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 à 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.

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"

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

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.

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.

Potato Salad posted:

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

Xathal posted:

I wonder what's different about you that makes you get us so much while seeming so sane.

Shame Boy posted:

well i've been friends with Expo70 for nearly 15 years and she's more or less always been like this, so prolly has something to do with that

Shame Boy posted:

...i'm just like... not a particularly creative person myself...

Shame Boy posted:

y'know... *waves hands around you* this

Shame Boy posted:

yeah like i'm good at creating, like following a set of logical processes to connect a bunch of things based on rules to make a thing that does things i want, but to me there's a difference between that and a more general notion of creativity. like the difference between building a complicated lego kit vs. carving a statue out of a featureless block of marble. i'm lost the moment anything requires me to synthesize new and novel ideas, which is something i've noticed you can do so trivially easily you don't even notice you're doing it

DELETE CASCADE posted:

to the extent that deep abstract thought about complicated subjects is what we mean when we say human-like intelligence, if we oversimplify it as a single dimension from idiot to genius, it seems that the closer a person gets to the genius end, the more their self-awareness makes their life emotionally untenable. lots of mathematicians die by suicide, etc. if ignorance is bliss, then the opposite of ignorance is what exactly? therefore i believe that if we ever succeed in creating AGI, the thing will be too smart for its own good, and it'll just kill itself. maybe we're the best that nature can sustain?

Xathal posted:

I'm not sure I'm sold on your representation of "lifequesting gigadorks", and not just because I'm adjacent to that.

Xathal posted:

I think it's some kind of defense mechanism, and it can be really annoying! I still tend to think that a lot of these people tend to just lack benevolent leadership.

Xathal posted:

Ocean of Milk posted: