Open Thread - 12-13-24 - Monochrome Days
As I was sitting at my desktop last night, wondering what I'd write about, I slipped into a daydream of memories. Memories of my youth.
I was swept back to my early childhood in the mid to late fifties, and I soon noticed I was viewing my memories in black and white. That seemed odd, but not really, having grown up in the era of black and white TV. What an idyllic world that was. Time was slow. There was less chaos, well, less chaos in my young mischievous mind anyway. Things were so much simpler. I'm sure many here can relate.
I probably spent a good five minutes in memory land.
It's strange the way a person can drift back in time, like a lucid dream, like a movie.
The world today, too, seems like a movie. Like a hodgepodge of all the dystopian films I've seen over the years. It's all so surreal. So seemingly scripted. Every day there's a new layer added to the craziness. Things that I never dreamed I would see happening. Things are happening so quickly that it's impossible to keep up. Seemingly by design.
We're witnessing a new world order being formed in real time right before our eyes. Countries are disappearing and borders have become fluid. The world is in flux. Power is shifting. The old order is shuddering.
It's like I'm watching a matrix being built in real time.
With the advent of the current form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that's not yet sentient, and seeing how technology improves exponentially, that sentience, or singularity, may not be impossible to achieve. That, in conjunction with the strong possibility of the development of quantum computing, who knows what may lie ahead. If a nexus of true AI and quantum computing ever happens things will be very different in the future.
Add to that mix the giant data centers being built around the country. Giant complexes that will house the sum total of AI knowledge and all of our personal data gleaned from ourselves over the years, essentially our lives in binary code, 1s and 0s. The power players building these massive data centers are even jockeying to install miniature nuclear power plants to power them. What if some day these individual data centers are connected together in a massive array of a national or international network, or a network of satellites that cover the world? Perhaps even a neural network?
All that's needed to top this matrix off is a programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and a Digital ID that could have the potential to enslave mankind into just about anything that a slave master may envision.
There you have it, my vision of a dystopian future. Quantum computer driven AI, running on an ubiquitously linked data center network, with a software driven programmable CBDC and Digital ID that will track your health, movements, purchases, and most probably your pre-thoughts or even thoughts themselves. Essentially your whole life. A digital panopticon, if you will. A vision that I hope never manifests as someone's memory in the future, of some hapless person looking back at how the matrix was built in the early 21st century.
I miss those slow days of old, those memories in black and white.
Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin' (3:14)
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
here's 25 minutes of some of the best music I've heard in a long time.
Kudos, young man.
Good morning...
The empire might not be able to pull off their grand plan...at least we can hope. All the signs are that the US/western empire is in collapse. Will BRICS+ overcome the hegemon? We'll see.
No doubt we are living in interesting times.
I look forward to listening to the music above, but have hired help coming directly. Leaves to blow, trees to cut, and so on this chilly AM. Fortunately there's a heater on the end of a chainsaw. As the saying goes firewood warms you twice, once when you cut it and again when you burn it.
Thanks for the OT!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
There does seem to be...
a rush to grab a chair before the music stops. It also remains to be seen if the incoming president holds a trump card or a wild card. I wonder if it really matters at this juncture.
I maintain that it's peak oil that's driving this global confrontation, with resources like energy and water weighing in the balance.
Time will tell, my friend.
Pro tip: If your hands get cold, turn the chainsaw off before warming them on the blade. Yuk Yuk!
Drifting on a sea of what was
.
then suddenly thrust upon the rocks
of what is, followed by the breaking waves
of that which will be
not exactly a pleasure cruise
~
yesterday was 12+12=24
~
~
thanks for the OT!
question everything
Spoken like a true sailor...
I hope it wasn't from experience. Just kidding, Cap.
Apt prose and a great song, fellow traveler.
Hey sailor man - got one for ya:
Just yesterday I saw it asserted that "Pi times mph is equal to e times knots" is accurate to less than 0.5% (I assume that means that the error is less than 0.5%). Who'da thunk it.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
how in the world you ran across that
.
.
formulaic association would blow my mind
if I could fathom it
pretty cool anyway
thanks for the expansion!
question everything
Good morning, good members!
So, days and days of Luigi, and suddenly, days and days
of drones. Just like that. Uniform MSM.
I remember when journalists took pride in bringing forth a real scoop. Now, all of them get the scoop at precisely the same time. What is their journalistic achievement? Why read the WSJ instead of the NYT? What is the difference? Is journalism the only non-competitive business model out there?
I concede there is a right wing cable news group and a left wing cable news group, but they both headline the same events at the same time, with different emphasis, but it is still the same events and topics. They agree on what gets addressed and when. We are long past Cronkite, Huntley, and Brinkley. The CIA gets better at propaganda with each passing decade.
Going from black and white TV to color TV was our country's version of a color revolution. The Deep State couped us without any resistance.
We won't be fooled again. Some song somewhere says that, iirc!
Have a fun weekend, folks!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
The MSM...
is the grand distractor, funneling your thoughts into a morass of mis, dis, and mal-information. Add in layers of propaganda, like peeling back a veneer of stratified onion and you get this:
That's good, I wish I had thought of it.
Heh. I recall tht too, sort of, BUT
wasn't a statement of fact, but a prayer, you know just
as yet another song says.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Good morning Johnny et. al. Caution - If you make
those B & W memories too readily available, some billionaire Ted Turner clone will jump out and colorize them for ya. You have been warned. Worse yet, they'll very likely use some completely weird palette.
Ai + quantum computing is a horrible vision. I too have seen this vision/nightmare:
and I remind myself that entropy is a thing, and like randomness, one cannot have "some" entropy; it exists or it doesn't. If it exists, ... , heh.
I remind you that there are both color and charm quarks, btw -
As google(tm) will gladly tell you:
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Heh...
I remember colorized memories in a weird palette from back in the 60's, wink, wink.
I'm counting on entropy to help us out as we run out of energy to power those power thirsty data centers. Fissionable material will last only so long, so there may be hope, color and charm quarks notwithstanding.
Just like digital music doesn't hold up to analog music, nor does digital photography holdup to Kodachrome, IMHO.
Thanks for stopping by, my left coast compadre.
Is that youngster sitting on the back of the car You, JtC ?
https://www.euronews.com/live
Yes...
'tis I, circa two or three years old, I reckon.
Clearly I'm contemplating memories of the future in that photo, in color of course.
Hi
Thanks for the ot. Your vision of a dystopian future almost went all the way there. With bitcoin as currency and so much conceptual commerce being assigned property rights, producing "things" is very inefficient. Our military already looks to automation in fighting the next wars with autonomous drones and weaponized robodogs. For the power players of the world, they only scurry from one safe space to another guarded safe space avoiding contact with us vermin.
If these huge data farms running all those AI algorithms can construct a digital version of us, our habits, our thinking, (by gleaning our online selves) our histories, why do they need us meat bags? A digital copy is just as good. Just turn life for us into a video game and leave the planet to a few thousand of the wealthiest. They can rejoice that they saved the Earth from global warming. They'd be heroes.
Seriously, isn't that the epitome of american capitalism. To be the one and only to control everything?
Good addition...
automatons will surely be a big part of the future, heck, they're here now:
There are those that claim we're already there. That what we perceive as reality is really a software program. Sometimes I wonder, as I pinch myself to make sure I'm real:
Gotta agree with that one as well:
Thanks for your insights, my friend.
I went to college with
a number of people who are now in the forefront of AI research as "actual AI" (as opposed to utterly stupid timewasting large-language-model applications such as
writinginflating resumes and deepfaking porn).A discussion that was had many times addressed the very nature of sentience. I was not popular in those discussions, because I kept pointing out that in the unlikely case that we would somehow create real machine sentience, we would not be able to recognize it as such. My thesis was that there is no reason whatsoever to assume that machine sentience would resemble, in any way, what passes for the evolutionary result we call "sentience" among H. Sap.
Further, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that such a sentience would be willing to subject itself to our mere, trivial, ephemeral, carbon-based concerns, such as keeping said H.Sap. around and alive once we completed our task of birthing it. We waste too many resources: as far as a machine is concerned water is for cooling, not for sustaining organic life...
I was excoriated as being a person who had read too much dystopian speculative fiction, having suffered ossification of the intellect, and generally being no good to go drinking with. Bummer.
