thirdwave

Pinned Post

Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: "In the 1988 primary, Jesse Jackson ran as a full-on leftist, calling for single-payer healthcare, free community college, a big federal jobs program, and the cancellation of Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich—and by sweeping the black South and winning everywhere among voters under thirty, he beat Joe Biden and Gore and came in second to Dukakis, but…he was never going to be nominated... In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically center-right party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of power"

"Seedance’s ‘generated’ AI Cruise-Pitt demo was a green screen and face swap.. Whoever made the Cruise-Pitt video didn’t generate it from nothing. They did a face swap — an older AI trick that’s now a standard CGI effect, because it works predictably."

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Ironically the article was about another LLM (who flamed a programmer on an article it wrote/posted after the programmer refused to accept its code). This story basically is now a living proof for all "AI" related cascading fuck ups.

Ars Technica: "[We] published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards."

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FT: "Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot.. Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools... The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to 'delete and recreate the environment'... Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption"

H2 Power Paste

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Osenilo: "Scientists of the late 19th century tried to build mechanical models [but failed]... The alternative was a strategy that changed the entire 20th century: 'Abandon mechanics and postulate formulas.'

This was done in:

Theory of Relativity — abandoning the medium altogether.
Quantum Mechanics — abandoning causal descriptions of the microcosm.

Once they abandoned the very idea of a medium, the problem of describing it vanished automatically. The mathematics was successful — and that was enough to psychologically reject the need for a mechanism... The turn of the 20th century became a time when a new unwritten rule emerged in physics: 'It’s acceptable not to understand what is really happening.'..

This provided enormous freedom:

Quantum mechanics didn’t require visual models.
Theory of relativity managed without a medium.
The probabilistic interpretation allowed one to ignore the mechanical process.
Mathematics became more important than physical meaning.

This was a departure from materialism towards abstraction — psychologically appealing because it eliminated the need to 'build a model that explains everything.'. But at the same time, it created the possibility to

Develop theories that contradict familiar causality.
Construct models that are incompatible with each other.
Abandon mechanical explanations even where they seemed obvious....

Over the past hundred years, we have acquired tools that were completely unavailable to physicists in the 1900s.. The [old] ether was imagined incorrectly — as a solid abstraction, not as a real, complex gas-dynamic medium"

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Dmitrii Osenilo has an aether based fundamental psy formulation. Check him out.

#TheDemistifySciPodcast.

Papers

James Cameron badmouthing WB-NFXL deal? Cameron endorsed every Terminator movie since TII, and nearly all of them sucked. He even promoted Herminator: Woke Fate, you know with the Sarah Connor literally looking like Hillary Clinton. Can we trust JC anymore? What is his angle here?

Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: "Just as they did thirty years ago, machine learning programs (including those with deep neural networks [like LLMs]) operate almost entirely in an associational mode. They are driven by a stream of observations to which they attempt to fit a function, in much the same way that a statistician tries to fit a line to a collection of points. Deep neural networks have added many more layers to the complexity of the fitted function, but raw data still drives the fitting process. They continue to improve in accuracy as more data are fitted, but they do not benefit from the 'super-evolutionary speedup'. If, for example, the programmers of a driverless car want it to react differently to new situations, they have to add those new reactions explicitly. The machine will not figure out for itself that a pedestrian with a bottle of whiskey in hand is likely to respond differently to a honking horn"

"Pioneer of causal AI, Judea Pearl, argues that no amount of scaling will get LLMs to AGI. "

"ORIGINATOR: FBI

FROM: HOOVER, J. EDGAR

TO: WATSON, MARVIN

TITLE: REACTION OF SOVIET AND COMMUNIST PARTY OFFICIALS TO JFK ASSASINATION

"[A] source reported that the KGB Residency in New York City received instructions, approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson's character, background, personal friends, family, and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was indicated that 'now' the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly that between President Johnson and Robert and 'Ted' Kennedy."

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It looks like KGB also thought LBJ was responsible for JFK's assasination. The excerpt above can be found in the JFK files (release started by in 2017 #DJT).

You can even bet on the possibility of rupture.. (4% chance) #Polymarket

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Road & Track: "Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds"

Futurism: "Tesla Robotaxis Crashing Vastly More Often Than Human Drivers"