The word "mid-witted" was popularized by far-right activist and writer Vox Day. On February 17th, 2012, Vox Day[1] published the blog post "The tragedy of the mid-witted" in which he commented on a life story article "Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume" by Jennifer Wright... The term "midwit," meaning a person of average intelligence, saw use on 4chan starting in late 2013... On January 1st, 2017, an anonymous 4chan[6] user made the earliest found post which used the IQ bell curve diagram to argue about the similarity of political views of groups with low and high intelligence... On June 24th, 2019, an anonymous /pol/[11] user posted a Manlet meme referencing the horseshoe theory interpretation of the IQ bell curve... The viral popularity of the format began on March 10th, 2010, when an anonymous 4chan[15] user posted a meme about Ted Kaczynski and the anarcho-primitivistic ideology. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit (cf Middle Mind) (more)

see Personal Data Server

component of BlueSky architecture (more)

Portable Identity for ActivityPub. I want to focus on: portable digital identity. The idea that I should be able to take all of my data, everything that my identity consists of, and move wholesale to a new instance/server/PDS/whatever you call it. Bluesky permits this. Mastodon and most (all?) other ActivityPub implementations do not. But that doesn’t have to be the case, nothing about ActivityPub—architecturally speaking—is incompatible with this vision. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #73: Openly Evil AI. What do you call a clause explicitly saying that you waive the right to whistleblower compensation, and that you need to get permission before sharing information with government regulators like the SEC? (more)

artificial super-intelligence - AGI but way smarter/faster than humans

Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper. https://situational-awareness.ai/ The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence (ASI), in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.

Neuro-symbolic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that integrates neural and symbolic AI architectures to address the weaknesses of each, providing a robust AI capable of reasoning, learning, and cognitive modeling. As argued by Leslie Valiant[1] and others,[2][3] the effective construction of rich computational cognitive models demands the combination of symbolic reasoning and efficient machine learning. Gary Marcus argued, "We cannot construct rich cognitive models in an adequate, automated way without the triumvirate of hybrid architecture, rich prior knowledge, and sophisticated techniques for reasoning."[4] Further, "To build a robust, knowledge-driven approach to AI we must have the machinery of symbol manipulation in our toolkit. Too much useful knowledge is abstract to proceed without tools that represent and manipulate abstraction, and to date, the only known machinery that can manipulate such abstract knowledge reliably is the apparatus of symbol manipulation.".. Henry Kautz,[6] Francesca Rossi,[7] and Bart Selman[8] also argued for a synthesis. Their arguments attempt to address the two kinds of thinking, as discussed in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. It describes cognition as encompassing two components: System 1 is fast, reflexive, intuitive, and unconscious. System 2 is slower, step-by-step, and explicit. System 1 is used for pattern recognition. System 2 handles planning, deduction, and deliberative thinking. In this view, deep learning best handles the first kind of cognition while symbolic reasoning best handles the second kind. Both are needed for a robust, reliable AI that can learn, reason, and interact with humans to accept advice and answer questions.... Implementations of neuro-symbolic approaches include: AllegroGraph: an integrated Knowledge Graph based platform for neuro-symbolic application development.[25][26][27]; Scallop: a language based on Datalog that supports differentiable logical and relational reasoning. Scallop can be integrated in Python and with a PyTorch learning module; .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-symbolic_AI

Barack Obama election-to-inauguration transition site. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Paper. This post is different. Usually I offer commentary and analysis. I share what others think, then respond. This is the second time I am importantly not doing that. The work speaks for itself. It offers a different perspective, a window and a worldview. It is self-consistent. This is what a highly intelligent, highly knowledgeable person actually believes after much thought. (2024-06-01) Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast with Leopold Aschenbrenner. The central discussion was the theses of his paper, Situational Awareness, which I offered quotes from earlier, with a focus on the consequences of AGI rather than whether AGI will happen soon. There are also a variety of other topics. (2024-06-01) Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper (more)

Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity.[1] It can be a form of utility computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing (more)

Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about conversational programming? *It’s not widely talked about yet, but it will be. To understand why, I’m going to build on my previous HackerNoon post on "Why the fuss about serverless?" (more)

Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about serverless? It’s how back in Canonical in 2008, we knew we had to focus on the emerging DevOps world and to make sure everyone (or as many as possible) that were building in that space were working on Ubuntu. We exploited this change for our own benefits. As one CIO recently told me, one day everyone was talking about RedHat and the next it was all Cloud plus Ubuntu. That didn’t happen by accident. (more)

Apple Computer Lap Top (more)

Cedric Chin has a free email course on using XmR charts, esp with his Xmrit tool. https://xmrit.com/ (more)

Leonard Richardson: "Writing Aliens", or, "Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt". In computer science, artificial intelligence is the stereotypical failed project. We have been working on this for sixty years and we don't have anything that approaches the general-purpose cognitive ability of a human being. (AGI) As a science fiction writer, I think it's presumptuous to use a human being as the standard of intelligence. We don't expect space aliens to have the general-purpose cognitive ability of a human being. We expect them to be different from us. (more)

see surrealism

Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.[1] Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.[2][3][4] It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g., "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.")[citation needed] or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed... This technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least as early as 1918... Later the game was adapted to drawing and collage, in a version called picture consequences, with portions of a person replacing the written sentence fragments of the original.[9] The person is traditionally drawn in four steps: The head, the torso, the legs and the feet with the paper folded after each portion so that later participants cannot see earlier portions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse