's not an idle or rhetorical question. Am I "healthy", despite
> the excruciating chronic pain in my shoulders, neck, and lower back?
> Despite my sporadic debilitating migraines? Despite my now abated
> follicular lymphoma? Sure, I *seem* healthy because I can do pull-ups,
> shovel dirt, drink 5 pints without a hangover, and maintain a full-time job
> with a bit of time for hobbies. But what you see from the outside doesn't
> reflect what I feel on the inside, which is like a sick puppy where the
> slightest bad event would topple me into the "disabled" category. "Healthy"
> is at best a misinformation concept, at worst a malinformation concept:
> https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/mdm-incident-response-guide_508.pdf
>
> Sneer all you want at the new-age descendant reading self-help books,
> cutting out magazine ads for their "vision board", or self-administering
> veterinary de-fetus pills, but there's something important, here. Fad
> diets, bottled water, alcoholism or pregnancy as an indicator for moral
> failure, etc. all point at that thing, whatever that thing is.
>
> In that context, self-administered abortion is legit.
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Web 3 is going great!

[Roger Critchlow]

   -
>
>TechScape: They used my identity to flog a doomed cryptocurrency – and
>then things got weird
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/01/cryptocurrency-tsuka-alex-hern

   "In the meantime, the Telegram channel was moving so fast that I could
>see history being corrupted in real-time."

   [...]
   -
   -
>
>If the idea of shitcoins as a big multiplayer video game intrigues
>you, I’ve just finished reading Adrian Hon’s book You’ve Been Played
>
> ,
>which goes into some detail on the same idea. Every major social trend
>takes on the characteristics of an “alternate reality game” these days,
>from QAnon to Crypto, and it’s having a deeply weird effect on our societal
>fabric.

-- rec --
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Re: [FRIAM] Web 3 is going great!

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/29/molly-white-crypto/

-- rec --

On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 8:17 PM glen  wrote:

> Ha! No, I won't be buying any NFTs. I do still hold out some hope for
> distributed computation, however naïve. My Ada is staked. And I'm
> sporadically re-piqued by FileCoin and AR. But the anti-crypto rants are
> fantastic. Perfect examples of healthy criticism. This one was a lot of fun:
>
> Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-sNSjS8cq0
>
> On 5/27/22 17:02, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > The longer-form, less sarcastic thoughts on web3 are also good reading,
> https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/ <
> https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/>, though the rate at which things
> are going great is pretty hilarious.  Who knew the future would bring us
> serial rug-pullers?
> > -- rec --
> >
> >
> > -- rec --
> >
> >
> > On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 6:31 PM Marcus Daniels  <mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> >
> > So you won’t be buying commemorative NFTs of the Heard/Depp verdict?
> >
> >  > On May 27, 2022, at 1:51 PM, glen  geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >  >
> >  > ...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring
> lighter fluid on our already-smoldering planet.
> >  >
> >  > https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ <https://web3isgoinggreat.com/>
> >  >
> >  > --
> >  > Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
>
>
> --
> Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
>
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