They did the mash They did the Mongrel Mash They did the mash It was a dog pound smash They did the mash It caught on like a rash They did the mash They did the Mongrel Mash
President Donald Trump's criticism came a day after Cracker Barrel told customers the company could have better handled its controversial logo rebranding.
It is easy for a ruthless regime to pick off individuals, companies and organizations one by one and make them bend their knees.
Expecting them to defy the fascists on their own is a bit naive and unrealistic on our part. We are are in a very dark situation. We seem to have no master plan (they do). We are still reacting to daily events rather than anticipating and preparing for them.
Much as I loathe everything MAGA, the old logo had personality and the new one was bland, so it was probably for the best that they dumped the redesign. I would rather see Trump crowing about this "win" than about all his other frightening crap.
Cracker Barrel, hours after President Trump called for the restaurant chain to return to its old logo, relents and announces: "Our new logo is going away and our 'Old Timer' will remain." crackerbarrel.com/allthemore
No reason to check this store out if I ever run into one then.
What did they even sell anyway? Sourdough hooch or something?
The Universe changed a stupid logo change into massive publicity such that it got my attention and I thought, "Huh, I don't know who the hell these people are but I may have to check that out someday." They chose irrelevance instead.
Welp. I wish they had, like, talked with him for an hour or two about it and distracted him from other people. But maybe people can flood his feed with how grateful they are to him and distract him that way? (No, I can't.)
Seems like a softball win for TFG. Out of the blue a conservative favored brand made a silly branding decision and TFG got to express himself and the fake change goes away.
Tells me a whole lot more than that about them. They've drawn their line in the sand and told those on the other side they're willing to kill them to ensure the world is more populated with those who think like them.
Johnny is a joker (He's a bird) A very funny joker (He's a bird) But when he jokes my honey (He's a dog) His jokin' ain't so funny (What a dog) Johnny is a joker that's a-tryin' to steal my baby (He's a bird dog)
The biggest trick the (far) right pulled off is to convince many people that anti-fascism is politically left. It isn't. Anti-fascism is a politically neutral, foundational requirement for any non-fascist society. Yes, you can be conservative AND anti-fascist. You should be. That is the bare minimum. If you are conservative and do not loudly oppose fascism, you are almost a fascist yourself. Simple, innit?
You're rebranding Conservatism in a way that suits you, instead of what e.g. Paxton shows in his The Anatomy of Fascism: Conservatism is the grand enabler of fascism.
If EUropeans were (properly) taught in schools or had proper cultural references/pop culture about their common past not passed through the Hollywood filter, perhaps one look at Konrad Adenauer or Alcide De Gasperi's wikipedia portraits would be enough. "You know who really fucking hated nazis? This guy. Does THIS guy look like a hippy to you?"
@davey_cakes @clintruin idc because he's not relevant to us. I was talking about *EU*ropeans and the need to de-hollywoodise our understanding of how our Union started for a reason. Anglos are the main characters in enough Hollywood films but no longer any kind of characters in our Union.
@zbrown @davey_cakes @clintruin The Council of Europe doesn't count. If we ever have the kind of EU-wide civics ed we need, he'd be a footnote. Perhaps older students can then get into details of how the Brits later pushed the Council of Europe in an attempt to sabotage the actual proto-EU, but that's advanced studies.
@Veza85UE @davey_cakes @clintruin the literal EU themselves cite Churchill, the Council of Europe pre-dates the EU, and what harm is the Council of Europe supposed to have done exactly? Provide a flag for the EU? Moderately effective enforcement of human rights that has improved the lives of millions?
Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung frei zu äußern. Das inkludiert das Recht, von diesem Recht keinen Gebrauch zu machen.
Natürlich ist mir jeder lieb, der sich entsprechend äußert.
Aber es ist sehr wichtig, dass dieses Recht, sich eben nicht zu äußern, absolut respektiert wird. Warum? Das wirst du sehen, wenn die Faschisten dran sind und sich nicht äußern oder pro forma positionieren verdächtig wird. Und das ist leider kein exklusives Rechte-Dings.
so you're saying that the only way for conservatives to not be labeled as fascists is to loudly support anti-fascism. Does that apply to other groups as well or are you targeting conservatives specifically?
@biscuit_overlord No targeting here, except: if you declare yourself to be not „anti-fascist“, then you are, by definition, fascist and should be excluded from the political debate. This is the tolerance paradox: you are entitled to any opinion unless you hold the opinion to abolish any other opinion. It is on display in the news daily, right now.
@axeln my point is that OP stated that being a conservative doesn't mean being a fascist, and yet only states that conservatives must loudly reject fascism in order not to be labeled as fascists themselves, but why only conservatives? Also, we're losing sight of the real problem here. Everyone is fixated on what Trump's doing, but he's not the problem. The problem is that millions of people voted for him. If I remember correctly he won the popular vote. That's the real problem.
This is the same game as convincing STUPID that WOKE is bad. It involves fundamentally misrepresenting, redefining what a good word means changing it into something evil that appeals to the target audience for political advantage. And it can’t be over emphasized how important STUPID and self-serving is in this equation. Anti-democracy power struggle? The capitalism end game? Keeping stupid guessing? It all seems related. 🤔
Which raises questions... were the Republicans always like this and we just didn't want to believe it? Remember the McCarthy era description of people the right accused of being communists as "Premature Anti-Fascists"?
@axeln similar parties are popping up all over europe, hence my point that Trump (or any other politician) is not the problem, just a consequence. The question to ponder is why do so many people feel voting for them is their best choice?
This is a bad take in my opinion, since it has nothing to do with propaganda tricks. Conservatives will always be much closer to fascists than anti-fascists, because they value capital and private property way more than they value individual rights and freedoms.
@JakeKb Property is an individual right without which all other liberal freedoms can't survive; because the opposite of private property is statism.
The idea that fascists value private property contradicts history. Germany's Nazis, Italy's fascists and others, such as Romania's Iron Guard were considering themselves socialists and had strong, virulent criticism of capitalism.
“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” — Mussolini
@alexelcu @JakeKb I give you a little benefit of doubt here that you simply don't know.
Nazi criticism of capitalism was not socialist, but a fundamentally bastardized version. I can recommend you the excellent essay "National socialism and antisemitism" by Moishe Postone.
Basically, Nazis said that capitalism had two distinct spheres. They criticized the abstract, Jewish, profit-driven, international, artificial finance capital and tried to eradicate their human representatives. They loved the concrete, natural, industrial, manufacturing capital, so they cooperated with that capital, crushed worker organization and provided slaves.
The German Reich was no worker's paradise nor a worker's state.
And by the way, there is no private property without a state.
@skaphle Since 18th century, socialism was understood as social and political reforms advanced by the state in order to improve life for citizens. Only later, after the advent of Marxism, it began to mean social ownership of the means of production.
