sonicvroooom

German here, living in single digit distance to military areas.... The shit they buried under argon et al decades ago, man ... tap in if you have the patience ... gives you seconds around the globe

> Indirect Realism

> we don’t perceive the world per se; our brains instantiate a world-simulation.

Sensory perception described in varying linguistic registers don't really differ at all. It's just a matter of semantic similarity, which depends on the audience ability to refit and reinterpret terms and concepts "down or upwards, left or right", in both, actual and Yankovich-Seuss terms ... so I can't agree with "indirect realism".

Focal attention, peripheral attention, sensory latency and processing speeds, amount of things perceived via all senses in the various mind/brain states and amount of things understood via progressive, cumulative and recursive cognitive processing based on cultural, psycho-social past and contiguously or non-contiguously ( coma & stuff ) resulting experiences and the intensity/relevance of these experiences effects/impact on the self and desires vary so brutally that it's impossible to simulate the world that we perceive in the same freaking way in pretty much every single brain.

The only thing imaginable to me is something similar to the whole universal grammar in baby brains theory, which I agree with but somewhat clumsily extend slightly deeper to the electrochemical domain of micro-voltages in intra- and extra-cellular osmotic environments. I don't think brains instantiate a world-simulation.

The only thing (within the given frame of reference) brains instantiate is a screen to watch reality (directly) on. Including that cool feature where you can record stuff and save it on cerebral/neural VHS tapes that degrade over time.

but it's fun to use, makes up for your lack of time or focus to build certain skills in the past and you live 30, 40, 50, 60 more years ...

what's the worst that can happen?

Hackers trolling you? Stealing and deforming your projects? Hackers sharing personal info about you and your family and/or kids with the trashiest of people from your past or with your local authorities and wannabe matadors? All without your knowledge but you notice and get pseudo-paranoid and raise your security levels although it is technically and practically too fucking late?

Damn, how much these companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and ISPs and their hardware suppliers and all those parties and mayors and cities care about their paying customers and users and the people, workers and their children ...

Let's build more data centers and make AI infer smarter & faster. Better margin, better life.

Addendum: We have entered the era where companies carry more responsibility--if not all of it in tandem--for their users' digital security and privacy than the users themselves, especially those for whom the RAM et al prices are a tad bit much but who still pump considerable amounts of time, data and money into various services.

> Immediately after the big bang, everything was ludicrously hot. The most powerful force in the universe was the wash of gamma rays everywhere.

Classic obfuscation method. That remaining static noise gave it away. Somewhere out there is a Savant who reads it like Tank and Link read the Matrix' machine code--blonde, brunette, redhead.

Curious indeed. But that "Humanity" part is a bit stale. I'd make it the not too far end after the current or next speciation event ... then "time travel" can get it's more or less natural and scientific manifestation when that ascended gene pool somehow suddenly notices that genomes from their archives are born to non-descendant parents .. [ spontaneous genetic recurrence, probabilistic replication, or a wild-type convergence? *had to use AI to pin down these terms, I'm tired ]

> to appeal to a wide audience.

... to appeal to the widest of audience(s) at the same time.

> filtered and averaged

... feeds, websites, news, ... everything is filtered and averaged, ... we have a lot of city part of town "content" because there are audiences--already there--who are drawn towards city parts of town content and produce ...

> we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.

You and I didn't. Some folks did. Some had access to cables. Others to satellites. Some were bosses and managers and fancied their power and enough of all these people had no issue with a lack of boundaries and nothing to stay busy enough with ( or the intensity of their predilections was a little too much ) ...

Convenience and accessibility are not capabilities/skill. To some people in every city part of town, things just don't look like anything to them. Monkey see, monkey do.

> We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver.

We did. Pre-WW II ..., and afterwards, the old, everlasting Cold War (vs the new one). And there are self-emerging/self-organizing buckets of people who all pledged their allegiance to ideas and plans, works forever in progress and aggregating jobs and expanding industries. People with value and virtue systems, radicalized or called to some need-to-know duty. And the personal level was always covered by applied and philosophical psychology, cultural discourses, however progressively or decadently lead by public figures while peoples' desires were and still are shaped by interactions, social AND parasocial.

Shouldn't we stop wondering whether they have enough time, now that several hundreds of thousands of hours of work already done and work yet to get done are neatly compressed into a few instants?

AI will always be "two" things:

- a search engine that misses less and less and is just waiting for you to increase your processing power - a tool to cope with your laziness or disability by deferring or skipping intervals of learning curves and/or biomechanics - an evergrowing compendium of abstractions and intents, formalized or not, by humans, for humans, off humans (even when it's AI)

but that's irrelevant ... because humans will always be only "two" things, as well.

So, ... the threat vector remains unchanged, however AI, accessibility and skill will amplify or change the landscape: casually, no, leisurely ignorant bystanders.

The mother of social media is free TV.

We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first.

Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and whole population segments, more or less conservative and/or liberal as well as more or less authentic sub-cultural patchworks were left unserved.

That wasn't even nonsense! MTV, suddenly going away? Uhm, guys, I only get Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... beep boop bop beep boop bop beep... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP... (pause) ...brr-ding... brr-ding... Krrrrrrrrrrr-shhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee-awwwwwwwww-eeeeeeeeeee... Bong-bong-bong... KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (click).

Silence ...

around here, and then a lot of popups, ads, .... you know, the wild wild west of internet history ...

We talked TV on the street and in school. And Video games. Now Netflix et al and your feed, too. Who's roofs is most of that media industrial complex under?

Thinking Meta et al and their ads infrastructure and UX weighs as much as that of Free TV is falling for a rather simple Kansas City Shuffle.

"New", only now native media still doesn't interface as well with the brain and our emotional processing as TV and "The News" do. And won't until Neuralink et al get their interfaces all the way up your ... lobes.

Forget Zuckerberg et al and let them do their jobs. They don't need publicity, they need to filter for suitable test subjects, edge case pop segments whose needs & desires are yet to be fulfilled.

There's still a lot of people out there with something to put on the market but they can't because a little something is missing and nobody seems to know why ... something double long running on the news maybe?

... and shouldn't this backfire hard?

All the signals that are missed by the (f)MRI are never "mirrored" in the digital twin even though on screen it will look like it. Bam, Experimenter Bias in the machine and I don't know how to phrase it but ... does this method/experiment leave any wiggle room for Falsifiability?

Even if the Hawthorne Effect does not apply to humans, it most certainly translates onto the brain and sensory (post)-processing-- live and remembered (vs in-memory, stored), real, virtual or imagined.

... I just realized how vastly different peripherals are when real, remembered, virtual or imagined sensory input is (post-)processed ...

It feels more like the machine will reproduce a superficial pattern. And at least some signal streams echoing in the brain on input from the digital twin won't emerge because the digital twin has only part of the data. And that's a premise for an unnoticeable rewiring of what once used to fire together, ... given a hell of a lot of exposure, of course, ... or not ... let's see

EDIT n: the paper says pretty much all that in like ... science, bitch!

Epic stuff.

yeah but that's a way they want you to behave in order to set up a control group within the target group that continues to behave as expected. the questions to be answered are not which parts of that control group, and how, nudge which parts of the target group slightly off the predicted and/or confirmed results. they answered that way back when. the question is, how can we react to the unexpected results that we ourselves forced. they can't just go on doing the opposite of what's good for them and bad for the users or vice versa, they have 50 years of data on that, some of which, should be noted, was accidently burned or bombed with a bunch of incriminating evidence shortly before investigators arrived ... which should make even the last sus person understand, it wasn't on purpose

> emotional dysregulation

Not having enough sex is hard to formalize as a diagnostic criterium.

Joke aside (which is on me), I have doubts that it's about psychiatry being an epistemic mess. And when I say "that it's (not) about", I mean that it's not (or is) relevant to the framing of the problem.

a) it's only been almost 200 hundred years, most of which were spend building crowd control rather than exploring minds, so it's not an issue of semantics and 'mental' x 'neural' topologies defined in as unambiguous terms as possible. psychology drew lines for the wrong reasons but men, who build and still run the field, are, ... well ... not very manly, are they? nobody is, these days. Some mafia says jump & people jump, you read it in studies and subtext all the time, and in real life, just look at the the amounts of highly functioning autistic people just rolling with the rules of conformity in 'realms' with 'grander'--meaning, in context, requiring high education (not the half baked kind)--purpose. It's weird.

b) "regulation" implies continuity, which requires literally no more than 2 things:

1. learning a few rules, which is an active thing, much easier for ADHD and other people than the thing they have no control over whatsoever, which is

2. brain circuits that don't (or do) constantly break continuity of ... all the things that return thoughts and emotions even though the "main" function isn't done, or any (or only some) of the concurrent, async functions called by the "main" function are or are not done, (yet), all while all the 'context and reality and "presence" sustaining functions' are just stable enough ... (minus that cool part of the CNS that does it's thing no matter what)

All that said, I have to check the study in detail. We should never forget that the personalities of parents (and other involved parties) play a 1337% more important role than the subtype of ADHD or whatever symptoms a person "shows".

vectorized thinking in vectorized context is math.

coding logical abduction into LLMs completely breaks them while humans can perfectly roll with it, albeit it's worth emphasizing that some might need a little help from chemistry or at least not be caught on the wrong foot.

you're welcome, move on.