Best joke you've seen lately: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/artificial-incompetence about why things aren't as bad as they seem. However, it forgot to consider the storage requirements of all the "sleepy cat" videos... Clever callbacks? Optimistic sarcasm? Whatever. Enjoy.
I just got kicked off of Facebook. Anyone else?
No idea why. The email announcement of my death sentence didn't say why. Not a hint. Nor any prior warnings or cautions.
If I did commit some odious crime, then I should be able to figure it out. My Facebook timer is five minutes. Per day. So not much of a strain on my memory. My last few comments on Facebook were encouraging people to vote. That covers the last week or two, since I didn't visit every day. Doesn't seem to justify "Death to the vote encourager!"
If I did something wrong or made a mistake, then I'd even be willing to apologize for it. In public or to the victim, if such exists.
But I right now I suspect the sudden death sentence goes back to secret complaints. Almost surely from sock puppets. But if this is the case, then I'm proud of my enemies. I hope I properly earned the enmity of such people. Cowards hiding behind anonymous sock puppets. And stinking cowardice is their best point.
As far as Facebook goes, isn't it interesting that Zuck wants to escape into his very own Metaverse from the real world mess that he's largely created? Certainly Facebook has more influence on the real world than me or you. But I guess that's still nicer than cases like Musk and Bezos who confess to wanting to escape from the entire planet that they've screwed to the wall.
A conclusion? I admit that I don't think I care enough about being a nice guy. I'm too busy trying to be a good person. Whatever that means, it apparently includes offending some folks. If they deserved to be offended, then good for me.
Well, [the current] poll already seems to have outlived its usefulness. Not that I'm hating on the topic, but it's pretty clear almost no one much cares. So I got to thinking about a new poll question, which is linked to this poll if you take it as a poll about the "effective" lifespan of Twitter. (And I confess I'm hoping Musk will earn a #heilElon for killing Twitter.) Though (as usual), I am coming at the topic sideways:
How long should a program (or a company or a Constitution) be maintained?
And don't forget the implications for the data created and manipulated by the program (or Constitution) in question. I'm sure the options are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, but here's my suggested list:
1. Short, on the order of 10 years. (If so, then you think Twitter has already lived too long?)
2. Medium, on the order of 50 years.
3. Long, on the order of 100 years, but maybe you want to go for geologic time.
4. Finite, but with an easy update process.
5. Finite, but with a difficult update process.
6. Until Captain Neal loses or zaps the decryption key and no one can use it anymore. Obviously.
[That's annoying. Can't even use an ordered list here?]
It's also coming from my time-centric philosophy: As far as the genetics go, we humans were created by evolving in geologic time. However as far as the software goes, we were created in a mutual bootstrap process running in historic time. At each phase of the bootstrapping, we created a slightly more complicated society that allowed us to bootstrap more complicated mental programs, leading to the current fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. But computers are changing and operating in quantum times that we'll never truly understand and certainly will never run in, singularity be darned. I used to think that "the image of gawd" in which man was made was basically a UTM, but now I understand there is no such thing as a UTM. For starters, you'd have to show me your infinite tape. It's just heuristics (and turtles) all the way down, where running time matters a lot and humans can't run with the computers. So have a nice day? You silly turtle, you!
And in case it isn't obvious, yeah, I got here as a result of contemplating the logical fallacy underlying the current alleged election in the States. If you believe in voting, then I hope you remembered to do your civic duty. But if you believe the elections are faked, then why would you want to vote for anyone so incompetent as to fail to collect any evidence of the YUGE fakery that you think took place in 2020? I know, I know. It's because you are full of theories about what could have happened, but that doesn't explain the incompetence. (This negative can actually stand on its own without the proof.)
Three Steps to kill Franklin's republic:
Won't matter if we #HeilElon as fascist or saint, he who dies with the most toys is still dead.
Just another c&p. This time I'll go ahead and localize it a bit, since the same thoughts basically apply to Slashdot. Also, I am sometimes amused by the panic of trolls when confronted with the idea of MPER as a tool to discourage their trollish behaviors. (Kind of sad when your purpose in life has been reduced to trolling, eh? (Me? Naw. I think I've earned my obscurity. When too many people start paying attention to my mumblings, I regard that as a good reason to move on... (Little to no danger of that on Slashdot?)))
Started thinking about "Features to figure out if [Slashdot] is "succeeding". How would anyone know?
Easiest to start with the bad examples. Facebook and Twitter want money, so the simple metric of their success is how much money is coming in. But in "social" terms, that metric has been disastrous. Dare I say utterly disastrous? Yes, and I think it's an understatement.
So how about AMPER as a proposed metric for the social success of [Slashdot]? Not the only metric, but I think Average Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation could be a useful tool to see what is going on and even managing it. And of course I have to confess that I'm building on all of the old ideas about MEPR.
As usual, I'm thinking about these things from a mathematical perspective of symmetries between public behaviors and the identities that are behaving, but I'm still finding that a difficult perspective to explain. Nor has anyone asked about it. Therefore it's easiest to start with an example dimension.
An easy dimension to describe and even to work with is "polite", so I'll pick on that one again. I actually think it's an important part of a higher cluster of dimensions that define "friendly", and I think we would agree that [Slashdot] should have a friendly atmosphere. [Or not agree?]
Using a 5-point Likert scale I think it would be fairly easy for me to classify a reply as "very polite", "polite", "neutral", "rude", or "very rude". (But you may see how much more difficult it would be to switch to "friendly" for "polite".) Then the system can scan all the recent interactions that were classified on that scale and come up with an average score. If there aren't enough scores, members of the system could even be asked to rate come comments until there's enough data to be meaningful. (That could be random or targeted sampling, depending on the goals. For example, neutral outsiders may have a different assessment of the politeness than the actual participants in the discussion.)
If the politeness AMPER is going up for several weeks, then that indicates the system is being more polite overall. If it is going down, then the system is becoming less polite. If one of the objectives of [Slashdot] is to encourage polite discussions, then I think the implications are pretty obvious. Stable or increasing politeness is okay, but decreasing politeness is a bad sign.
What to do about it? In the context of MEPR, I think the natural solution approach would be to adjust the visibility parameters to discourage rude behaviors by making those identities less visible. In contrast, if you are consistently polite and contribute in a positive way to that objective of [Slashdot], then there would be no reason to reduce your visibility (though I don't actually favor the idea of positive rewards for positive behaviors in this specific example, since I think politeness should be the normal default).Â
This kind of system management shouldn't be done in a way that targets anyone in particular. I actually think that would lead to some people trying to win rudeness awards. But the "social health" of the overall system is something worth measuring with the objective of creating a healthy social network. And yes, I even think that could be a positive contribution to creating a more healthy society.
Just another c&p for whatever Slashdot has become these years...
It's the spam, stupid!
And you're an idiot if you think the economy equals the price of gas. You don't even know if that's gasoline or natural, do you? So sad the economy is always complicated, but now it's been reduced to a fake wedge issue.Â
As a wedge issue, "the economy" is used to fool stupid people into voting to make themselves poorer. Benjamin Franklin's republic is dead. Now we're just voting to decide if it's an oligarchy or an outright kleptocracy. The rich people win in every case, though some of the rich people are bigger and more selfish bastards than others.
The problem as the super-rich bastards see it is money. They think they NEED more money. But it's a fake problem, because no amount of money can satiate such greed. And it's a circular problem because they only got that rich because they are that greedy and insatiable.
So back to the spam. Just went through my primary email account. Even there it isn't simple enough for stupid people. Do you know about spam versus ham? False negatives and false positives? The scamming spammers are always trying to push their garbage out of the spam folder. My email address gets about 20 per day that are correctly recognized as spam, but there are a few "false negatives" that should have gone into the spam folder. "Live and let spam" is clearly a business model the spammers love to live with.
But today I looked inside the spam folder and discovered quite a lot of false positives, too. Mostly politicians begging for money. Really sad because I don't have enough money to matter. The rich and selfish bastards mentioned above can squish any amount of money the poor folks like us can come up with. And they do it scientifically, with careful financial analysis of their "investments" in the cheapest politicians in the cheapest races. That's the #1 reason why we wind up with so many cliffhanger races between vastly different candidates. They "invest" their money to fool voters, starting with the stupidest voters who are easiest and cheapest to fool and carefully working their way up to 51%, when they stop "investing". (But the #2 reason is because the stupid journalists love reporting on close horse races.)
Not all of the rich bastards' money goes into the campaigns, by the way. A little bit goes into cushy payback jobs for the cheap politicians after they retire. And that part of the scam is made even easier because most of the politicians are naturally corrupt. Honest public servants do exist in Congress, but mostly in a few sacrificial districts gerrymandered to squander the votes of "bad voters".
So in conclusion, I think ol' Ben was being diplomatic when he said "It's a republic, if you can keep it." He knew that good things can't last forever and the American experiment in democracy has ended with whimpers about gas prices.
If you love democracy and freedom, then I still urge you to vote. Maybe my pessimism is curable?
But if you think elections are fake and you just want to follow your leader's orders without thinking, then why do you even want to be bothered with all that voting hassle and fuss? Especially when you can just shoot your way out of any problems, right?
Yet another c&p for Slashdot, though this one should be sufficiently self-contained to avoid the complaints about insufficient context... Rather against my better judgment, but I'll even click the "Publicize" option, though with a twisted preface and even twistier epilogue:
Preface:
If you love freedom, please vote!
If you don't believe in elections, then why should you bother with voting?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled "It's still about the economy stupid, but..."
It's still about the economy, stupid, but... It's now just the economics of buying votes for minority rule in the USA. All of the political campaigns are just smoke and mirrors to confuse folks.
Totally obvious to the sufficiently casual observer, but I haven't seen anyone put it together this way, certainly no one with a big soapbox. Maybe you can send me a URL? But there are only two sides to the modern federal election racket in America, one for the House and one for the Senate.
On the House side, it's all about the gerrymandering. Mathematically simple redistricting with two complementary phases. In phase one, the "good" voters are picked to make the largest number of safe districts, while in phase two the "bad" voters are picked and packed into the smallest number of sacrificial districts, "The better to waste the naughty voters' votes, Child." If you're in a "safe" district, then you might hope they didn't calculate the safety margin carefully enough, so you can imagine your vote might matter. After all it is theoretically conceivable that a larger than expected number of voters might suddenly vote differently and overwhelm the safety margin. But if you're in a "sacrificial" district then it's like hoping all of the air molecules will randomly leave the room. "Ain't gonna happen." Can't pick your so-called Representative after the Rep picked his voters!
On the Senate side, the game of controlling the Senate is about focusing on small states with fewer voters so the election riggers can buy enough votes. This is a bit trickier, but here's a simple way to think about it. Being free and voting on that basis takes work. Wannabe free voters have to do research to figure out what the truth is, and the work keeps getting harder, but the voters are spread out on a spectrum of how much work they are willing to do. In other words, some of the voters won't check anything and are easily fooled, and those are the first ones the election riggers buy targeted ads for, gradually working up the scale until they have bought enough votes. They don't even need to fool most of the voters some of the time. The election manipulators just need to fool enough carefully targeted swing voters on Election Day, and they got themselves a senator!
So who's paying for the redistricting to control the House and buying the ads to move those swing voters behind the picked senators to control the Senate? It's people with lots of money to invest in politics. For example, in 2021, the majority of the voters controlled less than 3% of the wealth. The exact number was 2.6% for 50%, so if you bump it up to 3% of the wealth you're talking about a majority of the voters with no money for ads. Yeah, the poor folks can still vote, but they don't have the discretionary money to rig the redistricting or to advertise at the swing voters needed to win the elections, so no wonder no one actually cares what most voters want.
And the result is that Congress has approval ratings around 20% while almost every incumbent is reelected every time. Representatives who actually represent a minority of the voters control the House of so-called Representatives and it's even worse in the Senate, where the mechanism of the game is hard coded into the Constitution.
In conclusion, the voters are right to think their votes don't matter. Ben Franklin was too polite to answer "It's a Republic until you lose it." Or maybe Ben's was just an optimistic "if"?
Given my conclusion, why did I bother to try to vote? Civic duty and ritualism, but I don't think it mattered. Almost certain that my vote has finally been cancelled. But the punchline is that I was gerrymandered at the first level until this year, when I was moved into a sacrificial district. Continuing with my ritualism, I am fighting to find and fix the error, but that's probably precisely what the election riggers want. If I do recover my franchise, that will probably interfere with restoring several other votes that might have actually mattered in districts that were only gerrymandered at the safe level.
Another c&p to Slashdot from elsewhere, though the same ideas could, in theory, apply here. Or maybe someone will recognize similarities to a URL they can share?
Different strokes for different folks? Why can't WTS treat the user interface that way? Give different users different user experiences, as long as the costs are covered, of course.
What provoked this idea is realizing that I like the feel of WTS2 less than the current version. I know it's still beta, but I already think it's safe to predict I will write less there. But is the objective to encourage people to write? Maybe not, but...
What if there were many user interfaces people could use depending on their personalities and purposes? With the costs for each user interface being covered by the people who like to use it. (Yes, I'm back to my CSB economic model.)
In my twisted imagination, I imagine that I could pick from a menu of user interfaces looking for the best one for me. And I could use it freely as long as the costs are covered. If the costs aren't covered, then I'd have to switch to another or donate some money to get my favorite turned on again. My imagination is probably too vivid, but...
The menu of UIs could explain the advantages of each one and its status. It should be ranked based on my personality (back to the MEPR again) and objectives. Obvious examples are that socializers will want a different kind of interface than wannabe writers and trend followers will want a third. (And wannabe advertisers should be offered a suitable interface that would help identity their "contributions" as probable spam... (But getting off topic yet again.))
If the interface I want is in "funded" status, then no problem and I can just start using it. If not, then I have to pick another or maybe donate to help fund it. The donors could even get transitional access until the funding period is fully funded... This could actually be extended to cover proposed interfaces with new features, and I don't see any reason that there might not be several versions of a popular UI. (Always subject to "the costs are covered" constraint.)
I've actually been told that some of my MEPR ideas may be part of WTS2. If so, I haven't recognized the linkage and no one has directly discussed such things with me... The quality of mercy may not be strange, but the bandwidth of public discussions is strange and narrow? (While I strongly dislike group meetings, face-to-face discussions have the best communications bandwidth and phone calls are a distant second. I think other communications, such as public discussions and emails are even more distant...)
American and like freedom? Please vote ASAP!
You don't like freedom? Then why bother voting just because you were ordered to vote? You don't really care.
Before the personal sob story, two higher-level comments. One about freedom and one about demographics.
Freedom is like TANSTAAFL. The payment consumes time and effort. If you actually want to be free, then you have to work at it. You have to collect data and figure out what it means so that your choices can be free. I think I love freedom, so I do the work.
The demographic research indicates about one third of the people (in every country) hate the idea of working for freedom. They are the wannabe followers of various kinds of authoritarian leaders and they just want to be told what to think and what to do. Makes their lives simpler and it doesn't really matter who they are following. (Usually they are scattered all over the place, but TFG's closest approach to a "political skill" is in getting lots of them into one angry mob.)
The rest of the people say they like freedom, but they are actually spread over a spectrum of how much work they want to do for freedom. I'm near one extreme, and at the other end you have people who don't actually want to do any work for their freedoms. Too bad that makes them easy to manipulate, especially in these days of computerized micro-targeting of ads and propaganda. At that end of the spectrum, they won't even think about which of their own personal buttons were pushed. (This means the Dark Money Boys can just buy as many votes as they need--which is why so many elections between vastly different candidates have become so close. The DMBs are greedy and don't like to waste money, so they don't buy excess votes.)
Now for the sob story.
I've voted by mail for most of my life. This year I requested my ballot as usual and was notified it would be sent at the proper time, which is now past. But no ballot has arrived.
I checked my voter registration at that time, and it looked fine. Same as it ever was. But now? Nothing. My voter registration suddenly went away.
There are actually several online systems that are supposed to help with voting. The voter registration system continues to insist I don't exist, but there are separate websites for tracking my ballot. But they also insist "Nothing to see here."