You have no capitalism without a free market. Oligarchies are not capitalism. Yes, you need a state, regulations to keep market free and taxing of externalities. Which is why it's in the centre of political spectrum.
@alexelcu @JakeKb Are you talking about a specific country? Can you name concrete examples about the "center" of the political spectrum?
The countries I'm most familiar with are Germany and the US. The US is a two-party system oligarchy that refuses to keep the market free of monopolies and to price in climate and health externalities. In Germany, the center is the social democrat party, spineless bureaucrats who refuse to price in climate externalities, which gets worse further right. Revolving doors between parties and industry are common. White-collar crime is tolerated to the tune of 100 billion Euros a year.
@skaphle I know, but there are examples of externalities being taxed, such as land use or water consumption.
Taxing greenhouse gas emissions is hard as it shakes society, making people poorer (for now). We rock the boat enough, we get populism & fascism, e.g., AfD in Germany, or Trumpism.
We may not have time for incremental reforms, but the alternative may be society tearing itself apart. This is Edmund Burke's conservatism 🙃
@skaphle The centre in western society is (classic?) liberalism on which our democracy and capitalism are based. Political ideologies that respect liberal values and want gradual reforms instead of revolution are close to the centre.
For example, Trump's administration does not seem at the centre to me, and the Republicans, realigned for Trumpism, seem to be going against Anglophone conservatism. I hope US citizens see the danger in what's happening right now.
@alexelcu @skaphle @alexelcu Every post you made proves my point. In your posts you tried to equate nazism with socialism, which indirectly legitimizes nazism and discredits many antifa groups that defend their communities against nazis and would identify as socialists. You also supported neoliberal policies that widen the wealth gap and create an environment where fascism can grow. Liberals and centrists like you will always enable fascism in the end, even if unwillingly.
@alexelcu @skaphle Sadly, I don't think he is a troll. Many people have the delusion that they are resisting fascism by staying in the middle and both siding. People who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
@biscuit_overlord The other side is of course doing the same, that is the whole point of the fascist take over. The main struggle today is not left vs right, but fascist vs anti-fascist. See eg Liz Cheney, John Bolton. They are not left in any conceivable meaning. Of course, people should be allowed to vote. But it should not be possible to vote for fascism, ie it should not be possible to vote for the abolishing of voting.
@biscuit_overlord Yes, I agree. And exactly because of that, it becomes more important than ever to exclude the fascists from political discourse to allow for that answer to be found. If you allow the vote for the (fake) easy way out, how can the actual hard solutions compete?
@axeln do you really think that's a solution? What's stopping the other side from doing the same? Also, I'm confused. what do you mean by allowing to vote for the easy way out? Are you saying people shouldn't be allowed to vote?
growing up in Portugal in the decades that followed the revolution, antifascist was a word used by the far left (communist) parties. In Spain the word "facha" was used to denounce anyone that was a "nacionalist". I'm a socialist myself but I think it's become a token word to cancel any debate with people from across the aisle.
Sure, #conservatives in liberal democratic societies are anti-fascist. You can't want to conserve parliamentary democracy/monarchy/individual liberty/the constitution and support fascism.
There is the problem however that #fascism is a bit of a slippery term. "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’" Orwelll cautioned. Conservatives do care about law and order and tradition, and some people will call them fascist for doing so.
@axeln and what's stopping people with influence start calling whatever party they don't like fascist to remove them from the board? This is not a solution. People are very susceptible to propaganda, I thought we'd learned that at least by now.
@biscuit_overlord No. I don't want to be forced to accept to "live together" with people that want to overthrow fundamental human rights. Tolerance has limits. Those who act against fundamental human rights have no place in society. @axeln
@axeln also, being unwilling to debate anyone because we're supposed to fight them is not going to solve anything. All it'll do is exacerbate this us vs them feeling. At the end of the day we still have to live together, whether we like it or not.
this is not true. Anti-fascism is inherently left-wing because any serious anti-fascism necessarily includes a rejection of the values that underly fascism: A desire to oppress racial minorities, women, queer people, disabled people and anyone they consider to be lesser.
And unless you want to strip the word "conservative" of all real meaning, any conservative anti-fascism has to be inherently hollow, since conservatism agrees with these underlying values of fascism.
i've had to explain to some people on the right that if they felt attacked when someone said "fuck nazis", it was a them problem, there are actual (sometimes self-described) nazis out there, they don't need to stand in solidarity with them because the left doesn't like them either. Yes, some people on the left will sometimes use the word too easily, and that's a problem, but unless there are hints that it's the case in that particular situation, they shouldn't assume that.
when discussing the kind of people the statements should apply to, they agreed that they were nuts, and didn't share their ideology, they just are not really aware of these people existing and supporting the same politicians as they do, as people will often have rose colored glasses about their political family and ignore the problems. So they think that the left is insane, because it calls the right-wing fascists, they think it's about them, not the actual nazis out there.
the reaction of people to the term "antifascism" is really g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ alarming.
I'm frequently wearing a neutral black t-shirt with "Antifaschist" written in white and a few days ago that triggered an encounter, where a guy reacted with shouting "so you're the opposite of me". People started to be proud of being fascists again 😟
Let's try this: all the isms, ist's, ey's are of no value, we can fight all F'ing day over this faction and that. What is important, is that the government whatever you call it allows for indiviual freedom, compassion and seeking to have equity of all people. Capitalism worked between WWII and mid 70's it was controlled by rule of law so it had limits, when you remove limits is when there are problems.The conservatives of that time were more liberal than many liberals of today.
@RebelGeek99 Sometimes a word gets co-opted and attached to negative connotations. Antifa, short for Anti-fascist is one of these terms. Long ago the right successfully equated Antifa with an imaginary quasi militant left organization and since then use of the term has been subject to this mis-interpretation. Ask a normal suburban left of center person what they think of Antifa, and it will congure images of bomb throwing anarchists. It is too late to fix this.
Absolutely clown shit. Conservatism is the establishment of a permanent underclass, it cannot function without that. Conservatism is the establishment of laws that protect but do not restrict the upper class, and that restrict but do not protect the lower class. Conservatism is the foundation and the root of fascism. Conservatives who claim to be anti fascist are like candy shops that claim to be anti cavity. It’s only plausible deniability because liberals demand that plausibility.
Yes, conservatives are almost fascists. News at eleven.
Maybe a little more serious in the interest of debate, what do you think conservatives are? In my view and experience, conservatives believe in heterosexual marriage family as the basis of society, the right of capital to exploit workers, competition as a natural state, and where people get rights and value via their passport and ethnicity. Those values are adjacent to fascist values, which are essentially the same but in overdrive and antithetical to left values of free expression of love, worker organization, solidarity and universal human rights and equality.
