[NetBehaviour] Scrubland / Cruelty

[Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour]

Scrubland / Cruelty

https://scontent-bos5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/445179596_10160906089270379_6884123229279743334_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=da8o6PIOY84Q7kNvgHt2mfp&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.xx&oh=00_AYA8ofklMi1nZTvgoW9vX1PuUhSOh0uie_VQLvuHfNOluQ&oe=6655905E


Well.
Oh, we were walking through the scrub land behind the convention
center and some other buildings that are over there. You are
walking behind them. The buildings on the scrub land period and
we are walked up.  Into the scrub at distance where we were not
visible from the rest of the parking lot that was down below. At
a distance period hunt. The next thing that happened was we saw
a car pull up. 3 guys got out of the car period and they had a
cat with them period and they basically threw the cat into the
scrub land.  And then got in the car and took off period it's
pretty clear to us. It was pretty clear to us that they didn't
want the cat that it was a cat that had been a pet and they
wanted to get rid of it, so they just threw it out period we
weren't anywhere near it and there was nothing we could have
done even if we were near it anyway. Period this crob lined had
a lot of small gullies and holes. And was difficult to go
through period But it was extraordinarily upsetting period we're
not sure that the cat would have been able to survive because it
clearly was a domestic cat that they had just decided to threw
out an animal period they threw out a domestic animal period
they got in the car and they took off period this wrecked, the
rest of the day for us. We didn't know what to do. There was
nothing we could do. The animal disappeared into the scrub land.
Period but it sings like this is sort of tinge of violence. This
tinge of anime this tinge of misery, that sort of surrounds our
lives are where we are here in Rhode Island in Providence period
it seems there's always an edge to it period it seems like
always something is about to go wrong period it seems like
something is always about to deliver misery to others period We
hope the cat survived period the cat had nothing to eat
throughout there and was clearly domestic cat was clearly not.
Perhaps able to live in the wild there period we hadn't seen
cats in the wild in that area period but the way that the pet
was just thrown out was horrifying period it's colored
everything period it's colored, absolutely everything period


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[NetBehaviour] The Threat

[Zak Qlikman via NetBehaviour]

The visitors have expanded their reach into the cosmos. The Welcome
Habitat, a vital outpost for interstellar activities, hums with activity.
At precisely 22:40, a life raft descends towards the surface.
[image: s-20240516_134653.jpg]


"Hold it steady," Charamaynne's calm voice echoes in the communication
system. The tension in the air is palpable, but their experienced hands of
navigate the descent with precision.

The life raft's landing gear touches the surface safely, and at 25:22,
Charamaynne meets with the base personnel.

At 25:37, Charamaynne addresses the team. The conversation unfolds,
covering various aspects of the operation. A technician, presents their
report, and the discussion delves into the importance of maintaining spare
levels.

At 26:50, the atmosphere shifts as a possible sighting is reported. The
tension escalates.

"Impact in 32 seconds," announces the control room at 31:09, and the team
holds their breath.

The room falls silent as the seconds tick away, and at 31:18, relief floods
the control room as the imminent collision is averted.

A batch of intergalactic emojis floods the Welcome Habitat’s mainframe,
signaling a cosmic invitation to an intergalactic disco. Sighting
coordinates materialize: 🛸 0 47 2 53 8 77 10 4 6 🪐. Charamaynne, donning
a sequined spacesuit, busts out dance moves and declares an impromptu
dance-off.

Shaklyn 1+2 engage in the celestial dance-off, twirling through
multicolored cosmic clouds at warp speeds. The fate of the visitors grooves
in the hands of Shaklyn 1+2, as they all of a sudden face an absurdly
rhythmic adversary in a surreal dance-off in the sky. 🌌💫

--

http://thevisitors.jeron.org
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[NetBehaviour] Noam Chomsky on the subject of AI

[Edward Picot]

Hi, Jim Andrews just posted this on Facebook, and I think it's really 
useful:


"Here is Noam Chomsky's much-quoted article about AI verbatim from the 
NY Times. I've seen "quotations" from this article that include fake 
material.



Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that to live in a time of great peril and 
promise is to experience both tragedy and comedy, with “the imminence of 
a revelation” in understanding ourselves and the world. Today our 
supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are 
indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because 
intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we 
fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine 
learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by 
incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of 
language and knowledge.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of 
machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, 
search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at 
generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike 
language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first 
glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that 
long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not 
only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but 
also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity 
and every other distinctively human faculty.
That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what 
can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious 
investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will 
not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like 
ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these 
programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer 
programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we 
know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge 
that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. 
These differences place significant limitations on what these programs 
can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.
It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much 
money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — 
something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint 
of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite 
use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.
The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical 
engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data 
and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most 
probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human 
mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates 
with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute 
correlations among data points but to create explanations.
For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — 
unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a 
grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and 
parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the 
innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with 
the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. 
When linguists seek to develop a theory for why a given language works 
as it does (“Why are these — but not those — sentences considered 
grammatical?”), they are building consciously and laboriously an 
explicit version of the grammar that the child builds instinctively and 
with minimal exposure to information. The child’s operating system is 
completely different from that of a machine learning program.
Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of 
cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most 
critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, 
what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and 
prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not 
be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true 
intelligence.
Here’s an example. Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now 
you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” 
That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The 
apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be 
correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only 
descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like 
“Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the 
force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or 
whatever. That 

[NetBehaviour] Invitation to Piksel Fest Spill Opening Exhibition Tomorrow and Artists Presentation & Workshop on Saturday!

[220hex via NetBehaviour]

Dear friends and Piksel lovers,

We hope this message finds you well. This is a kind reminder about our 
Opening Exhibition tomorrow at 18:00 at Studio 207, Piksel, Strandgaten 
207, Bergen.


*Exhibition Opening: Silent Vegetal Thoughts* Join us tomorrow, Friday, 
May 24th, for the grand opening of the exhibition "Silent Vegetal 
Thoughts." Experience the groundbreaking work of renowned bio artists 
María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde (ES). Their site-specific 
installation allows plants to control our IoT system, manipulating both 
lights and sound in the gallery. This is an event not to be missed!


*Artist Presentation and Workshop on Saturday* On Saturday, May 25th, at 
14:00, don't miss the chance to engage directly with the artists during 
their presentation. Right after their presentation, we will host the 
*Workshop: Discovering Plant Magic: A Sensory Adventure with Soft 
Sensors*, from 15:00 to 18:00. To register, please send an email to 
pikse...@piksel.no.


For more details on the Piksel Fest Spill program, please visit:

  * Piksel Fest Spill Program Overview

  * Additional Program Details


We look forward to seeing you at these inspiring events and workshops. 
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.


Warm regards,

Piksel Team

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