Following up on my last post on the Summer of Protocols sessions, I want to pass on (again, to my future self, and possibly a few techie MindBlog readers) a few links to the world of decentralized grass roots everything - commerce, communications, finance, etc.  - trying to bypass the traditional powers and gate keepers in these areas by constructing distributed systems usually based on block chains and cryptocurrencies.  I am trying to learn more about this, taking things in small steps to avoid overload headaches... (One keeps stumbling on areas of world wide engagement of thousand ..read more

I want to point to a project launched by Venkatest Rao and others last year: “The Summer of Protocols.”  Some background for this project can be found in his essay “In Search of Hardness”.  Also,  “The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols”  essay by Rao et al. is an excellent presentation of what protocols are about.  I strongly recommend that you read it if nothing else.  Here is a description of the project:  Over 18 weeks in Summer 2023, 33 researchers from diverse fields including architecture, law, game design, technology, media, art, and workplace saf ..read more

 I want to point to an excellent New Yorker article by Patrick House titled  “The Lifelike Illusion of A.I.”  The article strikes home for me, for when a Chat Bot responds to one of my prompts using the pronoun “I”  I unconsciously attribute personhood to the machine, forgetting that this is a cheap trick used by programmers of large language model to increase the plausibility of responses. House starts off his article by describing the attachments people formed with the Furby, an animatronic toy resembling a small owl, and Pleo, an animatronic toy dinosaur. Both use a simp ..read more

More information (summarized here) on what is happening in our brains while we sleep is provided by Jiang-Xie et al.,, who show that active neurons can stimulate the clearance of their own metabolic waste by driving changes to ion gradients in the surrounding fluid and by promoting the pulsation of nearby blood vessels.  Here is the Jiang-Xie et al.abstract: The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individ ..read more

Here I point to a PNAS article by Lutz et al. and a commentary on the work by Schechtman. Here is the Lutz. et al. abstract: Significance Real-life events usually consist of multiple elements such as a location, people, and objects that become associated during the event. Such associations can differ in their strength, and some elements may be associated only indirectly (e.g., via a third element). Here, we show that sleep compared with nocturnal wakefulness selectively strengthens associations between elements of events that were only weakly encoded and of such that were not encoded together ..read more

I pass on two striking examples from today’s New York Times, with few clips of text from each: A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture: (You really should read the whole article...I've given up on trying to assemble clips of text that get across the whole message, and pass on these bits towards the end of the article:) ....we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are ref ..read more

This video from The Economist is one of the best I have seen for a popular audience. Hopefully the basic facts presented are slowly seeping throughout our culture ..read more

Fascinating observations by Jimenez et al.  on our inherent human drive to understand our vastly social world...(and in the same issue of PNAS note this study on the importance of the social presence of either human or virtual instructors in multimedia instructional videos.) Significance Writer Kurt Vonnegut once said “if you describe a landscape or a seascape, or a cityscape, always be sure to include a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in other human beings.” Consistent with Vonnegut’s intuition, we found that the human br ..read more

 I have to pass on this link, sent to me by my techie son, Jonathan:   ..read more

I generally try to keep a distance from 'the real world' and apocalyptic visions of what AI might do, but I decided to pass on some clips from this technology essay in The Wall Street Journal that makes some very plausible predictions about the future of armed conflicts between political entities: The future of warfare won’t be decided by weapons systems but by systems of weapons, and those systems will cost less. Many of them already exist, whether they’re the Shahed drones attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden or the Switchblade drones destroying Russian tanks in the Donbas or smart seabor ..read more