Studies have shown over and over again that the best anti-fascist policy is investment in public services and social security, and conservatives hate that too.
the problem is you can't be anti-fascist and racist, anti-fascist and *phobic, because fascism relies on the fearmongering and hate of a scapegoated collective to advance their agenda (or other non-egalitarian mechanisms). If you are not *phobic, the left has a much easier chance to resonate with you, whereas conservativism, which in the US by the definition is non-egalitarian, resonates with fascism with ease; they kinda had it coming.
Antifaschistische Aktion in Nazi Germany were communist, and the social democratic Iron Front (three arrows) were enemies. Iron Front was anti communist and antifascist, so the AFA who were communists saw them as enemies.
Not to be confused with UK AFA and ANL!
I'm an anarcho-syndicalist so the nazis, fascists, and communists would all have come after me - but I support antifa within our current political context. Solidarity against the common enemy, fascists are scum.
I disagree, anti-fascism has a specific political meaning that historically is absolutely left. Historically, most antifascist partisans were collectivists, communists and socialists.
If you just mean anti-fascist as a word game, that's another thing altogether.
being anti-fascist after the inception of fascism was about the most American thing you could do.
There’s a not pretty history of America reluctantly pretending to be anti-fascist and joining in for WW2. Once they did join the rally cry was anti-fascism. The fascist dictators must be stopped.
The ones who cheered for eugenics and kindled friendship with the fathers of fascism left a long lived line of power that we are now being ruled by today.
@Nowhereman @ianrogers In my humble opinion there is a very clear cut between anti-fascism before the end of WW2 and after. While before it has clear origins in revolutionary/anarchist movements, WW2, especially here in Germany, where I live, moved anti-fascism from revolutionary to a fundamental axiom. Fighting fascism and totalitarianism became part of the definition of establishing a democratic society. Ant-fascism as civic duty, demanded by the constitution. And that makes it neutral to me.
@ianrogers It appears to me that you are not up to date with this topic. It is true that it started with socialists etc in Italy against Mussolini but even at that time some conservative and catholic groups started calling themselves anti-fashists. With the WWII the complete British conservative party does.
@Nowhereman That's a good explanation. I myself did not grow up in Germany but my nascnet understanding of antifascism was heavily influence by the punks vs skinheads type of antifascism I saw going on in Germany as a teenager. It definitely lacked political depth but its immediacy inspired me, as we had our own nazi skins problem in Canada at the time. I agree that antifascism is core human decency and should not be evaluated against a political spectrum.
She Pushed to Overturn Trump’s Loss in the 2020 Election.
Now She’ll Help Oversee U.S. Election Security.
==
Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election (and a protege of lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who tried to help overturn those election results), has been appointed to a senior position in the Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee election security.
Heather Honey has been appointed to a senior position in the Department of Homeland Security. State election officials and voting experts are concerned.
now that direct election rigging is enabled it means that your democracy is gone. the only recourse to get it back is to take anti-democratic action to eliminate all the elements that have sought to lock power away from fair voters
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." — JFK, back when a Kennedy in government wouldn't wreck our health
Organized abuse of office & subversion of the executive branch of power, implanting insurrectionary, anti-constitutional Trump loyalists. Almost none of Trump's nominees deserves to be confirmed by Congress!
DOGE accused of copying entire Social Security database to insecure cloud system Cloud copy of database "lacks any security oversight," whistleblower alleges. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
DOGE accused of copying entire Social Security database to insecure cloud system Cloud copy of database "lacks any security oversight," whistleblower alleges. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
Larry Ellison & Peter Thiel have the basis for a state surveillance system that is saleable to any despot or oligarch on the planet. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
The Trump administration has tapped Palantir — the notorious data-mining firm co-founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel — to compile information on people in the United States for a “master database,” creating an easy way to cross-reference…
Kasparov's book, "Winter Is Coming", describes the descent of Russia from the hopeful aftermath of the Soviet collapse to the rise of Putin's savage kleptocracy. It was published a year before Trump rode the money train to power in 2016, but we didn't take heed.
From the size of rulers' portraits to the dangers of creeping corruption, Garry has much to offer that is worth our consideration.
Many of you are too young to remember the Kent State shootings by the National Guard because of Vietnam Protests
The Kent State shootings (also known as the Kent State massacre or May 4 massacre) were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus in Kent, Ohio, United States. The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces, as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus and the draft. Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom sustained permanent paralysis. Students Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, died on the scene, while William Schroeder, 19, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna shortly afterward.
(Music And Song Courtesy:Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)I DO NOT MAKE ANY MONEY OFF OF MY VIDEOS I DO NOT OWN THE RIGHTS TO THIS VIDEO OR ANY MUSIC IN THIS VID...
Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced that Canada will keep troops in Latvia through to 2029, as part of a mission to deter Russian aggression in Europe
🇧🇪🇺🇦 “Belgium is ready to send troops to Ukraine after a ceasefire,” — Foreign Minister.
———
🇧🇪🇺🇦 «Бельгія готова направити війська до України після припинення вогню», — міністр закордонних справ.
Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action Advocates fear such settlements will "financially ruin" the AI industry. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
Both as an author who has had multiple books ripped off by AI trainers and as someone who hates generative AI just on principle, I see no problem with any of this.
I don't even feel like being bothered to post a "playing the world's smallest violin for them" on this one. That's too much work. They'll just have to imagine it. They can use their image diffusion systems to generate an image of it I guess.
The so-called "AI industry" has no actual path to profit, as what they're trying to sell is basically a novelty, one that's unfit for 99% of purposes it's being shoe-horned into.
And if your "industry" relies on dismantling copyright and stealing from others, it deserves to die.
The "financial ruin" these grifters are truly afraid of is that the money-hose from credulous and/or greedy investors to keep this otherwise unprofitable bubble inflated will be turned off.
Favourite comment: Everyone else is told they must buy a book to read it, or borrow it from a public library with the special exceptions allowed for libraries. Businesses can’t skirt the law because it’s inconvenient or expensive.
Let's face it: Social media is a voluntary, emotional and logical roller coaster. It's okay to step off the ride every once in a while. Some days, you are not tall enough for the ride anyhow.
It's easy to slip unconsciously into the idea that your people, your community needs you, needs your feet ready to go at the hamster wheel at a moment's notice. That's also how you know it's time to let someone else drive the wheel for a while.
I have it a bit easier on Mastodon than I imagine you do because there are maybe a few dozen people that actually care about the things I post about. My volume levels are lower when I go off on a tangent.
Even so, I have to remind myself sometimes I put myself out here because it is supposed to fill a desire to connect and converse with folks I want to learn from and about.
FWIW going forward I will personally try to like every Mushroom pic you post...
