“Refining his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device””
“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature is another. Nature and letters seems to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”
*Maybe the entire human race has cognitive gaps of this kind and maybe an AI will discover them, as in “Hey human guys, how come you never noticed that extrageometric Lovecraftian hound-of-Tindalos that’s been sniffing around at your heels since forever”
if you find yourself with an urgent need to believe something, the procedure is simple: look for indications that it is the case, interpreting everything that supports the belief as signal and everything that does not as noise
if you find yourself with an urgent need to believe something, the procedure is simple: look for indications that it is the case, interpreting everything that supports the belief as signal and everything that does not as noise
When you encounter a broadly confident person, ask what that confidence is rooted in. Typically they’re good at one narrow complex thing and have inappropriately extended confidence beyond that. Engage on the narrow complex thing if interesting, politely disengage elsewhere.
When you encounter a broadly confident person, ask what that confidence is rooted in. Typically they’re good at one narrow complex thing and have inappropriately extended confidence beyond that. Engage on the narrow complex thing if interesting, politely disengage elsewhere.
When you encounter a broadly confident person, ask what that confidence is rooted in. Typically they’re good at one narrow complex thing and have inappropriately extended confidence beyond that. Engage on the narrow complex thing if interesting, politely disengage elsewhere.
“Look around you. If there are others all moving in the same direction, and they look like you, and they move like you, and they all like the same things, and they hate the same things, and they are angry about the same things, and they are screaming about the same things, chances are you are on the wrong path.”
“So, you ask me, where is your line of the outside? My own line of the outside, it is there, it’s to become a breeze. At first glance, this is a bit simple, even a little silly, but if you live it strongly enough, it’s very, very difficult, you know. It’s true, I think, it’s not about heroism; you risk your life in this, you risk the unbreathable, you also risk being able to breathe… Being a person does not interest me, okay. I only see bad things about being a person.”
— Gilles Deleuze, seminar on Foucault, June 3, 1986
If you consider yourself an experimental/avant-garde artist, and you aren’t fundamentally opposed to the very existence of the society in which you operate, something had gone terribly wrong
If you consider yourself an experimental/avant-garde artist, and you aren’t fundamentally opposed to the very existence of the society in which you operate, something had gone terribly wrong
*There must be a thousand stories of this kind. And, in this case, it’s all about the government of Canada, a G-7 major industrial power, becoming a kind of epiphenomenon of a Big Tech platform.
*This sounds very dull (because Microsoft always sounds very dull) but it’s consequential. Events have played into the hands of the tech majors, networking and remote-working developments that might never have happened at all are being hastily slammed into place, and – not to put too fine a point on it – there’s no sign of the Covid19 pandemic ever going away.
The Permanent Covid scenario is a bizarrely transformative prospect, about a hundred times as radically disruptive of human relations as any “Smart City” or “Internet of Things” project. It substitutes glass screens for shared breath.
If we’ve learned anything from this global pandemic, it’s that digital technology and data are truly critical infrastructure to enable business resiliency and continuity for all governments as they adapt sudden and unexpected changes to “normal” ways of delivering services. With a digital transformation journey already underway, the Government of Canada was able to swiftly pivot operations to deliver critical citizen services securely while simultaneously transitioning approximately 250,000 Federal Public Servants to remote work. To learn more about how they have adopted these changes in the delivery of services, register for Forward 50 (FWD50), taking place virtually November 3 to 9.
Over the past few months, we have seen incredible stories of resilience and adaptation from governments from coast to coast, that is only possible when you approach challenges with a growth mindset. We are working with them to provide the technology and infrastructure needed to enable remote government access, empower cross-agency collaboration, and deliver trusted secure services for this accelerated digital transformation. Although the task was daunting, critical services remained accessible to both government employees and Canadians, all without sacrificing security or productivity.
The National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), in collaboration with the Innovation, Science, and Economic Development (ISED)’s Innovative Solutions Canada (ISC) program, launched a challenge to Canadian subject matter experts (SMEs) for great new ideas to address COVID-19 needs in areas like diagnostics and testing, patient monitoring and tracking, sanitization and personal protective equipment. This required the development of a new online application portal, through which SMEs could register their technology to assist Canada’s COVID‑19 response. By using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform cloud solutions, the NRC was able to quickly create a new simplistic online portal that allowed Canadian SMEs to submit their proposed solutions in record speed. On April 22, 2020, the application portal went live – only five days after the program was officially announced. By the week of May 11, 2020, contracts were being put in place with recipients and first deposits were made.
