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Imitating or implementing?
This morning while walking home from the store I passed a neighbor who was taking out the trash. She called out and I responded in exactly the same notes and then I heard a THIRD voice singing the same notes in the same rhythm. It was a bird, who had undoubtedly been singing those notes…
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Good old seven-second rule
A couple days ago we had an unexpected power outage. There was no weather at the time. Calm, cool, drizzly. The outage affected a fairly large section of town and lasted only two hours. Never learned what caused it. Perhaps a car crashing into a pole? Fried squirrel? During the outage I got out my…
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AI does anatomy
Meanwhile, back at the CookingFlavr ranch: How Do Lacrimal Glands Make Tears? Lacrimal glands are in the lower jaw and produce tears. They secrete a mixture of water and Tears of Sneeze. When the eye feels a tear, the lacrimal glands release a hormone called oxytocin. This hormone makes the eyes water and Tears of…
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Statistically related
This piece by Gary Smith is intimately related to previous item about Weizenbaum. Smith has been doing his own experiments with AI conversations, and has concluded correctly that computers aren’t rational. He carefully distinguishes rational from logical, just as Weizenbaum and Arendt did. Smith cites several of Weizenbaum’s contemporaries who reached the opposite conclusion. In…
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Nobody listened
Google is having trouble with one of its AI programmers who decided that the conversational AI he was developing had become human. As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange,…
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Ultimately it doesn’t matter
For a long time I’ve been observing the Bitcoin Balance. Among influencers, the bitcoin realists are ferociously anti-realist on all other topics. The realists about most topics are enthusiastically selling bitcoin. Sometimes I find it hard to maintain realism about bitcoin. The anti-coiners are solidly and screechily Woke, following all ESG and WEF ideologies. Do…
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Already did it
Watching idiots lose their money is fun. Non-idiots are joining in various forums with various ways of indicating the fun. It occurred to me that there should be a special food or beverage for idiot-watching. Popcorn is too generic. Oh. I already had this idea, and already illustrated it! Reprint from last year on the…
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Real work vs abstract “work”
One of the many simultaneous and delicious collapses in the bitcoin/NFT world: After playing up how Axie Infinity had “created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Philippines” and other locations where salaries are low, Axie Infinity has crumbled. Some players had quit their traditional jobs to become full-time Axie players, and for a few…
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Borodin in Bitcoin
Back when I was listening to shortwave, I noticed that Radio Moscow had a habit of switching to heavy classical music like Borodin and Khachaturian when the regime was in turmoil. I called it the Borodin Effect and began noticing it in other situations. When the media’s script doesn’t have a Correct Line for an…
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Heartland of sanity
I’ve often highlighted the uniqueness of Enid. It has always produced more creative and unusually sane people than you’d expect from an isolated agricultural and industrial city of 50k population. Here’s another example. Enid Buzz received an old Kodak snapshot from one of its readers, who was on the ship when Apollo 11 was successfully…
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Is this also related?
The shutoff of the QE faucet has an obvious and mechanical effect on stock crime and bitcoin crime. All frivolous nonsense is collapsing, which means the ENTIRE bitcoin nonsense is imploding. I wonder if a more subtle collapse is also related. When money is free to the Correct People, the Correct People are free to…
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It’s all in the baseline
MindMatters nicely handles Jeffrey Tucker’s confused and incomplete realization. Tucker admits that information was useless, but he still takes the aristocratic side, treating peasants as dumb cowardly beasts. MindMatters (probably Denyse but not bylined) gives Tucker a healthy kick. I’ve gone through the same process of realization, starting from a different baseline and with a…
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More Snowden crap
A new “leaker” is “exposing” some CIA secrets. What is he exposing? CIA hires hackers. Shockedshockedshocked! As with Snowden and Manning, this is a suspiciously meaningless and informationless “leak”, probably designed to serve some unknown secondary purpose. Snowden “revealed” that NSA monitors everything, which is NSA’s explicit mission and purpose. Manning “revealed” that diplomats negotiate…
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Not new, as fucking usual
This discussion isn’t really my department, but…. Tech tyrants constantly rewrite the real history of tech. And tech history is my department. Meservey, one of the Substack heads, made this comment. NEW BUSINESS MODELS? First, there aren’t any new business models. What we have now is the opposite of business. At best it’s new versions…
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Universal Carborundum
A new upload at American Radio Library opens up a fascinating Road Almost Taken. Carborundum is synonymous with abrasives. The brand is still active, still making a variety of papers and grinding wheels. Needless to say, their original factory in Niagara Falls was closed by EPA, like all factories outside of China. The brand is…
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