Author: linas

Notable stuff I’ve stumbled across, worth checking out. The  Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna Konior. If you just search for the title, you’ll get lots of hits to … something else. The one you want to read is this one: because Bogna is a far superior author.  What’s it about? Well, clearly…

If you are imprisoned by reality, is it wrong to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome?  I read this quote: “People who are addicted to Twitter,” Lanier said, “are like all addicts—on the one hand miserable, and on the other hand very defensive about it and unwilling to blame Twitter.” Another word for this is doomscrolling…

A list of stories I’ve read, that I found notable, pertaining to economics and capitalism (and so, ultimately, deeply political). I might update it occasionally. Reverse chronological order (roughly). This is a complement to the Social Network Crisis Reading List, which describes the memetic, epidemiological crisis fanned by social media (Facebook and Youtube, I’m lookin…

David Chapman offers a critique of rationality at his meaningness.com site.  Interesting reading. To define the word “ontology”, he offers up a rather striking list, a categorization of animals,  from Jorge Luis Borges, from the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. The list is at first absurd, and humorous: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed…

A social media acquaintance on scuttlebutt recently posted: “I have a friend that has gone full #QAnon on #facebook. I haven’t visited my account in over a year but now find myself visiting daily for about a week to see what they have posted. I guess this is why Facebook doesn’t want to limit stuff…

Before neurotransmitters, there was bacterial signalling, for example, quorum sensing in bacteria. Signalling with small polypeptides can solve certain kinds of decision problems, for example, the exploit vs explore problem in slime molds (basically, the trade-off of effort searching for new food sources, vs. “exploiting” (eating) the current food source). It can be shown that…

A younger student, Ben Schultzer,  emailed me yesterday, to ask about AGI.  Since I like writing, I wrote a long answer. I’m reproducing some of it below. 1. Evidently (because of OpenCog), you have at least some belief that symbolic/classic techniques are valuable towards the development of AGI. Yes. Do you think that a hybrid…

So I recently implemented the Zipfian random distribution for the scheme request-for-implementation 194. The code is available on git.  Discussions turned to the merits of using git and github, and so I had the opportunity to opine about the meaning of life in a long email.  Without further ado, the meaning of life: Both bitcoin…

Welcome to WordPress. This is your my first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing! Let’s go for edit. But first, a legal disclaimer: By reading or using this site, you agree that I (the author and writer, Linas Vepstas) is not very likeable, and is prone to saying things that you will incorrectly …