Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025Some people post cat photos on their timeline. Others repost politics only. Me, I will sometimes post about the kinesthetic experience set to words. Or perhaps about the act of setting the sublime, ineffable transcendence into words. 020
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025I don't fear the creation of a self-aware monster. I do fear that someone will create a propaganda machine and psychotic mind-control system. Some QAnon/Facebook disinfo pushing system that will drive entire populations to delusional endpoints. This is where the danger lies. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025Did I mention I have a PhD in physics? One of my more interesting experiences was when a prof closed his office door and made me swear an oath of secrecy that I assume dated back to Los Alamos. The strange part was not that it was about bombs, but rather, how to keep the cranks and crackpots away. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025OK, Don't come trying to lynch me or anything, but I am actively trying to build such a feedback loop. It's a lot harder than you might think, technically. But there's also, uhh, well, gee, a philosophical issue. What wants and desires could, should, would it have? 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025Honestly, beats me. Right now, I'll just say "overheard at a party" cause I'm too lazy to dig deeper. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025OK, Yes, its not exclusive to mammals, but I get tired of explaining so I start there. As to understatements about the nature of life, well, the LLMs force a rethink of basic beliefs, assumptions and definitions. I encounter a lot of expressions of dogma, which makes discussion hard. 010
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025Well, the lack of mammalian love is perhaps one of the more dangerous traits. The gut sense of love-for-mother helps drive compassion, even in carnivores. The lack of this in LLM's is I suppose the scary part !? 280
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025I'm happy to draw the line at a biological-cell level, "Embodied Cognition" is the catch-phrase, and Michael Levin writes very nicely about it. But there are also those youtubes of some cell bleeding out and dying that are somehow more tragic than watching russians get blown up. Go figure. 010
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 02/11/2025Well, speaking from personal experience, its usually when the wrong paper is from someone far more famous and important than you are. So its like "why are people listening to that dunderhead when they should be listening to me?" 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Oh. Says in your bio that you're autistic. Maybe that's the explanation. Well, we all do as best we can. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025OK. So you decided that the correct response is to harass me? Very interesting decision. 200
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025So, the construction of the federal highway system, the electrification of rural America, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration, the Grand Coulee dam, and the guys who pick up your curbside garbage, these are not done by the government? 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025You realize you are setting yourself up for failure, right? Perhaps its some kind of impulsive control disorder. I dunno. We are, in principle, on the same side. In practice, you are burning bridges and making enemies. Perhaps you should reconsider your tactics. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Which part? That some teenagers have problems being anti-social? Or that the median Army Colonel is well-adjusted and socialized? 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025The "civil war" bullshit was a meme he picked up on Fox News, BTW. It was a very very popular meme at the time. Everybody who was anybody was talking about it. It was a deeply held conviction. 10-12 years ago. A little older than QAnon. About contemporaneous. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Things I write about. This is a short thread about my personal experience with business owners and the capitalist class. Part of a longer thread on the nature of socialism in the USA. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025And I'm like "duude, if all the cities of America are gonna get torched, I'm pretty sure that the buyers of your product are gonna vaporize and you'll be filing bankruptcy, so don't tell me 'business is good, there will be civil war'" Well, we were both drunk, and he doubled down on civil war. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025One guy, CEO of a company of about 3K or 4K people, told me ten years ago: "Buy a gun, they're going to be breaking down your doors and coming in your windows and they will torch this entire city. Austin will be a smoldering wasteland. Business is good, we're hiring, want a job?" 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025I have no problem with this. Guy wants to drive a fancy sport car and do good works? OK, why not. The problem are the psycho anti-social CEO's. I've gone drinking and socializing with them too. They are (very) evil, in a very classical "mundane" or "banal evil" kind of way. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025"Some capitalists". I know some small business owners that hire disabled people, organize events for low-income classes, and are generally involved in positive community building. They have traditionally voted GOP, staunch republicans, while also performing these obvious "socialist" activities. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Citizens United is another major cause of political dysfunction. Perhaps you can blame both of these on "capitalists". But I want to blame both of these on the GOP mind-virus, the collection of thought-patterns that encourage fascism and authoritarianism.en.wikipedia.orgCitizens United v. FEC - Wikipedia 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025The Fairness doctrine was abolished in 1987, after a long GOP campaign. Fox News was incorporated a day later. That is, Fox News was already being constructed and designed, hand-in-glove with the repeal of the Fairness doctrine. This is one of the large propaganda spigots that were opened.en.wikipedia.orgFairness doctrine - Wikipedia 400
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025I'm a gonna play this stupid game cause why not. If you see this, post an album cover with a car (truck, motorcycle, tractor) on it. 010
