these remind me of rule 110 in GoL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

are they related?

online age verification is disingenuous and a pretext to give governments the hard coded technical option to regulate speech and association.

there's a great game being played out by these users of force against the advocates of desire. everything about the bureaucracies pushing digital ID is unwanted. this isnt about age verification tech, its about illegitimate power for unwanted people who are actuated by forcing their will on others.

we should treat these actions with the open disgust they deserve.

online age verification is disingenuous and a pretext to give governments the hard coded technical option to regulate speech and association.

there's a great game being played out by these users of force against the advocates of desire. everything about the bureaucracies pushing digital ID is unwanted. this isnt about age verification tech, its about illegitimate power for unwanted people who are actuated by forcing their will on others. we should treat these actions with the open disgust they deserve.

there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R.

great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.

ive been invovled in privacy for decades and not once has anyone named the parties behind the bills or authors of it, or who lobbies and uses leverage over lawmakers to push these bills through.

they are persistent and have continuity through generations, organize across borders, influence manufacturers and even pressure individual developers.

tech doesnt secure privacy. finding these people and calling them out directly might.

im of two minds, where on the one hand having some basic physical competence and responsibility can only improve civil servants, but on the other, the civil service is now stacked with radical partisans, and arming them and organizing them as paramilitaries is going to go exactly how you'd expect.

who was their control group i wonder.

the contrarian optimist case against this dystopia of CBDCs and digital identity is that institutions themselves are too corrupt to adopt them. i met some people involved in a project to turn a government budget into a ledger and the resistance was that it would remove all the discretion from the system, and even technocrats forget that the discretion is its own reward in those places.

their entire plan is predicated on there being no alternative, and these world domination plans make some noise but they do not prevail.

i've followed them for a while and as just a general technologist and not a scientist, i have a probably wrong idea of what they do, but perhaps correcting it will let others write about it more accurately.

my handwavy analogy interpretation was they were in-effect building an analog computer for AI model training, using some ideas that originated in quantum computing. their insight is that since model training is itself probabilistic, you don't need discrete binary computation to do it, you just need something that implements the sigmoid function for training a NN.

they had some physics to show they could cause a bunch of atoms to polarize (conceptually) instantaneously using the thermodynamic properties of a material, and the result would be mostly deterministic over large samples. the result is what they are calling a "probabilistic bit" or pbit, which is an inferred state over a probability distribution, and where the inference is incorrect, they just "get it in post," because the speed of the training data through a network of these pbits is so much more efficient that it's faster to just augment and correct the result in the model afterwards than to use classical clock cycles to directly compute it.

> Luxury is a marker that we can afford to do something others might consider wasteful.

the most interesting luxury thing i saw was palmer luckey showing his modretro chromatic game boy in his interview with rogan this week. sapphire crystal screen, special alloy from the weapons factory, offline, 90s aesthetic, exists for the pleasure of it, etc. what luxury really is is an expression of value, or values. the most coarse version of that is "status," but what about religious garb, artifacts and symbols? to an atheist, a hijab or a cross is a luxury item, but to the wearer, they are the literal, existential point of being. it's pretty crass and unserious to suggest these are just status symbols in a materialist power struggle. things that express values that bring you joy or pleasure are not a "luxury," as this presumes you are nothing but an undifferentiated clump of cells with the same material needs as any other one, and any distinction in satisfying those needs is superfluous. and to what? your meaningless existence as grist for an eternal struggle? surely.

we need a new model of luxury. in economics, there are normal and inferior goods, then giffen goods whose demand becomes higher when the price rises, veblen goods whose price is inverse to utility, and some other ones, but they are all names for the shapes of price and demand curves, but they're all just curves.

materialist ideas about luxury are dumb thought terminating cliches that deprive others of the opportunity to contemplate or appreciate them. we need new thinking, imo