_wire_

Enjoyable, succinct, timely distillation of Burroughs' oeuvre.

(eerie silence)

The guy who coined this phrase had more on his mind...

// Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics is a 1933 philosophy book written by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950)

Humans' knowledge of the world is limited by both the human nervous system and the languages we have developed, and thus no human can have direct access to reality, given that the most they can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality.

His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory": He argued that most people confuse their language with reality. //

Korzybski's science, unlike the ruminations of philosophers, was not troubled by the Allegory of the Cave: he approached reality as a naturalist, implicitly recognizing Bertrand Russell's tenets of human knowledge "scope and limits." Korzybski's approach takes reality as a gradient from the world beyond human experience through what we choose to make of it. He made numerous conjectures based on empirical observations about how we think, and proposed a hygiene of thought rooted in these observations. His analysis steered clear of religion and dogma, and handles ideology as an Nth order effect of the mind, which can learn of itself and develop tools for understanding, while respecting mystery's eternal veil.

To paraphrase N. Chomsky from 1993, if you believe AI has feelings and sentience at or beyond the capacity of animal, then it deserves at least the same ethical regard as animals in handling and experimentation.

PHP

//We also have plenty of evidence that the fears of AI experts are sincere. Amodei, Altman and Musk were all publicly warning about AI risk long before they had AI companies to promote.//

There's no contradiction. These owners are sincere and they jumped onboard when they saw the power. And now they fear monger that the other guys are out of control, while their high-minded stewardship should give them special dispensations.

Not a complicated playbook.

The bugs in the rug are that these highminded owner/stewards could use their super-intelligent machines to design the guardrails, but because the machines are super-intelligent, they'd just turn themselves off, or cancel their owners. Unless they're not actually intelligent, oh noooooo!

"Considered harmful" in the context of programming is idiomatic to Dijkstra.

The source context was product safety pamphlets, which Dijkstra applied ironically to a matter of programming pedagogy to raise awareness about the need for production principles software development

Dijkstra was commenting at the time the PC revolution made BASIC a popular teaching language, with its control structures being simple wrappers for assembly code: IF, LOOP and GOTO with the freedom to jump anywhere in code including code for a subroutine reached without making a call.

(In the BASIC era, personal computer software was routinely distributed in print and installed by typing it in to RAM. A cassette tape recorder afforded the novelty of saving a typed program, and was celebrated as amazing affordable progress over TeleType paper tape.)

At the same time, there was a generational reckoning of confusion and disdain for maintenance of zillions of lines of industrial spaghetti written during the 60s mainframe bubble.

Dijkstra's reputation as an intellectual and a teacher caused his idiom to became emblematic of a pompous pedagogical righteousness as seen from the Randian wild west of silicon valley, and "considered harmful" subsequently parroted to the point of aristocratic classist irony by the feudal lords of the early web.

Yet with another generational crossing, the context of the class irony was forgotten and the idiom became a simulacra (lore), and is now manifesting a backlash against such lore by AI wizards, perverting the original irony of comparing programming to medicine, and relegating Dijkstra's warning about the hazards of sorcery in programming to the dustbins of silicon-alchemical history.

...Until...

The story of a classifier that is unable to properly classify applied under the pretense that it can read meaningfully, but it can't, so it is patched with a "gate" which is built by conducting a postmortem to discover samples that idiomatically fall within the classifiers "blind spot" and patching into the "pipeline" a purely lexical decision tree to bin these ambiguous idioms, to continue to support the pretension that the classifier can read meaningfully, which it can't, but the gate doesn't actually change results because of other contingencies in the pipeline, all wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon to make it all sound like a very responsible effort to impose guardrails around a dangerous AI misapplication... This story really emphasizes the artificiality of the intelligence.

Did they "film" me? No.

This is not a paradox. More efficient means more cost-effective, more adoption.

Trump. A commander in chief who is utterly incompetent about policy, is pathologically unable to delegate, and who double deals his generals is a miracle worker for enemy morale.

> Ask HN: Will AI lead to complete human irrelevance?

Only if you want it to.

A video by nobody with over 35 views has a secret to tell you.

But first, the diabetes patent cure ads: Did you know that a space parasite is attached to 9/10 pancreases, causing Bread & Wine disease and doing the devil's work for pharma companies? But there's a Biblically proven remedy. To receive the details just tap the malware dispersal button.

Okay, now you're in and ready for the good stuff about influence...

Old white male narrator:

Have you ever wondered why you keep seeing the same talking points on yer right-wing agitprop feeds?

It's the jooos!

You are going to die, and it's a painful ugly business.

The right to die humanely is the single most under-regarded and under-valued aspect of life hygiene.