thomasjkenney
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I didn’t see this until TDK’s response:
<i>excessive faith in their immune system</i>
True story: My wife and I have not been germ-sick in a decade. Improved diet for me, and both diet and exercise for her, and we’re good to go. We’re not social butterflies, but we attend(ed) concerts of varying size, shop weekly in public markets, doctor visits, family shindigs, etc etc etc…normal life. NO GERMS!
So, yeah, I have a <i>little</i> pride in my immune system. After all, it’s the result of a billion years of evolutionary pressure, most of which cannot be repeated, let alone observed, so it can be plugged into a model. Replace that with a Bill Gates Joint? I’ve been battling Bill Gates’ evil proxy, Windows, for nigh on to 35 years. You think I’d trust his motives in this?
RE: All quiet on the ‘cyber’ front
StarLink is now mostly operational, and this is the ‘PTB’s replacement Internet. They are now free to shut off as much of the terrestrial Internet as they deem necessary. I’m working on building a ‘tiny library’ WiFi that I’ll keep up as long as we have power. It will contain as much free stuff as I can mirror, particularly Gutenberg Project archives and some public domain video/software. I can’t replace the true Internet, and I can’t be a nexus for revolutionary activities, but at least I can help stave off boredom.
RE: 400M guns
The problem is quite worse than that, I’m afraid. I have located several ‘backcountry compounds’ where it appears the residents have bunkerized themselves into a granite batholith. Your average prepper will be out of beans in a year or less. These folks have read Lucifer’s Hammer and taken the message to heart. Vegans will not have the personal energy to resist these people when they emerge to retake the country.
My wife is learning American Sign Language. She said nearly half the language is facial expression…like using the face to denote interrogative vs imperative expressions. She and fellow students, and the professor, likened wearing a mask to losing a whole branch of grammar rules. Imagine if English had no conjunctions.
She also gets spontaneous job offers the moment she mentions she’s studying ASL.
For a little beauty on this gloomy Friday: The Other Marx
I was gonna comment earlier about Bokonon and the connections re: ‘common-sense types’ to Player Piano, but didn’t. I did chores and let it stew…and, BANG! Cat’s Cradle was about the difficulty of a mundane problem driving frustrated people to drastic solutions. In the book, the problem was simply mud. That’s it. The military complained that mud swallowed up an inordinate amount of equipment. Solution: teach water to stand on it’s head (form ice at ~105F/40C).
The ‘therapy’ is not about preventing/curing. It’s simply, banally, moronically, greedily about…no more sick days.
Still get a germ, but won’t keep you down. All around you are similarly ‘therapized’ so they don’t care. Everybody keeps working. It’s like ‘mood stabilizers’ for the immune system.
@madamski re: asym and time and stuff
First, so I stay OT, remember that asymmetric warfare includes the tired-and-true tactics as well as the new-and-shiny. “Remember, and stay alive!” is also asymmetric warfare. Going Harry Tuttle is guerilla kindness. 🙂
About the pretzel, here’s just a fairly straightforward example in my recent travels:
Company wants reminder calls for appointments. We do reminder calls.
The database software has several (SEVERAL!!!) varieties of time storage types. I’ll keep to the flavors I use at the moment:
datetime – Stored as a 32-bit number internally, then helpfully converted for you by the ‘connector’ (a class driver of sorts). Storing in 32-bit limits to a granularity of 1 second, otherwise it’s only useful for a limited period. When you ask for the datetime, you get something that is adjusted to the timezone either set or assumed when you first connected to the database.
timestamp – This is the 32-bit number, in the raw. Seconds from epoch (in this case, I think sometime in 1970, but differs for hardware and software). This is in Greenwich, so must be manually converted to the needed timezone.
date/time – Either just the date, or just the time, stored as a string
The phone systems we use for this store the more critical timestamps in a 64-bit number, affording some room for growth.
We’re in SoCal, so PAC TZ. Most customers are east coast, so CEN or EAST TZ. Some expect to see their time in their local TZ, some expect to see some times in TZs specific to this or that call, or in the TZ of the agent making the action.
Entities send us data that we digest to generate these reminders. We usually have to support legacy systems that cannot be reconfigured by the clients, or it’s “Oh, you want a data export connector? That’s $10K please…” (MediTech, FU! Likewise McKessen!) I expect a baroque, almost maliciously designed time format to be used in each and every new site we support. I am seldom surprised. Here’s a small sample of formats I’ve encountered that I’ve since internalized:
07/25/2021 1:18 PM
07/25/2021 13:18:00
2021-07-25 13:18:00
2021-07-25 13:18:00T-08
2021-07-25 13:18:00T-08:00:00
2021-07-25%2013:18:00T-08
2021-07-25%2013:18:00T-08:00:00
07252021138000
25-JUL-2021 13:18:00 <– VAX VMS time format…my first professional use of time in computerland!The above are machine-produced and fairly reliable. When humans are used to produce these, you get the normal variances.
Then various programming languages and their libraries allow/do different things with time, not surprisingly and most egregiously hampered/damaged by Microsoft Win32 and .Net libs. They can all produce surprising ‘default’ values for bad input times, so catch out the lazy hackers.
Anyway, that’s just a vignette re: time display, storage, processing…just the mustard being prepared for the pretzel.
Re: the Y2K stuff…
It’s as different (time math) for human intuition vs computer solution as trying to make a self-riding bicycle. Time seems second-nature to all of us, even including awareness of time zones, DST, most even aware intuitively of latitudinal differences in day length. The computer version of all this is a freshly-baked Gordian soft pretzel salted with methamphetamine hydrochloride.
@those darned kids…thanks for the rec! Love animation stuff, Bill Plympton and Disney Studios and everything in between.
Apologize for partial thread hijack, but I must add: Hatten’s show was a true cartoon-lover’s show for kids who could concentrate for more than 15 seconds at a shot. He always had a lot of history and current connections to deliver, I think I remember guest stars (hafta go back and watch!), all in his ‘calmly energetic’ style. Not all 120 mins were Popeye, lots of George Of The Jungle and Tom Slick. And I wonder why I grew up a Doubting Thomas…
Thanks, @TAE Summary – It’s spreading far and wide. Denninger thread linked here also. (Hafta keep Denninger at arms’ length for fear of getting powder burns!)
For the Dr’s in the house: Saw some comments at Denninger re: vaccine injection protocols that generally, though intramuscular, do not require withdrawal of blood first to ensure no vessel was hit, due to cost (??) of the vaccine/medicine (not waste the dose!). This was suggested as a cause for the ‘instant death and dismemberment’ cases we see. Thoughts?
From my fevered paranoia, I’ve bumped to 60% confidence my opinion that this is a Gates redo of Afr/Ind. It is an attempt at sterilization, damn the collateral damage. Check birth rates over the next 2 years.
Also, I took a month off this madness, starting at the end of June, and only now doing catch-up. Wish I hadn’t, because I find so many people stuck in a loop. I spent the time since doing mentally productive things. Here was the impetus for my shut-off, going back to my required and long-overdue connection with my true home state, and realizing the World is moving on: The New Horizons Of A Bucket
@madamski: I’m glad the ProBosco is back! I value your presence in a strange way. You, to me, are similar to Little Horse the Contrarian, or a ‘fool on the hill’ gone HS Thompson on passers-by. The ‘act’ (as some may view it) is useful to open people up. I tend to read authors, rather than books, so I’ll start my Joe Bageant phase presently. Before I get to that, I want to read Wise Blood. The movie is a true work of art, and I can’t say why but it says something about the present, and about the ‘ProBosco Returns!’ thread. Anyway, hope you’re well. You might remember something I just found through a long stint reading tvtropes.org:Quasi At The Quackadero – the animation of Sally Cruikshank. When this was made, I’d have been watching Tom Hatten on KTLA, for 2 hours of Popeye and related.
You stand in line at a jazz club. The doorperson asks to scan your pass. You’re allowed into the club.
You’ve just volunteered your Personal Health Information to the doorman, who, by allowing you in, has just communicated that bit of Personal Health Information to all the other folks in line, the other staff in the venue, the musicians, any passers-by. I assume that, even though they might not see the PHI facet of this, they surely know they are deliberately communicating that one status point (with MANY connections) to hundreds of third-party participants in the exchange.
That violation of HIPAA is a felony with a possible 10 year prison sentence.
You can’t get to the folks at the top of this. It’s the attacker/defender paradigm. How can you defend against new threats? How can you detect new threats in a pool of 8bn people? Think globally, act locally. Break the tools. Misused tools often break. Oops. Shoudn’t’a used that screwdriver to pry my 302 block into position. The Gates, Fauci, Schwab et al are tools. They are not invulnerable, and can be broken. They are obviously not the critical parts, as they seem to have fallen under a passing vehicle at some point. But there appears to be a need to have something like them to get things done.
So…excommunication. I have a hard time with the lamp-posts concept (was raised a peacenik), but I can certainly see us letting them all flee to NZ or Patag, and just barricading them. They can’t do s#!+ without oil, so let them run, then starve them out.
Woke up with a bad ‘unintended consequences’ thought this AM:
If beef production is eliminated, how long will it be until the large- and medium-sized mammals remaining on this continent are wiped out? I’m sure Uncle Ted just won’t get the same rush bow-hunting meal worms.
Music for Madamski:
Wynton Marsalis – Jazz in Marciac 2009
The Aristocrats – Pressure Relief
Paul Gilbert – Argument About PieI had a bad thought, and wrote the following. Since madamski has taken a powder, I’ll be the resident weirdo for the day.
1) Who/what collects input data to train the model?
2) What criteria to pre-filter input data?
3) How collated? Is model code vulnerable to things like lsd/ordering problem?
4) Does the machine have ‘Asimov Switch’?
5) Allowed/capable of self repair/replication?
6) Allowed/capable of morality?
7) Allowed/capable of emotion?
8) Opacity of operation? Can we still understand what it’s thinking, or has it escaped?
9) Air gap? Please…for the love of Dog…PLEASE TELL ME IT’S AT LEAST AIR GAPPED!!
10) Automobile? Is it in a robot?This is not an exhaustive list of questions. Also, be mindful that a machine doesn’t have to be smarter than humans, it just has to be massively better at it’s specialty.
No machine can be ‘taught’ inspiration, serendipity, curiosity. Some randomness can be built into the system, and various weights given to ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ decisions (that is, don’t tell the machine to kill all bacteria before the machine has been taught that some varieties might actually be useful to have around). It is up to some human or other to ‘teach’ the machine what is helpful/harmful to humans. That’s already a problem for relying upon a human, with human biases and a superior but unchecked random number generator.
I’m starting to become a bit concerned. I’ve discussed with my wife recently about my view (too nebulous for theory yet) that entities like corporations and state governments are and have always been AI. Thinking along this plane, it becomes possible that maybe all organizations of intelligent species are AI.
Family, clan, tribe, town, state. All do something to protect the organization as an entity. We group together and make rules to ensure fair decisions, safe operations, whatever. All these rules imbue the organization with benefits for it’s participants. The participants are encouraged to keep the organization going. They’ve become the immune system of the org, the brain cells of the org, the blood cells of the org, but the artifice that established the org, the set of rules, is now calling the shots.
Take this to a corporation, which, in it’s modern inception, requires dividend payout ad infinitum. The org has written and unwritten rules about pulling weight or thrown overboard. Now you’ve got a filter for greed. The AI of the corp is ‘steering’ itself toward emulating a long-problematic slice of humanity. The further out on this tangent it goes, the profits go up. Positive feedback loop, gobble gobble gobble, but it’s not any particular human that did this, it’s the set of rules governing the corp, and the prevailing behavior standards.
Now to government, where there has ever been the problem of selection for sociopaths/psychopaths. There is less coherence in a government, it’s bigger and has more independent units due to the broader scope of operation. If government, too, is AI, it is a lurching, insane, gadfly-beset beast.
So, in my view, since organization of this sort has always been a sort of AI, it’s operation may already be too opaque. We may indeed have passed the singularity, and like the techies have always said, we wouldn’t notice. It wouldn’t be like Lawnmower Man’s “The sound of my birth pangs will be every telephone in the world ringing in unison!” If we have been coopted by the machines already, would we notice? Are we already slaves to something?
I’m certainly being paranoid, but we are really close now.
Aliens…Pshhhaw! There are scarier sharks in this universe. We’ll go ask the old man in the cave. He’ll know what to do.
RE: T2 Diabetes relief…
Yes, quite possible and not all that difficult. My wife did it, and eats less protein than when she started, was diag’d pre-T2 about 16 yrs ago. It’s mostly taking conscious control of your diet and exercise. She’s Asian, and comes from a rice/noodles culture, family well enough to have a chauffeur (middle-class thing in Jakarta). She switched first to brown rice, then to quinoa. Lots of veggies, real whole-grain breads (if at all), NO SODA OR JUICE! We’ve both switched to sparkly water, and don’t miss the sugar.
Message from Eric Clapton (I’m assuming that the old farts on here remember him!)
Of course I do! He’s George Harrison’s best friend!
And so it rolls…
This (below) is the opener from a message I received from a local (Studio City) jazz club, The Baked Potato. Keep in mind, this is a <i>jazz</i> club…you know, the music of intellectual freedom? This place regularly hosts some apostles of Zappa (Mike Kenneally, Joe Travers, others), and contemporary superstars like Marcus Miller.
They have been struggling the past year, selling VOD of prior performances, and doing rare ‘kinda live’ crowdless streaming shows. This is really a head-scratcher for me. These people are among the few I sorta expect to be geniuses. “If I had my way, I would tear this old building down!” Turn it into a ‘terrace’ with the only structure being a kitchen and a loo. But what did Carlin say about the indescribability of God?
I have been thinking more about what kinds of non-passive entertainment can be ‘shown’ to people who have been pretty well hooked on passive jibs like TV, movies, FriendFace. They can’t (yet) force you to show papers to read a book, play hopscotch in your kitchen, play a guitar, knit socks.
A weekly ‘farmers’ market’ sprung up in the nearby mall parking lot. My wife and I will go to see if it’s actually that, or just an attempt to make the mall seem relevant again. As long as I don’t have to show papers to use a bicycle, I’m within a couple hours’ ride of Camarillo/Oxnard, with copious fields of everything from avocados to strawberries. I haven’t been out there in a couple years, so I don’t know the current situation. The whole region has always been dotted with roadside produce stands, mostly temporary but some more durable, like The Somis Nut House.
Well, I ramble a wee bit, don’t I?
Asimov discussed various ‘Selden Crises’ in his works. I feel like we’re approaching a ‘Kunstler Crisis’ here.
For the Schulz fans here – I was given these books by my father almost 50 years ago. I rarely open them, and have never translated the German one (bogged down in computer languages).
@madamski & Mr House re: Ellison’s view
Midas World – Frederik Pohl. ‘The Midas Plague’ (1954) describes a society with compulsory consumption: automobiles to washing machines. The machines build, man must consume…or be considered antisocial. You’re given a stipend (UBI?) that ‘expires’ via the consumption quotas.
@madamski & @Michael Reid re: indica/sativa differences…
Subtle, but very important: indica will suppress dreams, sativa will stimulate them. My brother suffers from night terrors, and uses indica to keep a lid on things. This is a medium-duration effect, lasting a day or two after a single use. This may be tied to an increase in depression suffered by people who only/primarily use indica.
Still reading stuff, but had an appropriately strong knee-jerk reaction to this:
“An individual’s data is kept secure and confidential at all times.”
• Nation’s First ‘Vaccine Passport’ Coming To New York (NYP)
Uh…yeah…except the part you just broadcasted to anyone in sight range that you have been given the shot. You don’t get in unless you’ve had the shot, so everyone who sees you enter knows that fragment of your medical history. Serious PHI leak, stupid as phuq.
RE return of stolen stuffs, this is a really nice docu:
@my parents said know re: computer frizzies
Are you using a touchpad? If so, clean it thoroughly. If that doesn’t help, it may have aged out. They wear out and the thickness (or lack of) makes them more and more sensitive.
Also, check for the presence of cat hairs on the device! 🙂
@Dr P re: non-alterations
It doesn’t directly alter any DNA…as far as we’ve been told by the totally trustworthy manufacturers.
Here’s an analogy that’s kinda hyperbolic, but maybe not?
A carjacker points a gun at you, tells you to scooch over, takes the wheel and goes on a crime spree. He hasn’t modified your car, but he’s sure done a s#!+-ton of damage, eh? And then he leaves…no more carjacker, but things are still mighty f#(<ed up.
@madamski re: phantom PMSGiggle! As my wife always says, “Prepare to Meet Shaitan!”
Can I lighten the mood a bit?
Portland, OR, isn’t a lost cause: Paul Gilbert – Argument About Pie
I tried to find a comment I posted last night at MoA on this topic, that we need continuous low-level exposure to everything. Seems to have been deleted. I’ve never had b delete any of my posts.
Anyway, yeah, I logic’d this one out last year, too.
I don’t know if this has been posted here yet: The Manifesto of Great Awakening. Against Great Reset. This article speaks to the other thing I logic’d out last year…atomization of the populace.
The vaccines are a cipher. We don’t know what’s in them because it’s a trade secret. So…trust an unknown virus that seems to behave just like all previous viruses have for all of human history, or trust an untested ‘miracle drug’ that we aren’t even allowed to investigate.
Science is a mighty river, info deposited in the glacier, melting, flowing out into the ocean. You cannot plant a flag on a sandbar in that river and declare it “The Science” and be done. The sandbar will be gone before you can say “C. Everett Coop!”
Some quiet time for Sunday:
…and I must add, having read Dr. D’s take in this thread:
The end of mining isn’t the end. Every transaction must run through calculations to verify. And the end of mining Bitcoin means the next Xcoin is up to bat.
Escape the confines of the planet and that energy becomes nearly free…but I have a feeling they’ll strive hard to eat that cake, too.
Now <i>I</i> get to do a Dr. D:
• Bitcoin Energy Use ‘Bigger Than Most Countries’ (BBC)
Didn’t I say…?
Haven’t I said…?
REPEATEDLY?!?!?It’s a fucking black hole. Stupidist thing imaginable to do on a closed-system planet. Worse than a tire fire!
@Dr. D re: clay floors and real books…
Feels more and more like A Canticle For Leibowitz, eh?
@Arttua, re: Adams
V Arnols,”That’s quite a photograph; I don’t feel qualified to critique it, but the depth of field must have been huge…” He shot with large format cameras. and had a f64 club. smaller format cameras couldn’t come close to f64
He carried that camera on his back in the Sierra Nevada following Brower and Norman Clyde. That’s 30kg of kit that is only useful for the art, on top of his bedroll, etc. He worked in a period in which he could perfect long-exposure shots, which are now impossible due to jet contrails. This nighttime shot in New Mexico is certainly now impossible.
I am in awe of the masters of film, both still and motion. It’s such a surfer’s realm.
Raul… Thank you very much for posting the daily Calvin. My dad and I were ‘partners in C&H fandom’ and I miss him terribly these days. Each shot of Calvin is a little boost to what optimism I might retain.
Cheers, all!
“Geez, Raul…you used to be so cool! What happened?!?!?”
Seen a shit-ton of these posts at every blog. Same MO: light praise leading to “…gone off the deep end!” hyperbole.
That sock needs darning.
@madamski & Geppetto…thanks! Added to my list.
Impressionism and illusion… Each of us with our lenses being melted, distorted, fogged, cracked. I pass people on my rides in the woods, and some are still in my universe, while others seem to have moved off.
Impressionism and illusion:
Háry János in long form and suite
I have a CD with 3 different performances, first is Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, second is Háry János, third is Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé. The suite is on the CD, but there’s a movie.
I am likely to be derided for this, but I somewhat prefer the Emerson, Lake and Palmer rendition of Pictures.
I’ll be watching the long Janos and the long Kijé this week…work load permitting.