With respect, I'd take this further. If social media is annoying you in any way, it's a great idea just to forget it. People lived, very happily I might add, before it existed. The question for social media is the question for any other form of tech. Is it benefiting me more than it's burdening me? If so, it's great. If not... Nobody has ever threatened me to keep posting. I am nothing special, the community will live, again very happily, without me. That last may not apply to @briankrebs but it applies to the vast majority of people, certainly to me. If it doesn't apply, then we go back to the benefits and burdens. If I am really doing good work on SM, it is benefiting me and that benefit gets balanced against the issues it's causing like every other benefit. If that benefit and all the others is overbalanced, then nobody forces me to keep posting/reading/liking, the world is full of things to do. @pixelate
Yes, I've been doing that for several weeks now. I read a science fiction trilogy that was kind of depressing, but good. Now I'm reading a book I've had for thirty years, but I've never had the time for it before.
I hate to say it, but the Fediverse is, even (or perhaps especially) without the influence of anyone's financial best interests, still an echo chamber. Even if I agree with the rest of the echo chamber, it still is one. I know I can come here and post a perfectly reasonable take, and have a bunch of perfectly reasonable people agree with me. That's why I rarely say anything about politics here. If and when I do, I get very little if any pushback from anyone who isn't trolling. That's just the thing: I don't come here because no one ever challenges my ideas, and I don't think that actively trying to avoid ever having one's ideas challenged is healthy, frankly.
fwiw totally serious: i have appreciated the engagement you're willing to endure, knowing the mentality of people that would be provoked by thoughtful and honorable positions and values.
you were not screaming into any void, you were a harmony that at least i benefit from a lot. i felt less alone. encouraging people in my field to be critical of their work and actions. AND you bring important information to people that make better decisions occasionally because of it. 💗💗💗
"...if you want a search experience without AI-generated images, without Search Assist answers, and without Duck.ai prompts and entry points, start your searches on noai.duckduckgo.com instead of duckduckgo.com...."
They've had this for a while actually. I think we should all use the URL because it hopefully sends the message that we want nothing to do with any of that, but it's definitely not a good sign that we have to do this in the first place to (hopefully) get it through to them. Such things should be opt in (or, you know, not at all, no one needs a search engine with """AI""" """features""" — no one) not opt out.
If there's a way to trick Firefox or Chrome into doing this by default, I haven't found it. Firefox has a SETTING for it, but when you add the site, it insists it's an incorrect URL and I need to fix it. Chrome just has check boxes for "popular" search engines, and no visible URLs at all. There may be something farther down in the weeds to enter it manually, but I haven't found it yet if so.
@jstevenyork Yeh I use this method on Edge and Librewolf for both DDG's html and noai subdomains and it works. I think there was a gotcha for html, but it was obvious when it broke.
Okay, thanks. That seems to work. Being somewhat dyslexic, typing in character-based gibberish like the end of this by memory, even when that's just looking from one window and typing in another, is very challenging for me. (And the reason that modern password rules and second factor authentication sometimes make things nearly unusable for me. I can make and even remember truly strong passwords, but with MY rules. Theirs often break my brain.)
That's exactly what I already tried, and exactly what doesn't work. Didn't realized I needed a fully formatted http url, but that doesn't fix it either.
I went to noai.duckduckgo.com and made a search for "test." Then I cut the resulting URL from the left, up to where "test" was. I pasted it into the search URL setup in Firefox, inserted "%s" where "test" had been, and it works for me in Firefox in Linux Mint. [Edit: After also selecting it in the drop-down at the top of the screen of the Search section.]
@mikemccaffrey There's a certain class of AI image which makes me retch or feel seasick (the "uncanny valley" effect). But, I would rather not trigger that.
NEW: The Social Security Administration's chief data officer has blown the whistle, saying Trump's DOGE team uploaded a database containing the hundreds of millions of Social Security records of most Americans to an AWS cloud server, allegedly without proper access controls or monitoring in place.
The Social Security Administration's chief data officer has publicly blown the whistle, alleging DOGE put hundreds of millions of Social Security records at risk of compromise by uploading a critical government database of citizen's data to Amazon's …
I uploaded a copy of the whistleblower complaint for easier reading. Didn't have "uploads entire Social Security database to AWS" on my bingo card this year, but here we are.
Not because I changed my mind about anything, but because the thread turned into a cesspool of nasty replies, totally made up accusations, mischaracterizations...
...+ exactly what I first objected to: It got hijacked so the main point was lost.
And this is one reason I post less often here. This is a regular occurrence here now, vs when I first came here 3 years ago.
Expressing an opinion civilly is great, some of you did that.
@Lizette603_23 I blame Trump. He made (too much of) America hate again. He seemingly made it ok (to some folks) to be racist, misogynistic, and anti-gay. Not a great look for America.
Don’t succumb to the drama sweet pea…there are always going to be those who just don’t have the capability to understand. You’re doing a great job trying to keep us informed. I appreciate you…sending you a hug 🫂 and some love ❤️
You are one of my go-to accts when it comes to staying on top of the latest political news/events. Thank you for your service. 👏 Sorry abt the trolls. Unfortunately, they are everywhere. 🫤
I am sorry you had to deal with this asshat today. Your posts are awesome and help keep so many of us informed about the good news still popping up in our fight against Orange Pustule and his ilk.
Taking a closer look: That account hasn't posted jack shit since like January ... and then suddenly becomes outraged after misinterpreting or deliberately misunderstanding something you said?
Oh, I can imagine! I have a similar situation with some things I do voluntarily these days and there are times when I just have to break away before my head explodes.
@JanisKay What kills me is how people didn't read my words. They accused me of wanting him to win in 2028 (I said I wouldn't vote for him in primary), they accused me, mom of LGBTQ twins, of wanting gay people murdered, of wanting trans people murdered (I counseled teens who were transitioning when I was teaching), and more.
that’s what I got out of more recent conversation here. That’s just awful. Obviously don’t pay attention to your words! Some people just want to create upheaval.
Yes, Mastodon can be way too scoldy sometimes, though I suspect that much of that nastiness comes from bots and trolls given the fediverse has been gaining popularity and voices over time.
Your voice is a needed and very much appreciated one. Thank you for all you do to help us all navigate the mess we are in, and I’m so sorry you have to deal with all the garbage.
WTAF? Ideally we had left that nonsense behind at The Dead Bird Turd emporium… so tremendously sorry you’ve been hassled yet again for rigorous truth, Laffers. The self-righteous and vituperatively accusatory amongst us are why we cannot have and keep nice things. xOx
@timo21 It absolutely is. It was on Twitter; it has been on every other social media site that’s become sufficiently popular; it has been for at least a decade now. The big problem is that it’s so contagious among impressionable sorts who do not realize they’re being brainwashed by fake accounts. When someone you’ve known for years starts repeating troll talking points, you know that’s a Democratic vote lost. It’s been maddening to see it play out over and over.
I just block them when I see them troll other people. If on my thread, I think I’ll start responding block and block them, so other people don’t feel the need to keep engaging. Don’t take down posts if it gets overrun, because that’s actually their goal and I won’t let trolls win. They are social media terrorists who want to troll you into shutting up.
a MW/h?! That’s like a decent house using in a month!
