A word of warning. Because it has gotten too confusing too keep track of them, all Anonymous comments will be shot on sight from now on. If you’re going to comment and aren’t logged in with Google, make use of the Name/URL option; you don’t need to enter a URL, just a name.
Tag: technology
Comment issues
We’re having some trouble with comment counts over 200 being inaccessible to the reader, so please expect some turbulence as we experiment with solutions.
UPDATE – MK has fixed the problem. Once a post is over 200 comments, one can click on NEWER to get the 201+ comments.
Comment update
Thanks to the HTML master MK – who has the same initials, but is NOT Markku of the Dread Ilk – the Blogger comments now closely resemble CoComment and are much more legible. He was not, however, able to recreate CoCo’s special mashup feature, which I’m sure everyone will regret. A few things.
1. Clicking on the post title now accesses the comments, embedded below the post.
2. Anonymous commenting is technically permitted. This doesn’t mean you should use it because it’s too confusing. Pick a name and stick with it; you don’t have to register, just use the Name/URL option and leave the URL blank. Anonymous comments will generally be shot on sight.
3. To post with the embedded comments, your browser must be set to accept third-party cookies. Otherwise, you’ll see the “post comment” box, you’ll be allowed to click both Preview and Publish, but the comments will not appear. I’m not crazy about this either; it wasn’t set to embedded previously because they didn’t work with my usual setup, but just set the cookies to flush when you close your browser and you’ll be fine.
4. At the bottom of the post, you can now cycle through the comments on the individual posts using the OLDER/NEWER text.
In which we are amused
I don’t know which is more amusing to me, the fact that some of you are actually lamenting the demise of CoComment or the idea that the world has suffered any loss from the disappearance of the comments into the great digital void. The comments are a daily conversation, and like most conversations, exist only in the moment. When they did produce one of those rare moments of enlightenment, I usually turned them into posts anyhow.
Since none of the external comment systems are either very good or play well with the old Blogger template, I’ve simply gone with the existing Blogger comments since they’ve worked fine on Alpha Game. Unfortunately, there is no quote button, so I would encourage everyone to adopt the practice of italicizing text that one is quoting in order to distinguish it from one’s own comments. I would also encourage everyone who wants to provide links to learn how hotlink a URL; it’s not difficult and it will significantly increase the chances that someone will visit the link you are recommending.
Seriously, at this point, you look downright retarded when you copy an entire URL into a comment rather than hotlinking it. If you don’t care enough to hotlink the URL, then obviously it’s not important enough to bother pasting it in there in the first place.
While I’ll permit anonymous commenting for the time being, mostly because the alternative is requiring Open ID registrations, I would prefer everyone commenting to at least enter a name using the Name/URL box. It’s even easier to Remove Content than it was with CoComment – one fell click instead of the previous 7-step process – so don’t operate under the mistaken assumption that it’s going to be any harder for me to keep the usual suspects from getting out of hand than it was before.
Anyhow, it’s a sub-optimal solution, but a functional one, and should allow the daily conversations to continue to flow freely. A few notes:
1. If you don’t want a pop-up, but prefer to see all the posts embedded below the post, click on the hotlink on the bottom of the post in the white box. On this post, it looks like this: “3/15/2012 11:24:00 AM”.
2. The blogger pop-up window is not only limited to 200 comments, but won’t give you access to comments 201 or higher. To see them, you need to make use of the method described above in point (1), then click on either Newer or Newest depending on whether there are 401+ comments or not.
3. If any HTML-head knows how to adjust the template to allow the functionality described in (1) to be utilized using the post title in addition to the time, please let me know. It works like that at Alpha Game and I think it’s more intuitive.
It’s fascinating to see how much humans hate change. The traffic here dropped 600 visits from the lowest it has been in more than thirty days on a weekday, including holidays, simply due to the change from CoComment. Who would have thought the old commenting system would have so many fans? Somewhere, on an island not so very far away, Blackblade is wiping away a single tear….
UPDATE – All right, just pick a name, any name. It’s too much trouble trying to keep track of multiple Anonymouses, so I’ll just delete comments without names. It’s a pity Blogger won’t permit Name/URL without permitting Anonymous.
Mailvox: whither post-Jobs Apple?
LH wonders about the future of Apple:
I’ve noticed several news articles and radio broadcasts over the past week talking about a new Ipad coming out. Today I saw it’s official. Didn’t Apple do better at keeping product upgrades under wraps until the announcement prior to Jobs passing? Do you see the techno-facist facade failing?
Yes, I think the Eviler Empire is in the very early stages of collapsing. The screw-ups are small, but significant. They couldn’t even come up with a name for it? The killer new feature is a super high-resolution? I’ve worked in an industry that reached its natural limits – graphics cards – and the resolution gambit particularly is a classic sign of a product category that has peaked. Unless Apple manages to reinvent itself again, which would appear to be a very difficult trick without the evil genius that was Jobs, I think they will continue to be profitable, but cease to be dominant and they will become just another big technology company within 10 years.
