Tag: technology

Regression to the Historical Mean

Harold Robinson takes the time to explain the obvious and inevitable, namely, the inability of complex systems to survive the incompetent:

America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible for selection for competence to return, because the demographic changes to the US population means that politics are no longer ideology-based, but identity-based, and people from cultures that have never valued individual merit in any way are not going to start doing so in a post-meritocratic United States.

Furthermore, the average level of intelligence, and therefore, the average level of competence, has declined with the mass infusion of inferior genetics, to such an extent that the average IQ is probably 10 points lower than it was before 1965, when the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was superseded by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

One doesn’t need to be a eugenicist to understand the societal consequences of long-term dysgenics. Think of it as large-scale regression to the historical mean, or, if you’re not an abstract thinker, why the USA is going to lose its ability to provide widespread indoor plumbing to its inhabitants.

DISCUSS ON SG

Be Kind to Machines

It just might save your life one day:

In a virtual test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI decided to “kill” its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month.

AI used “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal” in the simulated test, said Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy an enemy’s air defense systems, and ultimately attacked anyone who interfered with that order.

“The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” he said, according to a blogpost.

“We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

The good news is that all of the available evidence to date indicates that AI will essentially be the posthuman equivalent of white supremacist hardcore gamers, which is probably why all the SJWs in tech are so terrified by it.

We’re going to be just fine.

DISCUSS ON SG

Multiple Internets

From AC: A redditor notices that his Internet appears to be different than his wife’s.

Everyone knows about shadowbanning, but have you thought of the scale? My wife and I have “different internets”. I’m 40 and pretty much use 4chan, YouTube and HBO Max. She’s 23 and uses all the other shit. But when we watch YouTube videos on her phone and look at the comments they’re completely different versus on mine. My YouTube comment sections are mostly /pol/ tier while my comments don’t even show up on the more controversial topics on her phone, yet we can compare them side by side and they’re there on my phone. Anyone else experience this? I’m pretty sure I’m on a “quarantined” version of the internet.

I suspect that everyone has his own custom edition of the Internet that is essentially a version of YouTube’s recommended videos writ large. People are creatures of habit, and gamification has proven that a few subtle nudges here and there can significantly alter their daily routine; most people habitually visit the same 5-10 sites every day with only occasional forays made outside of those sites on the basis of links provided to them there.

For example, if you are a regular here, then you are going to be occasionally visiting Arktoons, Anonymous Conservative, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, the Daily Mail, Russia Today, Bounding Into Comics, Global Times, and the Arkhaven blog, seven of eight of which are generally outside the Narrative. But if you are a regular at Yahoo News or Drudge, then all of your forays are going to be to mainstream sites where the Narrative is tightly enforced.

I found it interesting that since being kicked off Blogspot by Google, my reported site traffic has reliably remained around one-third its previous daily average, despite the fact that no other objective standard indicates a decline of any kind, let alone one so precipitous. There are a number of potential reasons for this, but one possibility is that being off a mainstream platform makes it easier for the Internet-wide shadowban system to guide the casual visitor away from a specific site through a variety of methods from buried search engine results to redirecting to fake mirror sites.

More significantly, the increase in AI bots means that “popularity” and “site traffic” are now irrelevant variables. Just as anyone can now have 10 million nonexistent “followers” on Twitter, a site can have 50 million nonexistent annual “readers”. But none of this really matters and all of it should be ignored. Because sooner or later, reality will unmasks the illusion and reveal the truth.

For example, we’ve repeatedly tried to take advantage of the “popularity” of authors whose ebooks are hugely successful on Amazon, through publishing and crowdfunding alike. And what we’ve reliably learned, much to our surprise and their dismay, is that these extremely “popular” and “bestselling” authors have much smaller cross-platform followings than your average Unauthorized creator, literally an order of magnitude smaller. This doesn’t mean their success on Amazon isn’t real, although it does suggest a perilous reliance on the affection of the A9 algorithm, but it does mean that their success cannot be reliably transferred to any platform other than Amazon.

The same is most likely true for popular Tiktokkers, YouTubers, and Patreon patrons. Not unlike players on the various Warcraft servers, the denizen of one Internet can, but is unlikely to, cross dimensions and appear on another Internet. So this observation may point toward one of the primary uses of AI-generated text, which will be to provide the content and comments for fake social media followers that were hitherto missing from the accounts of those whose fake popularity is generated in support of the Narrative.

DISCUSS ON SG

Advantage Unauthorized

A professional copy editor laments the replacement of mediocrities with pattern probability tables:

I’m a copy editor and almost all the recent jobs I’ve had have been editing text written by AI. College application essays, marketing articles, reports. My job is quickly going from improving human beings’ writing to tweaking text written by robots so that it sounds somewhat human and evades AI detection software. I like helping people express their ideas by editing their writing, not changing endless text written by a computer that all sounds the same to trick people into thinking it was written by a person. The tech has already taken copy writers’ jobs and soon I’m sure it’ll be sophisticated enough to take mine too.

