A month with a flat full of boxes, but all the kick-starter packages got packed up and sent out in time for my 50th birthday party.

Me

Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:

I bought an Aeropress and surprisingly no longer want sugar in the coffee.

Finding the all-Musk twitter show entertaining and hilarious.

Some thoughts on angry people upset about expanding of the ultra low emission zone and their right to continue poisoning children.

Upon checking of actual data, the tree which seems to bloom earlier every year blooms slightly later this year but it still /feels/ early.

The long thread on the experience of packing up and posting 200 packages to supporters of my Kickstarter.

Does the the new chat-AI build a model of the world inside it’s billions-of-parameters brain? Comments on a paper finding a model of an othello board in a simple version of the AI built from just Othello moves.

Hilarious how Facebook are going to start charging 15 dollars a month in order to be government-identified and their plans to only show posts to followers if the poster pays. Ha.

Adventures in trying to turn on a windows computer that hasn’t been used since 2019.

Is space even a thing? Thoughts after watching a PBS Spacetime episode.

Professor Nutt is just blatantly pushing a new drug I dunno why his legal-high seems to stand less chance of government persecution than the others. Good interview with Owen Jones though.

Thanks to spite and trade wars Northern Ireland gets to be the only place in the world that still has what everyone in the EU had before Brexit. Apparently this is a win.

Playing some VR games and talking about what might make you more likely to get sick. and how Jeff Minter’s games are a confusing world that doesn’t. Jeff pops up to comment.

Sounds like the Scottish leadership election is a corrupt terrible fix. Maybe they are ready to be independent if they can be as corrupt as Westminster already.

And at the start of March ready for my 50th birthday party which was lovely.

Hi to new readers from there! If it’s too dull you can always unsubscribe below.

Reading

Charles Stross - Dark State

Dark State is the second in the “Empire Games” books from Stross, and is an story with spies and government plots between different governments from different parallel earths. Great adventures.

Godfrey Smith - Other Minds

The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life has some description of the behaviors of octopuses and just as distantly related the cuttle-fish.

He compares their brains and mammal’s brains and does a really great job conveying the character and personalities of the watery animals.

It contains some speculation on the nature of sentience and what that might be and how it’s shared around the animals.

He describes well how sad he was when he learned how short lived the animals are. Made me sad too. They’re so brilliant and yet so fleeting.

Great book. I learned that octopuses have three hearts, a fact which then came in useful like two days later on a quiz machine.

Watching

Obi Wan

Got around to watching more of the Disney Star-Wars series, this one with Euan McGreggor as the younger version of the old man in the movies, hanging out with child version of princess Lia on the run from Darth Vader. Definitely one of the best Disney Star Wars so far but I’m told Andor with the teddy-bear people might be better when I get that far.

There’s nearly as much Star Wars as Star Trek now, both expanding at exponentially increasing rates. Soon we will pass the star horizon and there there will be nothing but the Star Franchise Battle shows.

The Boys Season Three

Season three of the ultraviolent comicbook show with an evil superhero they’re trying to appease or kill all the time. Some good humour if you have the stomach for the guts and the gore and the general perversion.

Links

AI

All the best bloggers talking about AI this month

Not because of Chat-GPT of course, that is just a toy, but the proper *actually* general AI that we will build without proper safeguarding.

Trouble is we have no idea how to do that safeguarding in fact, and have instead an economic system set up to push companies and nations into a race to build it anyway.

The AI does not hate you, but it does not love you either and it has use for the atoms you are made of.

“We can, I think, confidently rule out the scenario where all organic life is annihilated by something boring”

“So, if we ask the directly relevant question — do I expect the generative AI race, which started in earnest around 2016 or 2017 with the founding of OpenAI, to play a central causal role in the extinction of humanity? — I’ll give a probability of around 2% for that.”

Scotland

Scotland is getting a new first minister.

  • Craig Murray explains his views on the election He likes Ash Regan because he reckons she wants to actually just declare independence if they win the Scottish Parliament while the others still believe they need Westminster’s permission and so expect a long period of talk and devolution instead of a break with Westminster. He notes the whole party hasn’t really been polled in years so nobody really knows what will happen.

  • He also has a story about the departing minister “Sturgeon’s place in history will be as the woman who saved the Union in its hour of maximum danger – the moment the UK left the European Union, against the will of the large majority of Scottish people expressed in a referendum. […] Sturgeon was a great boon to the unionists. Whether as useful idiot or as traitor is something history will decide. My money is on the latter.”

  • Robin McAlpine describes the farcical way the election is being run. “Where to start in my attempt just to spell out how pathetic things have become? I think I’ll kick off by asking how it can possibly be the case that the election of a new First Minster is being wholly run by the husband of the previous leader, a man who is subject to a recently-escalated police inquiry into fraud who is expected to be interviewed under caution imminently?”

Nord Pipeline

  • Purlizer prize winner Seymor Hersh set out exactly how the USA blew up the Nord Pipelines With help from Norway, wxplosives were placed by divers during BALTOPS22, then remotely triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane moths later. You might think that the media would follow up such a story but of course not.

  • Media Lens takes you though why the media can not speak of it in case you needed it spelling out “Much the same is true of UK state-corporate media. In particular, BBC News, the Guardian and the Observer have simply ignored Hersh’s story, except for a passing mention emphasising White House denials in a Guardian live blog on 12 February. Curiously, despite writing in depth about Nord Stream last March, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposed dissident fig leaf, has not mentioned Hersh’s report”

  • Media Lens on the guardian in particular: “Finally, perhaps, the left is beginning to understand the role of the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the ‘MSM’ in maintaining the established system of power in the UK, including its endless support for war.”

  • Catlin Johnstone on why the west is getting what it wants in Ukraine “The US empire is getting everything it wants out of this proxy war. That’s why it knowingly provoked this war, that’s why it repeatedly sabotaged the outbreak of peace after the war broke out, and that’s why this proxy war has no exit strategy. The empire is getting everything it wants from this war, so why wouldn’t it do everything in its power to obstruct peace? I mean, besides the obvious unforgivable depravity of it all, of course.”

Fediverse

  • Flipboard joins the fediverse. “Flipboard is tearing down the walls of our own walled garden to give users, curators and content creators more choice, more freedom, more transparency and more ownership.”

  • Cory Doctorow explains how federation solvers the moderators trilemma “Facebook, Twitter and other walled gardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high switching costs to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls. Internal memos from the companies reveal that this strategy is deliberate, designed to keep users from defecting even as the service degrades”

Misc

  • Kurzgesagt’s video on cellular biology and protein interaction That resolved a thing I’d been pondering vaguely for years. The lock-and-key description of protein interaction never sounded convincing because a room full of keys randomly bumping around in solution wouldn’t open a lock. But the keys are all polar so there are gradients of magnetic interactions to slide down as guides. It’s just just random bumping about, it’s guided by magnets.

  • Robin Hanson explains why everyone is so boring. “we face bandits eager for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the sacred.”

  • AI prediction of white-collar-crime risk-zones Excellent paper in which the authors build a way to model financial crime and build an interactive map of where white collar crimes are expected. (Which is of course a satire of the equally stupid papers modeling other crimes)

more…

That’s just the highlights this month, there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed

Around The Fediverse

The fediverse is an anarchic rebellion of freely interoperating groups fighting against adverts and tracking and corporate ownership of the means of communication.

Some things I saw some of the people on it say:

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An algorithmic feed means that they don’t show most of your posts to most of your followers. They only let your followers see the posts that their algorithm judges to be the best. Writers are crazy to put up with robots judging all their posts.

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