You’d have better returns if you diversify your setup with a wind turbine (~5 kW traditional or even 10 kW vertical) and use a smaller battery (30-50 kW/h).
you mentioned impact on the environment. Our gas heating was 10x the carbon of our electricity in 2024, without any PV. Getting a battery to capture your spare PV generation, while staying on gas heating, will not help the environment at all.
grid batteries are finally starting to take off in the UK. Yes, to a point. Your annual electricity usage will probably go up to 10MWh, so it would take a bigger battery to cover 100%.
We are past the point of becoming a fascist country. We need to get rid of these people ASAP. We need to go blue in 2026 and impeach and fire every. single. one. of these morons.
Israel's latest unsubstantiated claims come after it massacred 20 people at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Monday, drawing international condemnation.
#Earthquake (#землетрясение) confirmed by seismic data.⚠Preliminary info: M5.8 || 21 km W of Dagestanskiye Ogni (Russian Federation) || 4 min ago (local time 23:33:40). Follow the thread for the updates👇
Messaging apps are part of our daily lives, that why the EMSC now offers LastQuake services directly on Telegram 😃 Just click t.me/lastquake_bot to register and you'll receive personalised information about felt #earthquakes around you!
#Earthquake 21 km W of Dagestanskiye Ogni (Russian Federation) 4 min ago (local time 23:33:40). Colored dots represent local shaking & damage level reported by eyeswitnesses. Share your experience via: 📱m.emsc.eu/#app 🌐m.emsc.eu/?id=1856132
Earthquakes may happen anytime: what to do during the shaking? 🠪 INSIDE: take shelter, keep away from windows. 🠪 OUTSIDE: stay away from anything that might collapse (bridges, roofs, electrical wires).
#Earthquake 29 km NE of #Novokayakent (Russian Federation) 7 min ago (local time 00:33:33). Updated map - Colored dots represent local shaking & damage level reported by eyewitnesses. Share your experience: 📱m.emsc.eu/#app 🌐m.emsc.eu/?id=1856132
ℹEvent wrap-up: today a M5.5 #earthquake (#землетрясение) hit #Izberbash (Russian Federation) at 00:33:33 local time (UTC 20:33:33). Shaking was felt over 500km by approximately 10M people in Azerbaijan, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Armenia.
ℹ Aftershocks may occur in the next hours/days. Unless it is necessary, stay away from damaged areas for your safety 🙏 Be careful and follow national authorities' information.
#Earthquake 28 km E of #Izberbash (Russian Federation) 22 min ago (local time 00:33:33). Updated map - Colored dots represent local shaking & damage level reported by eyewitnesses. Share your experience via: 📱m.emsc.eu/#app 🌐m.emsc.eu/?id=1856132
🔎 Regional instrumental seismicity in Caspian Sea. The colored dots represent the #earthquakes that have struck the region [using isc.ac.uk/ catalog -1960 to 2020- and emsc-csem.org/ data -from 2021 onwards]:
🔎 Deadliest #earthquakes that occurred in recent years within 300km of #Izberbash (Russian Federation): 13/02/1902 a M6.9 led to 86 casualties, 11/10/2008 a M5.8 led to 13 casualties, and on 25/04/2002 a M4.8 led to 5 casualties.
"Earthquakes do their best to be as unpredictable as possible" - Watch this video from @geosociety where seismologist Ross Stein explains why #earthquakes cannot be predicted at present👇 youtube.com/watch?v=ekTG-qjVHx…
Earthquakes explained by GSA's 2017-2018 GSA James B. Thompson, Jr. Distinguished International Lecturer Ross Stein. Stein’s video teaches the basics of pred...
maybe because a different kind of people is on Mastodon than on bsky. the later appears to me as a more of x replacement (not in a positive sense). Mastodon seems to be used by the more progressive lefty sort of folks. (in a positive sense)
@NorCalWineLady @mc Count me in the pile of folks who don't want you to close your account, and am willing to help.
So yes. it can get intolerable. it's largely why I'm not here more. I've commandeered Edison's 90/10: if you create for yourself one opportunity to boost those who are doing good, it's worth taking 9 solid hits yourself. I have no idea if those odds will pan out, but it seems doable.
@NorCalWineLady @mc When you come back, are you expecting it to be different? Just being humanity's mirror on itself, just being there in the fray, doesn't actually do anything besides provide opportunities for maybe a few people to get some clarity once. 8 billion people are making 8 billion mistakes each, most of which they won't see even when they /are/ reflected back.
Maybe there' a better fit for the good you're doing, but I do hope you'll leave a forwarding address.
Then just stop? Full stop. The difference for your mental health may be phenomenal! Unless you secretly yearn for the fight? Or try another medium like Substack, where you just write more?
@janisf As I said, what I really want is to inform (I'm done with long form, I did that for years). I do that well on social media. Quitting would solve nothing.
@mc @janisf If you're going to keep on doing it; no matter what, then... with all due respect, quitchurbitchin? No disrespect or negative animus meant. All love to you and what you do!🫂
@mc @janisf Lady, it just seemed that as much as you dislike it, maybe you spend a lot of time bitchin' about something that you can't change. And more and more so lately? And folks offer "solutions" but you slap away their suggestions. So??? So, I don't know what to do except maybe ignore it, best I can, when you do express your feelings on the trolls and just come back each day for the news. Anyway, sorry if you were offended by my comment. I genuinely thought this was an open channel for expressing interest/opinions. 😞
1st, because I disagree and express my own opinion about what you said, suddenly this isn't "an open channel or expressing opinions"? Where did THAT come from?
2. "Bitching" again? yes, that's offensive. I'm not "bitching." I'm expressing MY opinion about those who infiltrate my threads and hijack them. You're reducing that to "bitching" as if this isn't a real problem on social media that should be addressed? Really?
3/ I "slap way" suggestions? No, I disagreed that I should get off social media when you suggested that. So if I don't agree with you, I've "slapped you away"? Again, seriously?
Maybe rethink this, because yes, I am offended by your wording and implications that I'm just whining about some minor little issue here. Try being me for a day on social media. We'll see if you "bitch" about it.
It's called addressing a real problem, not bitching... "Lady."
@drdrowland @mc @janisf Excuse me, David, you obviously don't know much about me or my relationship to #Laffy, who I revere. I don't live under a rock. Do you? Knock off with the insults. Same side here, Ok?
@mc @janisf @NorCalWineLady Groucho??? Nasty???? Omg, he was one of my idols growing up. It wasn't anything but innocent and sweet. I saw him in a movie theater, I was very young, maybe 25, told him I just loved him, and he said, "Well I love you too" and kissed me.
my guess is: most of the Mastodoners grew up with Sesame Street. hence always asking "why, why, why" - questioning everything. but i get the point - sometimes it maybe way over the top ;)
sad that you're experiencing both. never happened to me - but i'm not as exposed as you are. nastiness might be kind of fun sometimes. but insults are pretty much a no-go/don't-do.
1st, because I disagree and express my own opinion about what you said, suddenly this isn't "an open channel or expressing opinions"? Where did THAT come from?
2. "Bitching" again? yes, that's offensive. I'm not "bitching." I'm expressing MY opinion about those who infiltrate my threads and hijack them. You're reducing that to "bitching" as if this isn't a real problem on social media that should be addressed? Really?
@mc I've noticed that many of the folks here who annoy me ID as ND. There are a lot more autistic and otherwise ND folks on here than elsewhere, and they don't mask as much here as elsewhere, and (being honest) they can get fixated on what seem to me like irrelevancies. But when I can see that that's their background, it's easier for me to cut them some slack, at least as to tone deafness.
@JanisKay What kills me is how people didn't read my words. They accused me of wanting him to win in 2028 (I said I wouldn't vote for him in primary), they accused me, mom of LGBTQ twins, of wanting gay people murdered, of wanting trans people murdered (I counseled teens who were transitioning when I was teaching), and more.
I've read through a lot of it. Sorry you have to deal with this authoritarianism from absolutists. It seems like a case of the hate that was created by hate. We're all of the opinion that people should be allowed to be who they are, but sometimes the hate is so great that those hated become the thing they despise, a hater. It's actually sad for everyone because, as you rightly said, we have a christo-fascism before us that requires all hands in deck.
I really think we have to change the framing of things. For example, when democrats are called socialists and commies, you need to accuse MAGA of conspiring for authoritarian single-party commie rule, where the dear stalinesque leader controls the economy and there are only two classes, billionaires and everyone else. As for the person here complaining about GN, we shouldn't respond to them. They're seeking attention to themselves rather than looking for solutions.
@briankrebs agree! An excellent book, in particular the detailed takedown of the Mars dream. As a complement to that I'd recommend Jill Lepore's podcast about the old science fiction influencing the ideas of Elon Musk and other tech types. pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-…
The story of Elon Musk, the way it's often told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero – or, especially lately, a supervillain. But what's the real story, the true history, behind Musk’s sense of destiny?
> When I say AGI is impossible, I mean: it requires mathematics that doesn't exist to model biology we don't understand to implement functions nobody can define. That's "impossible" in any practical sense.
@Erebus_Amauro the term intelligence implies a philosophical concept founded in metaphysics. As such it will always be impossible to construct an intelligent machine without implying that it has analogous properties than a human being.
Therefore it is not a question of science, of physics and biology, but a question of individual choice and social consensus whether to attribute intelligence (and ultimately rights and responsibilities) to the machine.
historically, "intelligence" denotes a social concept founded in colonial preconceptions of the inherent superiority of the white male. You might think that's a stretch, but the entire history is race science and IQ test calibrations were tweaked when they gave unacceptable outputs like women or Kenyans coming out smarter.
the more I look, the more corrupt the entire idea complex denoted by "intelligence" is, in theory and practice.
it's not a coincidence that the artificial intelligence endeavour is also riddled with blatant race scientists
and even this blog post is making some very dubious claims, such as implying that LLMs have solved machine translation or machine summarization, or can write functional code.
I mean, nobody understood fire. AGI is possible, but the techno cultists preaching about how it will elevate to a superintelligence vastly superior to all of humanity are delusional. If we had complex enough computers, they could emulate what a brain does, and it'd be as generally intelligent as any other brain.
The cost of computer complexity is astronomical so we can't even come close to the amount of computer neurons we'd need. And it'd be too complex to program so we'd have to use heuristic training to try and mold it into the program we want. But it is possible. If I were you, I'd just get someone pregnant it's easier.
@RootWyrm 🇺🇦 @David Gerard Ahhhh, slight correction is in order. Boolean Algebra doesn't really accommodate the "maybe" state, but solid state logic does: its early name was "toggle state". Today's solid state does a better job of accommodating it.
@claralistensprechen5th yeah, to be clear, yes|no|maybe is a gross abstraction and oversimplification. Brains and thought aren't boolean things. If they were, there would be no room for uncertainty!
But we really have no idea how many possible states there are exactly, other than "more than two." Could be 3, could be 30,000. (The 30k is way more likely.)
@briankrebs It’s absolutely required reading, and I push it whenever I can. Sadly, people seem not to be interested, no doubt feeling it’s another one of ‘those’ kind of books.
@briankrebs agree! An excellent book, in particular the detailed takedown of the Mars dream. As a complement to that I'd recommend Jill Lepore's podcast about the old science fiction influencing the ideas of Elon Musk and other tech types. pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-…
The story of Elon Musk, the way it's often told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero – or, especially lately, a supervillain. But what's the real story, the true history, behind Musk’s sense of destiny?
don't tell biology, but not even biology understands it either and just kinda made human intelligence randomly. Unless you believe in god(s), in which case you're in the who made them spiral.
Interesting. But, given how capable AI is at coding, should anyone bother to learn to code anymore? Is it pointless teaching yourself to code in Python, for example? Or any other language?
(Update: Thanks for all the great answers. It’s all very interesting as a phenomenon. I’m only really interested in programming in terms of its use in doing maths. Moreover, it could come in handy one day if I’m stuck outside the pod door and HAL won’t let me in!)
@EndorNim these LLM-based tools aren't actually that capable, though, as always, it depends on the contwxt. When it comes to producing actual production ready code, they're not there and are not likely to get there before this bubble bursts. I think learning a programming language has lots of value outside of getting a job writing code, so I say go for it!
@EndorNim If that is your goal then you probably don't need me to tell you that the market for jr devs is very weak right now. I don't think it will stay that way forever, but I don't know how long it will take for companies currently infatuated with LLMs to turn their hiring strategies post bubble.
@EndorNim It's not particularly capable at coding - as some wag put it, it can do the 80% where you put bugs in but not the 80% where you take them out. People think they're more productive with it, but there's increasing evidence that they're not.
@denisbloodnok @EndorNim I saw someone on fedi say one time that the statement "people who use AI at work feel like they're more productive" and the statement "people who do cocaine at parties feel like they're more entertaining" are virtually indistinguishable
I would hesitate to say impossible, but I don’t think it’s going to be done by trying to copy the human brain.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” - ACC
@arafel rather than glib quotes, i would ask for addressing the stated objections in the essay, e.g. if you propose a different architecture for intelligence, you have to actually set it out
His essay focuses almost exclusively on why it's impossible to model biological systems in electronic form.
He's probably right, at least with our current systems. I would hesitate we'll never find a way to permit some form of modelling.