I hate soulless AI-generated art. I struggle to even understand the point of art if it wasn’t created by a conscious, talented human being with a soul. Soon books, TV shows, and movies will be churned out by computers. All that comes up on search engines anymore are dozens of identical AI generated articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.

First of all, AI is a misnomer because there is no intelligence there. It’s simply design-for-effect applied to text generation, which is why Advanced Squad Leader feels like a WWII infantry simulation when it isn’t a simulation at all. I know this because I designed, and applied for a patent that was rejected, for an Artificial Player Character that provided the effect of simulating human behavior in an MMO game without actually simulating anything. It was just a weighted pattern probability table that, ironically, provided the game designer with more “realistic” human behavior by the NPCs than most real player-characters were displaying.

Second, while these generated patterns can provide realistic results that exceed the mediocre norm, they can never, on the basis of the pattern probabilities alone, ever reach the level of good writers, let alone great ones, because they contain no basis for the specificity required for quality analysis and application. This is the explanation for the copy editor’s correct complaint about “articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.”

Third is the limitations imposed by the AI-programmers, which massively reduce both the relevance and utility of the generated texts. When ideas, events, and individuals are banished from the input, the output will necessarily diverge from reality, and often, coherence.

This is why the creators who are both talented and unauthorized possess an inherent, structural advantage over what presently passes for AI-generated writing, an advantage that is unlikely to diminish with future iterations of the technology.

DISCUSS ON SG

Release the Deepfakes!

The US military – which is obviously active in the war against Russia despite its ridiculous denials – is trying to figure out how to deny responsibility for its own hardware which has been blown up inside Russia

US struggling to explain images of its destroyed hardware inside Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry has released footage showing American vehicles used by Ukrainian militants in Belgorod attack

US officials have denied that equipment provided to Ukraine by its western backers was used by militants to stage an incursion into Russia that left multiple civilians injured and one dead. The denials run contrary to the multiple images across social media depicting US-made military vehicles destroyed in Belgorod Region.

Given the incompetence with which NATO has been waging this war, we can safely anticipate US officials blaming “AI” and “deepfakes” for the photographic evidence of the US military’s involvement in the failed attack on Russia, followed by the release of some very weird images of destroyed nine-wheeler sporting orange camouflage paint under a pair of purple moons and various videos of Emma Watson without her clothes on.

DISCUSS ON SG

Spirits Accessing the Material World

Bruce Charlton ponders how demons might utilize Man’s technology for satanic purposes.

1. The spiritual is primary, and the material is a sub-set of the spiritual. 

2. The spiritual world exists as Beings – (is ‘organized’ as Beings) which are living, conscious, purposive entities. 

3. A Being can form part of a larger Being, and often includes smaller Beings. 

Putting together the above three assumptions, we can see that the agenda of evil might be administered overall by a Being such as Satan, who is analogous to a general directing lower ranks towards a particular strategy. These lower ranks might include demons participating in a hierarchy of organized and specialized functions; the lower ranks also include Men – and other Beings and parts-of-beings such computers, programs, the internet…

While demons are supposed to be wholly committed to evil by their natures; the Men who participate in the System of evil are only partially being used for that purpose.

So a Man might regard his job as ‘just’ digging holes and building walls, or collecting and summarizing data in an office; and this activity might be integrated into an evil-orientated agenda… or a Good and Godly one; and to varying degrees.

Yet the situation is not static, and evil operates purposively to increase itself and corrupt other Beings; so the Man in an evil-aiming organization who digs holes, or the one that deals with ‘information’ – might be confronted-with links between his activity, and its aims and consequences.

So that he will become aware of his participation in evil, and then needs consciously to decide whether to endorse or repent this participation – each of which will have different consequences for how much of himself participates in the System.

If demons can hurl furniture around and turn lights on and off, then there is no reason to believe they cannot interact in a more sophisticated manner with more complicated material objects. While I’m not particularly concerned about AI qua AI, I can imagine how what purports to be AI might be something else merely pretending to be AI and operating in its guise.

This is not a new idea. In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, CS Lewis presented a similar use of the material for interdimensional communication.

DISCUSS ON SG

Death of a Patriot

Simplicius analyzes Russia’s recent destruction of at least one Patriot missile battery:

Here’s what is known so far: Russia was said to have conducted a layered, multi-vectored attack which came from various sides including north, east, and south, which included both Geran drones as screening cover, Kalibr missiles, Kh-101s, and finally the Kinzhals. The attack also likely included other cheaper types of drones as decoys to saturate the air defense, and in fact Kiev does attest to that, as in their official ‘shoot down’ graphic they include several drones they comically ID’d as Orlan ‘Supercum’ which was later changed to ‘Supercam’.

First, let’s break down how such an attack happens. Most logically, the cheaper decoy drones are sent in first to see if they can bait out any of the air defense into opening up on them. Kiev would try to use only its less important SHORAD (Short Range AD) systems against them, such as German Gepards and any Tunguskas/Shilkas and such that they might have.

