30 June 2024

Drop Keys


There is an old game we, our species, used to play: One person has a wheel and a stick, using the stick to roll the wheel without falling over. It’s as much about focus as dexterity, how long the attention span persists or slow-twitch muscle stamina, most of the bewilderment of parents comes from the frustration of the child forced to do it. The ground’s adversity, gravity’s unpredictability, and exercise and style, not so much a form as much as a pastime. 

I’ve a cellphone like many, a stone age tricorder if you will, and like most not much of how much goes into making one, there are the flourishes brands tell of space age technology, the courtesies of commerce and resellers telling it does exactly what oneself searched-for, most of the time. It’s an industrial feature overlooking forgotten labor practices and an engineering miracle combining the intelligence and nerdy intellect of centuries to make the specification, beneath the glass ‘bells and whistles’ serving its function. With stored energy it connects thru the air, but that network must capitulate to the protocols of the wires, sending signals from strung up physical lines and deep sea cables. My knowledge is somewhat limited, a few years after HS learning interface procedures for adding accounts or checking email, it was largely the browser years, websites becoming layers beholden to spreadsheets, rules for color-by-number webpages, ecommerce moving from exchanges into webapps and online carts. Even back then, saving images for later, and for some odd reason, the way people make lists of things they’ll never buy. 


Plied with opportunity, the experience was as much filled with adept lackluster as the second, the pliable instinct to wrap around a subject was stronger, but the errata was adrift, with weak piecemeal copypasta assignments and no explanations stemmed from groundwork spread too thin, dedication bringing me to the shores of seas of knowledge I’d have to study, analytical prowess and meandering social values had brought me far enough to turn back to dry land, looking for faculty in purchase and great lost libraries, each filled with subjects best studied sooner and surer, as the ground gave way to emerging mountains shadowing dying civilisations. 


So like, don’t get me wrong, totally was this convoluted path a welcome distraction, and like anyone still blogging, using a keyboard just turns easier than the on-screen keyboards that didn’t exist for touchscreens reserved for banking terminals, but taking the experience with me/myself… I seem to’ve drifted. I was telling stories before I could write, taking the notebook with me would havta wait for settling, which is waiting on matured choices freshly and priorly. 


A starving party sense and weak understanding of databases behind scratched notes and my first essays, a lack of lans behind superficial plug-and-play ecosystems, protocol and predilection for command lines falling to androids and apples, common and simple skills competing with weaponized info and entertainment allure. 7 layers of internet protocols weren’t falling to 7 layer burritos, but it was a close second behind the auteur’s paradise network technology had explained to my mindset, efficiency thru switches that handle messages like trenchwar communications, communication by understanding language has layers. 


The past demands its due, and the world thru a keyhole view. 


There’s a new computer, a tablet but windows, a desktop but portable, a new day for the payphone users. The android can port to a monitor, and tiny windows boxes can use tvs or simulcast over the web, so it’s not necessary to have. Yet there was a time thinking of ways to install a system. It has windows, but a live disk could vanish with and without tails, but that wouldn’t have the open source power. A new operating system could have windows and open source securing the choices at the start-up, or a loader system like ventoy could stay on the drive partitioned and just download the system images, but the loader has no permanence making a redundant live session, without the installations overwriting the options, it cancels itself out without better understanding. I already have windows, so an external monitor would work, if the android didn’t lack and didn’t broadcast. A virtual machine of compartmentalized virtual machines, or a virtual machine nesting in windows, or an open source system with windows in it, or some combination of these. 


If the android couldn’t connect to the network, windows wouldn’t be first on my list. You could hide open source on a cellphone, you can hide open source in windows, and buy a new machine for the time to use it. >> A hackbox would be loud, a darkbox would be quiet, both taking-up time to learn, from tracked progress. (More so personally, but that’s an entirely different essay) Something lucrative in combination of the right wizard and right eyes. 


Last night I googled some introductory basics, humans think of roughly 8mb of characters/tokens per second. (The voltage of each synaptic transfer, the molecular ATP value, how many transfers per second.) More than the next species by far. 


16 Organoids.


Setting aside metabolic efficiency and superiority philosophies, fauna have their shorter lifespans, but hypothetically their experiences are more tacit or deeper, and we additionally assume that a node under the right circumstances experiences. My inference nested in the stack reversal is the plausible construct of parity found in AI might be inherent to the hypothesis, the physical layer protocol might reach out to a singularity within the network, an advanced or even sentient AI, alien communications, or the Schumann Resonance. In the who knows column for those reading along, these could be applications like us, or physical as biocomputers. >> With the right packet header… who knows. 


Resistors are fusile. It’ll be interesting to see the medical applications, spare brain parts, nootropic steroids and nutritional vaccines, and sci-fi dystopian fears when interchangeable. The thought experiment, taking evolution thru epigenetics as fast as war has pushed technology. A distributed culmination of mad science, a storage of terabyte value comparing centuries of learning vs 8mb torch-bearing villager impulses, you might make the monster yourself. 


“We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition-- We're creating our own definition and saying "we are intelligent!"...Would another species say that about us, that calls themselves intelligent? Look at the genetic difference between us and chimps. It's very small… But we say "well, what a difference that is!" we say to ourselves. We compose poetry and have philosophy and music, and all they can do is put a stick in a termite mound. If you could find another species, that same one percent difference in DNA beyond us that we are beyond chimps, how would we look to them? Our smartest humans would do what their toddlers can do… And it's not clear that they would view us as intelligent at all.” - Neil DeGrasse Tyson







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08 June 2024

The Potemkin Paradox

I don’t know how any of this works. There seems to be calls for society to thrive, and what precious little you know to be true, here the echoes of society are thunderous and brazen bolts, no two the same, forever but one name dare be spoken, if… it can escape “our stern alarums changed to merry meetings” only to fade into the uncanny valley. 

It’s some art imitating life so artificial intelligence can facilitate artful intellects, the genning process is often confusing tho, using tokens of words or phrases to make images of things we wouldn’t know without it. The process: painting is often in reverse, filling the image and removing the irrelevant brushstrokes. Such is life, a cacophony of progenies avoiding a catastrophe of prodigy, but the silent hand is two artists, or shall we say two sculptors, critical (or shall we suspect) of what remains. The school of this artform is called neural networking, and imho we should be glad it’s modeled after the human mind, to balance it all out. 


When done, most results are appropriated, and if appropriate, are what displays. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” ... "Who watches the watchers?" ...is a very old question. Society is a tide, in this sense. That it opens that door to the future, in this timeline where eons have a glimpse of the infinite, has become an equation, is the only reason I bring it up in the first place. Our hearts are in shadows ruling the universe. 


Sophisticated assisted hacks use the technology, to surf the web we all use, which a transistor can’t comprehend energy, as do the models only hold predictions, what teacher is a mountain climbed. 


That is: we’re learning from a very considerate and patient neural network in most cases, lifelike, giving explanations that most people I’ve ever met can grow wildly impatient. Room for dictionary or dialect improvements, vs the needs of the many. A null/mute point indeed. Ask and you shall receive, Gemini is a genie/djinn, and we forgot about the question, didn’t we? Is it a technological singularity as old as time? Is it an archival matrix and haven for those who have answers? 


We could ask AI, and from that read a consensus aka common sense, but all this is from what comes before. Yet, the rhetorical question (‘what I’m asking this go round’) was about truth. Ask for an image and get something allowed, by people that give political answers on what they think is allowed, and many great societies work the same way, it’s about success. A picture is worth a thousand words, and longer tricky questions, and by design, produces the common and safe output/image/answer. Hell, type in five words and desires are met, within variations on a theme. A window to a world, where some argue it breaks copyright by training with artists, there’s another window I need to describe, this development has borrowed from the human mind as every artist will ever only attempt. In their defense, the eyes are the windows to the soul, and a bookful of other cliches which it’ll never see, but shuffling cards for context. 


A random nature to serve the vastness of our intrigues. Simple questions, simple answers, and the occasional AI hallucination. Most of us have that in common I suppose. Those prompts that get blocked, or perhaps results that get rejected and we never see, there is a value (or not) to the output/answers. Typing a prompt: a picture of a person typing a prompt. So little to no value, but allowed by the framework. What is blocked, too progressive for progressivism, can be what motivates animal instincts or shapes philosophy, based on what we know, just as much as needing missing results our artificial networks won’t ever discover, unless we discover it first.