Talkin' Truth Beam with Red Batman and the PoliePals

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > Talkin' Truth Beam with Red Batman and the PoliePals

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Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

this is a thread to contain a conversation started in the buttcoin thread, about the Truth Beam and the nature of reality and also marbles in aluminum cans, cuz it was annoying other posters that just wanted to read about how many shrimp SBF can fit in his mouth at once. if none of that made any sense to you, you might as well not bother reading any further.

anyway, what's this about?

https://twitter.com/poliebotics/status/1713427481624269237
https://twitter.com/poliepals/status/1708506228760977721

that. it's about that.

i do wanna note that everyone involved (including the dude who came up with it) has been real pleasant and imo pretty interesting up till now even while discussing... whatever this whole thing is... so please don't be too mean if you're just joining us, thanks

# ? Dec 14, 2023 01:40

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 16:53

Expo70: Nov 15, 2021; Can't talk now, doing
Hot Girl Stuff

first

# ? Dec 14, 2023 01:44

Xathal: Dec 12, 2023

Thank you!

Heading to bed now, and will be travelling to Galway for Christmas etc., but I'll treat this thread with the honour it deserves.

# ? Dec 14, 2023 01:49

rotor: Jun 11, 2001; classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

Xathal posted:

Thank you!

Heading to bed now, and will be travelling to Galway for Christmas etc., but I'll treat this thread with the honour it deserves.

new guy already fittin in great

# ? Dec 14, 2023 01:54

Expo70: Nov 15, 2021; Can't talk now, doing
Hot Girl Stuff

reposting for convenience:

quote:

Xathal posted:
Yes, these are significant concerns. Importantly, inaction on my part is also a choice. One claim the red batman (RB) entity made, which is proving plausible, is that others wish to leverage fear of deepfakes to set themselves up as arbiters of truth, establishing hardware-based signing of camera footage which is secured on permissioned ledgers. Naturally, the intention is to be able to claim that real video is deepfaked and that deepfakes are real. In the case of the police officer in your hypothetical, this could be done retroactively and undetectably. The current reference implementation upon which I am working does indeed use near-infrared (NIR), and can be detected and countered by active jamming, but these active jammers are detectable and can thus be addressed by real-world solutions like legislation prohibiting their use by public employees, or social opprobrium.

Some advice: If a scenario's actionable response feels immediately obvious to you on an intuitive level (to the point where the only clear alternative is inaction), its very often the case that you are underfitting and succumbing to a false binary where none exists.

You need to consider the holistic problemspace more clearly, as the knock-on-effects of your work ten or twenty years down the line are incomprehensible to you.

Consider the way neurons don't handle exponential information very well, and don't respond well to logarithms. Time and eventhood are naturally these things. Nobody can be Laplace's demon, because the universe on a fundamental level seeks to be unknowable.

The best heuristic guide I've ever found for knowing if what you're doing is right is to examine whether or not you are adding further complication to an existing system or reducing it.

Consider that you may think you are simplifying an imaginary scenario you have forseen to protect others, but what you're actually doing is complicating an existing scenario, adding complication beyond the scope you, or no one human can fully concieve of.

Its like shifting the blame: Guilt doesn't undo events.

Then think, again heuristically and intuitively: Who shifts blame when things don't go their way? Who invents blame, because blame is easier than acknowledgement, is easier than acceptance, is easier than growth? Who turns pain external, so when they hurt the world, they scratch the itch in their own mind?

Its reactionaries. They chase phantoms they themselves invent because the phantoms are simpler and easier to imagine than the very real things which exist and genuinely distress them about themselves -- which are almost always internal emotional problems which remain unsolved.

In an attempt to secure one of Kant's perfect duties, they create a hundred imperfect duties they cannot possibly imagine or solve for that the rest of humanity has to pick up the pieces with.

You have to know that what you're doing creates positive outcomes, instead of preventing negative outcomes, because negative outcomes in one scope are positive outcomes in another. In equlibrium, mutually assured destruction might be rationalized as the longest period of human peace but it also let humans hand-wave themselves of any existential duty to themselves by commodifying and then abandoning the future as a fantasy which never happens, that nobody will ever live long enough to see.

It solved for material concerns, and existentially poisoned humanity so badly that even trying to explain this idea to most people results in a kind of sociological panic where they try to align you with an outline of a spectre, a stereotype of an imagined enemy because that's easier than acknowledging the truth.

This is how you become an enemy to others, and in turn if you lose self image, how you become the silouette itself.

Metaphors are semantic. Like a semaphor, you only see the flags they raise. Do not drown in a vector field of semaphorian flags simply because of the way the light dances across them.

Xathal posted:
The other obvious Torment Nexus scenario is that Truth Beam use be mandated universally. Again, something like this technology will exist, so I can only develop the best systems possible, and apply as much pressure as I can toward making them transparent, honest, and decentralised.
The point of the VR show is, in large part, to make implementing such systems as universally available as possible. I will also license my patents for free for research, personal use, free distribution of open source hardware etc. Ultimately, I can only push as hard as I can with as much integrity as I have, but very much appreciate discussion of these risks (but especially when contrasted with other available options).

The idea that a thing is inevitable is a lie of ego: a selective intellectualization.

We tell ourselves this lie because we think if we can make the least awful version of a bad thing, we can reduce harm and level the playing-field. What you don't realize is you also level the playing-field not only to the bad actors you know exist, but the ones you don't know exist: As a result of this, you increase the total number of bad actors who are given actionable means to perform harm.

This might seem strange to you. Difficult, even.

I am speaking from tremendous experience when I tell you that this hubris is the foundation of why even if you solve the technical problems you are dealing with, you will be forced to account for the consequences of your own work that you cannot see: and your entire life will become an emotional struggle to stay alive.

Please understand precisely what I mean in the terms of "success", and "win":

I want your ideals to succeed. I do not think your practical implementation of these ideas represents your ideals, because ideals are an infinite plane and where our implementations exist is an infinite intersection of the changing lines of thought with the ever shifting infinite plane of reality's potential.

The idea itself is like calculating a landing-area. Any imagined version of the space in your mind may feel like a desert. It is not. You are in a tempast. That is the ocean.

Really, *REALLY* think about this.

Xathal posted:
Expo70, it is very easy for me to see how your mind could launch a thousand ships. Our experiences are clearly similar, and I will try my best to communicate in a loop which oscillates around a volume in concept space until we feel satisfied that the mind objects we've described are isomorphic.

Contact.

Xathal posted:
Yes. Although I forgot this for a long time and in remembering, came to believe that it is true for all selves. The various traumas we have experienced, I perceive as being gifts that lead to our rejecting the identities that have been constructed for us, and gaining some measure of understanding and input to the loop.

I don't see you presenting the opposite to have a complete object for those traumas and their nature, and so I will say:
I caution you: Do not become addicted to models. They are the serialization of thought.
When you only think in thoughts, all you know is thoughts.

It is good that you do not see yourself a victim, but do not decide words like "gift": gift implies posessorship and ownership and that's inherently very dangerous, because it gives metaphors power they don't deserve. Don't give them leverage against you. They are ruthless, because they are the most ancient parts of you.

Xathal posted:
I accept the label of inadequacy for the task that, in some way, I thrust upon myself. My perception is that we are all on the cliff edge, and so I choose to fashion wings as best I can, to straddle the line between surf and wax-melting sun for as long as I can, and to attach wings to as many other fallers as I can. I don't believe that I can defy gravity for ever, but I seem to have the ability to choose a constructed identity with which I can be satisfied when the rocks finally become unavoidable.
I have been on literal and metaphorical cliff edges in reality, and made the difference between the survival of myself and others through my action. Since conscious experience deserves "trust, care, dignity and respect", I view this as a win.

Thinking in this space, imagine what it means to be water. Even if you are smashed on the rocks, nothing bad comes of it. You carve the shape of the land. The richness of the air. The life in both, and beneath.

This implies you are a particulate in a system.

Consider the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's hypothesis that reasoning helped to aid social action, instead of decision making. The human action advantage is born of cognition, not bodily lethality. We plan, hunt, coordinate and experiment, without needing evolution. Our automaticity is a firmware moddable instinct. Being able to argue that you're right -- reasoning, is born for justifications over understanding and this is something humans often do not understand or comprehend.

It is why rationality collapses against the reality it attempts to describe.

A reason is a justification. A justification exists to excuse things.

Consider now, "the wisdom of the crowd": Many people can network and act far better than a single mind, without the heuristic or bias collapse of a single point of failure. We deliberate: social reasoning.

The famous example of this is jellybeans in a jar: If you ask people, the average of all guesses is closer than any guess of any one individual person.

The real strength of humans is not only doing this, but finding the gaussian bells which work in these cases, and pointing humans at those problems.

If you are alone thusly, while you may have some exceptional capacity of vision, you do not neccecarily lack the capacity for CFOI: Catastrophic Failure of Imagination. We are all subject to it without question, and it is the causation of all collapse, from which most humans do not ever fully recover from.

This is why you're hearing people pip up about torture nexuses all of a sudden, and maybe that's something you should seriously consider.

Xathal posted:
I hope that's not an exclusive "or" ;-) I may not live another 60 years, and there's a lot of nonsense that happened in other timelines that I would rather skip in this one.
I suspect that the RB entity corresponds to a "Jester" archetype, who is pranking the pranksters by creating a joke which undermines their vicious schemes. He claimed to be some form of black ops angel, gone behind enemy lines to gain an understanding of enemy operations so that he could invert the inverters. Of course, the joke could be on me.

Well, jokes are funny things.

The saying goes that behind every clown is a ghost, and behind every ghost is a clown, which is why they both scare us.

Its more than makeup though:

Apolitical ideas ("things are getting worse") becomes shitposting (questioning narritives). When all is in free fall, and the meanings of words become so slippery and soft that you can bend them, it isn't the world which has become susceptible to new narritives, it is you. Beware irony: It is the birth of adopting a new narritive, and that in turn is the root of any new ideology.

Really, they're the same thing when you go cloak and dagger: Laughter is gunfire, because the positive associative heuristic is surrender. You should surrender towards what you truly know to be verifiably good, because that surrender is loss of parts you don't need. It is streamlining.

Beware what they try to add to you:

Do not become a chimera made in the image of metaphors: that is the vehicle of their escape.

Xathal posted:
While PolieBotics does have a steganographic component (IIRC, it's in the PolieGAN slide), the Truth Beam is more akin to watermarking, which does not need to hide. Additionally, recordings are added to a kind of "truth tangle", so the attacker can't attack an old recording indefinitely, they have to attack the entirety of the network simultaneously which secures the old recordings. Like most BFT systems, I suspect the universal network will work so long as more than two thirds of participants are honest, while more than a third of participants conspiring maliciously could likely poison the system. It would still work between pairs or for individuals but be unable to verify novel recordings.

This historically doesn't work: You're thinking in 51esque. There are other ways to undermine a system without undermining the system itself. The easiest way to defeat a door is to use a window. The easiest way to defeat a blockchain is to defeat the end user.

Remember what I said. Brains don't do exponentials. Nobody accounts for any of this. Its why crypto is a worthless wildwest. Its a race to the bottom. Zero sum. If you want to do something big, it has to be positive sum. That velocity of expansion will make it become big naturally for you. The thing will grow itself.

Xathal posted:
This is the case for the decentralised identity network, yes. While you have made some minor terminological inaccuracies, your intuitive grasp is excellent.

My intuitive grasp is almost certainly laughable. That I can communicate symbols you think look like an understanding is not the same thing as performing understanding.

Xathal posted:
I also appreciate the SSTV analogy, but caution against taking it too far. The Optical PUF has many more degrees of freedom than are available to radio, and is sufficiently non-linear to be not really amenable to analytic modeling at this time.

Ok that's a pretty important distinction.

Xathal posted:
In this context, I am intentionally constructing a system resistant to simulation, so that the parameters of the generator/discriminator pair used to verify the PUF's output can be adjusted until an attacker would have to operate at many orders of magnitude greater computational speed than the defender to hide the latency introduced my simulating the optical interaction within the network jitter.

ok I take it back, maybe I did get it. its the phenomenology of network itself as the shroud. Wouldn't radical improvements to networks entirely undermine this entire concept? If latency improves faster than affordable processing, your system is entirely defeated by cost.

Xathal posted:
It would be my fondest wish to shape a world in which people such as yourself are free to use your incredible talents. I believe that you are some of the best of what humanity has to offer.

I'm going to accept the compliment because someone told me to accept the compliment.

Xathal posted:
Yes. One of these metaphors claims that he intends to fashion me into an escape tool for myself and others. My fear is that he might consume me and laugh that he has tricked another soul into wasting a life but so far, the more I embrace this mission, the better things go. It is reassuring to have someone like you to question me.

Better for better is the same logic that leads to local minima, be very mindful of that. You want more than one heuristic pointed at this problem given its the cost/benefit analysis of your life, and you ideally want them coming from more than a single mind so you can have meaningful confidence.

Xathal posted:
I'm unconvinced that it isn't. I have some scar tissue in my eyes from having been irresponsible enough to let an unqualified friend hold a laser. In some ways, this may be just the vicissitudes of life. In another, it is a permanent reminder to be to be careful with coherent light. In building my current prototypes, I am ulta-cautious about exposing others to similar injuries, and I am constantly reminded that my sensation is not empirical reality, but the integration of sensory data.

I have a similar experience from the paralysis of elements of my right hand, and UV light in my left eye.
It sucks but yeah, you do get this.

Xathal posted:
Yes. I can feel this. Ultimately, the way of the Bat is to become this prince and to be defined by this struggle. That said, the struggle is itself creative and gives my life a sense of meaning. It's fun to play the hero, and I seem to keep surviving and doing good along the way. Is the risk the opportunity cost of spiritual development?

The trick is making sure you're the one with the scars you need to learn, and that you don't give them to other people. Life's experiences are scars, and the systems we make on the world are bruises on the cloth we've projected onto the invisible nature of reality. The scars on the irredescent gradient cloth oceans to climb and soar, become their own ropes eventually and in turn, their own networks.

Be mindful that when a higherarchy emerges, that's always the first sign of danger.

If something is forcing you to commit to a higherarchy or have nothing, do not always assume the thing is superior to the nothing. That might strike you as bleak, or nihilistic, but think of all the things you wish you'd never said, or never done in your life.

A moment's hesitation to course-correct saves lives.

Live skillfully, and do so mindfully, that you do not ever not course-correct.

Xathal posted:
Thank you, and no. I wish the same for you, and this is some of the most valuable text I have read in my life. I'll post this now, and attempt to come back for more later if I may.

I don't understand why you would call it valuable. Its just a conversation.

We can talk more, but understand we won't always agree on everything, and that's perfectly ok.

The goal here isn't to make you feel bad, or tell you what to do.

I can only help you see the oppertunities in your own life.

I cannot and will not make you do anything.

Xathal posted:
High praise, and thank you!
Banning IR jammers for police officers has the potential to be effective because they are easily detectable and linkable with the offender, with little room for misattribution. For a justice system operating in good faith, it is pretty easy to custodiet ipsos custodes in this case.

Banning deepfakes in general is obviously excessive, since they're ultimately just maths, any attempt to enforce such a ban would require a ban on general purpose computing (something RB believed to be a hidden goal of the "bad guys"), and is still unlikely to be effective, as an offender would use previously purchased non-networked GPUs and disperse the deepfakes anonymously. Additionally, deepfakes can proliferate across borders easily with hostile governments having an incentive to distribute malicious content against a naive populace who lack the experience and hardware to identify them. In reality, it would be a very bad scenario.

I think its more that you're not realizing its just not enforceable.

Xathal posted:
If this is folie � deux, it is a most satisfying one.

Possibly.

Xathal posted:
Thank you, and no rush. I would like the opportunity to savour and digest your posts!

I'm not sure if by this you mean reading my replies, or scouring my entire post-history.

This response comes almost entirely out of paranoia:
Do not let this become an obsession to you. I think kindly of you, and I would like to go on thinking kindly of you.

That said, I'm glad you're getting something useful out of them.

# ? Dec 14, 2023 01:59

Shaggar: Apr 26, 2006

gas

# ? Dec 14, 2023 02:48

Dans Macabre: Apr 24, 2004

Shaggar posted:

gas

Hey Shaggar check this hot poo poo out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_13RfVBYWw

# ? Dec 14, 2023 03:30

ellie the beep: Jun 15, 2007; Vaginas, my subject.
Plane hulls, my medium.

Xathal posted:

I can do the latter succinctly, but communicating with Expo70 requires code switching to a language only spoken by those who have experienced high levels of trauma.

i gotta say this elicited a sharp bark of laughter because ive been following yalls conversation just fine but also yeah heavy trauma and periods of semi-institutionalization

also thanks expo70 for trying you seem cool as hell

# ? Dec 14, 2023 03:59

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

ellie the beep posted:

i gotta say this elicited a sharp bark of laughter because ive been following yalls conversation just fine but also yeah heavy trauma and periods of semi-institutionalization

also thanks expo70 for trying you seem cool as hell

expo's a friend of mine outside the forums so when i first dove in to the truth beam video a few months ago after it was posted in the buttcoin thread i was immediately like "waaait a sec, this feels vaguely familiar somehow" :v:

# ? Dec 14, 2023 04:07

Expo70: Nov 15, 2021; Can't talk now, doing
Hot Girl Stuff

Shame Boy posted:

expo's a friend of mine outside the forums so when i first dove in to the truth beam video a few months ago after it was posted in the buttcoin thread i was immediately like "waaait a sec, this feels vaguely familiar somehow"

for those just joining us, i'm not quite "an incomprehensible person who has gone into the woods". I *think* it happened years ago, but for some reason i didn't really lose my tether on the world. its more sort of like, instead of going from position A to position B, I can carefully walk from one back to the other, sorta like how a dual channel radio can do uhf and vhf.

