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Linas Vepstas

@linas.org

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · Sep 17

I am fascinated by ideas from AGI: a mashup of math, computing, physics, sociology, linguistics, psychology, structuralism and more. I explore these ideas via Atomese, this odd compute system that is part of the OpenCog AtomSpace. Described here: bsky.app/profile/flee...

Fleeky @fleeky.bsky.social · Sep 16

@linas.org please please make an opencog profile here so you can talk a bit about it and where you are going in the development , looks like you are doing a lot of interesting things there and i bet other people would be as fascinated by it as me :)

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 46m

From what I can tell, VICE was doing news like this. Exploring the seedy, shady underbelly of work, ranging from dishonorable to criminal. They've got a series of interesting bio interviews on youtube. But also people seemed to hate VICE. Not sure why. Because it was smeared in shit, I suppose?

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 1h

"back up to"

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 1h

The story here is that it's not "petabytes"; my phone has maybe 5 or 10GB of photos. The problem is there's no button/menu n the photo app that says "automatically back up linas.org/%22 I would tell my sister to punch that button, if I could, but I can't. So she pays google $20/month for it.

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 2h

So google has built a walled garden. Not as fortified as Apple's, but still hard to escape from. And, like the Berlin Wall, these are designed to keep people in. Which is (yet another example of) why I call these people "Soviet" instead of "fascist".

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 2h

This is hard. Here's a mini example. My phone syncs photos to Google Cloud. At home I have 30TB (yes, you read that right) of disk storage. Can I change my phone to sync photos to my home machine? Supposedly. But its so hard & technical to set up I haven't done it (yet). What about my sisters phone?

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 2h

Well, can we game out a scenario to prevent this? The "terminal" is de facto the phone, and the apps on it. The path for google is easy: provide an LLM SDK that app writers will want to use. The alternative is what? Use same SDK, but attach it to an LLM that is non-hostile?

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 3h

But the biggest of them all was(is) string theory. When it started it was explosive in popularity. And stayed that way for decades. I mean, I see exactly why. Who doesn't want an excuse to learn knot theory or number theory, and claim "I'm still doing physics, so you can keep me on the payroll"?

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 3h

But earlier "mini-" fads in particle physics: recall magnetic monopoles? proton decay? SU(5) unification? Met a guy who wrote his PhD on SU(5) and he was kind of oddly pissed when I said out loud "Oh yeah! That's right! I forgot about that one!"

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 3h

The charmers are in space: the Pioneer anomaly (now settled). The flyby anomalies (not settled, last I looked). The rainbow of MOND stuff, e.g. the large-diameter stellar binaries evidence (against dark matter). the "no dark energy, we just happen to be the edge of a giant void." Wild stuff.

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 3h

I'm drawn to unexpected results. There are strange resonances in some low-energy nuclear reactions that keep getting tagged with "is this a 5th force?". But there's also: anomalous muon g-2. The off-by-10% proton charge radius. I don't recall the status of those. Stuff keeps popping up.

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 16h

The number of corners on a typical neural-net hypercube is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Much larger.

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 17h

She's drunk as a skunk when she starts texting. My general impression is everyone in or near the White House is knockered out of their gourds on drugs or booze.

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 17h

The median normie physicist is distributed on the surface of a soap bubble. All of physics has been subject to fashion trends since forever. Everyone wants to think about the fun new thing instead of the impossible old thing that won't crack despite years of work. That's just how it is.

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 18h

Who are these so-called Dems, and why do they hate us so much?

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 18h

Why not both?

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 18h

Day late and a dollar short.

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 21h

You can't say this, because I imagine a lot of people would get mad at you, if you did. You're a public persona. I am not. So I can say it. But I also imagine this is not news to you. (Oh, I mis-spelled "kompromat". Oops.) bsky.app/profile/lina...

Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 3d

Some decades ago, Trump was flyin to Moscow regularly to get the russian bankers to bail him out of bankruptcy. I imagine there's a metric eff-ton of compromat of Trump doing 13-year-old russsian girls. This shouldn't be some mystery at this point. I think it's pretty clear, by now.

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Linas Vepstas @linas.org · 21h

Well, the crazy perks were kind of crazy. There was (is?) this management technique: "let's get them to hang out in the office 16 hours a day" and that works if you've got ping-pong tables and the employees are single. Grad school was definitely like that.