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2024-11-12

are we an oral culture?, gambling is evil, cephalopod civilization, consensual mathematics, Vision Pro dropped, wicked porn, leap less, illegal orders, liberal angst kills, Iran disclaims assassins

Worthy

  • Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture

    • You can't look things up easily because we live in a perpetual now -- if you don't understand the context of the discourse, you need to ask someone to catch you up
    • This also makes society very participatory
    • This has weird knock-on effects like needing to always be online to know what's going on in the world - you can't just hermit away and study, at a minimum you're lurking
    • We determine if things are truthfulness through vibes/tribal consensus - there are authorities but they're cults of personality vs. institutions
    • You can't "just learn" things, you need to be in the right networks

  • The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed

    I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive.

    When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports. It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.

    • We was told that gambling is evil. For good reasons.

etc

  • The Arecibo Observatory's 'powerful radiation environment' led to its collapse

  • How a post on Reddit accidentally kickstarted the revival of Angus Steakhouse

  • The Silurian Hypothesis: It was the Cephalopods

    The first level is the Neolithic stage, reached by a species of cephalopod eons ago. Reaching “only” the Neolithic stage could be described as a “Silurian hypothesis light”; it’s not highly significant achievement for a species, and even such a species can significantly turn over the planet’s fauna. Even our hunter-gathering (Paleolithic) ancestors hunted a number of large animal species to extinction (you don’t have to kill every last mammoth or giant bird to do that), and our farming ancestors (before the advent of even the simple most metal tools) caused massive modifications of the fauna and florae of extensive landscapes. Some of these faunal changes might be detectable millions of years into the future.

    I think that the likelihood of squid kings ruling the Jurassic seas or of octopus knights jousting for Mesozoic reef dominance is not high, and there is no support yet in favor of it. As usual, unusual claims need especially strong support, and this support doesn’t exist yet. But the ancient cephalopod civilization is one of the poetic believes I keep for myself to remind myself of my pre-grad student, sci-fi devouring teenage self.

  • The elephant in the room

    Real world events have real consequences, however, and in light of an event as consequential as the last election, a math lecture on contour integration or the central limit theorem may seem meaningless. But there is one precious thing mathematics has, that almost no other field currently enjoys: a consensus on what the ground truth is, and how to reach it. Because of this, even the strongest differences of opinion in mathematics can eventually be resolved, and mistakes realized and corrected. This consensus is so strong, we simply take it for granted: a solution is correct or incorrect, a theorem is proved or not proved, and when a problem is solved, we simply move on to the next one. This is, sadly, not a state of affairs elsewhere. But if my students can learn from this and carry these skills— such as distinguishing an overly simple but mathematically flawed “solution” from a more complex, but accurate actual solution—to other spheres that have more contact with the real world, then my math lectures have consequence. Even—or perhaps, especially—in times like these.

    • Truth is not defined as consensus. When your field decides to move away from reality, as so many have, do you stay with the tribe or with the real?

  • Uranus Might Have Experienced a Freak Event When Voyager 2 Visited

Horseshit

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

Musk

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • On Pseudo-Galileos and Selective ‘Free Thought’

    We’re in this bizarre situation where the people actually challenging norms—trans people, queer folks, anyone even slightly outside the “normal” box—are the ones facing down all the backlash. They’re the ones putting themselves on the line to expand how we see each other, pushing for a future that doesn’t have a place in the tech intellectuals’ flowcharts. They’re doing what Galileo actually did: they’re making everyone uncomfortable by suggesting, hey, maybe our understanding of reality isn’t complete yet, maybe there’s more to the universe than a rigid little belief system. Meanwhile, tech’s rationalist LARPers just keep clutching their pearls, citing “immutable truths” like they’re reading off a papal decree. They claim to be free thinkers, but they’re really just defending the same boring old hierarchy in slightly shinier packaging.

  • Is God a Silverback? Protective, omnipotent, scary and very territorial.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

  • How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom - Ars Technica

    Neural networks had delivered some impressive results in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But then progress stalled. By 2008, many researchers had moved on to mathematically elegant approaches such as support vector machines. I didn’t know it at the time, but a team at Princeton—in the same computer science building where I was attending lectures—was working on a project that would upend the conventional wisdom and demonstrate the power of neural networks. That team, led by Prof. Fei-Fei Li, wasn’t working on a better version of neural networks. They were hardly thinking about neural networks at all. Li tells the story of ImageNet in her recent memoir, The Worlds I See. As she worked on the project, she faced plenty of skepticism from friends and colleagues. “I think you’ve taken this idea way too far,” a mentor told her a few months into the project in 2007. “The trick is to grow with your field. Not to leap so far ahead of it.”

    • the person who said to "Not leap ahead" earned a smack, not respect and certainly not compliance.

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

  • A look at his opening moves in the White House.

  • Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders | CNN Politics

    Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN. Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

    Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back. “Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?” It’s unclear at this point who Trump will choose to lead the Pentagon, though officials believe Trump and his team will try to avoid the kind of “hostile” relationship he had with the military during his last administration, said a former defense official with experience during the first Trump administration. “The relationship between the White House and the DoD was really, really bad, and so … I know it’s top of mind for how they’re going to select the folks that they put in DoD this time around,” the former official said.

    • Why would the plan be any different than if Biden issues illegal orders?

  • Day One: Fire Them All - by Erick-Woods Erickson

  • If Trump Tries to Fire Powell, Fed Chair Is Ready for a Legal Fight

  • Trump beefs up security with robot dog seen patrolling Mar-a-Lago estate

Democrats / Biden Inc

Left Angst

  • America's New Power Couple

    Then there's Tesla. Everyone’s still talking about Teslas saving the environment. Yeah, sure. But let’s be real: Tesla is the new poster child for Trump’s “America First” ideology. The government’s pouring cash into electric cars, and Musk is raking it in. Who needs “environmentalism” when you can call it patriotism and get billion-dollar subsidies, right? But the real plot twist? SpaceX. Musk doesn’t just launch rockets for fun; he owns Starlink, an entire internet network in the sky. Right now, it’s about “global connectivity,” but picture this: Trump says jump, Musk says “How high?” Boom. Starlink starts cutting out countries left and right. Who gets to have internet and who doesn’t? Whoever’s willing to play ball with the Trump-Musk duo. We’re looking at a new era of global “democracy,” as defined by a billionaire with a space hobby and a President who loves the sound of his own voice. Trump and Musk aren’t just changing America—they’re building a power play that could rewire the entire world. Free speech, clean energy, global internet access? Sure, as long as it comes with a Musk-Trump seal of approval.

  • Who Would Support Deploying the Military to Domestic Protests?

    In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, warned of violence by “radical left lunatics” around Election Day. Both have said that, if necessary, uniformed military forces should be deployed to contain Democratic protesters, whom Trump referred to as “the enemy within.” When the former president has made these threats in the past—most notably during the racial justice protests during summer 2020—national security professionals and scholars raised two major concerns. First, the military could be used selectively against domestic opponents. If a president can deploy military forces to suppress protests by members of other political parties while tolerating those by co-partisans, it threatens democratic expression and turns the military into a tool of domestic politics.

  • Exit Right. Trump has remade Americans, defeating him requires doing the same

    Although on the surface MAGA is nostalgic, Trump’s movement has been immensely historically generative: creating new modes of political expression, opening new arenas of policymaking: mass deportation, anti-trans assaults, vaccine skepticism. This is why it is so destructive. On the contrary, it is the Democratic leadership that is engaged in a backward-looking project. Only through restorationism can the party balance its competing commitments to social and economic justice and capitalist growth. It seeks to recapture a lost past in which these goals accommodated each other, and it suppresses any positive vision of the future that might require deciding internal tensions. Just consider the way that Biden and Harris both have championed reforms that everyone knows cannot be accomplished without abolition of the filibuster and reform of the federal court system, which they are both hesitant to contemplate, occasionally entertaining narrowly tailored, self-limited reforms. Such an effort, if undertaken more generally, would necessitate a wider critique of American society and the undemocratic institutions that define it—a critique at odds with an image of an America that is “already great.” Despite their various discrete policy goals, Democrats thus prove unable to tell a clear story about what those goals mean, how they fit together, and how we might get there; they can only insist that they are not Trump—and even this is no longer quite true.

    If the solution were so simple as a frontal attack by forming a third party, we’d have accomplished it already. One thing that is clear, however, is that the appetite of liberal institutions for joining “the resistance” is much diminished from eight years ago. In one sense, this is frightening: the actual resistance will be smaller, more isolated and exposed, as powerful actors in our society tacitly defect to the fascist cause. Indeed, they already have begun to do so, validating Trump’s politics while declaiming his manners, which was exactly how Trump won again. Liberal corporations, the press, the universities—institutions that deplore Trump in name—have shifted in recent years toward carrying out elements of his program in miniature, seemingly uncoerced. On the other hand, our role in defending the values once claimed by our employers, representatives, and self-appointed spokespeople will become harder to mistake or avoid. As Brecht also observed, “those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat.” To tell the truth instead is not in itself a solution, but it is the necessary, and only possible, first step.

  • A new era. America's tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power

  • Taylor Swift fans are leaving X for Bluesky after Trump's election

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

  • Iran denies DOJ report of involvement in plot to assassinate Trump | Fox News

    On Saturday, spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei "categorically dismissed allegations that Iran was involved in attempts to assassinate former and current US officials," according to the foreign ministry. Baghaei, who described the report as "completely baseless and rejected," said Iran has been accused of similar scenarios in the past that have been "firmly denied and proven false." He said that repeating these types of claims "is a malicious conspiracy orchestrated by Zionist and anti-Iranian circles, aimed at further complicating the issues between the US and Iran."

World

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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