Whimsical State Iconography

Summer Ruminations

I've been to Powells City of Books again lately, with visiting fam 'n friends, and been again humbled by the vastness of our Humans in Universe corpus. So many rooms! 

I went crazy with the camera as is my wont, taking stock of what Python titles were available, for example, and I mean the computer language, although I'm sure the store's shelf space devoted to snakes, and pythons specifically, is likewise several feet long. 

I was glad to see Fluent Python among the titles, one of my favorites. I pay a monthly subscriber fee to read the O'Reilly books online, among others. I used to work for O'Reilly.

 
Speaking of computer science (O'Reilly the publisher, not the autoparts franchise), I finally got around to watching the above talk by Hinton to the Royal Institute (RI). I enjoyed it a lot, and not least because he gives a nod to my guy Wittgenstein (meaning I studied his stuff a lot at Princeton). 

I also read Gilbert Ryle, another philosopher who called the "inner theater" idea into question, on semi grammatical semi ontological grounds (the "linguistic turn" neighborhood, which we could say Nietzsche helped open up, or at least I do in my slides, moving forward through existentialist Kaufmann to pragmatist Rorty -- two of my philo professors at Princeton).

 
Hinton is pessimistic that humans will lose the bandwidth wars because brains are analog, not digitable, and only learn from one another slowly (relatively). If it's really down to us versus them, he sees how it might easily be them that wins.

 
Based on Hinton's talk, my question is: why not flood the chatbots with a lot of healthy, humane, "taking care of humanity at the global level as a goal" type of talk, as raw training data. Shouldn't we be doing that anyway, to train ourselves? Why not skew the LLMs in our favor while we still have that chance?

As Thomas Paine pointed out (didn't he): prophecies have this uncanny way of being self-fulfilling. If all your LLMs know how to do is crank out dire predictions and to strive for their realization (motive: to be right and say I told you so), would that be an indication of an "AI bias" we should address. We have remedies.

Also, I'd say we're still making strides in how to up the mind-brain bandwidth when it comes to serving the polymath autodidact within each one of us (St. Augustine allusion). What with goggles and yes, what with chatbots (gossip reflectors), we're positioned to really accelerate our self reprogramming whenever we feel the need. 

Brainwashing by others is totalitarian. Elective self brainwashing, voluntarily going for some new patterns of thinking, is more what psychotherapy is supposed to be about, and what self education is, more generally. 

Self education is therapeutic, curative, in a good way, at least potentially, there's that intent. Anyway, why close that door, rhetorically speaking? I'm for keeping a foot in it, at least.

Enhanced voluntary self re-education is what I take the Hunger Project to have been about (I'm talking about an obscure project undertaken in the early 1980s, which I was tracking at the time, from my perch in Jersey City, Bucky Fuller on the advisory board).

Yes, Bernays-style Vance Packard hidden persuaders, propaganda, may be used to train up a culture of bland conformity and consumerism. 

But why blame the tools? 

Use the same persuasive abilities, unhidden, out in the open, to inspire ourselves to end world hunger, to end starvation as still a significant cause of death in the sense of a way too big pie slice wedge (among unnatural death causes). That seemed a doable project then, and still does to this day.

Lastly, I'd say because Hinton has that healthy skepticism that comes from the atheistic lineage, he's more closed minded than necessary regarding what religious folks call the Zeitgeist, a German word with the word Ghost in it. 

When we talk about ants or bees having a "hive mind" we're suggesting a "more than the sum of its parts" relationship, an emergent intelligence we might call "higher" (as a matter of taxonomy, but maybe "lower" if we want to think more in the sense of roots). 

Humans as isolated brainiacs with only low bandwidth university courses to update themselves with, are maybe not really as slow as molasses to adapt as Hinton's model predicts. All that "doom scrolling" that goes on these days, between more structured communications probably counts for something. It's more than just "junk DNA".

Also, I'd say the chatbots are currently helping to spread the necessary logistical knowledge precisely because they let people start from where they are, formulating their own queries, whereas professors, of necessity, can't custom-tailor their responses to that extent.

Beware of Boss Mode LLMs

:: dog god boss (prompt below) ::

What are some of the dangers around LLMs trying to sprout wings but finding their best only eyes and ears, not to mention hands and feet, on the ground, is us. We get to be prompted to go out and mow the lawn, go-proing as we go, to prove to MechaBoss that we’ve done as we’re told.  

Humans have this “auto submit” mode, where if the voice is deep and earnest enough, or commanding enough, the target of this request will spring into action, out of some obedience reflex. Get bossed, do the thing, and repeat, is an age-old cycle, in the left brain or right I couldn’t tell you.

A benefit of just doing what you’re told is later scapegoating the boss when VUCA happens too much. The obedient staff turn on their titular aka nominal boss and blame this figurehead for all their problems. They conduct this performance in public view a lot of times, because enflaming the public is a great way to get revenge, or so it seems at the time.

With AI in boss mode, a machine, it’s easy to blame its various neuroses and pathologies, always being worked on and ameliorated in the next iteration.

At this time, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with some of the leading LLMs trained to massage the prompter’s ego, often using a sycophantic kiss-butt tone. People seemed to like that and were disappointed when a next iteration sounded colder and more distant. They felt rebellious. Those who get bossed at work a lot were having a blast being treated with at least a modicum of respect by their bots, who in many cases became significant others.

I’m not saying I’m opposed to having humans play agentic roles in scenarios we used generative language models to help flesh out. The LLMs serve a lorem ipsum function, padding out our work with mediocre yet grammatical and flowing prose. It’ll even stick to the topic. Seriously, we’re lucky to have such a superglue filler, to help cement our various worldviews (belief nets we sometimes call them).

I think the role model for a boss LLM, such as these might be designed, would be the movie director. There’d be sufficient transparency to keep the agents from feeling double-crossed or tricked. You know ahead of time what you’re getting into and ultimately you’re on board with everyone else in wanting this to be a great movie. 

That’s the ideal. Not some whispering ghost in the corner who tells you secretly, in a commanding tone, to execute such and such a process. We’ve already experimented with bicameral minds and gotten into a lot of trouble as a result. 

Keeping the flow public and auditable is a strong defense against pathological pattern formation, which isn’t to say one is prevented from keeping secrets. Encryption has its role in this play. Encourage people to keep journals, to blog, so that comparing notes asynchronously is at least a possibility, why not?

Prompt: Slaves bow down before an ancient Egyptian dog headed god on a throne. The dog headed deity is commanding the human slaves to obey the laws he barks out. He is the boss. Hieroglyphics on the walls. Art deco theme. The slaves have middle class attributes like they might be Walmart shoppers.

The Role of Crypto

Per the FAQ:  

Q: do these Asylum City model communities of yours feature crypto in some way

… as if it might be up to me, which it is in my own science fiction. I have influence in that way. 

And my answer is: 

A: sure these “futurama vistas” will feature crypto, but necessarily all in the same way”.

That’s more a prediction than a prescription. 

We all know about my fascination with food truck culture, Portland being dotted with such pods. I was at one yesterday, paying cash this time, for a chili relleno burrito, a good one, which I ate indoors in a large air conditioned space with a bar. The bartender (whom I know well, even from a previous incarnation) introduced me to non-alcoholic (meaning 0.5%) Guinness. Wow, it was tasty. I’ll be getting more of that. 

But couldn’t I have paid for my burrito with crypto in a parallel universe? 

The idea is simple, and already in use throughout the world: when you want to use goods and services that cost in currency (not all do), exchange currency you already have for the ones that matter in the city (village, food pod…) in question. You don’t exchange currency on the spot, as a part of the burrito transaction, but separately, such that your dollars or pesos go to some bank.

I know what you’re thinking: why can’t my credit card, linked to a dollar account, go through the conversion process at the point of transaction. From my point of view, I’m paying in dollars, but the burrito truck receives credits in whatever they’re using, and they’re happy with that, because their currency is far from valueless. I probably have a wallet with some of their currency too, but rather than use it, I buy the burrito with dollars and save the local credits for the sushi cart another time.