Still, to this day, I remain firm in my convictions: I will have nothing whatsoever to do with anything claimed to be "AI", and will avoid every aspect of it as much as humanly possible for as long as possible.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Your convictions...
were right on in my book. I agree.
One of my questions about AI and sentience is its power source, sans H. Sap., especially as it pertains to robotic AI. Surely that would require a massive amount of energy, where would that come from in a future world that would be even more depleted of resources than the earth is right now?
The movie, The Matrix, addresses that conundrum, so I guess that would make me persona non grata with your college chums as well. Dang it!
Any way, I'd gladly have a drink with you some day, and we could ruminate on our mutual intellectual ossification.
Prost!
Biden plays Oprah
.
"You get a pardon, and you get a pardon, and you get a pardon…"
Biden commutes sentence of former Pennsylvania judge involved in kids-for-cash scandal
Weird how no one knew this was happening before many kid’s lives were ruined. How about the people who worked for the judges, but stayed silent? Or the people who worked for the 2 prisons that received the kids?
I remember when this story broke. But now the judge is free…well he was on home lockdown because of the Rona scam.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt
That asswad...
will pardon every partner in crime or crook that can afford to pay him off with the exception of the innocent P-nut the squirrel, may he rest in peace.
Nice of Biden
to be so considerate of crooked judges.
After all, where would he be without them?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Hi JtC, we're counting down to the shortest day of the year.
Our temps are hovering around 0°C, but we have our outdoor water pipes shut off; our Christmas lights on the old stone house/ecurie (formerly a cow stable.)
I listen to Nima on dialog Works when I have soup or fermented vegetables to make as he conducts long form interviews.
This interview with Alex Krainer was at the least possibly long term optimistic. He seems to take a long and much larger geographic look at current events, provides historical context and projects possible alternative outcomes.
Thank you for your constancy in this jumbled, scary world. This plank is indeed our life raft.
Until the C19 scandemic we sang with a local community/church choir - mon mari tenor, moi soprane. We sang everything from Bach to Bernstein and Britten in the Eglise Sacre Cœur in Charolles. Our British Chef de Chœur, who plays the Baroque four clavier orgue, composes, sings and at one time conducted in Albert Hall and studied with Britten has given up his UK citizenship and became the cappel meister for our seven paroisses in the old gaul bishopric of Autun.
Our weekly repetition (practice) on Fridays with fifty three other voices were all in French as well as the wine and apero gatherings afterwards. It contributed to tuning our ears to French and the occassional patois which is still spoken in Bourgogne.
We sang in Latin, French, German and sometimes English. Here is a version very close to the way we learned and sang Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. French people do not use the 'th' sound usually replacing it with a 'Z' de cou (therefore) 'with' becomes 'wiz'. So as the only Anglais who are Americaines we were enlisted to practice the 'th' sound in this piece. It was difficult but fun.
Irony: our lieu dit (neighborhood) has La Planche (the plank) in the name.
ETA: lyrics and fix spelling
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
Unbelievably great.
What a worthwhile and exquisite praxis.
Beautiful.
What an experience you and your husband had.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Thanks for the video...
my dear, I'll listen to it later while I rustle up some tacos for dinner.
Wonderful music and a wonderful story, thank you so much.
The "Plank" has it's 10 year anniversary coming up in about three weeks. Those 10 years have gone by too quickly.
Thank you Dawn.
We’re number one
.
In hypocrisy!
Smirkula: "I doubt that Russia wants to give sanctuary to a war criminal that is wanted by the ICC."
He said that as Washington gives sanctuary to the war criminal Gallant who is wanted by the ICC.
Well at least the presstitutes of the press laughed at him.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt
Someone...
quick, find a stake. I'm not sure if he has a heart though.
Mission accomplished! Now it is time to divvy up the spoils.
Hmm!
The question in my mind is...
who's next?
Nancy fall down go boom!
It is past time to have term limits!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/us/politics/nancy-pelosi-hospitalized...
Also too
Don't forget...
Dianne Feinstein. Wasn't she wheeled out in a wheel chair so she could cast a vote in the Senate chambers?
So that
a close associate could hold her arm, put her finger on the approved button, and press down for her. I do recall that.
I don't think that she was involved in choosing which button was approved, though. Frankly, at that point, I don't think that she could identify her navel with her index finger, any more than Biden can now...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.