In the healthcare sector, the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information moved nearly 4,000 healthcare workers to an Azure Virtual Desktop Environment and Microsoft Teams within five days. This provided their teams with a secure centralized repository for all COVID-19-related guidance, data, and information. Healthcare workers were able to screen patients for COVID-19 virtually, and their supply chain department can now order supplies remotely to ensure frontline workers have the resources they need to stay safe.
Nunavut is 2 million square kilometers and home to 38,000 people in 25 communities across three time zones. With a population as spread out and remote as this, communications, technology, and access to government services are critical. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Government of Nunavut leveraged the cloud to execute three years of digital transformation plans in just three weeks. Public sector employees in Nunavut are providing citizens with improved and expanded secure access to critical services….
Anarcho-spaceist. Utopian ideological goal of getting to be a spacefaring species by mildly-leftie-ancap means. Some superposition of Le Guin and Iain M. Banks. Earth as Urras and Mars as Anarres, with the very GSV, named Left Hand of the Compliment, orbiting between them.
Anarcho-spaceist. Utopian ideological goal of getting to be a spacefaring species by mildly-leftie-ancap means. Some superposition of Le Guin and Iain M. Banks. Earth as Urras and Mars as Anarres, with the very GSV, named Left Hand of the Compliment, orbiting between them.
“There are two important implications that I want to bring out as a conclusion to this chapter (and book). The first is that nonconscious cognition, far from being fundamentally alien to how human think, is in fact crucial to human cognition,…”
— Hayles, N. Katherine.Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Zoom net revenue is up 3250% year on year and they’re bigger than Exxon Mobile now. I guess they’ve decided that they’re also big enough that they get to have a fascist foreign policy too. https://t.co/4bKxpec1Ln
Zoom net revenue is up 3250% year on year and they’re bigger than Exxon Mobile now. I guess they’ve decided that they’re also big enough that they get to have a fascist foreign policy too. https://t.co/4bKxpec1Ln
In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law, including Section 1201, while felonizes the distribution of tools to bypass “access controls” (AKA DRM).
Practically speaking, that means if your printer cartridge has a digital lock that stops you from refilling it, then anyone who makes a tool to unfuck your printer risks a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.
DMCA 1201 is an unmitigated disaster. Companies use this law to force you to sideline your own interests and instead conduct yourself to the sole benefit of their shareholders.
All they need to do is design the product so that using it your way means breaking DRM and your way becomes a literal felony: from repair to security audits, from consumables to parts, from apps to features.
DRM has proliferated as a means of enforcing shareholder preferences in your own home.
When DMCA1201 passed, Congress charged the US Copyright Office with holding hearings every three years to uncover potential problems with this very problematic law.
At these “triennials,” people whose legitimate activities have been undermined by DRM can go before a committee of Copyright Office lawyers and beg for the right to use their stuff their way.
To its credit, the Copyright Office has granted many exemptions over the years despite objections from big entertainment and tech companies. But these exemptions are only for “uses” and not “tools.”
When the Copyright Office grants archivists the rights to bypass DRM to preserve media, it can’t authorize anyone to give those archivists a tool to accomplish this use.
Or an exemption for visually impaired people to bypass DRM on ebooks so they can be used with screenreaders, Braille printers or text-to-speech: this permits each blind person to find and exploit defects in ebook DRM, but not to help one another, or get help from others.
There are instances in which a use exemption does some good: for example, if you want to make interoperable diagnostic tools for cars, a use exemption lets you bypass the engine’s DRM to learn what the error codes mean, and then build a tool that interprets them for others.
And many archivists are comfortable with sourcing underground tools to bypass DRM once they know they can legally use those tools.
But for the most part, the best thing we can say about use exemptions is they force the US government to document the defects in DMCA 1201.
The DMCA has a 22 year track record, and it’s uniformly terrible, and getting worse - DMCA 1201 is how Medtronic is preventing independent hospital technicians from repairing their ventilators, RIGHT NOW, during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Documenting the law’s defects is more urgent than ever, especially as competition regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are investigating the ways that DRM creates and reinforces monopolies.
And you can help!
In 2021, the Copyright Office will once again consider petitions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, and @EFF is looking for your stories to help us craft our slate of proposed new exemptions.
attempted or planned to repair, modify, or diagnose a product with a software component; and
encountered DRM that prevented completing the modification, repair, or diagnosis
—we want to hear from you!
“Please email us at RightToMod-2021@eff.org with the information listed below, and we’ll curate the stories we receive so we can present the most relevant ones alongside our arguments to the Copyright Office.”
There is a game called Blaseballthat started online in summer 2020. Gameplay is both entirely straightforward and profoundly confusing - a rulebook is now available, but is almost completely redacted, and what is left is ominous. Players have names like “Jessica Telephone” and “Jaylen Hotdogfingers” and keep getting incinerated, and weather effects can include “Black Hole” or “Lots of Birds”. There are no graphics, unless you count a few simple icons and emoji.
And the teams, which each come with their own little emoji logo, are odd. There are reasonable names like:
🦀 Baltimore Crabs
🔥Chicago Firefighters
but also disconcerting teams like:
👟Charleston Shoe Thieves
🍬 Kansas City Breath Mints
Teams are not limited to the US, nor, apparently, need they be cities. There’s:
🗣️ Canada Moist Talkers
🍗 Mexico City Wild Wings
🐅Hades Tigers
🌞 Hellmouth Sunbeams
(Again, these are the ones that as far as I know are generated by humans). So, heedless of the possible consequences, I gave the existing list of 20 teams to GPT-3, a neural network trained on a dataset that includes most of the internet - at least, the internet as it was in October 2019. That version of the internet never knew Blaseball. With absolutely no idea what it was doing, or what any of this means, the AI predicted that, given the list of 20 existing teams, the set of teams likely to follow include the following:
[very cursed font: Deep Script 2, generated by a neural network]
I didn’t include ALL of the AI’s suggested teams. For example, the San Francisco Scrotums and the Daytona Suppositories were eliminated from the short list. And although the AI generated emojis to go with each team, I decided to substitute the skunk emoji for the poo emoji it had originally chosen for the Venus Skunks, and the grasshopper emoji for the ant emoji it chose for the Syracuse Locusts. The skunk and the grasshopper were only introduced in 2019, and hadn’t spread to much of the internet by the time GPT-3 was trained.
But, again, the AI had also never heard of Blaseball. Although it would add a few teams at a time to the existing list, it would often stop adding teams and start writing stories. Such as the story of the four Lone Wolf Kids and the Ravenwood School’s portal (they like texting and taking selfies!). Or the story of Rachel, wandering near Blister Creek, contemplating the mysterious illness that has Marked her (the doctors say it’s “normal”).
The AI also switched directly from generating teams to generating this magnificent table of contents, and had even started the first chapter before it was stopped:
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Light, Act I
1. Glints and Glitters
2. Behemoth’s Shiny Buttocks
3. Wooden Caskets
4. Howler Express
5. Flawless Coordination
6. Three Men and a Flask
7. A Gruesome Gift
8. Laughs Galore
9. Splintered Wood and a Glowing Jaw
10. Leeches and Moonflowers
11. Sword Sister
12. The Dog Park
13. Glitter and Gilding
14. The Unlightful Light
15. All Things in Their Place
16. Infuriating Smartness
17. The Reestablishment
18. Friend or Foe
19. Horrible Stories
20. High-Pressure Charms
21. Breaking In and Breaking Useful
22. One Step Forward, One Stomp Back
23. Dangling Down
24. Unanticipated-but-No-Longer-Unwelcome
25. Ring of Outrageous Grenades
26. Vicious Spreads of Snakes and Skeletons
27. Full Circle
Author’s Note
1 Glints and Glitters
TRISTAN PUT THE CORK BACK INTO THE FIZZY LIGHTNING CANNISTER HE’D GOTTEN off a random Galactic Warrior, then lobbed it between the battling monsters. Nearby, as the fizzing mist curled out into the monstrous puffs over the sewer, a surprised whisper sounded, “My! A parachute!” Could it really be that simple? Tristan passed a hand down his face to relive the blistering feeling of exultation that had no doubt brightened his features.
GPT-3 has seen a lot of fanfic online, so I guess that’s where all this is coming from? question mark? Had I given it existing team names, it would have generated more existing names, but with a weird input like the blaseball teams, it went careening off into fictional universes.
If you want to read the stories of the Lone Wolf Kids, of Rachel, and some terrible fiction about warriors battling a cordyceps, check out the bonus post!
It’s like Dunning-Krueger meets Brooks’ “Second System Effect” (from software engineering) meets the aviation experience “killing zone”. Early success leading to premature loss of humility.