I'm 90% sure its some sort of weird neurodivergent thing following a head injury atop a list of other poo poo I was already saddled with.

I have this gut feel that 100 years from now, it'll turn out because of the way we treat neurodivergent people made them a lot worse and that a surprisingly high number of them could be way more lucid than anybody thought if they were living in a society where they didn't have to put the lotion on its skin again for an abusive overclass that needs proles and serfs to pay tides. I have no idea how many that could even be, but I think those of us who live long enough will be kinda blown away by it. There's obviously cases where people need meds, and special help, etc, etc, but maybe hundreds of years from now there'll be an insanely different metaphor for dealing with this stuff.

I wonder what the world would look like if we poured as much money into people as we do into pointless crap, without perverse incentives or bullshit metrics to make torture nexuses?

I'm rambling, and the flu is making me really dizzy.

ellie the beep posted:

i gotta say this elicited a sharp bark of laughter because ive been following yalls conversation just fine but also yeah heavy trauma and periods of semi-institutionalization

also thanks expo70 for trying you seem cool as hell

no problem, I firmly believe everybody who's willing to be patient deserves patience and everybody willing to be kind deserves kindness.

Xathal posted:

I can do the latter succinctly, but communicating with Expo70 requires code switching to a language only spoken by those who have experienced high levels of trauma.

Communication is the exchange of semiotic representations of experiences. When experiences are more extreme, you have more things to represent. We simulate future experiences in semiotics, but this can only go so far: The collapse of experience is probably the root of media illiteracy -- that nobody has priors or first-principles of experience to base their comprehension of emotional states on.

In a way, having more experiences is the opposite of heathdeath: More contrast means more signal per second. It also means more noise, unfortunately.

That level of miscommunication is intolerable to those who don't have a conception of it. They shut down, because they can't parse it.

I know this is rude, but it feels like when a child walks in on a conversation. They know all the words being used, but they don't understand any of the context of experience, and so they assume its all jibberish. When they want to be included, they have no frame of reference, so it feels bad, and that feeling of rejection creates resentment.

That resentment is a root experience everybody deals with growing up, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn its the reason intergenerational miscommunications exist.

A common defence mechanism of people when not understood, is to become deliberately incomprehensible as a kind of revenge strategy to assume control. This rapidly sinks into conflict.

The problem with conflict (a disagreement between two parties) is while it is necessary for all communication to exist (eg, disagreements get exchanged), they want to end conflict instead of the resulting understanding that results (conflict resolution, which demands some mutual acceptance, compromise, personal growth and change, and recognition from both parties). People tend to run away from conflict though, in favour of physical, emotional, financial, institutional or cultural violence. They circumvent conflict, and thus conflict resolution does not happen.

On some level, you eventually have conflicts like those within yourself if you live for long enough which you cannot reconcile with physical, emotional, financial, institutional, or cultural violence. The circumvention techniques don't work, because they harm you, and risk ruining your life. At some point, you eventually have to see a conflict to its end: That no matter how weird or bizzare the outcome is, that you have to take it in and process those experiences and feelings so you can have healthy emotions instead of unhealthy coping mechanisms.

In its own way, that disagreement too, is its own kind of experience that you can have, which can give you new symbols like I said before. That in turn, can let you "better talk to yourself", as a meta-cognitive strategy.

Simply put, the gently caress else am I meant to do with all this negative experience and pain?

e: still editing this post. I am full of flu and dizzy as hell so I imagine there's a lot of DumbShit tm in this post that's missing words or needs me to read it back to fix it. I should be sleeping.
e: This post is probably full of dumbshit takes, but its nearly 4am, I'm ready to go to bed and if its horrifyingly bad or something you can all call me an idiot and I will deserve it.

Expo70 fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Dec 14, 2023

# ? Dec 14, 2023 04:32

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Expo70 posted:

That level of miscommunication is intolerable to those who don't have a conception of it. They shut down, because they can't parse it.

I know this is rude, but it feels like when a child walks in on a conversation. They know all the words being used, but they don't understand any of the context of experience, and so they assume its all jibberish. When they want to be included, they have no frame of reference, so it feels bad, and that feeling of rejection creates resentment.

me irl whenever this conversation happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc7c7Cdfjik&t=55s

# ? Dec 14, 2023 04:46

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

this sounds awful

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Dec 14, 2023 06:34

woke kaczynski: Jan 23, 2015; How do you do, fellow antifa?; Fun Shoe

I read this before bed and my dreams were trippy as hell so that was neat ty

# ? Dec 14, 2023 13:58

Repaired Radio: Nov 13, 2017

this looks like weirdo poo poo for insane people

# ? Dec 14, 2023 14:44

mediaphage: Mar 22, 2007; Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through

Repaired Radio posted:

weirdo poo poo for insane people

yospos bihtc

# ? Dec 14, 2023 14:53

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

congrats on your timecube, or whatever its supposed to be

# ? Dec 14, 2023 14:56

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Repaired Radio posted:

this looks like weirdo poo poo for insane people

it's definitely weirdo poo poo (Xathal i hope you're ok with that label cuz i think weirdo poo poo can be some of the most interesting poo poo) but i don't think it's insane. like i wouldn't be anywhere near as fascinated by it if it were full timecube-level incomprehensible angry schizophrenia, there's a lucidity and consistency here you don't normally get with internet nuts

# ? Dec 14, 2023 15:28

ellie the beep: Jun 15, 2007; Vaginas, my subject.
Plane hulls, my medium.

Expo70 posted:

for those just joining us, i'm not quite "an incomprehensible person who has gone into the woods". I *think* it happened years ago, but for some reason i didn't really lose my tether on the world. its more sort of like, instead of going from position A to position B, I can carefully walk from one back to the other, sorta like how a dual channel radio can do uhf and vhf.

I'm 90% sure its some sort of weird neurodivergent thing following a head injury atop a list of other poo poo I was already saddled with.

yeah i am very neurospicy as the youths are calling it (to the tune of finding myself homeless twice in the last twelve months) but i was in special ed for basically my entire childhood so i'm decently fluent in a variety of neurolects

Expo70 posted:

I have this gut feel that 100 years from now, it'll turn out because of the way we treat neurodivergent people made them a lot worse and that a surprisingly high number of them could be way more lucid than anybody thought if they were living in a society where they didn't have to put the lotion on its skin again for an abusive overclass that needs proles and serfs to pay tides. I have no idea how many that could even be, but I think those of us who live long enough will be kinda blown away by it. There's obviously cases where people need meds, and special help, etc, etc, but maybe hundreds of years from now there'll be an insanely different metaphor for dealing with this stuff.

i think about the first person diagnosed with autism for this. donald triplett lived to age eighty-nine and worked a steady job at his father's bank for 65 years and got near so far as i can tell an idyllic life

and i think about ethan saylor who had down syndrome, and how we were both in the same waystation after school group therapy program on west patrick street and how he spat on my backpack and how he helped me harvest seeds from a bunch of plantago major and how he was strangled to death by police at age twenty-six because he tried to sneak back into the movie theater to watch zero dark thirty a second time without paying for a ticket all while his aide begged them to stop killing him

and its just... let the loving retard watch the movie again, it doesnt matter that he's nasty sometimes

# ? Dec 14, 2023 15:44

Cat Face Joe: Feb 20, 2005; goth vegan crossfit mom who vapes

Expo70 posted:

reposting for convenience:

# ? Dec 14, 2023 15:53

OldAlias: Nov 2, 2013

welcome new person :toot:

don�t be scared away by people dunking on you, you�re sincere and lucid in a way outsiders like yourself aren�t usually

ellie the beep posted:

i gotta say this elicited a sharp bark of laughter because ive been following yalls conversation just fine but also yeah heavy trauma and periods of semi-institutionalization

also thanks expo70 for trying you seem cool as hell

same also nd lol

# ? Dec 14, 2023 19:10

MononcQc: May 29, 2007

I saw the inside of some projects that wanted to leverage ledgers and certificate authorities to deal with surveillance cameras and their main objective was a lot more of being able to prove that from the start of the assembly chain down to deployment in the field, only authorized personnel were touching things. Like making sure nobody in the manufacturing plant adds the wrong parts or counterfeit equipment in a shipment that lets them gain access to a government surveillance network.

other uses came from control-level software for surveillance networks to be able to tie specific cameras and installations to role-based access control and accurate accounting of who has access to which time slices of video/audio files based on mandates, and then digitally signing the content such that you have the ability to trace the whole chain of custody/tempering.

the goal is never to show that other videos are fake or not, but to show that yours is real and was not mismanaged nor tampered. This is okay because for surveillance camera networks, a given camera exists at a location at a point in time and by proving yours is real, you disprove all competing videos for your source and location.

proving that any and all videos are real or fake is loving bonkers and impractical.

# ? Dec 14, 2023 22:36

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

MononcQc posted:

I saw the inside of some projects that wanted to leverage ledgers and certificate authorities to deal with surveillance cameras and their main objective was a lot more of being able to prove that from the start of the assembly chain down to deployment in the field, only authorized personnel were touching things. Like making sure nobody in the manufacturing plant adds the wrong parts or counterfeit equipment in a shipment that lets them gain access to a government surveillance network.

other uses came from control-level software for surveillance networks to be able to tie specific cameras and installations to role-based access control and accurate accounting of who has access to which time slices of video/audio files based on mandates, and then digitally signing the content such that you have the ability to trace the whole chain of custody/tempering.

the goal is never to show that other videos are fake or not, but to show that yours is real and was not mismanaged nor tampered. This is okay because for surveillance camera networks, a given camera exists at a location at a point in time and by proving yours is real, you disprove all competing videos for your source and location.

proving that any and all videos are real or fake is loving bonkers and impractical.

and then someone does something equivalent to holding an ipad in front of the camera

the idea of a digital proof-of-life sort of thing isn't a terrible idea on its face, but getting to provable tamper-resistance is a lot more complicated that the proposed "truth beam". which is susceptible to what in effect is a replay attack (if i can paint the thing i want to be verifiable with the flashlight of truthiness, then someone can simultaneously be painting an arbitrary number of alternate scenes with exactly the same signal). i can provide a "solution" to this problem but the bad news is that it involves qm and isn't likely to be ever practical for poo poo like surveillance cameras and cell phone videos outside of a hopelessly speculative science fiction future

# ? Dec 15, 2023 00:30

Xathal: Dec 12, 2023

Addressing the "Uncle Dave" criticism, I've rather given up people who aren't "Neurospicey" (beautiful, thank you!) caring about consistency or correspondance of their model with empirical evidence. It's tempting to think of most people as stimulus-response systems who believe whatever their physical or social Skinner boxes reward them for believing. Then I remember that I'm entirely dependent on them to maintain the society around me, that realistically I'm the freak, and realise that they are adaptive organisms which periodically generate weirdos like me to help them redesign their Skinner boxes as they see fit. I'm building these systems in the hopes that enough people will care about empirical grounding to become more economically and culturally relevant through coordination, and thus shift the Nash equilibrium in favour of cooperative honest strategies.

Shame Boy posted:

i mean i specifically came up with a scenario where the cop has an IR detector rather than a jammer, which would be a lot easier to hide, but fair point about the relative scale of banning one vs. the other

however i will quibble with "we can't ban something if it's just math!"...

The detector can be addressed by economies of scale. Part of the reason I'm building these into robots is so that drone swarms can monitor a scene e.g. a warzone or the vicinity of a gunshot. They can communicate via optical link, which allows them to avoid RF jamming, and would ideally operate in multiple wavelengths, reducing the utility of optical jamming.

MononcQc posted:

...proving that any and all videos are real or fake is loving bonkers and impractical.

It sure would be. A lot of people (not those who have invested effort, but the drive-by posters) seem to be projecting onto me a lot of unreasonable goals that have nothing to do with any claims I have made.
The Truth Beam (or physical layer watermarking, if you prefer) has goals more similar to the system you described. The distinction is that systems based on secure hardware have to be perfect at every step along the way forever, are still susceptible to the analogue hole, and ultimately reduce to a bunch of humans saying "Trust me, bro.", which I don't. My system assumes that novel videos were captured on compromised hardware by adversarial actors and uses empirical models of physical systems for their verification. You can record your own datasets, and train your own empirical models for verification without placing trust in any specific group of humans.

SubG posted:

and then someone does something equivalent to holding an ipad in front of the camera...

Imagine each iteration of the recording being represented by a six-channel matrix - the emission and response. An autoencoder is trained to map this matrix into a latent space. A generator attempts to produce fake examples within this latent space (optionally seeded by noise-augmented real examples), and a discriminator learns to distinguish the reals from the fakes.
The discriminator detects that the ipad does not react to the projector's light emissions like a real scene does. In fact, even if you make super-realistic androids and have them act our the scene, their skin etc. would have to react to light like a human. The analogue hole here is replicants. This is addressed by the more advanced systems (imagine every Truth Beam node being a GPS emitter and receiver, allowing the approximate relative positions of each node to be recorded).

SubG posted:

...if i can paint the thing i want to be verifiable with the flashlight of truthiness, then someone can simultaneously be painting an arbitrary number of alternate scenes with exactly the same signal...

No. Only the initialisation vector can be projected on multiple scenes (which is fine). Future projections are derived from hashes of the returned camera image. If you simply project the hashes from another loop, they won't correspond to the hashes of the returned images and verification will fail.

Expo70: in your technical commentary, I believe you were conflating a few different aspects of PolieBotics (which were presented at high density within seconds of each other, so fair enough.)
Some aspects of PolieBotics are physical layer digital watermarking (basic Truth Beam), physical layer analogue watermarking (experimental Truth Beam), optical steganography (only included for completeness; haven't done much with this yet), optical jamming (DiffDazz�), and use of projector-optical_resonance_cavity-camera systems as Physical Unclonable Functions or in computation (not yet useful, but promising) i.e. the PoliePuter� and PolieGAN�.
In the symmetric DiffDazz, Agent Alice and Agent Bob share a key that Agent Eve lacks. Alice projects a signal derived from this key, and Bob inputs this key alongside his camera image to a network trained to descramble the image. He has an advantage over Eve due to knowledge of the key. This experiment has been somewhat successfull. Ideally, this is expanded to become asymmetric or keyless (relying on the physical environment), but I haven't put much effort into that yet.
One of the most basic examples of a PoliePuter is for dimensional reduction. In this case, the Agent-Recorder-Emitter-Scene_analysis (ARES) Suit would have cameras all over it facing outwards, and these camera feeds are projected into the optical Ram's horn in my belt, making a single camera representation of all optical inputs. Ideally, this would be trained to activate a DiffDazz in my helmet when weapons are detected (again, it's early days on the more advanced stuff.)
The DiffDazz and Reality Transform (neural projection mapping) are our only weapons, since Green Orb (GO) only agreed to help us get all this technology etc. on the condition that we avoid violence and lies.

On to the spiritual component, which is valuable to me. The things you are saying make a lot of sense. I'll try to address them holistically rather than reductively.

Would it be reasonable to say that you are warning me against doing harm to others by acting out my various inner struggles using real people as props? I have at times accidentally sucked people into my story without caring whether being a character in my quest really helped them in their hero's journey. I now try to escape these traps via the G�delian method of defining my ends as using acceptable means, applying the Kantian categorical imperative to our respective characters in our overlapping narratives.

May I ask whether you have a telos? I have had a very specific Solarpunk image in my head since I was a very young child, with many humans living happily together acting according to principles that allow for the flourishing of a diverse range of conscious experience. The more I pursue this, the more smoothly my life goes, the more constant absurd synchronicities help me, and the more positive feedback I get from everyone in my life. When I diverge from this mission, things go wrong for me as though my life were a narrow ski slope surrounded by sharp rocks.

Do you have a mechanism to escape your escape mechanism? This may be the masculine vs the feminine principle, but I like to shape reality, and the metaphors which presented themselves facilitate this. Do you believe that Siddhartha Gautama was wrong to embrace the Middle Way?

Don't mean to cross examine. I'm just permanently suspicious of inputs that may tempt me into enlightenment before I have satisfied my egoistic desire to provide an environment which allows for an overunity of enlightment. To construct a pyramid scheme which is sufficiently fractal and non-repeating that everyone gets to be the top of their pyramid.

EDIT: Used the old backronym for ARES Suit.

Xathal fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Dec 15, 2023

# ? Dec 15, 2023 04:48

MononcQc: May 29, 2007

Xathal posted:

The distinction is that systems based on secure hardware have to be perfect at every step along the way forever, are still susceptible to the analogue hole, and ultimately reduce to a bunch of humans saying "Trust me, bro.", which I don't. My system assumes that novel videos were captured on compromised hardware by adversarial actors and uses empirical models of physical systems for their verification. You can record your own datasets, and train your own empirical models for verification without placing trust in any specific group of humans.

there remains an implicit trust model going from the evidence being presented and listened to by whoever is going to act on the information, or choose to ignore it and further whatever agenda they have.

Sophisticated mechanisms may be unreliable, or hard enough to understand that for the layperson, the trust in the infallible solution is equivalent to the trust in the experts telling them it is reliable, because practically speaking, it is impossible and unrealistic for people to do their own validation of everything.

And because your best experts are close to the industry building and selling the solution, they are in a position of being slightly less trustworthy by virtue of having their livelihoods attached to the success of said solution, if not outright in control of the whole process.

this is how you get telcos regulated by people working at telcos, the FAA letting Boeing decide what is critical with the MCAS systems, and industries writing their own laws which less expert government bodies just rubber-stamp.

�trust me bro� is a fundamental part of how systems and society work. it is unavoidable, and one of the things most blockchain and smart contracts enthusiasts seem to disregard is that trust goes deeper than the mechanistic aspects of how rules are applied; it also includes concepts like sentiments of justice or reciprocity.

put another way: people and systems reject solid evidence in favor of shaky evidence all the time already, whether it is climate science, return-to-office policies, or the justice system.

Why would even more solid evidence change things? is there a belief that at some point it becomes undeniable in a way that can counteract an untrustworthy system? Are we just shy of trustworthiness tipping points in evidence gathered and presented?

# ? Dec 15, 2023 05:44

Expo70: Nov 15, 2021; Can't talk now, doing
Hot Girl Stuff

Its a little late on my end, so I'll reply when I'm better rested, but letting you know I've seen the post.

edit:

What I will say is sophistry (born of a deficit somewhere in your life) will always inherently limit you, and create paranoia which is a waste of your resources. You cannot out-think every problem because not all problems are solvable with the tool of thinking. Some you just have to engage with and solve -- be it physically, socially, or emotionally.

Thinking will rob you of the energy you need to do feeling, or emotion, or socialization, or action.
Thinking (in the form of overthinking) can be an addiction, be mindful of this. A helpful video on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAaxaYQptfc

Thinking is the brain engaging in self-justification and selective intellectualization, using semiotic substitution in place of understanding which comes from practice, and doing -- either through simulated action with imagination or practical doing, such as play or applied action. Only thinking about things will not produce knowledge, only insights and observations. To really be functional, you have to do all of these things in a loop: Thinking, and doing, together.

Soliphism robs us of that loop: Mistrust is a friction which grinds action to a halt and it invents phantoms for us to fear. Paranoia is like a rachetting effect too: Anybody who tells us "you're paranoid" could be some sort of agent or someone out to get us. But then, what of every opportunity lost to paranoia? And what of every great happiness lost to protect one's self from only very minor inconvenience? It does not really add up, does it? This is why the paranoia of solipsism doesn't make sense and why in the end, we do have to engage in the world.
Even our attempts to use models to treat people as object-likes doesn't work, because really its cowardice: We treat it as grand and important but in truth, it is a scared child protecting themselves by turning real people into fictional ones to hide from realness in the world. They then feel nothing in the world itself is real, and so they in turn are suffering from feeling dissociated, and even lonely: "nothing feels real", despite the fact the child did this to themselves. Isn't it funny?

Anybody insisting their intelligence can fix every other problem in their lives by thinking is lying:

Intelligence can only tell you what you should be doing, not do it for you.

When you think in thoughts, all you know is thoughts.

Will respond more after a rest.

Expo70 fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Dec 15, 2023

# ? Dec 15, 2023 06:11

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Shame Boy posted:

it's definitely weirdo poo poo (Xathal i hope you're ok with that label cuz i think weirdo poo poo can be some of the most interesting poo poo) but i don't think it's insane. like i wouldn't be anywhere near as fascinated by it if it were full timecube-level incomprehensible angry schizophrenia, there's a lucidity and consistency here you don't normally get with internet nuts

All of this is unquantifiable, and it's a pathetic attempt to try to quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. It's challenging to remark on this in good faith because it's like trying to explain smalltalk to somebody who can't even say hello to a cashier.

It's like that conversation that showed up again recently where a certain far-right weirdo billionaire was talking about colonizing Mars to some sycophants at a party, and one person "blew his mind" they responding that we ought to be concerned about genocidal artificial intelligences following humanity to Mars like some Warhammer 40K larper.

Bizarre, irrelevant solutions to problems that nobody is framing in this way, because most sane people know that dealing with truth and veracity -- trust -- concerns social forces that have nothing to do with what this solution proffers.

# ? Dec 15, 2023 06:40

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Potato Salad posted:

All of this is unquantifiable, and it's a pathetic attempt to try to quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. It's challenging to remark on this in good faith because it's like trying to explain smalltalk to somebody who can't even say hello to a cashier.

It's like that conversation that showed up again recently where a certain far-right weirdo billionaire was talking about colonizing Mars to some sycophants at a party, and one person "blew his mind" they responding that we ought to be concerned about genocidal artificial intelligences following humanity to Mars like some Warhammer 40K larper.

Bizarre, irrelevant solutions to problems that nobody is framing in this way, because most sane people know that dealing with truth and veracity -- trust -- concerns social forces that have nothing to do with what this solution proffers.

ok but it's not musk it's some internet rando with a rich inner world, and i think that's a lot more interesting and not really at all comparable to a billionaire's stupid power fantasies

and like, "It's challenging to remark on this in good faith" buddy i made this separate thread entirely so people who didn't want to deal with this discussion cuz they thought it was stupid and annoying didn't have to and you followed us in here anyway seemingly just so you could be mad at it so like, what even do you want

# ? Dec 15, 2023 07:04

Expo70: Nov 15, 2021; Can't talk now, doing
Hot Girl Stuff

Potato Salad posted:

All of this is unquantifiable, and it's a pathetic attempt to try to quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. It's challenging to remark on this in good faith because it's like trying to explain smalltalk to somebody who can't even say hello to a cashier.

It's like that conversation that showed up again recently where a certain far-right weirdo billionaire was talking about colonizing Mars to some sycophants at a party, and one person "blew his mind" they responding that we ought to be concerned about genocidal artificial intelligences following humanity to Mars like some Warhammer 40K larper.

Bizarre, irrelevant solutions to problems that nobody is framing in this way, because most sane people know that dealing with truth and veracity -- trust -- concerns social forces that have nothing to do with what this solution proffers.

