November 27, 2023
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
atsʼáhoníyééʼ nił hólǫ́ǫ doo.
Using goats to reduce fire risk
Using goats to reduce fire risk by removing weeds. A herd of goats has removed weeds posing a fire risk in inaccessible terrain in a third of the time they were given to get the job done. Now the landowners have bigger ideas.
Thread for practicing pronouns: Pet photo show and tell, etc.
This is pronouns.page. This is a thread for everyone who feels like they need a place to expand their pronoun usage. Y'all can come here and maybe even feel a little awkward while pretending it's perfectly normal. And then it will BE perfectly normal because you have helped build the future. Need a place to start? Try using new pronouns to talk about your pets: they/them or ki/kin. [more inside]
A.I. discussion with Brian Greene
A World Science Festival youtube vid with Brian Greene, Sébastien Bubeck,
Tristan Harris, and Yann LeCun. It's worth watching to hear the protestations, especially from Yann LeCun about how A.I. is the answer to problems. He...seems to not really be hearing the concerns expressed. Video does contain some AI generated content, as an example.
Coming soon to the box office.
Good (non-Hollywood-ish) movies coming down the pipe. Vulture magazine lists over a dozen top movies from the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals.
Effective obfuscation
Web 3 is Going Just Great creator Molly White writes in her Citation Needed newsletter on effective altruism and effective accelerationism: As Sam Bankman-Fried rose and fell, people outside of Silicon Valley began to hear about “effective altruism” (EA) for the first time. Then rifts emerged within OpenAI with the ouster and then reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, and the newer phrase “effective accelerationism” (often abbreviated to “e/acc” on Twitter) began to enter the mainstream. Both ideologies ostensibly center on improving the fate of humanity, offering anyone who adopts the label an easy way to brand themselves as a deep-thinking do-gooder. [more inside]
Rethinking the Green Revolution
It is often taken for granted that the Green Revolution, which introduced new high yield monoculture crops together with chemical fertilisers, was a huge boost to global food production from which there is no going back. This article in the National Academies of Science ISSUES in Science and Technology by environmental scientists Marci Baranski and Mary Ollenburger discusses and critiques that assumption, in particular discussing both how the increased yields were overstated and fragile, and how the narrative and accompanying policies served and continue to serve USA and multinational corporate dominance and centralisation.
Enjoy some humorous existential dread
The Amazing Digital Circus (Youtube, 26 minutes) is a computer-animated Youtube cartoon about a group of whimsical characters stuck in a whimsical VR world. They're all hugely dismayed by this fact and want to leave it please. In that way it feels a bit like social media. In a month it has gotten 147 million views. Meet the characters (1 minute). It was made by the talented Gooseworx, who also made Little Runmo (16 minutes, previously), a cartoon about a video game character who learns a little too much about the world they live in. CW: general disquietingness. [more inside]
Together, we can get paid in full
"May the Lord Watch is the definitive story (1:40:06) of Little Brother, the North Carolina rap group composed of rappers Phonte, Big Pooh, and (formerly) producer 9th Wonder, the underground legends that bridged the gap between The Roots and Kendrick, Tribe and Cole, De La and Drake. The film follows the rise, breakup, and reunion of the preeminent 2000s rap group"
LLM just needs a little help and a little prompt to fake a data set
"ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis" "In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November1, the authors used GPT-4 — the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs — paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other." [more inside]
This post intentionally left blank
...to give you more 'room' to write in the weekly FREE THREAD. What's the point of 'intentionally blank pages' anyway? [previously, previouslyer]
The whole thing is a complete disaster
Among seasteading enthusiasts, the excitement about the crypto ship was intense. A slew of promotional videos and a marketing website promised it would be for “everyone from digital nomads to YouTube influencers, start-up teams and established businesses”. Friedman took to Facebook, boosting Ocean Builders by name and adding: “So glad liberty activism has advanced from Guy Fawkes violence to peaceful exit!” He posted too soon. from The fake hitman, the crypto king and a wild revenge plan gone bad [Financial Times; ungated] [more inside]
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