Only 10 kinds of people...

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” 

― Robert A. Heinlein

This defines my interaction with the Internet these days., and I can't be alone. Its funny how Big Data has tailored its interfaces to keep us pawing at their interfaces so they can scrape as much information from our interactions as possible; but that very modification has made our interactions that less meaningful. 

If in 2002 someone visited ten websites in a day, and one of them was a stuffed animal fan-site, that's a significant marketing datum. If today that person clicks on sixty Youtube videos and one of them is Meg Myer's Curbstomp and another is Radioactive Dragons Imagine, stuffed animals are not significant. 

Stop filling my 'Recommended Feed' with this sort of gibberish.

(And if you auto-playlist feed my Katy Perry and I don't notice, it does not mean that I want to listen to more Katy Perry. Absence of protest is not presence of approval*)

There is a similar problem in attributing authorial ideation: if a writer writes a character with certain mindsets, does this mean the author approves of these mindsets? The better the writer, the better the writer's ability to adopt foreign mindsets, and the less this should tell about the writer's beliefs. Not to mention that writing has masturbatory overtones, and what someone gets off on may not be the same as what they believe is proper behavior.

Am I still talking about stuffed animals here? **

 No, but I may be thinking of Stephanie Meyer. 

..Here too is a interesting test of authorial complexity. A one dimensional writer -- Meyer, Spillane, Fisher, to pick a random few -- has nearly identical ideation between books, and it would be hard to quote their works to support cross-purpose ideas. A good writer displays ideational depth; quotes can be taken out of context with relative ease.

When you add the subtlety of sarcasm or irony to the mix, deriving good information becomes extremely difficult: practically the same as the Translation Accuracy Problem.

Exercise for the reader: quote Gunga Din to support and then to deride racism.

Consider that Heinlein has become the go-too SF author for the right-wing; compare it to his books that support public nudity, free sex, atheism, trans-sexuality, mate-swapping, incest, and anarchy.*** 

Heinlein wrote to sell; the algorithms write to maximize their own inhuman returns.

Where Heinlein got direct and complex feedback from his fan base and his editors that modified what he wanted to actually write, complex feedbacks, leading to complex results, the algorithms that 'Recommend' for us get  a simplified 'file streamed/link clicked' feedback for their actions. Its not surprising that the Facebook News Trending bot serves so many crap stories...but it may be surprising that it can find so much crap in the first place.

People like crap. Simple, direct bullshit: its easy to argue about and easy to enjoy. If the broad strokes of your opinions can be crayoned in, than your personal color of crap can be served in steaming handfuls.  And if all you see is grass, you start to think you're on a lawn...

 

So here's the vicious cycle: we provide trivial actions in feedback to the trivial pleasures they supply to provoke more trivial feedback. Our complexity is much greater than the algorithms...our interactions with them simplify the interaction but the simplifications are readily observable. Our internal simplifications must be subtler, and harder to notice...

Would it be worthwhile to point out that this software is written and designed by young people, who have largely led sheltered lives characterized by lack of complex interaction with other people and the universe?

 (As opposed to old people with fossilized mindsets and outdated ways of thinking, I suppose.)

*An endlessly difficult problem covering all ranges of human expression from sex to music.

** See what I did there?

***Just read Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, Number of the Beast, or pretty much any story with Lazarus Long in it.

Tarzan - I mean Jason Gridley - versus madness

I'd never call Edgar Rice Burroughs 'visionary'.
Like George Lucas, he assembled wildly popular works out of wildly disparate elements, and like Lucas, I never expected an original idea.  (Let us let 'The Monster Men' to stand as the holotype for my complaints, shall we?)
But while listlessly paging through 'Tarzan at the Earth's Core', I ran into a scene which I nominate for the best idea ERB ever had:

!~Gliding Stegasauri~!

 I wish to god blogger had manicule symbols for this one. I suppose it makes as much sence as any other idea vis-a-vis stegasaurus spine plates, really.

"AS Jason Gridley leaped down the canyon side toward the lone warrior who stood facing the attack of the tremendous reptile gliding swiftly through the air from the top of the opposite cliff side, there flashed upon the screen of his recollection the picture of a restoration of a similar extinct reptile and he recognized the creature as a stegosaurus of the Jurassic, but how inadequately had the picture that he had seen carried to his mind the colossal proportions of the creature, or but remotely suggested its terrifying aspect."

"... the reptile, using its tail as a rudder and tilting its spine plates up on one side, veered in the direction of the American..."

"... From the instant that the stegosaurus had leaped from the summit of the cliff, it had hurtled through the air with a speed which seemed entirely out of proportion to its tremendous bulk, so that all that had transpired in the meantime had occupied but a few moments of time, and Jason Gridley found himself facing this onrushing death almost before he had had time to speculate upon the possible results of his venturesome interference.

With wide distended jaws and uttering piercing shrieks, the terrifying creature shot toward him..."

" Still shrieking with rage and pain it glided to the ground beyond him.

Almost immediately it turned to renew the attack. This time it came upon its four feet, and Jason saw that it was likely to prove fully as formidable upon the ground as it had been in the air, for considering its tremendous bulk it moved with great agility and speed..."

This calls for a dramatic reconstruction!  As a exercise for the reader, I leave the calculations of how light a stegasaurus would have to be in order to be able to glide upon its plates... 

.

 

This is me, watching Prometheus...

How did Ridley Scott manage to do a worse job ripping off his own work than Roger Corman? Galaxy of Terror is actually more entertaining, and the murder by orgasm while being raped by the Space Slug of the Galactic Id was certainly edgier than forced caesarean porn.

O.S.I.R (some value of n where n > 'n previous')

Nice to know I am not the only one that suffers at the hands of Linux.
"What’s the point in telling a rabbit hole story if you just fix the problem and forget about the underlying issues that cause it to begin with? "

Epigram, via Poul-Henning Kamp : "...a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution."

The Hidden Testament.

"He lived with regret at his own table– for his own sake have mercy upon him."

---Tolstoyish

The universe surrounds us with its laws and notions, and in many cases it takes a clever and discerning mind to tease Nature's ways out into the light where they can be clearly seen.

Perhaps there exists in potentia the Greatest Book, the Ultimate Bible, the Definitive Word the way that the fabulous kingdom of Amber hides within its endless reflected and distorted images.

Hidden deep within the enormous library of possible books, then could be the ur-Book. What can not be found by logic might be stumbled upon by oracles, and as such, the algorithmic  genii may as yet prove fruitful.

"The book had produced. Night was disturbed by the words to avert the latter, and hope, I not suppose, the pathless seas, and from my solitary isle like abhorred."

--Schmipsum

Of course, this is just a expansion of my favorite hobby. Considering the Doc Savage Canon as if it is reflections of real events is walking the thin edge of paranoia and conspiracy. I always feel the classic example of this is the Holy Blood/Holy Grail madness, crowned by Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum*  Its a hobby that is given an extra thrill by the possibility that at some point  I will become convinced by my own research that Clark Savage was real, and at that point will become irretrievably mad.

The Insane Gods of Chaos are sprung, like all Gods, from our foreheads, after all. Using software Markov Generators and Completion Anticipators ups the game, improves the  mirror we gesticulate in front of.

 Now its time to start running these programs upon the Canon, and see if we can shake out new adventures from the echos of the Ultimate Book.

"I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock."

 --Edgar Allen Poe

*Proving yet again that a intelligent academic can exceed any madman's excesses.

Board porn

Inside of a old Yamaha Pf10.

Its got an annoying problem: certain notes won't play, or intermittently play.

 Tearing down the key switches.

The keyboard switch assembly. The problem does not seem to be with the switches, but with the wiring harness from the matrix decoder.

In particular, that set of solder points are the bases for the output header. I thought it was the pins, and reflowed the solder, and it all seemed to work.

Sad to say, about a week later, my brother reported the problem had restarted...and he thinks its the ribbon cable that accepts the matrix output.  Maybe so.

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Facebook just suggested Mark Zuckerberg to me.
Seriously.
It just suggested that I might want to friend him.
Mark Zuckerberg.