Posts

John Searle on the Logical Structure of Human Civilization

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This is a great lecture. He makes the same jokes he was making in 1998, but he clearly enjoys telling them. See Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society . It's quite a claim though, that this applies to all of human civilization.  I suppose one could just declare this to be the case in some appropriate context, ... but which one? 46:52 . His answer to the question at 59:06 seems to me to put particles such as protons and electrons fairly squarely into the category of products (i.e. theories) of social institutions: they are produced by people who have machines the development and manufacture of which are funded at least in part by income tax! You need to have been immersed in a very peculiar (I can't say  particular ) culture to have even a vague notion of what a proton or an electron are. Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose .  

Glenn Diesen interview with Jeffrey Sachs

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It's another good one. Lots of history I didn't know and some figures about BRICS representation in terms of economic production and population. See Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. interviewed by Nima Alkhorshid . 27:34 When the Soviet Union was dissolved Russia took on all of the legal obligations the USSR had entered upon. I presume that included the nuclear agreements which the US backed out of. Subscribe to Glenn Diesen .

About Logic - Choice vs. Excluded Middle: A Constructive Paradox

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I didn't get much of this!  See nlab on  Diaconescu-Goodman–Myhill theorem and Wikipedia's  Diaconescu's theorem . My comment :    11:05 FYI I found this very hard to follow. Actually it has so far been impossible for me to follow! I don't know the context of these statements like "a predicate of booleans is a function from bool (Boole?) to prop" I can guess that it means a well-formed formula with a parameter P, say, which when substituted with any well-formed boolean-valued expression produces a well-formed statement of a proposition, i.e. just another boolean-valued expression? But it could also be interpreted extensionally in set theory and the result would be completely different. So what is the sense in which these things are equivalent? The only way I can see to make this meaningful is to restrict to a language where you speak only of how these translations are made. To talk about sets and types as if they exist independently of this seems like mad...

Matt Brown on IoT Firmware Reverse-engineering Utilities

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My comment : Oh wow, if you work for one of these companies then watching this is like seeing your underpants being taken off and shown on TV!  See  Sylvain Huet - Bare Metal Made Easy and https://github.com/nmatt0/moria   https://github.com/nmatt0/mithril   More about the tools: Subscribe to Matt Brown .

Petri Krohn - Inside Nvidia’s CMP 170HX e-waste

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They were able to buy these things for around $200 and enable 64GB of HBM2e memory and 200 TFLOPS of FP16 tensor compute on the CMP 170HX. Subscribe to  media.ccc.de

Sylvain Huet - Bare Metal Made Easy

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Not that easy,... See  David Evans, Vladimir Kolesnikov and Mike Rosulek - A Pragmatic Introduction to Secure Multi-Party Computation  and  FUTO FUBS .  See  the Hackaday article  and these pages: https://minimacy.net/ https://www.sylvain-huet.com/ If you are interested to know what your 10Gb Ethernet router is doing on the wire, you will need something like  http://fireless.cs.cornell.edu/sonic/faq.php . Subscribe to Hackaday . 

Pupina Plomer on the Feminization of Poverty

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You can get Calibán y la bruja: mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria  by Silvia Federici from the Internet Archive, or in print from Tinta Limón press . She's going on tour soon. See https://linktr.ee/pupinaplomer . Subscribe to Pupina Plomer .

David Evans, Vladimir Kolesnikov and Mike Rosulek - A Pragmatic Introduction to Secure Multi-Party Computation

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See the book at  https://securecomputation.org/ There are some interesting case studies in Chapter 1 . Here's the article by Yehuda Lindell: https://cacm.acm.org/research/secure-multiparty-computation/ See Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. interviewed by Nima Alkhorshid .  Subscribe to  Association for Computing Machinery . Raspberry Pi are making an effort, albeit a bit of a half-arsed one ( 16:43 ) responding to legislation with 'industry partners': Subscribe to Raspberry Pi .

Dennis Rediscovering an Overcast Stitch Binding Method for Loose Leaf Books

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It's a good technique for binding single sheets rather than folded signatures, for example you could use this to bind full-size output from an ordinary A4/letter laser printer. Here are some improvements to the method:  Subscribe to Four Keys Book Arts .

Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. interviewed by Nima Alkhorshid

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He's refreshingly positive. He thinks there are no great obstacles to a global "economic communications system" and a trans-national global reserve currency ( 32:55 ). All it needs are the central banks to stop toeing the IMF/World Bank/BIS line. I think once you have a half decent telecommunications system you won't even need a notion of a global reserve currency. That is what Britain and the US are fighting. See Kim Iversen interview with Richard Grove  and American Life . On PIX see Fabiola on The House Fire at Lago Amanã .  It's strange that the title of the Spanish translation of Hernan Diaz's novel Trust is Fortuna . His first language is Spanish but he writes in English. See this interview in El Pais with Diaz:  The inventor of capitalist realism is an Argentine who writes in English . The English and Spanish together can really fuck up some words!  Subscribe to Dialogue Works . Glenn Diesen interviewed Chas Freeman around the same time. He thinks ( ...