http://sheer.us/stuff/2016/Sheer.HistoryOfModern_2.mp3 – History of Modern, my first OMD cover.
This song is dedicated to my good friend Cygnostik, who runs EBM radio.
New and improved, with vocals that suck less.
So, lately the DAW plugin market has been a bit saturated with a bunch of vendors all producing plugins that more or less do the same thing. This is great insofar as it’s driving down the price of plugins, but not so great insofar as it suggests no one can think of anything new to do.
My first and most obvious suggestion on this front is to abandon the beaten path of what’s been done before. In particular, might I suggest that there’s a huge GPU on most modern computers that could be used to play with building artificial neural networks to perform audio processing. I’m not exactly sure what the results of this would be, and maybe a GPU isn’t big enough yet to do meaningful amounts of ANN processing, but I still think it’s a neat idea.
I have memories when I was a tween of having a vision of manipulating a giant artificial neural network via a set of controls very similar to a mixing board, which controlled trigger levels and amplitudes of signals passing between subnets. I didn’t fully understand what I was imagining at the time, but looking back…
So, I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while, partially because I think it’s a fun set of thoughts to bounce around on. I’m waiting for a big file to download and a even bigger database to copy, so I might as well engage in a little bit of woolgathering.
Forgetting any particular religious text, the question that I’m pondering is, based on reality testing, what could we reasonably guess about the nature of God?
Alderin suggested that if there were gods, we would probably want to stay far away from them, because they would be inclined to squish us like bugs, or at least care about us as little as we care about cattle. If there were Gods that were external to us, I would tend to agree. But I tend to think that if there are Gods, we’re as a row to their table, a neuron to their brain. And you generally don’t want to squish your own brain cells.
Anyway, obviously this fits into the category of intellectual wanking, because we can’t even know if the reality we’re experiencing has that much to do with the reality that is – there’s so many layers of neurons between our senses and the part of our mind that’s on the ride that it’s really pretty hopeless. Nonetheless, let’s see what we can figure out.
First of all, it seems clear that whoever they are, they want to have some distance between groups of intelligent life. The whole design of the universe, at least via the perspective that I see it, seems inclined to put ridiculous amounts of space between groups of people. The nature of relativity makes even communication with anyone that’s not in our immediate neighborhood very difficult, and as far as going there, forget about it, at least until we learn some things that we don’t yet know.
Second of all, it seems clear that the intention is for us to have bountiful amounts of energy to play with. The sun delivers unbelievable amounts of power every day, there’s enormous amounts of power stored in thorium and uranium, there’s a bunch of power stored in oil. They’re even arranged in stages, so you can figure out first how to build internal combustion, then fission, then fusion. Almost like we’ve got a little puzzle going on here.
Third of all, it seems likely that there is some sort of state machine at work here. A lot of physical laws can be described with mathematical relationships – most of them are even relationships that are not particularly difficult to calculate. Also, DNA, in it’s rather binary way, looks suspiciously like it might be the output of a compiler. God uses computers. Probably much more advanced ones than we do.
Fourth of all, we can safely say whoever they were, they did in fact like to play dice with the universe. The quantum world we’re discovering.. and building lots of neat stuff based on our discoveries of.. is full of probabilistic behavior.
Fifth of all, they did not want lasting records to be easy to make within the universe container we are in. This world is incredibly hostile to data storage. Our best storage methodology so far is *paper*, and it’s only good for a few hundred years. The only data that gets kept is the data that future generations choose to make copies of.
Sixth of all, it seems clear there’s no one ‘true religion’. I’ve been through the reasons we can know this enough in the rest of this blog to not need to iterate them here. On the other hand, if we assume that they’re actively a part of the current dance, as opposed to just being a agent that started the whole thing in motion and walked away, they *want* there to be a lot of variety in religions. God might well think that religions are orthogonal to God, or even antithetical. There are a few ways this could work. It might well be that different neural subnets in each of our minds would have to have radically different data loaded on them – different religions, if you will – for the system as a whole to operate. It’s also possible that if you could go in and talk to the individual hemispheres of our minds you’d find that they hold radically different beliefs. I’m not sure how you would experiment with this, although the people experimenting with cutting the corpus collossem would probably have some interesting ideas on the subject. Anyway, it might be that if we *are* all individual neurons to God’s brain, then if we all had the same religion, the results would be *very* bad. Imagine what happens to the lion/no lion subnet if it only believes in lions and not tigers, for example.
