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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#111

Post by mejutoco »

throwanem wrote: post #35
satvikpendem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the show Devs (2020), by Alex Garland. The joke is "Devs Ex Machina", Ex Machina being another film of his.

Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the…

The way what they discover can predict but only some amount into the future reminds of how context works in ai

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#112

Post by WJW »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #107
WJW wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? It has always seemed to me that while programming does indeed like to couch itself in magical terms ("he's a database wizard", "this compiler stuff is black magic", etc), it is fundamentally understandable and replicable. All layers of programming build on their lower layers and this stuff is understood well enough that you can go to university to learn about it in detail. Programming is techn…

You can go study religious spells in a school as well. There are catholic universities teaching exorcism, and buddhist schools teaching tantric magics that give you superpowers. The critical difference is that I don't believe in either of these things, so I've labeled them "occult". I believe in programming and I'm not calling it occult, but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices. Thi…

> but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices.

Isn't there? I would say that the key difference is that programming actually works, and works reliably. Even if it is opaque to normal people, at least the programmer themselves has a reasonable ability to understand why their program will work and critically can "call their shot": they can reliably predict the effect a certain program will have. Magic is not like that: even if the practitioner claims to understand how it works, their success rate is typically abysmal. AFAIK there are zero faith healers or other magic types whose claims consistently hold up when inspected, but programmers and other engineering types do it all the time. That's the objective difference right there, even if normal people struggle to discern the two.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#113

Post by [deleted] »

WJW wrote: post #112
AlotOfReading wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go study religious spells in a school as well. There are catholic universities teaching exorcism, and buddhist schools teaching tantric magics that give you superpowers. The critical difference is that I don't believe in either of these things, so I've labeled them "occult". I believe in programming and I'm not calling it occult, but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices. Thi…

> but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices. Isn't there? I would say that the key difference is that programming actually works, and works reliably. Even if it is opaque to normal people, at least the programmer themselves has a reasonable ability to understand why their program will work and critically can "call their shot": they can reliably predict the effect a certain program wi…

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#114

Post by david_shi »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #78
david_shi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The application layer has way more gravity than the networking one right now. You'd need to fork that for anything to happen.

It's (mostly) not the networking layer where people pay to target us. It's the application layer that would most benefit from being forked. Of course the problem is that what can be forked already has been. Federated social media. Distributed git hosting. However most "essential" uses are centralized and often also commercial in nature. If you fork Amazon you're ... still Amazon. That sort of thing.

Can't have network effects without lock in effects as well.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#115

Post by Slackwise »

railgunmerlin wrote: post #5
bfmalky wrote: post #3

> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act NSFW blog content on HN? Really?

perhaps the safety filter is wrong instead of the post?

This is not a safety filter. The owner/author is explicitly geolocation IP blocking UK users:

https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-n...

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#116

Post by throwanem »

WJW wrote: post #112
AlotOfReading wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go study religious spells in a school as well. There are catholic universities teaching exorcism, and buddhist schools teaching tantric magics that give you superpowers. The critical difference is that I don't believe in either of these things, so I've labeled them "occult". I believe in programming and I'm not calling it occult, but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices. Thi…

> but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices. Isn't there? I would say that the key difference is that programming actually works, and works reliably. Even if it is opaque to normal people, at least the programmer themselves has a reasonable ability to understand why their program will work and critically can "call their shot": they can reliably predict the effect a certain program wi…

Well, there's magic and then there's magic, you know? If you want to perform an incantation that really works, the only formula or ritual you will ever need is: "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

It is a ritual, though. That means it only works as long as you do it every day.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#117

Post by sph »

david_shi wrote: post #60
talkingtab wrote: post #7

Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.

What would you do? The system is very good at transmuting critiques of it into its own propagation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now

You might like Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
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