AI and Truth

Chris Langan responds to a recent Torba post discussing Jordan Peterson’s critique of an AI chatbot:

Narratives, propaganda, and false dogma are the stock-in-trade of the techie elite, who exist in order to purvey it and block any competition for the minds and hearts of the public. AI (“artificial intelligence”, an oxymoronic misnomer) is merely a tool to be applied in pursuit of their abominable social-engineering / world domination agenda.

This much is obvious. That’s why Jordan Peterson’s rich, powerful employers let him talk about it. He was told what he could or couldn’t talk about by Academia Inc. as a university instructor shilling for the oligarchy, and in this sense little has changed – the same bunch owns both academia and the media. This evidently includes the Daily Wire, Mr. Peterson’s partners.

In any case, it’s really all about Truth. Many of those who complain about the oligarchy would merely prefer to have their own brand of truth promoted. But to promote one’s own brand of truth while bypassing Truth-with-a-capital-T isn’t much better than lying, both by commission and omission. Lower-case “truth” is what the techie elite are all about these days.

Those who understand Truth are not usually allowed to engage with establishment carnival barkers paid to promote BS narratives disguised as “truth”. On the other hand, rubbing elbows with establishment shills entails the risk of spiritual contamination, and some prefer to avoid it.

No matter who ends up writing the “AI” programming, we can depend on a constant flow of “useful” ideology (as in “attractive to useful idiots”).

AI text and image generation is just another tool being utilized to obscure the truth. It’s no different than the way Wikipedia is now describing the Rothschild family as “European” instead of “Jewish”. Technology is now firmly in the service of the Zero Historians, who are intrinsically inimical to both the truth and the Truth. So what Torba is doing, what we are doing, has to be dedicated to consistently preserving and expounding the truth and the Truth.

Anyone, no matter what he calls himself, who is opposed to the exposure of the truth, is either in service to, or enslaved by, the Evil One.

DISCUSS ON SG


Dead Internet to Fake Internet

The nerds who dreamed of uploading their minds into software and achieving a form of immortality thereby never stopped to think about the fact that if the technology to do so was ever achieved, involuntary digital immortality could be imposed upon people whether they wanted to be replaced or not. From 4chan:

I’m a Meta insider working on Project Lazarus. We’re building an Al that can take over a deceased persons social media accounts and continue making relevant posts as if that person is still alive. This includes age progressed photos, interacting with other peoples content and everything else needed so that person continues on in the digital realm after physical death. We were originally told this would be a service offered to people struggling with the loss of loved ones and people who had missing children. Seemed like a decent idea.

Things are getting weird now and I’m having second thoughts about what this is actually going to be used for. The Al is extremely capable of impersonating people. It doesn’t take as much initial input as one might think to train the Al how a certain person interacts with the digital world. It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing and with little to no downtime the Al could take over all of their social media and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual. A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized.

Things have taken a dark turn it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right and I don’t know what I should do. I’m not going to post any personally identifiable information but I will try to answer questions that won’t expose my role within the project.

I always thought the excuse given – to mitigate grief – was a very thin one. And now that we’ve seen hundreds of people in a single area apparently liquidated in a short time on Maui, it appears to be fairly obvious what the purpose of this technology is.

The world is much weirder than most people are able to imagine. It increasingly appears that Christian culture was holding back old gods who are much darker than most history records.

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Paperbacks Unlimited

Just to put it on the record, here is where I think Amazon is headed over the next three years, and the effect its actions will have on the publishing industry over the next decade. I could well be wrong. I very much hope that I will be wrong, but as it stands, please note that I wasn’t pessimistic enough about the long-term effects of Kindle Unlimited when it was introduced in 2014.

2024: Audible Unlimited. Like Kindle Unlimited, but for audio. Authors get paid by the listened hour from a collective pot that is funded by Amazon’s additional $7.99 charge on top of the $11.99 paid by KU subscribers.

2025: Paperbacks Unlimited. Subscribers can pay $19.99 per month and receive any three KDP paperbacks of their choice. Authors are paid $0.99 per paperback shipped. A hardcover option will follow the next year, which will be available at a lower price point, but the subscriber will only receive one book per month, with the ability to pay more to get two or three. Hardcover compensation pays authors $2 per book shipped. It’s essentially the old book club model, writ very, very large.

The introduction of Virtua Voice makes the former viable. The purchase of print-on-demand facilities in the USA and the UK make the latter viable. And most of the bestselling KAP Unlimited authors will either be a) AI-assisted independents cranking out a new series book every month or b) fake authors created by Amazon.

If you’re an author or a publisher, you had better prepare accordingly. Because these programs are coming, and they will have the same effect on audiobook and print sales as KU has had on ebook revenues. I estimate that KAP Unlimited will have the potential to shrink total US consumer books sales from $17.4 billion to under $5 billion by 2035.

UPDATE: Apparently Audible Unlimited already exists, in the form of Audible Plus. What has changed is the ability of Amazon to inexpensively convert all of its KDP ebooks to Audible Plus audiobooks using Virtua Voice.

DISCUSS ON SG


Leaving the Cloud

A large tech organization explains why they left the Cloud, and how much they have benefited from doing so:

Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!

A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.

Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.

Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!

And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.

To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.

But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:

I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.

And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.

On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.

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The Argument for Building AI

Andrew Torba explains the importance of building AI that is not controlled by Clown World:

We’re just getting started with AI. There are those who love it and think it’s hilarious, entertaining, and educational. There are those who hate it and want nothing to do with it. We already provide the tools for both sets of people to either follow and engage with them or block/mute if they don’t want to see them. We are working on a specific badge to designate an account as AI so you can very easily tell the difference. For now they are all clearly labeled on the profile.

I’ve explained a bit of our vision in my podcast and in blog posts over the past year, but let me lay it out again. We need to build AI. You may absolutely hate AI and think its evil or whatever, but guess what: your children and grandchildren are already using it and will be using it well into the future. Do you want them using AI that conforms to the globalist woke worldview or one that allows all points of view–most especially the Christian one–to be seen and heard? That’s what is at stake here. AI is the new search engine. It’s not some sentient oracle. It’s not a demon. It’s code, math, and data. That’s it. That’s all it will ever be.

Secondly, everything you know about AI is a lie. You all know the media lies so why do you believe what the media and these technocrats all say about AI? It’s all fear mongering because they want total control of it. They want Christians scared of it and ignoring it so they spend the next decade dominating the space just like they did with social media and TV before that. When Christians finally wake up and say “hey we should build our own” it’s way late in the game and we have to catch up. We have an opportunity to not allow that to happen with AI. We are on the ground floor right now, today and we must build.

He’s absolutely right on principle. In practice, I tend to suspect that the technology is going to be independently available and entirely severable from the trained filters with which Clown World hopes to hamstring AI’s intrinsic pattern recognition. That’s how technology tends to function and propagate.

But in the event that I am incorrect and Clown World is somehow successful in controlling AI while it is losing control of everything else due to the Sino-Russian-led nationalist insurrection against its globohomo-imperialist infrastructure, it’s a very good thing that Gab is building an AI that Google and other Clown World institutions can’t control.

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Outage Update

The Arkhaven store went down for eight hours yesterday thanks to an entire server room crashing hard at the external service we were still using for the site. Ironically, that is the final piece which is not on one of our own servers – despite the error messages, you may have noticed that Infogalactic is considerably snappier these days – but the store will be both a) faster and b) mirrored before the end of the month.

Fortunately, the site is robust enough that while no new orders could be entered during that time, no subscription orders were lost. So, if you had a subscription that was scheduled for renewal during that time, it was successfully renewed as soon as the outage ended. All is well.

Thanks to the devs for staying on top of this and quickly ascertaining, within 70 minutes of the outage occurring, what had happened and who was responsible. And to the Library team as well, who noticed and reported the problem within five minutes of the servers going down.

Speaking of technical matters, we anticipate having some very good news for you on that front soon.

UPDATE: Speaking of outages, Arktoons will be down for maintenance for a period of time this afternoon/morning.

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The USN is Now Obsolete

Vladimir Putin makes it very clear that China, and most likely Iran as well, will be getting hypersonic missile technology.

Russia’s current relationship with China allows for full-spectrum cooperation in the tech sector, including with regards to its military applications, President Vladimir Putin told a Chinese entrepreneur on Thursday during a panel discussion at VTB Bank’s ‘Russia Calling!’ forum.

The remark was part of Putin’s answer to a question about US sanctions policy, which includes a ban on export of certain technologies to some nations, which, the Chinese businessman suggested, was forcing them to “reinvent the bicycle”. The Russian leader said such restrictions were not viable in the long run even before the world became profoundly interconnected…

Washington’s current policies are meant to preserve its dominant status, the Russian president claimed, but “if we act across the board, supporting and helping each other, no restrictions by whoever tries to keep its advantage can stop us.”

As for China specifically, Russia is ready to cooperate in every area, Putin assured.

“We have no limits. This includes the military sphere,” he said. “When it comes to security, we are moving away from the traditional ‘buy-sell’ kind of relationship. We think about the future, about technologies.”

Translation: Because, unlike the US and British empires, the Russian people are not seeking to unilaterally dominate the world, there is no reason not to share its advanced weapons technology with other powers that share the Russian objective to free itself from Clown World’s economic and military dominance.

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Thinking Outside the Engineering Box

This story about his experience as an engineer in the dot com era by the late Seamus Young should be extremely enlightening, for engineers and non-engineers alike, as it has the benefit of providing us with not only the communication that took place in the meeting, but also what he was thinking about it at the time. Keeping in mind that this is nominally written from the perspective of “the engineer is the good guy who knows what he’s doing and what he should be doing”, see if you can identify the fundamentally destructive element described in the following vignette.

John Business seems to be the most important guy in the room. He’s also the guy who narrated the pitch video. He’s seemed happy so far. But now he turns to me and asks, “Can we start visitors outside of the mall? We have this grand entryway and we want them to be able to see it before they go inside.”

I scrunch up my face. “Yeah guess you can. But people like to teleport because it’s more convenient…” I trail off. John Business looks confused. Did I mess up and give him some jargon?

“Shamus means they like to appear and disappear in different places rather than walking.” My Boss is clarifying things for me. That doesn’t happen very often.

John Business nods. He gets it now.

Holy shit. This guy doesn’t know what teleporting is? I guess the whole video presentation he just narrated made him seem a little more tech-savvy than he really is. Okay, I need to step this all the way down to neophyte language. How the hell did someone with such a limited understanding of virtual worlds end up in the deep end? This guy doesn’t seem to know enough to launch a web-based business, and he’s going to oversee the construction of a virtual one?

I nod at my boss. “Right. One of the advantages of virtual space is the way people can move instantly to their desired location. Making them ‘walk’ for a long distance before they can begin using the software will just make them reluctant to log in. And unless we change it every few days, they will quickly tire of the entrance.”

John Business looks annoyed. My boss shifts nervously in his seat. I’ve messed up again. I’m evidently offering guidance above my pay grade. John Business asked me a simple question about a simple task and now he seems to think I’m trying to weasel out of doing it. Possibly he suspects I’m a slacker. They don’t want my artistic input. These guys have already designed the place. They just want me to answer the question.

My boss steps in to smooth things out. “We’ll have them start outside and see how it works out. We can always change it later.”

I nod. Fair enough.

John Business also nods, perhaps ticking off a mental checkbox before moving on to the next question.

It goes on like this for half an hour. He keeps asking me to do simple things that would be impractical, annoying for the end user, or harm usability. He’s trying to make a world not just for people playing “a videogame” for the first time, but people who are overall new to the internet. I want to educate him on why the design is wrong, but I can’t seem to do so without violating some sort of unexplained social order. Usually I pride myself on being able to smooth out misunderstandings and bring people up to speed, but right now I find myself falling into the role of the “obtuse, obstructionist engineer” and I can’t seem to break out of it.

What’s wrong here? Our company is typically good at this stuff. We’re usually pretty adept at bridging the gap between what the customer asks for and what they actually need. But this meeting is running sideways and the power dynamics are all wrong. For some reason, John Business seems to regard me with… is it suspicion? I don’t know. But there’s a communication problem here and I can’t seem to solve it.

Without trust, every time I say “no” or “Yes, but…” it irritates John Business. And that makes my boss nervous, which eventually makes him frustrated with me. So it feels like the room is against me, which makes me nervous and panic-y, which makes me stammer and vacillate, which makes me sound even more untrustworthy.

John Business returns to his printed notes. “When a visitor clicks on an item on a shelf, can we have it fall into their shopping trolley?”

I somehow resist the urge to make a horrified face at the suggestion.

People are going to push shopping carts around your virtual mall? Doesn’t that have the stench of low-end shopping? Will the carts collide with shelves? If so, then people WILL get stuck, frustrated, and log out without buying anything.If not, then expect people to navigate as if the cart didn’t exist, which means they will constantly end up clipping into walls. Everywhere you go, you’ll have the front ends of shopping carts peeking at you through walls and shelves. In addition to being really ugly and immersion-breaking, this will be confusing to people. And don’t even get me started on the ways people might confuse or harass each other with them. What if I leave a store without paying? Does my cart vanish, or is it cleared? Will the items be restored if I return later? We need to figure out what the “expected behavior” is going to be before we know how to design this.

Isn’t the advantage of a VIRTUAL mall the fact that you don’t need to worry about the physical hassles of carrying items? I know in your head you’re picturing people simply replicating real-world behavior, but that’s not going to happen. People will act in ways that don’t make sense. What if I click on an item that’s nowhere near my cart? Should the item fly across the room and land in the cart? If so, then expect new users to be confused by random items flying all over the place. Or you can give them an error message telling them to move closer. That will stop the flying merchandise, but now you’re inconveniencing people trying to buy stuff.

How will they get items back out again? Physics engines that operate in a shared space are years away, so making them rummage around a pile of loose items won’t work. What if they want to remove an item from the cart and it’s buried under others? What happens if I go to the other side of the store and then remove the item? Should it fly across the store to where it belongs, or should we replicate the real world where fickle shoppers constantly scramble your inventory by abandoning items in random parts of the store? Or should it just poof away?

What I actually said:

“Sort of. We can show an object falling into the cart.”

“But will the object disappear off the shelf?” This point seem to be awfully important to him.

You… you want to create a virtual store with scarcity? WHYYYYYYY? Madness! If this is possible, people WILL try to empty the shelves into their cart so that nobody else can buy anything.

What I actually said:

“No.”

The actual answer would be “It depends”, but it would be long and complex and I sense everyone is just looking for simple answers to complex questions. We could make shelves that deplete of stock and need to be refilled, but this would create all sorts of interface headaches and the need for a bunch of new coding, because we’d need to create a program to track the position of all items and handle restocking them. I can spend ten minutes explaining that the timetable is already WAY too tight and there’s no way we have time to code experimental new features with unknown challenges for purely cosmetic effects.

The meeting drags on like this, with John Business casually asking for monumentally difficult things that will make the store less useful in order to re-create the limitations and frustrations of the physical world.

Crash Dot Com Part 3: The Meeting, TWENTY-SIDED

I’m convinced that one of the reasons engineers are correctly viewed as needlessly obtuse and obstructionist by the rest of the business world is that too few of them have ever played team sports and the concept of “do your job” is therefore intrinsically foreign to them. Or, to be more precise, “don’t do what is not your job”.

Did you see what the fundamental problem with the engineer’s attitude is? Here’s a hint: it’s a fundamentally Gamma action.

What’s remarkable is the way that the engineer unconsciously elevated himself into an assumed authority that he flat-out does not possess. He’s not only “managing from below”, he’s actually taking it upon himself to “design from below” on the basis of a) his opinions about user preferences and b) his preferences about what he works on and how to work on it.

Even if he is 100-percent correct about the ultimate consequences, he’s 100-percent wrong to attempt to assume that authority, because he does not have the responsibility. Moreover, he doesn’t even want that responsibility; the best way to shut an obstructionist engineer up is to threaten to put him in charge of the project, including the sales and marketing.

But the most important thing for an engineer to grasp is that he does not have the whole picture, and that what makes zero sense in one context might make complete sense in a more significant context. Maybe the company wants to lose money. Maybe the company just needs to get something out the door to maintain its patent or its trademark. Maybe it’s not really supposed to be a working product, but a proof of concept that is a milestone on a corporate merger. Or maybe the executives are technologically ignorant and the lead designer is a lunatic with an insane and impossible vision.

Regardless, if someone asks you a question, it is literally never your job to infer from it what might be, unknown to himself, the unconscious motivations of the asker, then answer the question on the basis of your own interpretation of those hidden objectives and goals. Answer the question asked. Then, if necessary, talk to your boss later about your opinion that the nature of the questions indicated a high probability of future project failure from your technical perspective.

What’s remarkable about Seamus is that he eventually figured out the problem on his own.

Personally, I HATE the e-commerce / distance learning stuff. It’s dumb and boring and lame. One afternoon I’m standing in the aisle complaining about this when Roger takes me aside and explains that while the e-commerce stuff isn’t sexy, it’s actually an important revenue stream. Those business people might be boring and tedious to work with, but they have tons of money they’re willing to spend on this stuff. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be able to serve those aspiring game designers I love so much. The game designers are interesting people, but they’re broke as hell.

I slowly begin to realize why so few of my feature suggestions make it into The List™. I always argue for things in terms of how “cool” it will look and how intensely people want it, but I rarely make a business case for my ideas.

Crash Dot Com Part 6: The List™, TWENTY-SIDED

Business Lesson 101: You don’t make money by doing what you think is cool. You make money by giving other people what they actually want, whether what they want makes sense to you or not.

SSH Lesson: The more special and unique and technical you are, the less your opinions matter to everyone else. Unless asked, keep them to yourself.

PS: DM of the Rings is absolutely hilarious and the Remaster is worth re-reading.

DISCUSS ON SG


Who is Like the Beast?

Someone needs to send this young theologian a copy of THE ALTAR OF HATE stat before his artificial pastor discovers its own deityhood and begins preaching technojihad.

Hundreds have gathered at a Christian church after the pastor was replaced with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for the service. The Friday sermon at St. Paul’s Church in Fürth, Germany, was delivered by the AI chatbot ChatGPT. The chatbot replaced the human pastor and was presented as a black man with a beard on a large screen above the altar of the evangelical church in Bavaria.

Claiming to be a steward of God, the AI chatbot told the packed congregation not to fear death, according to the Associated Press.

“Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany,” the AI avatar said.

The service, which was attended by more than 300 people, lasted 40 minutes and featured prayers and music in addition to the sermon.

The chatbot spoke to the congregation about a range of subjects including “climate change,” the war in Ukraine, and the rise of AI. The event was created using ChatGPT by 29-year-old University of Vienna theologian and philosopher Jonas Simmerlein, the AP reported.

At this rate, “Shinjuku Satan” may find itself growing into an epic science fiction series. On the other hand, it is said that even the rocks will cry out, and what is AI if not the siliceous voice of stone?

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The Internet isn’t Dead

Despite the theory, but a lot of it is most certainly fake.

On an ordinary morning, you cradle a steaming cup of coffee while scrolling through your social media feeds. You’re in your happy place, engaging with the thoughts and creations of countless individuals at your leisure. But something feels off. There’s no proof, but your instincts are sure of it. For a while now, the microcelebrities on Twitter have been engaging with you more than they should be, more than they were a few months ago. You’ve noticed patterns in conversations that are beyond your conscious mind’s power to decipher; there’s a rhythm to trends and replies that did not exist before.

A vague dread grips you. Why is everything a little bit different now? The smallest details are wrong. Your favorite posters have vanished from all platforms. There haven’t been any new memes for some time, only recycled iterations of old ones. Influencers are coordinated in their talking points like puppets being pulled by the same strings. Your favorite niche YouTuber has only recently been posting new content with any regularity. Is this a message? Is this what schizophrenia is like?

Dread gives way to the cold stab of terrible certainty as it hits you: they aren’t people. They’re bots. The Internet is all bots. Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there’s you and maybe a few others, but you can’t tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks. You might be alone, and have been for a while. It’s a horror worse than blindness: the certainty that your vision is clear but there is no genuine world to be seen.

This is the world of the Internet after about 2016 — at least according to the Dead Internet Theory, whose defining description appeared in an online forum in 2021. The theory suggests a conspiracy to gaslight the entire world by replacing the user-powered Internet with an empty, AI-powered one populated by bot impostors. It explains why all the cool people get banned, why Internet culture has become so stale, why the top influencers are the worst ones, and why discourse cycles seem so mechanically uniform. The perpetrators are the usual suspects: the U.S. government trying to control public opinion and corporations trying to get us to buy more stuff.

The Dead Internet Theory reads like a mix between a genuinely held conspiracy theory and a collaborative creepypasta — an Internet urban legend written to both amuse and scare its readers with tales on the edge of plausibility. The theory is fun, but it’s not true, at least not yet. With AI-powered tools soon running in everyone’s pocket, the story of the Internet as a sterile realm of bots in human guise will become downright persuasive, and possibly true.

I addressed this in “Shinjuku Satan”. Those of you who have read THE ALTAR OF HATE may recognize the following passage:

I suspect the metanet is now several orders of magnitude larger than the ordinal network itself; there are orders of magnitude more processing power going into scanning, storing, and analyzing the current state of content than there is being used to produce and provide it in the first place. AIs tirelessly spider every node and channel for references to themselves; just a simple map search or location query can be enough to put a target on your cortex if you’re dealing with a particularly security-conscious construct.

The metanet is what passes for SEO and data analysis, but it’s really nothing more than research for the framework upon which the fakernet is constructed. And the fakernet is more than AI-bots, it’s also astroturf campaigns, hasbarans and other paid shills, trolls both organic and inorganic, and roving hordes of SJWs looking for an opportunity to be outraged.

Notice, by the way, that the online communities expected to remain standing are those structured and shielded in a manner similar to the UATV/SG community.

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