However, I'm not sure I agree that simple aping of biology will result in intelligence, or that it's the only way to do so. He didn't demonstrate that, just asserted it.
If you define "AGI" as "whatever imitates the human brain in every single way possible" then I agree. It's basically impossible.
But I don't agree that an artificial superintelligence is impossible. I agree that the biggest roadblock is "A system that actually learns while running" but I don't agree with the other 3 points. You don't need to define intelligence to create a system that eventually is able to predict and prevent humans from stopping it from achieving its goals, whatever they may be. It's a very real risk that must be considered.
The article makes the argument that you can't keep scaling up infinitely, and I agree. But consider: A recent model that can run in my potato phone outperforms chatgpt 3.5 (175B) on everything except for encyclopedic memory. Sometimes you don't need to scale up. In my opinion the big frontier models are not really getting any closer to super-intelligence because of inherent limits with LLMs, and that the bubble will pop long before they figure out how to overcome these limits. But the better furnace fallacy doesn't exclude alternative architectures which can do similar tasks with a much smaller amount of energy. There are already many papers with alternative to transformers, some of which can modify their own weights to have memory. It's too early to say if any of those will amount to something.
You appear to be confusing Knightian uncertainty for risk. Risk is something that can be quantified. It's what insurance companies trade in. Knightian uncertainty cannot be quantified. Since you are putting aside defining what this "risk" is supposed to be about ("you don't need to define intelligence"), then it cannot possibly be a "very real risk". For one thing because it literally is not real!
Granted, most of the AI shills and xrisk barkers out there are either ignorantly or purposely conflating risk and (Knightian) uncertainty, probably because it serves their cause and makes their sci fi stories sound more exciting. No one is going to jump on the "We have no clue what intelligence is or how to synthesize it or whether that would be a dangerous thing to do. In fact we don't even know when we might know any of that" bandwagon. So confusion is understandable.
@abucci Maybe I'm confusing terms, but keep in mind that you don't know what you don't know. I've been interested about AI safety long before the AI craze. I don't think that transformer based LLMs will pose a risk in the future, but LLMs (possibly of a different architecture) will be a piece of the puzzle of a system that we possibly could not control. And it's a very different type of risk. Most other risks are recoverable. A nuclear catastrophe? Society will still exist and it will recover. A runaway AI that gets into power and we cannot control? It's game over. At the very least, life long dictators end up dying of old age. But having a dictator that can clone itself is a different story.
You don't need a conscience in a machine that is capable of manipulating people to reach the keys of the realm.
a piece of the puzzle of a system that we possibly could not control. And it's a very different type of risk.
I'll say it again: it's not a risk if you cannot quantify it. That's what the word "risk" is usually taken to mean.
When you say such and such is something that we possibly could not control, what's your basis? I assert that we possibly could control it. End of conversation forever, because it boils down to nothing more than a clash of two meaningless, evidence-free assertions that obligate no one to assign any weight to. Another "risk" of this nature is that a jar of mustard in your fridge goes out of control and kills everyone. This "risk" has exactly the same weight as the "risk" that "AI" does. You don't see this?
@Anthony @Piko Starsider A risk you can't quantify doesn't nullify the fact that it's a risk. Consider the mischaracterization contained in the term "speed of light" where "light" is the confined bandwidth that the human eye can detect, and redefining it later was required. Just because you can't something doesn't mean there's nothing there.
Evidence-free assertions fall into the realm of philosophy. Evidence falls into the realm of science--anybody conflating the two has a religion problem.
Viewed as computation, the DNA/RNA operation of biology is that of programming memory. A caterpillar doesn't have more than a ganglion for brains and yet it can, for the most part, execute dietary, pupation, adulthood programming impeccably. It can also execute adaptation semi-impeccably, and in both examples, the variants are likely to simply perish while the successful versions adapt and replicate.
And I know of human beings who are outsmarted by insects. THERE's intelligence for you.
@abucci It is not, because a jar of mustard can't learn to deceive. There's plenty of research on AI safety that outlines many scenarios on which we may fail to control it, as well as practical examples at a small scale.
How do you know a jar of mustard cannot learn to deceive?
AI safety is not a real field of study; it's a grift, and it will steer you wrong. xrisk is an application of the inductive disjunctive fallacy. It conjures scary scenarios out of thin air using the failure of Bayesian inference to distinguish between lack of evidence, very low evidence, and impossibility.
@abucci What do you mean? It is clearly an answer to your question, directly related to the topic, and indirectly answering why an AI could learn to deceive (i.e. because we can observe the emerging behaviour).
Or do you mean that you don't have a counterargument?
@abucci You asked "How do you know a jar of mustard cannot learn to deceive?" and I gave an answer that implies that we cannot see any behaviour that implies the possibility of deception on the part of the jar of mustard. We cannot see patterns that correspond to any input stimuli.
If that's a non-answer, what does an answer look like?
It is a non answer because you have not indicated how you would be able to observe this about a computer program. The context was your fears about computer programs. What is it about computer programs that lets you discern their potential ability to deceive, compared to a jar of mustard (or anything else)?
@abucci We can put a program in a controlled environment (real or virtual) and see what it does for specific inputs, and we can empirically test theories about e.g. goal preservation, reward hacking, deceptive alignment, interpretability....
A jar of mustard doesn't even have an input and an output.
What you've done here is replace two difficult words--"learn" and "deceive"--with several more equally-or-more difficult words: "input", "controlled environment", "theories about goal preservation", etc. You even ended with an ellipsis suggesting the pattern you tried to establish is obvious, when it is not. None of this is convincing argumentation.
Rather than continue this Socratic dialog, let's just leave it here. What I believe is that folks worried about xrisk--AI programs somehow causing harm to humanity--are engaged in the intellectual equivalent of fear of the dark. One way to name it is the inductive disjunctive fallacy, but regardless of the name, it is fallacious to argue that because there's a vast space of possible "AIs", at least one of them could be dangerous, and therefore we should call that possibility a "risk' to "mitigate". That is superstitious thinking, not science or deduction or empiricism, regardless of whether it's fear of the absence of light or fear of the absence of knowledge about AI. One way to combat it is to shine a light in there--which is e
... show more
What you've done here is replace two difficult words--"learn" and "deceive"--with several more equally-or-more difficult words: "input", "controlled environment", "theories about goal preservation", etc. You even ended with an ellipsis suggesting the pattern you tried to establish is obvious, when it is not. None of this is convincing argumentation.
Rather than continue this Socratic dialog, let's just leave it here. What I believe is that folks worried about xrisk--AI programs somehow causing harm to humanity--are engaged in the intellectual equivalent of fear of the dark. One way to name it is the inductive disjunctive fallacy, but regardless of the name, it is fallacious to argue that because there's a vast space of possible "AIs", at least one of them could be dangerous, and therefore we should call that possibility a "risk' to "mitigate". That is superstitious thinking, not science or deduction or empiricism, regardless of whether it's fear of the absence of light or fear of the absence of knowledge about AI. One way to combat it is to shine a light in there--which is exactly what I'm trying to do. Best of luck to you.
