Here’s one of my favorite keyboards, which I made in July of 2021. This is the
Clock Keyboard.
The way it works is that it is a clock (not the analog one on screen, that’s just for show for the video), and it has one button. The button types the key that it’s currently time for.
And what key it’s time for is determined by the minutes of the current time:
At 0 minutes past the hour, it types an “a”.
1 minute later, a “b”.
and so on.
Typing “Hello World!” into twitter took 5 hours and 24 minutes.
At the risk of ruining it, I’m going to deconstruct this excellent joke and use it as a lens through which to look at the state of life, the universe, and everything.
Taleb of course, is being his usual obnoxious self, performing Levantine identity in a way that has perhaps single-handedly turned me off ever being a Levantophile, over the decades he’s been doing it. That’s just Taleb being Taleb, and he’s old and beyond reform. Sadly, most people the world over perform their cultural identities this way. Though rarely with such relentless thin-skinnedness, and to such a global audience.
Sosna’s reply also performs identity, Slavic in this case, but in exactly the opposite way — self-deprecating (the stupidity of joyless drinking), emphasizing a universally resonant sentiment (life is pain) via a globally familiar motif (the potato). The vodka-vs-wine subtext is only gestured at, not centered. This is a reply that makes me want to be a Slavophile.
Of course, given that both the Levant and the Slavic world are being torn apart by really ugly wars right now makes being either a Levantophile or a Slavophile something of an armchair aspiration at the moment.
In the grim darkness of the unevenly distributed future, there is only potato.
I’m Not Afraid of AI Overlords— I’m Afraid of Whoever’s Training Them To Think That Way
by Damien P. Williams
I want to let you in on a secret: According to Silicon Valley’s AI’s, I’m not human.
Well, maybe they think I’m human, but they don’t think I’m me. Or, if they think I’m me and that I’m human, they think I don’t deserve expensive medical care. Or that I pose a higher risk of criminal recidivism. Or that my fidgeting behaviours or culturally-perpetuated shame about my living situation or my race mean I’m more likely to be cheating on a test. Or that I want to see morally repugnant posts that my friends have commented on to call morally repugnant. Or that I shouldn’t be given a home loan or a job interview or the benefits I need to stay alive.
Now, to be clear, “AI” is a misnomer, for several reasons, but we don’t have time, here, to really dig into all the thorny discussion of values and beliefs about what it means to think, or to be a mind— especially because we need to take our time talking about why values and beliefs matter to conversations about “AI,” at all. So instead of “AI,” let’s talk specifically about algorithms, and machine learning.
Machine Learning (ML) is the name for a set of techniques for systematically reinforcing patterns, expectations, and desired outcomes in various computer systems. These techniques allow those systems to make sought after predictions based on the datasets they’re trained on. ML systems learn the patterns in these datasets and then extrapolate them to model a range of statistical likelihoods of future outcomes.
Algorithms are sets of instructions which, when run, perform functions such as searching, matching, sorting, and feeding the outputs of any of those processes back in on themselves, so that a system can learn from and refine itself. This feedback loop is what allows algorithmic machine learning systems to provide carefully curated search responses or newsfeed arrangements or facial recognition results to consumers like me and you and your friends and family and the police and the military. And while there are many different types of algorithms which can be used for the above purposes, they all remain sets of encoded instructions to perform a function.
And so, in these systems’ defense, it’s no surprise that they think the way they do: That’s exactly how we’ve told them to think.
[Image of Michael Emerson as Harold Finch, in season 2, episode 1 of the show Person of Interest, “The Contingency.” His face is framed by a box of dashed yellow lines, the words “Admin” to the top right, and “Day 1” in the lower right corner.]
With Robinhood, “you’re able to put it on your homescreen and flip between Instagram and Snapchat; it doesn’t feel as serious as it used to,” he said. “It’s just an app you open up on your phone, there’s graphs, and numbers, and it’s easy to understand and learn really quickly.”
Many young users on the WallStreetBets forums have complained that no matter what they do, the deck is always stacked against them. Many say they seek to expose the entire financial system for the game that it is. Meme stocks are part of that. Some will hype up a novelty stock or trade it as a stunt.