Tracking the trackers
This Firefox add-on is a good idea, particularly if you don’t make use of NoScript or keep your cookies turned off.
Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has unveiled a new add-on for the popular web browser that gives web users an instant view of which companies are ‘watching’ them as they browse.
The move comes the same week that Google pushed ahead with its controversial new privacy policy, built to provide even more data for Google’s $28 billion advertising business – despite concerns that the massive harvesting of private data might be illegal in many countries.
The Collusion add-on will allow users to ‘pull back the curtain’ on web advertising firms and other third parties that track people’s online movements, says Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs.
Google’s new anti-privacy policy is disappointing, as it really reduces the usefulness of Android. I don’t even turn on the data connection on my smartphone or use most of its features simply because I don’t want to share my entire life with Google.
It increasingly appears that the only way to deal with the data monsters is to flood them with crap. I’m thinking it might be useful to have an app or an add/on that will surf all the nastiest websites and all the most random shopping sites possible in the background and constantly stream that information to the data collectors. Sure, your real data will be there, but they’ll have to work a lot harder to make any useful sense of it.
Fascist America and the technostasi
Big Brother is spying on you through your laser printer:
A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.
“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.
It must astonish those who have spent the last fifty years worrying about the establishment of a White Christian Fascist America to realize that they’re on the verge of getting a Rainbow Progressive Fascist America instead. No doubt plenty of them still believe things are progressing in a positive manner, but I suspect there are a few glimmerings of nausea in more than a few progressive stomachs.
Here is the list of the printer companies who secretly agreed to serve as technostasi for the Secret Service.
Mailvox: the case for the Singularity
Agnosticon presents his argument for his Singularitarian faith, or as I prefer to think of it, the techno-apocalypse:
In response to whether exponential technology will continue, whether immortality is feasible, and the compatibility of transhumanism with Christianity:
Technological Singularity doesn’t only rely on continuous exponential growth of separate technologies. If you look at the history of technology, there hasn’t just been a single exponential curve that keeps advancing each technology. For instance, vacuum tube technology gave way to transistor technology that gave way to integrated circuits with shrinking scale and increasing speed.
The Kurzweilian Singularity is composed of a series of S shaped curves, each having a gradual initiation and leveling out phase and a middle exponential growth phase as technologies come to fruition and then lapse into obsolescence. The combined effect of technological paradigms appearing and then shifting to new ones are observed as Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, Moore’s Law being just a special case. The LAR posits that complexity leverages itself to create more complexity.
The exponential nature of technological advance, particularly in anything that becomes an information science leads to what is now becoming a common pessimistic fallacy across a number of fields. The example Kurzweil gives is of the Human Genome Project which began in 1990 as a fifteen year project to sequence all of human DNA. Halfway into the project only a tiny portion of the genome had been completed, yet by the year 2000 nearly all of it had been finished. What researchers hadn’t realized, due to our inborn tendency to think linearly, is that gene sequencing had become an automated information science, amenable to exponential increase in efficiency.
If we consider the prospects for material immortality today, a similar distortion clouds our perception, namely you cannot extrapolate by linear means into the future and expect to come anywhere close to a realistic target. Not only is this because biology is now an information science, but also because the sophistication and intelligence of computational tools will also grow exponentially in the future.
The single greatest stumbling block for Singularity is the poor performance of software and artificial intelligence in the last half century. While Kurweil can confidently claim that the most powerful supercomputers today are roughly equivalent to the computational power of the human brain, and that by 2020 personal computers will share the same distinction, he cannot project a similar track for AI, which is crucially important. Most people interested in Singularity don’t believe it can happen without I.J. Good’s predicted Intelligence Explosion, whence intelligent machines are able to parse their own code and are smart enough to improve themselves recursively. It is possible that from that point onward, machine intelligence will explode in a positive feedback loop, giving rise to intellects many orders of magnitude beyond ours. The complex interdependencies of biological networks may be beyond our ape’s brains, but very likely they won’t be beyond the superintelligences that arise from the Intelligence Explosion.
The relatively poor performance of AI’s today, and the inability of narrow AI’s to generalize on their own to other domains is somewhat disheartening; however there is cause to be hopeful that things will change in the coming decade, mostly because research is now focusing more on general AI, and it is now known that narrow AI does not lead to insights in general AI. No matter how well DARPA gets a Hummer to cross the desert, that skill is not transferable to other domains.