Seventh of all, I’m fairly sure we’re here with at least one species that is smarter than we are, and probably a number of them. My guess is when we start playing with ANNs and using them as mediators between us and dolphins and whales we’re going to discover that the joke really has been on us for a very long time. My guess is A: we’re hypervised – that is, we’re inside a virtualization container “in the real world”, as well as being hypervised in a second virtualization container inside our own minds and B: some other species here has access to the hypervisor console and we don’t because we’re not yet evolved enough to be able to use it responsibly.
Eighth of all, nothing is forever here. Most noticeably are the laws of entropy, but also difficult to miss is the fact that we have a TTL engineered into our DNA – DRM, in fact. You get this many copies and no more. My guess is this is to protect us from our own stupidity. No matter what, you can’t get stuck in a situation for more than about a hundred years. Mixing this with the quality of the human body’s design (good, but with significant flaws), I would guess we are in a beta test version of the universe we’re currently experiencing.
Struck by lightning, sounds pretty frightening
But you know the chances are so small
Stuck by a bee sting, nothing but a B-thing
Better chance you’re gonna buy it at the mall
But it’s a twenty-three four-to-one
That you can fall in love by the end of this song
So get up, get up
Tell the bookie “put a bet up”
Not a damn thing will go wrong
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright tonight
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright for another night
Hit by the A-Train, crashed in an airplane
I wouldn’t recommend either one
Killed by a Great White or a meteorite
I guess there ain’t no way to go that’s fun
But somewhere in the world someone is gonna fall in love by the end of this song
So get up, get up
No it’s never gonna let up so you might as well sing along
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright tonight
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright for another night
Sure things go wrong, but I’ll take my chances
Odds are long, so why not play?
Struck by lightning, sounds pretty frightening
But you know the chances are so small
Hit by the A-Train, crashed in an airplane
Better chance you’re gonna buy it at the mall
But it’s a twenty-three four-to-one
That you can fall in love by the end of this song
So get up, get up
No I’m never gonna let up
So you might as well sing along
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright tonight
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright tonight
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright tonight
The odds are that we will probably be alright
Odds are we’re gonna be alright, odds are we’re gonna be alright for another night
I realize that it’s become politically incorrect to say that all lives matter – that by doing so, some people somehow feel like I’m saying all lives *don’t* matter. Or like I’m saying there’s not a problem with people of color being gunned down by people wearing blue.
Look, I do get it that statistically said people have been getting the short end of the stick. However, I belong to another group of people who I would wager are a lot MORE likely to be gunned down by the cops – people with mental illness. 99% of the time I’m perfectly normal. 1% of the time I’m really not. I’m not *dangerous*, but I’m definitely way, way outside of normal. Numerous times I have had cops with their guns drawn and aimed at me, so I know of what I speak. I’ve never acted threatening towards them in any way, but nonetheless it would not at all surprise me if I were gunned down someday by a cop with had a itchy trigger finger.
But I’m not looking for special service for my group, because I think that’s part of the problem. I’m looking for general, broadband fixes that will help both people of color and the mentally ill – and anyone else who interfaces with our gaurdians:
1) Streaming video from body cameras, which can not be disabled nor easily tampered with
2) Guns and tasers that have small but powerful ANNs* and video cameras and software designed to make the ‘danger/no danger’ decision, so that even if a cop does pull the trigger, the gun will not fire. As a backup, two individuals (generally dispatch, who has streaming video from #1, and the officer in question) can override the computer to un-safe the weapon.
