A New Kind of Bullshit

Perhaps more troubling is how far away we are from the type of intelligence humans demonstrate. Human brains despite their complexity remain extremely energy efficient. Our brain has over 85 billion neurons but runs on the energy equivalent of an electric shaver. While deep neural networks may be scalable, it may be prohibitively expensive to do so in a regime of comparable intelligence to humans. An apt metaphor is that we appear to be trying to build a ladder to the moon.

The concern with the efficiency of human brains is maybe they will be used as an AI platform? :( I hope not!

Also the author of The Hardware Lottery uses the phrase “risk adverse” twice in their paper, which is just so annoying.

The Chinese curse is: May you live in interesting times.

This is kind of hilarious: Laws of Computing. It’s a good example of one of those things where you’re not sure if it’s genius or quackery. :) (Hint: it’s quackery!) But it is good fun, and the author makes some allusions to the difference between Western and Eastern perspectives.

So the Time Cube is described as: “a pseudoscientific personal web page, founded in 1997 by the self-proclaimed “wisest man on earth,” Otis Eugene “Gene” Ray.” You can find a version of it online over here: https://timecube.2enp.com/.

The tildeverse is a loose collection of websites. I have an account on tilde.club over here: tilde.club/~jj5.

We were talking about Bluesky and I mentioned this article: Bluesky’s user safety situation.

Comedy for the ages:

An old classic: Nirvana – Oh Me (Live On MTV Unplugged, 1993 / Unedited).

The motto of the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland (3 SCOTS) is an infantry battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland: “No One Provokes Me with Impunity” — Bad ass!

I forget how this one came up, but wow: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Jubilee Street” (Official Uncensored Music Video).

I have purchased this one, but have not read it yet: The Courage to be Disliked: The Japanese phenomenon that shows you how to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness.

I tried to find the quote from the person who said “I write tshirts” for a living. It was in some movie, but I forget which one.

If you have some time you might enjoy some of my essays:

If you like Nine Inch Nails and anime, you will love this: Anime Music Video NIN The Becoming Lain, Akira & Ghost In The Shell.

Postmodernism

Posted on 2023-05-05 [Friday] by Jay Jay

A fun talk on Postmodernism.

Gary Aylesworth defines postmodernism as:

a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilise other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

I had automatic subtitles on while watching the video and it figured “differentiate” as “French cheese”. Poetic, I’m sure. Cop that Derrida! Cop that Foucault!

In the video the lecturer presents a slide which makes the claim “thought and language can’t distinguish two worlds that have exactly the same structure–exactly the same logical form.” But that is a patently false claim in my view. Take for instance the integers and the rationals, they are distinguished but we can build an isomorphism that shows they have the same form.

Later this statement is made: “we could know the necessary and sufficient stimulatory conditions of every possible act of utterance, in a foreign language, and still not know how to determine what objects the speakers of that language believe in.” This is true, but it’s also true of all people who speak the “same” language, too.

Then it is said “there is no fact of the matter about which translation is right”, but that’s not true. There is a fact of the matter about substance. Some machines can work and others can’t owing to the specific nature of what substance can do and how it works. Of course we can’t truly know substance as we only have objective access to it.