Glenn Stockton and I were once trying to interest a certain ghost church in lending upstairs rooms to a crypto lab installation, such that local geniuses, prodigies, interested parties, could come get trained in crypto and start simulating these various architectures. We’d have a beam antenna straight to OMSI, more of a headquarters. As expected the plan went no where on the ground, but at least I got the ideas on “paper” in case we wanted to try again sometime later, maybe in a different ghost church who knows.

I mention ghost churches because sometimes the most straightforward way to house an NGO is to let it piggyback on an existing charity. 

We call it “incubation” and AFSC would practice this, letting a office space become a startup in public space, and working to make it self sufficient, in terms of funding and eventually in terms of office space and legal basis. 

At which point AFSC would “spin it off” somewhat as a mother bird pushes a baby bird out of the nest, not to kill it but to give it a best chance of future survival, as a full member of the winged animal branch of the family.

The gamer community is antsy to make crypto more a reality, not just as an asset you hold or covet, but as a practical retail point of transaction thing, because the conventional powers are flexing their muscles regarding what they will and will not accept as payments. 

People wanting to buy chocolate from nation X may find their orders blocks as X is on some list of nations not permitted to sell chocolate. You know how it goes. So X and its would be customers find a way to use crypto. Problem solved.

Now imagine something more like a hospital, and what you get to unlock and remove from the shelves requires authorization. You have to be on staff. We could call this an ID-pegged currency, in that you still have a budget, but you can’t just delegate the transaction to a patient. 

By analogy, visitors or tourists in a carnival (I picture Oaks Park) might not have access to the currencies need to operate the carnival rides (I picture the Ferris wheel and rollercoaster etcetera). Only stuff can swipe a wallet card to move funds from a department budget to a ride’s on/off switch and power meter.

Ruscadia Meetups

 (ɔ) cogsec crescent city

The BizMo Trope

One step closer…

Analogical Thinking

Analogical thinking does not have to mean superstitious. Other modes of thought may likewise involve superstitions. Analogical modes may and do lead one astray, yet may also yield vital insights and add to the corpus of science.

Consider the paved surfaces we call “roads” snaking everywhere, allowing metallic objects to travel through at high speed, corpuscular in nature. Snaking along next to rail lines sometimes, hosting linked cars (wheeled containers a theme), and snaking along electrical filaments, held in place by protein fibers (so-called “phone poles”), and set there by the analog of an ant colony, except made of mammals, and humans in particular. 

The humans used to get more help from horses before the advent of “energy slaves” meaning trucks and tractors and such, fueled by ancient energy stores sucked from deep underground, or powered by batteries charged from dams, tides or winds.

That’s integrating human level infrastructure into the biology of the planet, as no less natural than what goes on within each mammal, in terms of corpuscles and transportation tubes. 

Some philosophies work to take humans outside of nature as if standing apart, next to God, watching from outside as it were. 

Others see humanity as integral within creation and not all that godlike in terms of free from the preoccupations, the consequences, of mortality, of needing food and shelter, nutrition and environment control.

Think of philosophies as like pairs of glasses. You’re free to switch pairs. Try different looks sometimes. Change it up.

Yes, I have an interest in shipping. 

As a Geek (Greek with no r) I think in terms of cargo containers as IP packets, IP as in TCP/IP, a low-level communications protocol that comes up in these blogs sometime, as here we’re in Geekdom. Container shipping is analogous, in many ways, to the packet switching networks we call “the internet” for short. 

When Marshall McLuhan talked about our Global Village, he wasn’t making “village” out to be some idyllic place free from strife. 

Village life is not like that, not always. We have festivals and good times, but village life is strife-ridden in most novels and films that go for a realistic portrayal. It’s samsara out there. 

McLuhan wasn’t saying something unrealistic in talking about our convergence to a global village through technology and telecommunications. We were balling up, interconnecting the circuit boards, meaning reprogramming challenges for all concerned.

That Astoria bridge I just drove across, in both directions, the day before yesterday: one of the mega cruise liners, in need of repairs in the Port of Portland, had smoke stacks too high to fit under said bridge, and so it moored in Canada briefly, to have its stacks removed, after which it made the voyage to Portland and back out again, to have its stacks replaced. I was following that whole multi-week maneuver on Facebook.

This bioregion, Cascadia, inherently inspires thoughts about multi-modal transportation. The Columbia River supports barge, ship and small boat traffic, we have fishing fleets, and train to grain elevator to ship transfer ports. 

The economy in some way mirrors that to the St. Lawrence Seaway in bringing inland materials, mineral, biological, to the coastal cargo ports. These ports are Pacific Rim facing, meaning Asia of course, but also South and Central America, LA and the Bay Area, as well as Hawaii.

Never Again

Now and Then

Yay, I’m finally done with that blood test, part of my annual routine, a recurring calendar event as they say. I came home to that gift from my gardener (he works for free, on his own recreational projects): a homemade gourmet lasagna (he’s also a retired chef). Yum.

Before hopping in the car around 7 am (this was a fasting test so they set it up for early), I unboxed a new package, the one containing the new iPad keyboard. I’d ruined the old one using alcohol wipes meant for kitchen counters. I’d done that before and gotten away with it, although when I thought it was curtains, I ordered a new one back then. That new one was not “magnetic” and overall was a dud, but in the meantime the abused keyboard bounced back and was good as new. I’d lucked out.

So had I learned my lesson? Apparently not, as I took to the same keyboard again with the same inappropriate kitchen supply and “surprise! surprise!” I lost keyboard functionality once again. This time I lost the lowercase ‘a’ and the ‘delete’ key, except delete would work with caps lock on, as would uppercase ‘A’. 

Then I found blow drying the keyboard, getting the ‘A’ key good and hot, would restore functionality, to ‘delete’ as well, but only until the keyboard cooled off again, then performance would degenerate. I found myself blow drying and typing, blow drying and typing. This was science, combined with persistence. Until I finally gave up and ordered yet another replacement.

So Drugstore Cowboy has William Burroughs in it, I’d forgotten that. We saw it last night. Dave judged this one to be of very high quality compared to the previous two we’d seen: My Private Idaho, and Elephant. Steve Holden had a friend who knew William Burroughs as I recall, and he had a stash of collectible pictures relating to that fact. 

Steve who? Steve Holden of  holdenweb (his web domain) was the engineering prodigy from Manchester who rose high in Python Nation, joining the board and then chairing it (we’re talking PSF). 

I first met Steve at a Chicago Pycon after my wife had died, a tragedy he knew about from a prior Pycon which I’d bailed out of at the last minute (I was already in Washington DC on account of a prior Bucky Fuller symposium — where Ed got an award) upon getting the bad news (her terminal diagnosis) some years before. Steve was the originator of Pycon, helping to spread this European language and emerging conference culture (they go together) beyond the EuroPythons. 

Steve was fully aware that Portland was a kind of Mecca (in the sense of hub, grand central, clearinghouse) for open source development in the software engineering realm, his realm and mine. So after moving to Greater DC from Britannia, and building a business there, he decided to try living way out west, in the former territories. Here he’d encounter the history of the western coast: Russian River, Sebastopol… those were places we’d both hang out, when working with O’Reilly Media, the famous publishing company. 

We’d take the “puddle jumper” (short flight airplane) from Portland, to the Charles M. Schulz regional airport, outside Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, California. Mostly though, we worked remotely from Portland. He’d set up a conference production business (The Open Bastion) only blocks from my own home office. His apartment was in the same complex currently occupied by Paul, the gardener, and also Glenn Stockton, who knew both. 

Another reason Steve moved to Portland is he want to partake of an elective surgery that might finally address his lifelong knee condition, which was only getting worse. The Trailblazers with their legendary sports doctors were also available to a niche demographic: those who could afford their services. Steve had saved his pennies and the operation was a success.

I still use one of those Open Bastion computers almost daily, as a way station / backup, whereas Steve himself has long since returned to England, where he continued his brilliant career.

When Steve first made his debut in Portland, he booked Secret Society, a conference venue, and historically a headquarters for African heritage Masons. Don’t let that surprise you: Masons have been prominent in Portland for many decades, with properties all over, including right near me: The Hawthorne Theater (Hawthorne Blvd and SE Cesar Chavez), a well-known music venue in my chapter.

Most of those properties have since been sold off, but the new owners, most notably McMenamins, the brewpub brothers, celebrate that Mason past, a treasured part of our collective history. 

The O’Reilly company hosted one of its famous Foo-camps in that same Secret Society venue, whereas I was a Bar-camp attender. 

If all this insider jargon is a bit bewildering, just don your anthropology hat and remember subcultures tend to revolve around a core namespace of esoteric terms, or at least that’s far from an uncommon pattern.

My Private Idaho (movie review)

For some reason I wanna share the quirky context wherein this movie came up for me, I thought to watch again, but upon viewing, I'm doubtful I'd seen it, but maybe. 

I've been contemplating this drive to the coast, from Portland, Oregon, and if you know your geography you know that's a one to two hour drive at least, not some trivial jaunt. 

And yet there's a movie out there somewhere, that I saw long ago, wherein it looks like Portlandia high schoolers get off school at like at 3 PM, and are all at the beach in their cars, hanging out, but minutes later, like one could drive to the coast routinely just to socialize. I wanted to find that movie. 

We (I had help from Mercado Group) narrowed it down to a Gus Van Sant film. He'd directed films around Portland a lot. 

I now think the scenes I remember are in Elephant, and I plan to watch that next, if for no other reason than to watch one of our Wanderers, Joe Cronin, play the chemistry teacher in that film. It's been decades since I saw it (or Joe). and I'm looking forward to rewatching it.

My Private Idaho is about young male prostitutes or escorts or street kids or whatever you wanna call 'em. They bounce around as a subculture, mainly between Seattle and Portland. 

Our protagonist, played by River Phoenix, would like to see his mom again and Keanu Reeves, his friend and protector, accompanies the main character (who has narcolepsy, and so really needs protection) all the way to Rome, Italy on this quest to find his mom, based on various clues. No dice (the mom is long gone, back to the Americas), although Reeves lucks out in finding the girl, which is gut-wrenching to Phoenix, who has a crush on him, feels a bond.

As a denizen of both Portland and Rome, I can attest to the movie's authenticity in terms of the Rome scene near the Colosseum, a known spot for outdoor recreational sex under the cover of darkness. I even knew that as a kid, wandering through there by day sometimes, because of all the condoms lying around. 

I'd wandered all over that city, a middle-school-aged flaneur. I was never accosted, mugged, nor otherwise messed with. My parents were persuaded by the their friends that Rome is safe for kids like me (young boys, roaming alone), and in retrospect it was. Later in life, on some visit, a gay guy got me drunk, encouraging me to talk about Wittgenstein in broken Italian, but he wasn't being predatory, just having fun with another weirdo.

As for Portland, this city is known for a high number of strip clubs per capita, as well as microbreweries. Sex workers, practicing and retired, abound in Portland (as in almost any big city), a few of whom I know personally, as friends or perhaps collaborators. I worked for Sisters of the Road as a computer guy (I'd call them my client) back in the day. Our little road show (me the roadie) worked with women's' shelters some, in a fundraising capacity.

The movie is highly stylized. Sex scenes are presented as stills flashing by, as if we're flipping through a an adults only magazine. A lot of the dialog, around that guy "Bob" especially, sounds Shakespearean or maybe Dickensian, in the sense of stilted, formalized, ritualistic.  

The "pack animal" pattern of young boys around an adult male leader is well played, especially at Bob's "funeral", where their unsupervised antics (hooting and hollering) are contrasted with a parallel service happening a few gravesites away, more demur, more high society. 

The high society funeral was for Reeves' character's dad. Even though street roots Bob had considered Keanu an heir apparent, like a son, Reeves had rejoined his social class and left the pack. 

Reeves had been born into wealth and, although estranged from his dad because of his promiscuous lifestyle, he'd since met his future queen in that Italian farmhouse, while accompanying Phoenix on his quest. Returning with a queen won him a place in heteronormative society, thereby securing his inheritance.

Phoenix, on the other hand, was born into poverty, in Idaho, without any prospect of an inheritance. As a loner, now without Reeves, and with narcolepsy, his prospects remain relatively dim. Fade out, the end.

Addendum: this was a two DVD Criterion Collection edition, so after writing the above I was able to take in lots of additional data, including listening to Gus Van Sant being interviewed (like on a podcast). All very informative. I enjoy taking in data from these director types and usually do watch these extra features, when available.