I contacted my registrar and was assured my ballot was in the mail--but at no point did the registrar include any information to indicate the status of my ballot had actually been checked. My theory is the registrar is just saying that to ALL of the voters who ask. Too busy (because of deliberate staffing shortages) to do any actual checking.
If I trust what someone in a different office said on the phone, then I might know one of the errors in play. Based on that data, my theory is that there was a bunch of registration data input by temps. Perhaps even by volunteers. But the instructions were something like "Speed is most important here." They probably gave prizes and bonuses for the fastest work. "Don't worry about accuracy. Our big computer will fix any mistakes." Meanwhile the programming of the "big computer" focused on finding EVERY error or inconsistency so those ballots could be frozen, with the highest detection priority of course given to the ballots of "bad" voters like yours truly. "Sterilize imperfections?" After the election, who cares why someone didn't get to vote?
All of this reminded me of why I voted AGAINST the incumbent whenever the candidates were similar enough. (These years the candidates have become so dissimilar that I'd forgotten about that old tiebreaker.) Unfortunately, the only thing all of the politicians were able to agree on was that they were personally "entitled" to job security, so killing democracy to protect their own "jobs" made perfect sense to them.
"Public service". No. It's just a "job". And now you suddenly understand how Congress can have incredibly low approval ratings while almost all of them get reelected every time. That was the only objective all of the bastards could agree on. (Not all of them are selfish bastards, but the the "principled public servant" caucus doesn't have enough votes to sneeze at.)
So if you are a freedom-loving American, I urge to vote. In memory of my dead ballot. Perhaps for the last time it actually matters? The very idea of democracy in America has been dancing on the cliff's edge for so long, maybe we didn't notice when it fell off? Maybe it's just been falling quietly and will hit the rocks RSN.
Ending with a joke? My quasi-mathematical definition of freedom: #1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} <> (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
[Another C&P...]
Do filter bubbles strengthen misinformation?
Strange new thoughts on this topic, but not sure where it could be discussed on WTS. I also considered "Social Feature Requests" under the Title of "Mathematical pins to puncture filter bubbles", but that's related to a possible solution I've started thinking about. That will follow shortly, but it may be another case of the kid with the new hammer who sees everything as a nail. And it's only a virtual hammer in this case...
What makes misinformation dangerous is how strongly some people believe it even to the point of doing insane things like attacking the Capitol. Yes, people believe what they want to believe, same as it ever was, but technology has made that more dangerous in at least two ways: Better targeting of the misinformation and mental closure of the groups of believers against the truth. There have been many discussions of the microtargeting based on abuses of personal information, but I haven't seen much about the "mental closure" part of it. Maybe you have some URLs to hurl at me? But my summary is that it's a basically a "websearch destroys time" thing. Each of us has limited time, but the Internet is really big and people who want to believe any particular thing can saturate their input channel with agreement (for the greater "glory" and profit of google and Facebook and Amazon (and other corporate cancers)).
So could WTS detect the formation of "social bubbles" around specific misinformation and burst the bubbles? How to "nudge" a pin into the right place? Not a universal pin, but a mathematical average pin...
The solution-oriented hammer I'm thinking of is MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation)... (Again?!?) What are the public behaviors that would reveal some identity is part of a bubble? Even worse, what behaviors are creating the bubbles? And how to help people escape from the bubbles? As those behaviors are recognized, how would the MEPR change?
The basic idea would be to look for the bubbles and try to make them more permeable by adjusting the way the feeds work. I still think people should have more control over their feeds, but there are also default settings and those defaults are going to influence what most people see and maybe even what they believe and how they act. (How about not rioting in the Capitol as a starting goal?)
Maybe a monthly public announcement of the relative mental closure within WTS? Along with an adjustment of the default settings for the feeds? Not even sure if "fighting misinformation" is an actual objective of WTS, but if it is, then it would make sense to include everyone in the struggle... At least I think so. And I better clarify that I don't think everyone should be set to the same defaults each month. I think each person should be able to change their own settings any way they want to, but I'm suggesting that all of the settings might be partly shifted each month to "adjust the weather" of WTS, with the objective being to make the atmosphere more friendly and open to the truth and shrink the bubbles of aggressive and malicious misinformation.
