Tootfinder

This article by a former OpenAI employee makes a powerful case that AI exploits the same clever game design that can make Furbies, dinosaurs, and even triangles seem sentient. It's not about modeling a brain's complexity; simpler systems can ironically feel more intelligent.
https://www.

Monitoring Wandering Behavior of Persons Suffering from Dementia Using BLE Based Localization System
Marcin Kolakowski, Bartosz Blachucki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19704

Monitoring Wandering Behavior of Persons Suffering from Dementia Using BLE Based Localization System
With the aging of our populations, dementia will become a problem which would directly or indirectly affect a large number of people. One of the most dangerous dementia symptoms is wandering. It consists in aimless walking and spatial disorientation, which might lead to various unpleasant situations like falling down accidents at home to leaving the living place and going missing. Therefore, in order to ensure elderly people's safety it is crucial to detect and alarm the caregivers in case of s…

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.
They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.
I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)
Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.
The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.
Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.
Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

Ukraine and Taiwan stand together against disinformation. Ukraine in Flames #591: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/28/ukraine-and-taiwan.html

Life in the Holocene! Historic water shortage: "We are in danger of seeing Sicilian agriculture die"
The Italian island has been suffering from a rainfall deficit for over six months. The lack of water is threatening the economic survival of many farms.

Historic water shortage: 'We are in danger of seeing Sicilian agriculture die'
The Italian island has been suffering from a rainfall deficit for over six months. The lack of water is threatening the economic survival of many farms.

My dream workbook is here! Thanks, @… . #YAY

At a DC event on May 1, over 100 tech CEOs and investors plan to lobby against AI regulation, ask to relax immigration rules, and drum up hawkishness on China (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/…

A.I. Leaders Press Advantage With Congress as China Tensions Rise
Silicon Valley chiefs are swarming the Capitol to try to sway lawmakers on the dangers of falling behind in the artificial intelligence race.

"for Republican lawmakers, criticizing university presidents for failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism is a useful political issue with the potential to deepen divisions among Democrats — one that, unsurprisingly, they have pursued vociferously."
thing is, Democratic *voters* are not divided. 75% disapprove of Israel's actions in Gaza!

Think Fast, Think Slow, Think Critical: Designing an Automated Propaganda Detection Tool
Liudmila Zavolokina, Kilian Sprenkamp, Zoya Katashinskaya, Daniel Gordon Jones, Gerhard Schwabe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19135

Think Fast, Think Slow, Think Critical: Designing an Automated Propaganda Detection Tool
In today's digital age, characterized by rapid news consumption and increasing vulnerability to propaganda, fostering citizens' critical thinking is crucial for stable democracies. This paper introduces the design of ClarifAI, a novel automated propaganda detection tool designed to nudge readers towards more critical news consumption by activating the analytical mode of thinking, following Kahneman's dual-system theory of cognition. Using Large Language Models, ClarifAI detects propaganda in ne…

Anti-Ukrainian narratives pushed by the Kremlin as deflection tactics. Ukraine in Flames #603: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/25/antiukrainian-narratives-pushed.html