Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 72

[ecosophia]

As we proceed through the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. 

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before: 

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religious, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.  

Comments

[tunesmyth]

Color me skeptical that an AI wrote that. It's a nice poem though!

[(Anonymous)]

I'm amused. We've already reached the point that we can wonder if an AI-generated interaction is really coming from a human.

Almost a perfect mirror image of the original idea of a Turing machine.

[ecosophian]

Maybe they have a dozen or so poets locked up in a room, and they write when they get the prompt.

[(Anonymous)]

It is, you can try your own

https://chat.openai.com/chat


I even ask a limerick about planets, tarot arcanas, etcetera

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, here is a limerick about the unvaccinated:

There once was a person who shunned
The vaccines that others had won
But when illness came knocking
They quickly were rocking
And wished they had not been so undone.

Please note that this limerick is meant to be light-hearted and not meant to offend or demean anyone who has chosen not to get vaccinated. It is important for everyone to make informed decisions about their health and to consider the well-being of others, and vaccination is one important way to protect both individual and community health.

[(Anonymous)]

"vaccination is one important way to protect both individual and community health."

I would have agreed in 2020.

No more.

[(Anonymous)]

Please note that this limerick is meant to be light-hearted and not meant to offend or demean anyone who has chosen not to get vaccinated. It is important for everyone to make informed decisions about their health and to consider the well-being of others, and vaccination is one important way to protect both individual and community health.

This is part of the AI response besides the limerick.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh my God, the AI is woke! Everyone run for the hills!

But seriously, do you think my post needs a trigger warning?

— Christophe

[(Anonymous)]

definitely woke

Q: can you make a shield for microwaves?

A: It is possible to create a shield to block or absorb microwaves. There are several different methods that can be used to achieve this, depending on the specific characteristics of the microwaves and the environment in which the shield will be used.

One common method for creating a microwave shield is to use a material that absorbs microwaves, such as metal mesh or specially designed absorber materials. These materials can be formed into a shield or placed in front of the source of the microwaves to block or absorb them.

Another method for creating a microwave shield is to use a material that reflects microwaves, such as metal or a special reflector material. These materials can be shaped into a shield or placed in front of the source of the microwaves to reflect them away from the intended area.

It is important to note that microwave shields are not typically used to protect people from microwaves, as microwaves are non-ionizing radiation that do not pose a health risk to humans at the levels typically found in microwave ovens or other household appliances. However, microwave shields may be used in certain industrial or research settings to protect equipment or materials from exposure to microwaves.

[(Anonymous)]

Incoherent (rocking? isn't that good?) and doesn't scan. A poor effort.

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

[(Anonymous)]

I was skeptical last year when the first fairly legit image generators started making the rounds. At least ones that could do decent work. This year things have started to snowball. The pace of improvement is hard to grasp. As a trained artist, I can still tell which piece is human produced and which isn't. There is an "AI-ness" to a piece. But it's getting hard to tell lately. A few more years and I doubt I'll be able to tell. For example, here is a great thread of images someone produced recently. It's sort of "christmas by way of cthulu":

https://twitter.com/nat_sharpe_/status/1602411961689509895
(*Warning: some mildly disturbing characters here, but not in the ballpark of Loab. More "magical spooky".)

What is interesting is diving into the 'how' of the process, to the extent I can grasp it, as a layman on the tech. It seems to me that a system to digitize the concept of 'imagination' has been built. When I draw, or paint, or design, I'll doodle first, just to get something on the page. I keep it loose, to try and find interesting shapes and compositions. After the big idea is out, I go in and refine as necessary. These systems do the same thing. Here is the best explanation I've seen on the process so far:

https://youtu.be/1CIpzeNxIhU

Essentially, these systems had been trained at first to fill in noise in an image. To repair a damaged or missing section. They learn an idea like "cat". What "is" a "cat"? (Thanks Dreamwidth captcha! I think it's learning strawberries right now, btw. What are you guys seeing?). Then, when presented with a damaged image of a cat, the system can apply what it knows to fix the damage, or extend the image. If you blur an image, or add a lot of noise, it takes the principles of 'catness' and tries to resolve the image back to completeness. Here's the interesting twist or insight someone had: what if you push an image into full noise? Just a chaotic jumble of pixels and say "find and fix the cat". The system will start to use it's knowledge of 'catness' to doodle, and it will gaze into the pixels and 'scry' out a cat, or two or three. It's almost literally doing what I do when I daydream and try and open my minds eye to what image wants to come into existence. The advantage it has over me is that it can do a thousand images in the time I can do one. Probably 10,000 to be fair. More next year.

Meditating on this trend, one begins to wonder, what is the point of humans continuing? AI can do things better and faster, improving so fast it will pull away from us (shout out to Her). From a consumption society point of view, where profitable output is all the matters, the AI will probably be throwing many of us out of work before long. But from a spiritual point of view, what I've realized is that just because the AI may, at some point, gain a spark, that does not negate ours. Does my spark negate that in a bird, or a worm, or an amoeba? Not at all. They are also whole and of value, unto themselves, regardless of their complexity. Somewhere between Camus, Frankl, Nietzsche, Parmenides, Lao Tzu, Vonnegut, Adams, and PKD, I've settled on the notion that our meaning comes not from the output of our work, our profitable-ness, but from the doing and the being. And Stalin's apocryphal saying "Quantity has it's own quality" does not apply. Where it really matters, in making meaning and enchantment, the quality of intention is the key. Big or small, it matters not. Are you digging a hole? Knitting a sock? Painting a portrait? Planting lettuce? Is it a full intention or a half intention? That is the ONLY metric. Plant one tomato, with full intention, and you can enchant the world. Easy to say. I'm still working on it. Incidentally, this has me wondering if a tiny human intention might be as 'meaningful' as a larger, more powerful being...

Murmuration

[(Anonymous)]

It is captured intelligence.

All those years of people filling
¨I am not a robot¨

ended in training robots

Select the faces
Select the buses
etc

just trained some networks


This is IMHO just a big distraction, actually a problem, because what we need are creative solutions and this should come from the new

Giving these tasks to AI will get just mixes of old solutions that seem new

[scotlyn]

That is a very interesting meditation...

What it immediately put me in mind of was a scene in "Wizard of Earthsea" where (I hope I am remembering this correctly, but don't hold me to it) Ogion is teaching young Sparrowhawk the name of a plant that is growing beside the path. Ogion says you must know this plant in bud and flower, in summer and winter, and so on... (which, IIRC, is the longest speech he ever makes in the book).

Sparrowhawk replies, "Master, what is its use?"

Ogion, "None that I know of..."

What is, after all, the "use" of any of us?

Perhaps, the (or an) answer is that quality has no quantity, which is to say, it has no measure.