Hoax of the Century

In A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, Jacob Siegel presents a history and analysis of recent “anti-disinformation” efforts in the U.S. I’m skeptical about some of his conclusions but I appreciate the detailed history he presents and I’m increasingly concerned about efforts to control what we (the populace) think because (according to some powers that be) we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule.

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AI and Reflective Equilibrium

The proposals to combine neural networks with model and rule-based reasoning remind me of reflective equilibrium in political philosophy. In this metaphor, the case-based results of a neural network correspond to intuitions, and the models and associated rules correspond to explicit principles and beliefs. In an AI system comprising both neural network and model/rule-based reasoning components, a management layer (with human intervention?) could perhaps intermediate and adjust the two components to strive for consistency between them (and perhaps self-consistency in the neural network part).

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ChatGPT as search engine

I keep notes in text files using the Emacs Org-Mode, and I often search through those files using grep. I got thinking about a book I read years ago that, among other topics, discussed (near as I can recall) a note-taking application that allowed quick incremental searches through a large textual document. But I could not recall the author, so I asked ChatGPT using some sketchy criteria: What is the name of the guy who died a few years ago who wrote about software user interface design?

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Modern AI

I’m excited, and concerned, to see Artificial Intelligence become capable after so many years of failed promise. Back in the late 1970s I took a college1 course surveyed the state of the art in AI. At that time there was very little practical application as the technology was weak and the hardware was limited. The course comprised only readings and we did not write or run any code. In the 1990s I wrote a simple rule-based application intended to help software developers in a large organization2 satisfy a set of process-management requirements.

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Tezos Tickets

Here my understanding of tickets in the Jarkarta protocol of the Tezos blockchain, from the perspective of a developer interested in working with tickets. A ticket comprises a creator, a value, and an amount. A ticket’s creator (or ticketer) is the address of the contract that created the ticket. Tickets are created only by the TICKET Michelson instruction in that smart contract’s code. A ticket’s value is set by the creator when it creates the ticket, and cannot be changed later.

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Default ACL in Tezos v10.1

TL;DR: Configure the tezos-node RPC port with --rpc-addr localhost:8732 rather than (or in addition to, if providing remote RPC access) --rpc-addr :8732 Default ACL for RPC The v10.1 release of the Octez software adds a new default ACL for RPC feature, and the way it works is subtle. If the listening address resolves to the loopback network interface, then full access to all endpoints is granted If the listening address is a network address, then a more restrictive policy applies.

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Building Tezos 8.0

Building and running Tezos version 8.0 on an Ubuntu 18.04 system was a bit more complicated than usual. Here is a build procedure that works. Install rust Follow the directions at http://tezos.gitlab.io/introduction/howtoget.html#install-rust. This only needs to be done once on any given build machine. Get the version 8.0 code Assuming one already has the ’latest-release’ branch checked out, just do the usual git pull Start the build as usual make build-deps This will work for a while and then fail with a message about “fatal: unknown value for config ‘protocol.

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COVID-19 Info

Here are some sources I’ve found useful and which seem reliable. 91-divoc Trajectory of cases, by state Rt Covid-19 Interactive visualization from John Hopkins data Worldometer: global Worldometer: US Johns Hopkins map Financial Times tracker (incorporates some of the above) COVID-19 projections The Peter Attia Drive Postcast (The CDC seems to have stopped incorporating state data into its totals starting about March 16, so I don’t find their data useful.)

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Web Sign-In

Yesterday I got web sign in working with this site. With that I’m able to login to indieweb.org via github.com, which is currently the only supported web-sign-in method for the sites that I’ve connected with (per the links on the page footer here). I’ve also got this site connected to webmention.io which I think will collect and store any cases where other similar sites might link to pages on this site.

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IndieWeb

This site is an experiment using the IndieWeb approach to posting web content and connecting with other similar sites. I’m building the site with Hugo, and with that the Indigo theme that is designed to support IndieWeb.