Not exactly my first thoughts on the topic, but I do regard the ideas as only partly baked. Therefore I look forward to your reactions, and especially to citations related to "mental closure" and the formation of "closed groups of fanatical believers".
America's Dilemma: Reasoning with Unreasonable People
Though actually this started with the more limited question of "How can President Biden reason with the nuts?" And it was motivated by Biden's response to a protester at one of his public speeches.
It's also intended as a suggestion to the White House, but because I can't make my ideas small enough, the actual 'home' of this suggestion is a comment at WTS, https://wt.social/post/us-politics/hk0yrvc5543048937556, where it can also collect your reactions and suggestions for improvements--as long as they are rational and reasonable. Been there, done that, and I know you can't reason with some folks.
So I better start with my premise: Government should be rational. The people in government are supposed to be sane and doing rational things to make the real world better. If it's a democratic system then that means there should be rational discussions among the citizens about what the problems are and how to solve them. At this point I think I can defy you to point at any issues about which such discussions are happening in America these days.
I also believe there are real problems for "the government" to help with. The government should focus on the problems that for-profit companies and private charities cannot solve, especially the big problems. The "most terrifying words in [any] language are" insane words, but usually they aren't said out loud because the nut is too busy shooting or stabbing. It's actually the lucky cases where the crazy words help prevent the killings.
So back to the angry protester. Biden applied the old philosophy of "Hate the sin, not the sinner." The main sin in that case was breaking the behavioral rules of being an audience member. Not a terrible approach, but I think Biden could have handled it better. And he should be better prepared to do so, because it's happened before and it's absolutely safe for me to predict that it's going to happen again.
Biden needs to be the old dog that learns more new tricks. And in this case he can prepare the tricks in advance so he can turn the predictable problems into political points where he needs them. No, I'm not suggesting he try to reason with the unreasonable person, though I think Biden wants to reason with everyone. But I think he should try to get the topic and use it as a jumping off point for a detailed response.
Focusing on the recent incident, in the recordings I heard, I could not hear any of the words the protester said. Maybe Biden couldn't hear them either, but someone could. Actually and just for security purposes, someone needs to be listening because such words might be pointing at an imminent threat.
Not knowing what he said, I have to guess and my guess is he was a fan of TFG. Based on that guess, I think a more topical and effective response would have been something like this:
"I see you're angry and I wish I had the time to ask you why. But I also see you are not reasonable, so it would probably be a waste of time. So let me respond with my sadness about why we can't reason together: We need to agree on reality. I think you're starting from a logical contradiction, so reason can't work. Since you've raised the issue, I'm going to say a few words about The Big Lie. [Though that is just my guess for the issue the protester raised.] The Big Lie is that there were big problems in the 2020 election, even though TFG's own election security expert was fired for saying the election was accurate. But the biggest contradiction is between TFG's competence and his lack of evidence. The Big Lie says that there was massive fraud but TFG couldn't get ANY evidence that any judge would believe. Many of them were judges that TFG picked after insisting he picks all the best people. TFG predicted massive fraud and yet failed to find any evidence? It's a contradiction and we all know there's a lie in there even before we check the facts and find out that all of the parts are false. Sometimes a contradiction involves a truth and a lie, but in the example of The Big Lie there was no massive fraud and the "best people" to work for the government were not picked."
Now that I see written out like that, I can see that I don't write so well. Needs to be shorter and tighter, but my main point is that President Biden should be better prepared to respond with some prepared remarks when the irrational people do their irrational things.
The underlying point is that you can't reason with some folks, but it might help to explain why not. President Biden should seize those chances to make it more clear why reasonable people should agree with him--and then get back to his well prepared remarks.
Later on Eco wrote Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation on the closely related topic of translation between languages. It's an excellent book and I can recommend it fairly strongly, but my main reaction is that translation is even less possible than I thought it was...
 The short summary of my newly revised position is that the mechanics of translation are fundamentally wrong (partly based on a mechanical model of the brain (influenced by Kurzweil)). Each language is perfectly defined by each speaker, which means that each native speaker of a natural language has a complete and definitive model of the language. None of those machines can be taken as the absolute model, but each of them has to be regarded as perfect.
 Hard to find any example that is simple enough as a starting point, but think about a simple linguistic concept like the word "dog". At the deepest levels the concept isn't even linguistic. Children learn to recognize and love dogs before they can speak, right? (Which makes me realize that "mama" may have been a better example.) But as we develop language, each of us winds up with LOTS of neurons that are associated in various ways with the idea of dog. Many of them must be in the visual cortex where various patterns associated with "dog" are associated with higher level contexts. After the word "dog" is learned, there will be more neurons associated with the sounds of the word, but when the child learns to read, another load of visual neurons will be linked into the letters that form the word, again linked into higher level patterns of groups of letters and related forms of the word, such as "dogs". "Dog" may have seemed like a simple concept, but the result is a huge network of neurons linked to the concept in various ways--and EACH speaker of English has such a network, and they're all good, even definitive English machines. Yes, many of the neural networks are probably similar among English speakers, but now start thinking about all the more complicated ideas at levels of abstraction above "dog"...
 But the translators have at least two language machines in their heads. Even if they are translating to their L1, there's too much entanglement to hope that they can bring the translated result to a form that would better than roughly approximate the mental machines of the authors or the authors' L0 readers. In this context, L0 is referring to people who only speak one language, their original language, which implies that a translator has to sacrifice his L0 to become a translator. As soon as a translator starts learning a new language, L0 gets promoted to L1 and the translator is in a sense no longer a "reliable" (or "authentic"?) L0 speaker. All of his neural networks for L1 start linking to neural networks from L2, and where there are no linkages, the translator is stuck and cannot translate.
But maybe there's a loophole? What if the author is a translator and the readers are also translators? If all of them are working with the same languages, then it might be possible for them to achieve relatively similar mental networks.
The oldest tech I'm still using and maintaining is a database app that I wrote in the early 80s, but the data in the database goes all the way back to 1971. In the earliest days it was actually a list updated with a typewriter. (I still had a typewriter until 1989.) I use it about 3 times per week, booting up an old multi-boot machine with a 20-MB DOS partition. I was never able to set up an emulator that could support the FCBs properly, but it's become a concern. It's an ancient ThinkPad, and built like a tank, but how long can it keep going?
Pretty sure that there are very few bugs in the code, but I sometimes edit it to add functionality. I remember adding a rolling window for the Year 2000 problem, and there was a decade tweak around 2011, too. However the main recent modification was a new statistical function that was added about 3 or 5 years back. Major problems because I had forgotten about the internal editor, so when I used an external editor the handling of the CRLFs was quite different.
I mentioned the typewriter, but it also went through a PL/C (dialect of PL/I) version around 1982. At that point the program and data were living on Hollerith cards. And I added a different front end for the Internet around 1997. That version is also still alive, but actually in more feeble condition than the back end running in DOS. I don't even have any admin capability on the server where the PERL/CGI runs, so around 2016 I wound up doing a separate version that can run the PERL locally. Most recent work with the system was actually a new statistical function using JavaScript. But for the last few years I've been thinking about porting the whole thing to Python...
But my actual interest in the story was whether this explains the anomalous location and velocity data. I read about it in a book called "13 Things That Don't Make Sense". Can't find any current references to those anomalies.
Basically another archival C&P. The original context actually started with a complaint about sock puppets... I hope that website survives, but I still don't see a viable economic model over there, and yet this reply within that discussion encapsulates quite a bit of my thinking on the topic, so I decided to save a copy here. You can say what you like about Slashdot, but it seems to be a fairly persistent website.
I think I was unclear, but it may be the limits of my understanding. I am not an expert, though I may sound like I think I am simply because I write "firmly" and hopefully clearly. In contrast, one of the deep skills of a true expert is to describe extremely complicated stuff so clearly that non-experts at least feel like they understand it. (There's also a joke about the expert making it look easy, so a beginner tries it and discovers just how much expertise was concealed there.)
 But on the Likert scale, it isn't the number of points on the scale, but the bucket approach. However five-point Likert scales are popular (and sometimes taken as a default number) because most people can easily work with that number of mental buckets.
 Also the odd number of buckets (versus 4- or 6-point Likert scales) allows people to sit on the fence, though I think that often confuses the issue between two dimensions that often should be kept distinct. The middle bucket can collect people who don't know or don't care along with people who have carefully considered reasons for picking the third out of five. (But it's generally too much hassle to ask that question seperately... If screen space isn't tight, perhaps a slider option at the right? (Or an option to skip the question?))
 Seems easier to me to describe what sort of MEPR I'm seeking in functional and visual terms, which comes back to the double-icon idea, with the MEPR icon as the new one. So let me try to describe it in terms of what I might want to see on the screen? (Without worrying too much about what's going on behind the screen?)
 Each identity would be represented by a pair of icons. The first icon would basically be what we frequently have right now, which is a link to whatever profile the identity wants to offer. On many websites (including WTS) that icon uses a self-selected avatar image [but not on Slashdot, where there is only a link from the user name to the user's profile]. (Often distinctive and sometimes memorable. Hence my nose profile avatar from a childhood joke: "The Nose knows.")
 The second icon would be a standardized representation of the public reputation. Much of that data might come from reactions to the identity's public behaviors, but some of it might represent public metadata. I currently imagine a little radar diagram, with four to six featured dimensions. (Control over the dimensions and dimensionality as a paid feature?) From a glance at the MEPR icon I would have a feeling for what sort of identity it is and whether or not the associated content deserves my attention (or trust).
 Looking for a simple example... Perhaps not a popular or important dimension, but let me use "Funny" as an example. That "humor" dimension would appear as one of the spokes of the radar diagram (shrunk to avatar size). I imagine five levels on each spoke (basically for the same reasons as above, though I also like to imagine colors and transparency as bells and whistles, with green and red for good and bad and pale for limited data). If an identity gets a lot of "That's funny" reactions, then it might score 5 on that spoke, whereas a lot of "That's NOT funny" reactions would lead to a score of 1 on the humor spoke.
 I've probably already created too much confusion, but I can try to explain if you have any questions. (I've thought way too much about this stuff?) But even worse, some of my thinking has already started wandering in new directions... In relation (or allergic reaction?) to a discussion of "ethical behavior", I've started thinking about human personality as stable or frequently recurring patterns of neuronal activation networks.
 But I got a new joke out of one of those discussions. Let me see if I can work it in here:
 "The focus is strong in that one."
 That's intended as a kind of positive rejoinder to someone who is good at bringing a discussion back to it's main point. The "that one" would refer to the participant with good focus.
 But to make the joke work well, it should somehow be paired with this punchline:
 "The focus is weak in this one."
 The "this one" would be intended to focus (no pun intended) on my personal (and frequently confusing to whoever I'm speaking to) inability to sustain any focus. And as shown by the length of this comment, I also suffer from the sin of lacking concision. (Want a citation?)
"These are not the websites you are looking for." (With the usual apologies to Obi-Wan Kenobi.) Not this one and not WTS. Not that WTS is going down completely, but I've said some relatively nice things about that new project of Jimmy Wales and now I feel like I was being presumptuous... Version One of that website is sinking soon, and most of the old content is going down with the ship. "Long live King WTS V2"?
So I'm still looking for a different kind of website. My basic objectives are all wrapped around time. Lots of things I want to do and learn, but my time remains as limited as ever. What I seek is a website that will help me use my time better. I think a lot of that is filtering the input, and I still think the best approach to filtering involves the (Multidimensional) Earned Public Reputations (MEPR) of the people who are offering the input and making the comments. Trolls will be trolls, but the website I am seeking will assist such negative sources in rendering themselves relatively invisible...
I also imagine a financial model based on cost recovery for services received. Perhaps some sort of Charity Share Brokerage (CSB) guiding the money flows?
So do you have any leads? Or questions? (I've been advocating for the CSB and MEPR for some years and never detected much comprehension.)
#discussion #news #social #website
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
