Tootfinder

A starter pack of questions to help think about "discovery" and "knowledge":
1. When was X discovered?
2. Once it was discovered, who knew X?
3. 1000 years later, who knew/knows/will know X?
4. Is X true?
5. Which groups of people would say it's true vs. false?
When X is "a² b² = c² in a right triangle" we think there are nice clean answers to these questions. But when X is "COVID-19 transmits via small airborne aerosols and a mask is needed to reduce the risk of infection" things get more interesting, particularly the answer to question 1. Does something count as "discovered" if many/most people would say it's false?
People love to answer this question by appeal to "scientific consensus" but the scientific consensus on aerosol transmission is still shaky if you consider certain big institutions, and even if it's mostly settled now, there was definitely a period between "experts on transmission know it" and "there's a scientific consensus." So which counts as discovery? What if knowledge is held secret, like many military technologies? What about historical facts that become censored?

Agonising listening to this particle physicist David Krofcheck on RNZ right now. He knows so much he can't possibly dumb it down enough to answer Kathryn Ryan's questions in the way she's fishing for. He has such a volume of knowledge dammed up he can't figure out how to let it out in a sufficiently mundane way. Everything he says assumes that the average person knows ('you remember "conservation of energy" that you learned about in highschool'... er, yeah) …

Such exercises don't need to be grand though. They can be small. They can be for any domain. They can be organized by people with experience to help people who are new.
A simple scenario of "you're at a protest" can branch off into "you hear blast balls and smell tear gas," "you see someone with a gun," "you see someone injured by police," or "a kettle is forming." Games can allow people with experience to transfer information in a highly effective way, a way that lets new people leverage their knowledge immediately but without risk.
Other scenarios might be things like...
- Someone tells you that your organization has been infiltrated by a right wing agitator
- There's conflict between two members of your organization
- An organizer goes missing
What scenarios do you think activists and organizers should think about?

It's also important to recognize that tech oligarchs won't let this die. It's too important to them. This is part of the boss fight right here. They will take everything from us to coerce us into making LLMs profitable, to deskilling our labor and selling (skewed) human knowledge back to us at a premium. They will take away every benefit the state has, kill as many people as it takes to funnel every penny of government subsidy into this. They will burn every drop of subsidized oil. Those ICE camps are gonna be used for something. If it takes right wing death squads, they'll do it.
They will kill every last one of us to realize total domination. We have to be ready for that, and prepare accordingly. As many lives as have been taken by people with similar ideologies, those ideologies have always lost. If we know what's coming and prepare for it then they will lose faster, and at a lower cost.

www.maptap.gg July 6
95🏅 94🏅 95🏅 100🎯 100🎯
Final score: 979
(well, the last one was spoilered(?) by someone thus got the right island)
1. x: 4,488 pts, 161 km, 3 min, 0 steps
2. x: 4,208 pts, 257 km, 40 sec, 0 steps
3. x: 759 pts, 2,812 km, 1 min, 51 sec, 0 steps
4. x: 108 pts, 5,715 km, 53 sec, 0 steps
5. x: 1,706 pts, 1,604 km, 1 min, 4 sec, 0 steps
Total: 11,269 pts, 10,550 km, 7 min, 28 sec, 0 steps
TimeGuessr #1132 — 42,159/50,000

The thing I love about computers is that I can tell you basically anything about how a computer works, not because I know everything but because I know how to figure it out. I can walk you, over the course of an hour, two, there, maybe more, though every step of typing something into a web form, from the electrical signals that get turned into digital via an ADC, to the USB controller memory, to the kernel driver, to user space, through the application stack, back down to the kernel, to the network driver, through routers, up the server stack, TCP/IP, key exchanges, etc.
I don't mean I have the time to dig into these things. I used to, and it was fun. I've given more than my fair share of interviews talking though variations of this. What I'm talking about isn't pure knowledge, but that, given relatively simple theory, and the right tools, every action of a computer can be understood down to the limits of physics.
The thing I hate about #LLMs is that take something comprehensible and make it something almost completely opaque. Even with a solid understanding of the theory, literally no one understands what's happening. That is shit. It makes playing with technology not fun anymore. The way in which companies are making things even more opaque by running stuff in the cloud is everything I hated about closed source on steroids.