Tootfinder

Tucker Carlson and Trump are falling out over the Iran war (Andrew Prokop/Vox)
https://www.vox.com/politics/417085/trump-kooky-tucker-carlson-iran-israel
http://www.memeorandum.com/250617/p119#a250617p119

Hello!
I have a happy favour to ask.
Last year, I had a US intern working with us and she now is looking for help that you- good reader of this account- could give.
(She needs academic survey participants)
Check out her flyer below, click the link, and please RT
http…

Research Study on Data Privacy and Collective Redress
A researcher at University College Dublin wants to conduct anonymous interviews to learn about why you would or would not participate in a legal action to rectify a data protection violation. This information can be used to help nonprofit organizations better represent you when organizations violate your data protection rights. Provide your email to receive more information. All personally identifiable information will be deleted following completion of the study.

How Warm-Glow Alters the Usability of Technology
Antonios Saravanos (New York University)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14720 https://ar…

How Warm-Glow Alters the Usability of Technology
As technology increasingly aligns with users' personal values, traditional models of usability, focused on functionality and specifically effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction, may not fully capture how people perceive and evaluate it. This study investigates how the warm-glow phenomenon, the positive feeling associated with doing good, shapes perceived usability. An experimental approach was taken in which participants evaluated a hypothetical technology under conditions designed to evok…

Variational Inference with Mixtures of Isotropic Gaussians
Marguerite Petit-Talamon, Marc Lambert, Anna Korba
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13613 https://

Variational Inference with Mixtures of Isotropic Gaussians
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this paper, we focus on the following parametric family: mixtures of isotropic Gaussians (i.e., with diagonal covariance matrices proportional to the identity) and uniform weights. We develop a variational framework and provide efficient algori…

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

'Trump Inc.': Filings Show Staff Profited From Being in the President's Orbit (Kenneth P. Vogel/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/us/politics/trump-inc-filings-show-staff-profited-from-being-in-the-presidents-orbit.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p51#a250615p51

Trump has not called Walz following shooting of Minnesota lawmakers (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/15/trump-walz-minnesota-shooting-lawmakers-call
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p68#a250615p68

CBP Confirms It Is Flying Predator Drones Above Los Angeles To Support ICE (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/cbp-confirms-it-is-flying-predator-drones-above-los-angeles-to-support-ice/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250611/p134#a250611p134

Vance Secretly Flies for Audience With Trump-Baiting Rupert Murdoch (Josephine Harvey/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jd-vance-calls-in-on-rupert-murdoch-despite-his-papers-flaying-trump/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250612/p69#a250612p69

National Portrait Gallery head steps down following Trump attempt to fire her (Sophia Nguyen/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2025/06/13/kim-sajet-resigns/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250613/p92#a250613p92