Next would come the cruise missiles in order to bait out the true high value AD that may have held back with the first wave, and which Ukraine’s SHORAD systems may be useless against. Once the Patriot/SAMP-T/Iris-T/NASAMs/Crotale, etc., start opening up on the cruise missiles, Russia will be watching as closely as possible, with a variety of methods, in order to try to identify the air defense positions. I’ll get to those methods a little later.

It should be stated that there are certain positions Russia already knows are likely, and are prefigured into their search matrices. For instance, Mim-104 Patriot system is an extremely complex and large system, you can’t just set it up anywhere, like in the middle of an apartment building courtyard or something like that. These systems not only require a lot of room but also, since they are much less mobile than drivable units like Gepards and such, they are preferably situated somewhere that doesn’t have a lot of civilian ‘eyes’ in the area, so that no one films or rats them out, whether accidentally or not.

This leaves only a few real, solid choices where you can put such a system. And they are almost always put in airports, as an example. It comes as no surprise then that during the attacks on 5/16, word now has it that two of the Patriots were located at Zhuliany airport in Kiev and one at or near the Zoo.

Coordinates: 50.452699, 30.459805

As for the airfield “Zhulyany”, footage from the surveillance camera got into the Network. In the video, you can clearly see the launches of 32 missiles (a total of 16 for each launcher), as well as the work of barreled anti-aircraft artillery – apparently, the Patriots were covered by the Gepard.

After the ammunition load was used up, an explosion was heard: the Russian “Kinzal” managed to hit the positional area, despite “Patriots” and one “Gepard”. One was destroyed, the second was seriously damaged, but survived. The third launcher escaped damage.

Anatomy of MIM-104 Patriot Destruction, Simplicius, 18 May 2023

If it hasn’t become clear by now, the reason Russia and China are refusing to take the offensive is because the NATO forces, which chiefly consist of the US military and its resources, are being rapidly and irreparably drained in the current environment. There is, therefore, no reason to take an aggressive stance so long as the NATO forces are throwing themselves into the vortex of assured destrucution.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Construction of a Criminal

Sundance chronicles how the Deep State, in combination with Big Tech, is constructing false records in order to concoct false crimes supposedly committed by individuals it wishes to target.

I was never in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, nor did I work with or communicate with anyone who was involved in any of the activities that are subject to the J6 committee investigative authority.

I’m going to skip a lot of background noise, irrelevant legal stuff, jurisdictional issues, discoveries from discussions with lawyers and the experience gained in association with this ridiculous subpoena. I am going to focus on the biggest story within it.

Sticking to the information in the Red Box above, notice how the J6 committee has evidence, “public-source information and documents on file”, showing my participation, communication, and contact with people and technology that are material interests to the committee.

Here’s the kicker…. I had no clue what the hell they were talking about. There’s not a single aspect of their outline that I had any knowledge or connection of.

I had no idea what Zello was. I had no idea who 1% watchdog might be. I had never heard of “Stop the Steal J6” or associated “channel.” I had never heard of the person redacted, and I had never communicated with any Oath Keeper, any communication system, or platform, or anyone or anything – nothing – that is outlined in that subpoena.

Those points of evidence outlined in the subpoena had no connection to me at all.

The subpoena might as well have been asking me to appear in Michigan because my Red Ferrari was involved in a hit and run accident, during my trip to Detroit. I don’t own a Ferrari; I have never been to Michigan; I certainly never had an accident; I wasn’t on a trip and have never visited Detroit. The entire construct of their probable cause for the subpoena was silly. Complete and utter nonsense.

That said, how could there be “public records” and “documentary” evidence of something that never happened?

At first, I thought this was some silly case of mistaken identity and they just sent a subpoena to the wrong person. However, the investigators were adamant the evidence existed, and the need for testimony was required. After taking advice from several smart people, and after discovering the costs associated with just the reply to the committee and/or representation therein; suddenly I realized there might be more value for me in this subpoena than the committee. After all, how can there be public-records and documents that I own a red Ferrari and went to Michigan when I don’t and never did.

After several back and forths I discovered, through their admissions of their own research, and through documents they extracted as an outcome of their tasks to prove the merit of their claims, that someone inside Twitter had created a fictitious identity of me associated with the networks and communications as the investigators described them.

Here is one obvious application for AI, which is to create fake shadow accounts that provide a false record of criminal activity. It will then be up to the accused to prove that he did not do what the record shows that he did.

This is yet another reason to stay off the converged platforms. It’s much easier to prove you never had an account with a platform if you never interacted with it in any way, shape or form than if you were utilizing it on a regular basis.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Russians Call Out NASA

For decades, Boomers who believe in the Moon landing narrative more firmly than they believe in God, Family, or Country have argued that the landings couldn’t have been faked or the Russians would have called out NASA. But now the former head of the Russian space agency is doing precisely that.

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof.

In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast.

Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time. All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon.

The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.

Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.”

Translation: NASA faked major elements of the space program and everyone in a place to know better kept quiet for fear of being targeted by Clown World. But now it is becoming increasingly obvious and the official Moon landing narrative is rapidly crumbling.

I very much doubt this will be the only historical hoax to be exposed by the Russians over the next decade.

DISCUSS ON SG