3) Until the day that #2 is a reality, any cop who shoots a innocent should lose their right to carry. Actually, anyone who shoots a innocent, period, should lose their right to carry. You’ve proven via the only test that matters that you don’t have what it takes to carry a gun. It’s *extra* important that this apply to cops, however, given that their job often puts them in situations where emotions are running high and split second decisions are needed.
#2 is just common sense. Humans are not really rational enough to be trusted with guns. Unfortunately we have a ton of them out there, and it’s going to be a long time before we realize this, but of all the guns you want to be safe, the guns carried by the guardians are the most important, because they might see use at any time, 24×7, they’re always loaded and always being carried.
In any case, while it may not be possible to preserve all lives under all circumstances, all lives matter. The lives of our guardians matter. The lives of people of all colors, stripes, and religions matter.
* = Artificial neural networks. It should not be that difficult, in a era when we can do face and voice recognition, to teach a computer to recognize when there’s real danger, especially once we collect a corpus of incidents where there was real danger from #1.
http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=1727.
2 terabytes was actually a impressive amount of disk. Now I routinely slam 2T SSDs in things, and one system I work with regularly has a RAID array of PCIe 2T SSDs capable of 2+G/s read and write. I’ve recorded more than 2T worth of multitrack content. And so forth.
One of the things my friend Andy wanted me to do was figure out a mathematical model for measuring the impact of gratitude.
I haven’t done that yet – I’ve put in some time on it, but it’s resisting a easy solution. I have, however, as a side corollary been thinking about measuring suffering, which is not exactly the inverse of gratitude but is tangentially related to the inverse.
Measuring suffering mathematically is a important thing to be able to do in order to do triage to figure out which issues facing the human race should be solved first. I grant you that we don’t currently do this kind of triage in any meaningful or useful way – somehow the herd picks a flavor of the week to solve, but it doesn’t appear to be that connected to what’s hurting the most people.
Anyway, let me talk about my thoughts on the matter, and then we can come back to that if I still have the energy. If not, I’ll probably talk about it in a future article.
For measuring suffering, the first and most obvious thing to measure is direct impact. You measure the suffering intensity (we could arbitrarily scale this as between 0 and 1), the suffering duration, and the number of people impacted. Multiply these three numbers together and you have the suffering quotient. It doesn’t really matter what scaling you use on the three numbers, as long as you use the same scaling for all problems, since all we’re really trying to get at here is some meaningful way to measure that can be used to compare sources of suffering and figure out which ones to fix first.
Beyond the direct impact, there’s the indirect impact – the “If mama aint happy nobody aint happy” impact. For example, the police shooting innocent people has a large indirect impact – it makes everyone sad and angry – while kidney stones would have almost no indirect impact. Deaths tend to have indirect impact. This can be measured in the same terms, but is a lot more complicated to figure out what the appropriate values are and likely involves a statistical distribution of values depending on the number of people indirectly affected and how strongly the issue affects them.
The direct and indirect impacts just sum together, nothing complicated there.
There’s also the potential impact of not resolving the suffering. For the cops shooting civilians, you have a potential civil war on your hands, which has a enormous suffering quotient. For cancer and AIDS you have people dying, which is not as bad as people dying in a war zone but still bad. For some things, this third effect doesn’t apply.
Because it’s a conditional, it should really be in a separate column rather than summed with the other two.
Another question is where to get the suffering quotient from. You can get people to self-report, but outside the land of physical pain a lot of suffering quotients (fear of being homeless, fear of getting shot by the cops, etc) are really hard to quantify. It’s possible that some of this could be determined by looking at the fatigue poisons in people’s blood, and possibly neurotransmitters behind the blood-brain barrier. I don’t know to what state our science is when it comes to measuring misery, so I don’t know if this is something we already know how to measure or not.
Anyway, I do think figuring out a mathematical model for measuring suffering and using it to measure the current large problems facing us would be a smart thing to do.
Super chill.. this may get another layer of paint – I’m thinking of making it a spoken word peice..
This is more of me trying to get a handle on Vienna. This one is interesting in that *none* of the instruments in it have any corporeal existence – well, many of them might be based on samples, but as of now they’re all software running on a x86 😉