Don't be mean. We don't have to be mean.

there's unquantifiable (proof) and "unquantifiable" (conjecture). like stuff putting in the hours or the energy obviously but the difference is indeterminate, and likewise lots of things "exist" which are unquantifiable which then people bicker over trying to make quantifiable and its the successes and failures of those attempts which teach humans about themselves in the grand scheme of history.

i am way in over my head here on the technical stuff he's proposing (you probably know more here on this than I do), but you're also making a lot of assumptions here based in past experience so I think the odds are good you're seeing a pattern in those experiences and assuming this is more of that thing you have seen before.

people who misuse tools don't care "if it works or not", just that it lets them achieve what they set out to do. They didn't have to be quantifiable, just the aesthetic of credibility.

history is full of things like that, which probably put the fear in this guy in the first place into doing this. what he doesn't realize is all of those things were chosen not because they worked, but because of the secondary impacts they had on human behaviour, which the people who proposed them (likely in good faith) couldn't have forseen and even expected their inventions would some how circumvent instead of enabling

the thing is, it wasn't the projects themselves that were inherently dangerous when their creators thought of them, but the way people deployed them used them.

when you're in his situation, you feel pent up and mad about the climate we all live in, and powerless about the world and you see a preventable problem

you think, "if I don't do something, I'm going to hate myself for not having helped anybody when I could have" and its very hard to live with that feeling

he's in exactly the same situation you are, in that sense right now

i get what you're saying and how this gives you the heebyjeebies, but being mean about this isn't going to help anybody

if anything, he'll be harder to communicate with and that means if he decides to change his mind or has second thoughts, or change what he's making or modify his thing in some way to prevent some outcome he's realized could happen to make it less torture-nexusy or remove a torture-nexusy thing about it, he's not gonna course-correct from a negative outcome if he's mad at people being mean to him

an idiot once strapped a board system meant for a bunch of individual servers per board across mac minis in assembler to handle 1000x the traffic and got drunk on the traffic, then used social experiments to try a new decentralized form of activism. that person was so angry at the world they didn't course-correct when they should have and now the rest of us are dealing with it.

another idiot once got so angry with a girl turning him down he realized he could turn a positive sum environment into a zero sum by making users compete and then once he got them, making them dependant on the structure of the site to communicate and enhance the sense of value with exclusivity from google searches the same way aol's walled gardens work. that moron was so angry they didn't course-correct, and they got so mad they got greedy and stupid, and now the rest of us are dealing with it.

this stuff always happens because someone feels slighted

i have no idea if this is one of these kinds of moments but being mean is kinda the opposite of what would fix these kinds of problems

and if you think the idea is truly dumb for whatever reason, think of it as outsider art instead

i get that the world seems awful sometimes, and the days get worse but I promise you:

better days are coming. have a noble mind.

there's no need to be mean.

wherever you go, y'know?)

e:

ok fr, its 6:40am I am getting my rear end to bed because Shameboy is yelling at me and if our sleep goes too out of sync there's a project we can't collab on properly because we're in different timezones

later, skaters

Expo70 fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Dec 15, 2023

# ? Dec 15, 2023 07:34

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Expo70 posted:

i get what you're saying and how this gives you the heebyjeebies, but being mean about this isn't going to help anybody

if anything, he'll be harder to communicate with and that means if he decides to change his mind or has second thoughts, or change what he's making or modify his thing in some way to prevent some outcome he's realized could happen to make it less torture-nexusy or remove a torture-nexusy thing about it, he's not gonna course-correct from a negative outcome if he's mad at people being mean to him

yeah like i get that SA loves making fun of stuff like this but the dude seems nice and open to discussion and isn't actively harmful to anyone like a lot of other people that we mock so like, idk, it's fine

# ? Dec 15, 2023 07:42

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Expo70 posted:

you're also making a lot of assumptions here based in past experience so I think the odds are good you're seeing a pattern in those experiences and assuming this is more of that thing you have seen before

This is far, far from the first time this has come up on SA.

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:04

Expo70: Nov 15, 2021; Can't talk now, doing
Hot Girl Stuff

Potato Salad posted:

This is far, far from the first time this has come up on SA.

So basically you're doing exactly what I said.

Man, I'm trying to sleep. I shouldn't have to hover like this on my phone.

Again, don't be mean: We don't have to be mean.

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:14

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

i dont understand what this thread is about and its way too many words to read

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:16

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

can i get a tldr

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:18

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Expo70 posted:

So basically you're doing exactly what I said.

No. The one making extraordinary assumptions is you. Trivially.

fart simpson posted:

can i get a tldr

People who got high and read a bunch of buzzwords put together a chain of words that make absolutely no sense through the perspective of information and entropy. Even if you take the treknobabble at face value, which you can't, the proffered solution literally accomplishes nothing to establish trust.

I have an advanced degree in a hard science and actually understand the proposal sentence to sentence, word to word. I presently work in information security, on the technical side. I have actually written code that implements cryptocurrency mining and transactions and signs NFTs. This is all horseshit.

Edit: I also want to point out that the op meanders quite a bit into their experience with neurodivergence, I empathize with you there but this is just word salad by rent-seeking tech bros and you'd be better off without it in your life.

Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Dec 15, 2023

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:19

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Expo70 posted:

Man, I'm trying to sleep.

don't forums in bed from your phone you fukken dork, no wonder you have insomnia

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:21

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Potato Salad posted:

word salad by rent-seeking tech bros

it's all a single dude working out of a kinda shabby-looking house, sharing all the ideas publicly for free

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:31

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Shame Boy posted:

it's all a single dude working out of a kinda shabby-looking house, sharing all the ideas publicly for free

I will admit to you that I have not literally doxxed the author. That's my bad (?)

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:35

Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

Potato Salad posted:

I will admit to you that I have not literally doxxed the author. That's my bad (?)

i'm just going based on that video i posted in the op but yeah

like i get your reaction to this kinda thing, usually it is rent-seeking techbros, but this really seems more like a weird-rear end hobby project with a bunch of spirituality mixed in, like templeos or something

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:39

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

Shame Boy posted:

templeos or something

ok this is the tldr i was looking for. thanks op

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:46

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 16:53

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

imagine if somebody was trying to use TempleOS prayers as a watermark for trust

it's trivially defeatable, but hey apparently it deserves a thread

# ? Dec 15, 2023 08:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > Talkin' Truth Beam with Red Batman and the PoliePals

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