Something new (that is, old) to think about

A post from our friends at Quantum 19:

BAM: Builders of the Ancient Mysteries

An excellent chance to learn from others who were intent on leaving a record for those who would have to start over in the future.


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The Coming AI-mageddon

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Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 12:01 AM, Wednesday, December 25.  Latest entries are “Year End Thoughts on 2025,” “The ‘W’ File from Moon Books,” and “The Cryptkeeper.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! XMAS STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated December 24. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I m...
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The Cryptkeeper

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  WW2 Flying Tigers P-40 showing Ace-level kills at “Threads” based on  notifications of 50 to 100 Likes for various replies I’ve made to TDS ranters. I’ve been in a down mood as we approach the end of 2025 and the completion of Trump’s first year in office since 2020. My annual End of Year post will describe my big picture view, but this post will fill in a significant part of that picture and can be used as a basis for endorsement or dismissal of my personal perspective. The social network app called Threads has been reference here previously, after my first exploratory encounters with what I’ve termed the “submerged 10 percent of Trump haters” the real percentage is probably much higher than a tenth, but these are the noncelebrity Rosie O’Donnells and Robert De Niros who are so obsessed with Trump that they have to type it out loud at the top of their keyboard lungs on a daily basis. After my first few brushes with them, I began to think that there’s something important goi...
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We can learn from useful archetypes of the liberal elites

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  This was going to be a Facebook joke, playing on the contrast between the haughty New Yorker grand dame and the plainspoken Trump 2.0 disdain for reflexive mass media TDS. When I looked Jane Mayer up in Wikipedia I discovered the need to write this post. The woman is an archetype of the particular kind of box highly influential lefties in the nation’s press come from. They are by no means representative of the nation they purport to understand and cover objectively in their reporting and opinionating. Back in April of this year, I wrote a post called “ TDS is a coalition not a monolith .” It described criteria that define various ways in which Trump haters are limited in their knowledge of American life despite  levels of education, power, and prosperity that might seem guaranteed to give them broad insight into their countrymen as a whole. Limiting factors include the isolating effects of being among the overpaid and over-indulged, the vertical siloing effects of geography...
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Epstein Files Release Delayed Again, EXCEPT…

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 We have one, secretly transmitted to us via the DarkNet… If you’re not allowed to play with DarkNet stuff, go no further. Fair warning. Don’t show this to anybody else. It could damage reputations… Who’s that smirking at Bill from behind the lavender incense cloud? (Don’t click on the pic; we can’t be responsible for what you find)
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The Roots of TDS in the Dem Rank and File

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  Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
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The “W” File from Moon Books

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  Good ol’ W has put himself back in the news recently, bemoaning the plight of Afghans whose escape route to America via the Biden EZ-Pass might come unglued. A man’s got to have his priorities.  Anyhow, I was reminded by his return to the public eye that I had an orphan piece about his 43ness floating around somewhere in the electronic ether I live in. There was a place called Shuteye Town 1999 , in which there was a mall store called Moon Books, in which there was a book for sale titled ‘Loving Ameria 2’ by George Hubert Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush IV.  You had to use your video game savvy to get inside Moon Books w/o getting arrested thiugh… * The Bore Backgrounder exists too. Still needs formatting… For more than 50 of the books sold at Moon, you could click on titles and see the front and back covers. For a lot of those, there was also a representative text sample and background on the writers. Unfortunately, Internet life has been complicated for ST99, and at ...
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About that feller Norm Chompski…

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  A long time ago I decided to build a little time capsule depicting the world as we were experiencing it at the very end of the 20th Century. It was called Shuteye Town 1999 and is still hanging on for dear life here . Like the rest of 1999 it had a lot of public transportation, a lot of entertainment media, and a big mall with the usual stores, including one that sold the books of the day. The way it worked, you could use your mouse or touch screen to go where you wanted and get what you wanted with your handy-dandy credit card. The bookstore had been the scene of a recent shooting, but you could get past the crime scene tape and shop for all kinds of publications, even the intellectual crap from the Shuteye Times bestseller list. One of the books in the intellectual category was Norm Chompski’s Global Politics . He was one of about 50 authors whose book was featured not just with a front and back cover display, but also a selection of the text.  I’m telling you all this be...
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An Open Letter to Michael Smith

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  Michael Smith He has about 10,000 more FB friends than I do. Just posted this on his Facebook page: You posted recently about the problem of what we can really do as individuals to deal with problems you describe capably and suggested a two-part format for addressing this hole in the communication challenge. I replied with this: “There’s an alternate universe to be built out there. For all of us who care about the ones who will come later, the ones who are kids now and the ones who may only be a gleam in your children’s eyes. A deliberate linkage of all that we consider best and inspirational, both intellectually and creatively, including pure entertainments. We have all been taught (programmed?) to regard ourselves as vectors, pushed by economic (egononomic?) needs, working alone with friends, acquaintances, acolytes as support for our labors. But we are limiting ourselves by an engrained habit of clinging to customary means of attracting notice to ourselves. I know there are pr...
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