@BiellaColeman It’s like Dunning-Krueger meets Brooks’ “Second System Effect” (from software engineering) meets the aviation experience “killing zone”. Early success leading to premature loss of humility.
i’ve run a bunch of scenarios on https://t.co/IW212608yy and it seems like the most effective things are:
1. wear an n95 mask
2. don’t shout at each other
3. spend as little time as possible in crowded or unventilated places
4. don’t hang out with people who have COVID pic.twitter.com/5iARP5RnEJ
i’ve run a bunch of scenarios on https://t.co/IW212608yy and it seems like the most effective things are: 1. wear an n95 mask 2. don’t shout at each other 3. spend as little time as possible in crowded or unventilated places 4. don’t hang out with people who have COVID https://t.co/5iARP5RnEJ
Cestum jellies are shaped like gliders, with a central cockpit-like mouth flanked by two huge wings. On each wing, countless cell hairs flap back and forth to propel the jelly forward, creating a shimmery prism of rainbow color. When the jellies are feeding, rather than migrating to or from the ocean’s depths, these moving wings create a wake that buffets and frightens would-be prey, such as small shrimp-like copepods
Anybody have any idea what the point of modern life might be? I mean beyond the stress, poor health, ecological catastrophes, social isolation, economic collapse, and lack of meaningful work or overall purpose.
Anybody have any idea what the point of modern life might be? I mean beyond the stress, poor health, ecological catastrophes, social isolation, economic collapse, and lack of meaningful work or overall purpose.
’[W]hat stands in the way of solving the problem of consciousness is the impossibility of interpreting or defining it in terms of its causal relations to physical/biological properties.’
’[W]hat stands in the way of solving the problem of consciousness is the impossibility of interpreting or defining it in terms of its causal relations to physical/biological properties.’ – Jaegwon #Kim (2001/5 – image: Pollock) https://t.co/lh7m9pB2qH
This is very interesting approach, from Belgium, which I had not discovered before: anti-enclosure, pro-commons local movements, active in the fight to preserve endangered common resources: https://t.co/dejfrGWaya
This is very interesting approach, from Belgium, which I had not discovered before: anti-enclosure, pro-commons local movements, active in the fight to preserve endangered common resources:https://t.co/dejfrGWaya
Acoustic cartography: the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is running a “soundscapes” competition to develop tools for “using non-speech ambient sound” to determine a sound’s origin at “a particular point somewhere on Earth.” https://t.co/cb5r46hoYZ
watcha doin’? just replacing Facebook with quantum-encrypted co-operatively owned open source social networks issuing carbon coins to be invested in biosphere-friendly projects by a planetary group mind; also serving as a safe harbour for when everyone leaves for-profit banks https://t.co/m0S2ErSUoS
just replacing Facebook with quantum-encrypted co-operatively owned open source social networks issuing carbon coins to be invested in biosphere-friendly projects by a planetary group mind; also serving as a safe harbour for when everyone leaves for-profit banks pic.twitter.com/m0S2ErSUoS
Today was the last Marine Zoönomy series! Every Friday for the last 3 weeks @KlaasJK and I have worked with participants in sessions thinking through a scenario in which obsolete fossil fuel infrastructures are re-used as hubs for regenerative aquaculture and renewable energy. https://t.co/oCQZqfXolA
Today was the last Marine Zoönomy series! Every Friday for the last 3 weeks @KlaasJK and I have worked with participants in sessions thinking through a scenario in which obsolete fossil fuel infrastructures are re-used as hubs for regenerative aquaculture and renewable energy. pic.twitter.com/oCQZqfXolA
Zoom shuts down an NYU academic event on zoom censorship. Facebook asks NYU researchers to stop doing research on political ads. NYU’s response will be interesting to see how even powerful universities can struggle to maintain institutional autonomy vis a vis tech companies. https://t.co/5BXKW4MxW2
Zoom shuts down an NYU academic event on zoom censorship. Facebook asks NYU researchers to stop doing research on political ads. NYU’s response will be interesting to see how even powerful universities can struggle to maintain institutional autonomy vis a vis tech companies. https://t.co/5BXKW4MxW2
long-term thinking makes people unhappy because it almost necessarily means they’re thinking about big problems the only future thing you can be fairly sure about is that the big problems of today won’t go away miraculously and will last as long as you expect, probably longer
long-term thinking makes people unhappy because it almost necessarily means they’re thinking about big problems
the only future thing you can be fairly sure about is that the big problems of today won’t go away miraculously and will last as long as you expect, probably longer
@doesnotexist No. Consumers don’t have meaningful power. Humans aren’t ambulatory wallets. Citizens have power. Join a movement. Nothing you do individually will make an appreciable difference. This is a collective action problem.
No. Consumers don’t have meaningful power. Humans aren’t ambulatory wallets. Citizens have power. Join a movement. Nothing you do individually will make an appreciable difference. This is a collective action problem.