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Even more impressed when the UHaul trailer has one low tire, is fish-tailing and the safety chains are bouncing behind on the pavement! Its a pretty impressive sight to see! 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Well, Claude has cut my sysadmin debugging effort by 90% I just keep prodding it until it finally comes up with a fix for my problem. I used to love stack exchange and github issues for that, but this is way better. (so far...) 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Pretty sure that is a Ford S-car. Or an Oldsmobile Escalade. Buick Town Car? They look a lot alike, I have trouble telling them apart. Chrysler Esprit? 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Walked around my mom's neighborhood last year, there were dozens upon dozens of yard signs (I walked maybe 20 miles over a few weeks ... multiple neighborhoods). I was not able to find anything at all about what those yard signs meant. Something important had happened ... but what? 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025I like Art. I particularly like Modern Art. But it can be intricate. Below is an image that is decidedly neo-classical. It is effective and stunning because of it's emotional directness. It connects your visual cortex to your enteric brain to your prefrontal cortex to deliver a knockout. 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Social sciences study how teenagers get alienated and traumatized in high school. The joke t-shirt "anti-social social club". Punk rock didn't spring from outer space. Is the Pentagon filled with well-adjusted, socially integrated, functional adults? I would certainly hope so. 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025I don't know how the Pentagon functions. In some earlier era, he might have been demoted or even court-martialed for writing this. These days, its called "free and fair debate". If the officers in the Pentagon have been atomized, alienated from one-another, they might not close ranks. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025There is a wild misconception about "central planning" because it has been baked into some parts of some people school curriculum. Depends on you school teachers and school district. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Long threads that I write. This one is about an article written by a US Army officer, wringing his hands about a quailing surrender to the enemy of Hegsethian fascism. In short, some of our officers in our Army are dazed and confused. And can't tell apart Treason from doing the right thing. 121
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025One of the things that I write long threads about. In this case, a socialist community-driven IT and storage infrastructure. 041
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025The incentive is to say "screw it I'll pay $20/month to Google Cloud to make the sysadmin headache go away". Or even go big and use AWS. How can you build a social cooperative that provides AWS-style IT for community ... colleges, libraries, whatever. Something friendlier, cheaper than AWS? 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Maybe Bonnie Cullum over at Vortex has more than 1TB of videos of three decades of theatre productions ... but disks are already seriously cheap. The #1 hard part here is the sysadmin costs: the time to set up a computer or two, install, monitor, repair, support, bugfix. It hurts. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Maybe tie them together. But so what? You probably have enough storage for your stuffs, and I for mine. And, with Moore's law, cell phones will soon have 1TB storage, so the pressure to back things up to Google Cloud for a monthly $$ fee mostly goes away. 100
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025You have three social choices: (1) be a crypto bro (2) be an atomized individual, alienated from society, or (3) build the community cooperative. You're a circus/theatre guy, so (3) is your choice. My guy is daviddemaris.com from the #VortexTheatre. Set up some Ceph nodes, and maybe tie 210
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Couple of reasonably smart software guys, experienced in distributed computing, interested in the project, using modern tools (i.e. Claude, CoPilot, ChatGPT) could build some OK-ish distributed P2P data store system in weeks/months. But without the social contract, its worthless. 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025We are not yet at the point where there's an implicit social contract that says "I promise to keep my cell phone on, and let you store your photos on it (encrypted), if you do the same." That is the #1 hard part of distributed P2P data store. The social contract. Everything else is easy. 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025So, basically crypto provides capitalist incentives for what could be termed to be a socialist issue. When we live in a city, we all agree to be nice to one-another, and not burn it all down. There aren't any anarchists blowing up sewer pipes. But distributed, socialized P2P data storage? 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Let me point out the meta-problem: distributed P2P data store risks catastrophic collapse. You just need to have some significant percentage of people to say "screw this", turn off their computer, and all is lost. The crypto solutions try to avoid this with economic incentives. 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025There are a few others, I can't remember their name. The scuttlebutt guys would occasionally talk about them. I just asked Claude, it listed half-a-dozen of them, most tied into crypto in some way. Why? Well... 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Scuttllebutt, the off-line p2p social media system, had a half-finished system for "sharding". Chunks were encrypted, passwd-protected, and redundant. The now 30-year-old "Freedom store" was a distributed p2pdata store system, inspired by mp3 file-sharing. Then there's IPFS. 110
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025Aw common man. Do some healthcare analytics on pedestrians getting injured cause they could not hear what's going on. We post street signs in neighborhoods, warning us of deaf people. Now we have an epidemic of people who willingly make themselves deaf. All because you can't take a joke. Sheesh. 000
Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 01/11/2025What's wrong with y'all. I made a joke. You don't like the joke. I get it. It's also clear as day that wearing headphones in public is a clear safety issue for pedestrians. And .. I get accused of being an AI for pointing out the obvious? Jeez. 100