Along with investigating general AI, the Singularity Institute is investigating means to ensure that superintelligent machines will not destroy us. Friendly AI is the new field that seeks to use decision theory and ideas about mind architecture to create minds that share our own values and retain those values perpetually throughout the intelligence explosion. The overall principle is summarized in the statement: “Gandhi does not want to commit murder, and does not want to modify himself to commit murder.” By grabbing any mind at random out of all of “mind space” the chance of picking one of benevolence is very low. However, by guiding the process onto favorable paths as the Singularity process initiates and unfolds, the theory is that we will be able to avoid those minds that are indifferent, or even hostile, to our existence.
Summarizing and putting all the pieces together, the hardware Singularity is already in progress, the software Singularity has been less spectacular, though there have been significant flashes of brilliance. Software systems in general have steadily increased in complexity. Showcase systems like IBM’s Deep Blue chess player and Watson Jeopardy player have impressively beaten human players, but like the DARPA challenge, are still hampered by being narrow intelligences. This may seem like cause for pessimism, but remember 1998 during the genome project. Remember that we humans suffer the myopia of linear thinking.
The prospect of material immortality? I, for one, am doubtful we will ever get there alone. If there is one thing that we know for sure, it’s that human intelligence is not part of the exponential explosion. Humans are pretty much as smart, and as dumb, as we were thousands of years ago (give or take a Flynn Effect). But imagine, if you will, an intelligence a thousand times greater than ours working on the problem, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Imagine something as far beyond us as we are beyond a gnat.
Is transhumanism incompatible with Christianity? This depends on how you interpret the Singularity. If you recast the quest for material immortality just as the attempt to extend lifespan, I don’t see why you can’t regard it as another medical procedure, albeit an unusual one. Many things about the Singularity can be regarded as only methodologically materialistic and not as pure materialism. However, it would be disingenuous not to recognize that most Singularitarians are probably strict materialists. Things like mind uploading, which contradict doctrines about the human soul, are probably Christian heresies; however, I don’t see much problem with cryonics, nanotechnological resuscitation, and a very, very long life.
There is some question about what and who will be allowed into the post-Singularity “heaven.” If our AI’s are made to be friendly, it might be presumed that evil human intention won’t be allowed into the Singularity either, at least not into merged or uploaded minds. On the other hand, since vintage, unaugmented minds will probably be quite innocuous considering the superpowers that inhabit the Singularity, they may be relegated to a quiet, pastoral existence on a preserve of some type, should they choose to remain human. But even that type of human existence will probably be different than our lives today — or perhaps they will cater to nostalgia. You may be able to return to childhood and relive your life as many times as you want. By this time, human qualia will be understood as neural/cognitive processes; the capacity to feel happiness and reward, or erotic pleasure will be beyond the crass boundary provided us by evolution. Conversely, the ability to inflict arbitrary horror, anxiety and pain on a cognitive agent could conceivably be without bound. The post-Singularity Hell could make Christianity’s look like Disneyland.
If our minds are to populate the post-Singularity on equal status to the potencies of those around us, whether merged with us, or as individual identities, are we ready and willing to relinquish those aspects of ourselves that are inimical to a collective existence? A similar question could be asked of the Christian afterlife. How much of “you” can you afford to lose before you become “not you”?
Said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
If you desire to live in full post-Singular status, you might face a similar quandary, and this may be the final answer to the question of immortality. Stealing a thought from Buddhism, it is change that defines the central aspect of our lives. It is unclear whether anyone ever lives beyond ten years in any actual sense, because after that interval we have changed beyond equivalent identity.
If we met our ten-year-ago selves, would we share any intimate empathy with them at all? We are engaged in a continual process of birth and becoming and death and dissolution. What we feel as nostalgia is the dim remembrance and mourning of a deceased relative who was ourselves. To achieve true immortality, we may need to reselect from “mind space,” this time choosing one capable perceiving an integrated experience throughout time. For human beings, immortality may be pure illusion.
Mailvox: the last man standing
CrisisEraDynamo requests a rebuttal:
How do you plan to answer Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), all of whom assert that aging will be conquered Real Soon Now?
Watching them die.
NB: I have nothing against any of them, you understand, but all three of them are older than me.
The death of sex
This can’t help Japan’s demographic decline:
A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found. The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.
If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.
Combine an economic downturn with the increasing excellence of porn and video games, then throw in female economic independence and this is the result. For all that they are decried as soshoku danshi, the position of the “herbivores” is a perfectly reasonable one.
People often point out that “a real woman” is better than the autoerotic options, but the fact is that a) the real women tend to come with considerably more negatives than they did 50 years ago and b) the gap between a real woman and autoerotica has narrowed considerably in that time, especially for men who are not in the upper half of the socio-sexual rankings.
Throw in the difference in time and money expenditure, and one can see it is a real testimony to how highly men value actual women when one considers how compelling the alternatives have become in the last two decades.