Children riding bikes are impossible, for you must know the math and physics, before attempting to ride. - Not quite, kids ride bikes, and you presumably have conciousness too, also not setup or solved formally.
To my knoweledge turing complete is the limit of any computation the universe really does. Random code permutations if it replicates itself will be it's own* digial evolution, and is often tagged as genetic algorithms.
AI isn't being hyped up by the fossil fuel industry for its accuracy.
It's very inaccuracy can be used as "plausible deniability" narratives to obfuscate future investigations into election interference.
"Plausible Sentence Generators" don't need to be accurate to manipulate public sentiment & con people out of their money & their vote. pbs.org/newshour/classroom/dai…
I like how you point out the alchemists weren’t actually wrong either. They just didn’t have particle accelerators. We have since proven you can make lead into gold. It’s just not economical.
my problem with this article is the following: the fundamental assumption is that because we don't (and possibly cannot) know how a neuron works, we cannot build AGI. However, a recurring pattern in statistical mechanics / large systems is that the macroscopic behaviour only depends on the microscopic properties on a quantitative level, but their qualitative properties often don't depend on their microstructure. 1/2
What I've studied is that it requires mathematics that we've only hinted at in the realm of infinite cardinals, which digital computers are inherently incapable of dealing with, they can only approximate some of it at best.
The human brain, if we take that as intelligence, because that's the only 'true' intelligence we know, deals with both the discrete and the continuous. Digital computers can only approximate the continuous as discrete numbers of a very specific resolution (floats aren't really vectors, they're a discrete number of bits of a finite, relatively small resolution).
The realm of ideas and concepts that modern computers can't access is inherently vast and unreachable for today's technology.
By way of a metaphor, if continuous thought is a curve, the approximations a digital computer can handle are control points of a Bézier curve. That thought can perhaps discuss the slope and inclination of a beautiful curve. But that discrete thought can never be the curve itself.
Nyquist doesn’t really address the objection. It shows that certain continuous signals can be reconstructed from discrete samples under strict conditions. But the claim here isn’t about bandlimited signals — it’s about cognition and thought. Human intelligence seems to involve structures that aren’t reducible to neatly sampleable functions, especially when you bring in infinities, self-reference, and biochemical dynamics.
Approximations can be powerful, but approximation is not identity. A Bézier control net isn’t the curve. Saying “for practical purposes” is a move into engineering sufficiency, not a rebuttal of the point that digital computers may be ontologically limited in ways brains are not.
This is close to what Penrose argued: approximation and reconstruction don’t capture what’s actually going on in cognition. Nyquist solves an engineering problem, but not the ontological gap.
Nyquist shows you can model a certain class of continuous signals with discrete samples. But a model is not the thing itself. A simulation of fluid isn’t wet, a simulated flame doesn’t burn, and a Bézier net isn’t the curve. My claim (and I believe Penrose's as well, although for different reasons) is that intelligence belongs to the latter category: the thing itself, not merely its model. Approximations may be useful, but they don’t collapse the ontological gap.
I think a better word would be "intractable" or "improbable". "Impossible" suggests there is a formal proof that it cannot be done like it is "impossible" to make a perpetual motion machine, but it is "intractable" to decrypt a quantum safe cipher.
Oh yeah, sure. I'm going to start writing articles around saying that it is impossible to get AIDS because there is such a low probability of that ever happening and it relies on biology that we don't fully understand yet.
I find the alchemy comparison interesting because it turns out it *is* possible to turn lead into gold via fission and fusion (or helium into gold, etc.). It requires conditions we understand but can’t currently replicate, and even if we could replicate them it would be so energy-intensive it won’t be remotely worthwhile. Still, we know it’s possible. The alchemists simply didn’t get far enough in their understanding of the materials.
We definitely don’t understand what makes a mind, so it’s currently impossible for us to make one intentionally. Current efforts directed that way are guaranteed to fail because they’re scaling up things which we know aren’t sufficient to create a mind.
I suspect that what makes a mind is *knowable*, though.
it's not that the math doesn't exist, because it does. But we don't know what the math should be. And there are some incredibly plausible ways the brain works, and if we model it, all those ideas work. So that tells us there may not be a single way the brain operates. And with more and more neuropsychiatry being done on autism, we're see that may be the case.
> it's not that the math doesn't exist, because it does. But we don't know what the math should be.
that's a uselessly pedantic bad faith reading of the article in an attempt to score a nerd point with a distinction that makes no difference. this isn't a mode of posting that contributes anything.
One additional thing that I feel the AGI movement lacks is a proper explanation of why we need it. If we remove the part about understanding our brain, what is the value of creating AGI? Saving money after spending trillions on it seems quite a moot point. All I see is people saying it is inevitable. But people have been saying it since the 70s, and there are a lot of other inevitable technologies that never came. I am also not aware of any example of optimistic fiction work about AGI. And if we cannot even imagine a positive future involving it, maybe we should stop trying to make it a reality.
@antopatriarca I think the goal of a lot of AGI people is to reach the singularity. The idea is that if we can make an AGI that's actually smarter than a person, it can then make a system that's smarter than it is, and so on until we get superintelligence. There are plenty of reasons to think this is a fool's errand- and not necessarily desirable if it were possible- but that's where the advocates are coming from.
@VATVSLPR @antopatriarca yes - it's extremely important to understand that the AI doom and AI safety and AGI talk is literally a particular AI doomsday cult, the LessWrong rationalists, that e.g. OpenAI and Anthropic are full of. They're the ones who tried to fire Sam Altman from OpenAI in 2023 because he wasn't a sincere cultist (he's just a monorail salesman). They're why Anthropic keeps turning out papers that say the chatbot will kill you. These people are *pervasive* and they are directly responsible for so much arrant rubbish.
One thing that's bothering me in particular as a (senior) software developer is that even in the most vocal criticisms of the AGI from philosophical or science critical viewpoints is that they're buying the hype that "LLMs can turn descriptions into code".
This only works with very basic examples which probably have a very high similarity to the training data. As soon as the specification gets a little more complicated, it's crap 1/
METR are hardcore AI doomsday cultists, *but* they seem to have done their best to do a reasonable study here, and they called out every caveat themselves. n=16 is small, but it sure beats the n=1 of personal anecdote from the AI boosters.
Model Evaluation and Threat Research is an AI research charity that looks into the threat of AI agents! That sounds a bit AI doomsday cult, and they take funding from the AI doomsday cult organisat…
n=16 is indeed small I didn't notice that. And thanks for the pointer back to your article which I think I have read *before* the metr study and forgot about it. 😊
Radio Free Trumpistan
Unknown parent • •Indeed! I like the way you think!