Category: Blog

The story of the our networked age is noise. Data rot. Lossy compression. Entropy. Message attenuation over distance and time. Lost in translation. And yet – with modern gen-AI – something new: Novelty on the wire. Originality from… somewhere? — Read on interconnected.org/home/2024/07/26/cci

We’re no longer in a world of ballet stories told with stylised mice; we’re in a world of mice. — Read on interconnected.org/home/2024/08/16/bombadil

The Smith/Party/Big Brother triad in 1984 is the character/reader/author triad. The world is a book. That’s why the past can be so fluid: there is no time in books; no reality except that communicated in the current line of text. — Read on interconnected.org/home/2023/09/08/razor

at some point ads will be indistinguishable from content. You can already see the outlines of that given I’ve discussed both generative ads and generative content; they’re the same thing! That image that is personalized to you just might happen to include a sweater or a belt that Meta knows you probably want; simply click-to-buy.…

Avatar therapy may help in treating mental health conditions beyond psychosis. Preliminary research from Ward’s team with an avatar embodying the “anorexic voice” has shown it to be a promising intervention for eating disorders. Glenthøj is researching VR-based avatar therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder. Ward also wants to investigate whether dialogues with avatars could help…

Sara Vranes, who was diagnosed with ADHD at 36, relates to this idea. She said she sees her ability to hyperfocus under pressure as a “superpower”. Vranes now works with homeless communities, but had 15 years of experience as a midwife and doula before that, and she says she was most calm in crisis. “I…

These three imagined scenarios lead many physicists to doubt that space-time is fundamental. — Read on www.quantamagazine.org/the-thought-experiments-that-fray-the-fabric-of-space-time-20240925/

“The evidence is consistent and robust: physical punishment does not predict improvements in child behaviour and instead predicts deterioration in child behaviour and increased risk for maltreatment. There is thus no empirical reason for parents to continue to use physical punishment.” — Read on www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/19/how-many-more-children-like-sara-sharif-will-be-killed-before-smacking-is-banned

We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally…