Posts

James Corbett on Cybernetics

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My comment : That slogan "The purpose of a system is what it does" probably has its origin in Aristotle's De Anima . For Aristotle the soul was three different but interdependent things: the vegetative, the animal and the rational. Plants have a vegetative soul which is how they reproduce, animals have a vegetative soul and an animal soul, and human beings have vegetative, animal and rational souls. The nature of these souls he called their perfection: what they strived to be. This was the teleological purpose or final cause of the soul. So Aristotle was saying that what a system does, when it is functioning properly , is its purpose. The kinds of system the cyberneticists studied were systems which had this teleological, goal-seeking behaviour by virtue of the internal relations of their parts to one another. So when you apply this slogan to what is loosely called "the education system" you are really abusing the terms 'system' and 'purpose'. It...

Kyla Scanlon on The Cost of Outsourcing Innovation

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You end up with shit like prediction markets and AI chatbots instead of social media that's actually helpful to people and empowers them.  Subscribe to  Kyla Scanlon . 

Katie Halper Talking to Yasha Levine About his Documentary

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See also  LA Times - California orders bottled water company to stop ‘unauthorized’ piping from springs  and  In California Bees Can Legally be Fish .  Subscribe to  The Katie Halper Show . Subscribe to  Watermelon Pictures . 

Sean Haas on Models and Programming

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I didn't realise until just now that Adjunct of Computing is an Adjunct to Advent of Computing. The adjunct to this episode is  People Talking about Programming . Subscribe to  Advent of Computing . 

Crisis in Perception - An Example of a Common Problem

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It's not just water, this happens with gasoline too. Ask an Iranian. But there are many, many, many equally dumb things people do all over the world. The problem is most of them are considered "part of the way of life" in whatever society in which they occur, and nobody wants to change their way of life.  Subscribe to  Crisis in Perception . 

Airship Entrepreneurs

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They're hiring:  https://sceye.com/career/ . Subscribe to KRQE News . Subscribe to  Electric Aviation . 

Tsoding Standard ML

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He first tries to build and install sml/nj but his GNU Binutils package isn't up to it, so he tries Moscow ML ,.. I can't bear to watch. Sad how little interest there is in God's programming language.  (But I did send kfl a PR for some very conservative changes to make utf8 encoded character I/O feasible.)  He next decided to write raylib bindings for Moscow ML: Subscribe to Tsoding Daily .  Here's some stuff that uses raylib .  Subscribe to  raylib . 

Asianometry - Fanuc and the NC Revolution

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My comment ; That was really interesting. Thank you. The causal gap between reading binary integers off a paper tape and the movement of the tool in that MIT machine controller is intriguing. There's quite a lot to do, because you have to parse the stream of numbers into at least x, y and z movements, but there must also have been some sort of timing control or feedback-driven wait condition. That's not too much short of a Turing nachine. In the early seventies, losses in a manufacturing downturn in the US, caused by tightening credit and a slowdown in the aerospace industry in the mid sixties, resulted in the merger of most small macine-tool businesses. See the book  When the machine stopped : a cautionary tale from industrial America  which is also available on the Internet Archive  and tells the story of Burgmaster  and its acquisition by Houdaille Industries .  This was the start of the long slow decline of American manufacturing which started sixty years ag...

Al Jazeera Inside Story - Who's in Control of AI?

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This panel, from the video description :  Ramesh Srinivasan -- Professor at UCLA Department of Information Studies, AI and technology specialist. Marc Einstein -- Research Director and Global Head of AI Research at Counterpoint Research & Digital Transformation analyst. Adrian Monck -- Senior Adviser on AI and Technology to the United Nations and Editor of the 'Seven Things' newsletter in Geneva. Subscribe to  Al Jazeera English . 

Robert Elder's Robot Tank Project with His Students

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See  Robot Tank Quality Assurance & Design Evaluation . He also did a great blog post about Jeri Ellsworth:  Jeri Ellsworth & the Robot Uprising of 2038 . Subscribe to Robert Elder Software .