Tootfinder

from my link log —
The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-one-science-reform-we-can-all
saved 2026-03-04

The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do
OR: the long overdue forest fire

Following the fatal shootings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis last month,
Democrats have refused to support long-term funding for the Department of Homland Security unless Republicans agree to reforms on the tactics of federal agents carrying out Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“The American people rightfully expect their elected representatives to take action to rein in ICE and ensure no more lives are lost,” Senate minorit…

First they made useless demands, then they also caved even on their useless demands. The US is a one-party state but in our typical extravagance we have two of them.
https://truthout.org/articles/democrats-cave-on-demands-f…

Democrats Cave on Demands for DHS Reforms, Agree to Short-Term Spending Bill
The deal — a major concession from Democrats — funds DHS and its immigration-related agencies for another two weeks.

I have to say I don't hate the faces of DLSS 5. Maybe I don't get the Snapchat reference because I've never used it? They don't look exactly off and uncanny to me either. Maybe because of the comparison which shows they are more or less derived "from the artwork"? The more upsetting explanation would be that my uncanny valley threshold is kind of low.
One thing I strongly agree with--the end results look uniformly AI-perfect, dull across the board even with th…

Paramount reaffirms its commitment to its $30-per-share offer to acquire WBD and says that its analysis values Discovery Global at $0 per share (Paramount)
https://ir.paramount.com/news-releases/news-release-details…

Following federal cuts to history-focused organizations, the president of the Canadian Historical Association, Colin Coates, sent this letter to Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
One thing might not be obvious: Coates's reference to Carney's recent Quebec City speech suggests Canadians' need for historical context right now. He doesn't agree with Carney's claims. In fact, most Canadian historians would dispute them.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@igd_news/116028054267544225
I agree. He's referenced this quoted section from "They'Thought They Were Free" before. I know because I found the idea so remarkable, I had to painstakingly transcribe it so I c…

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM