Posts

Clone Work

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If... Two Heads are Better... "Smart people improve smart machines" seems a no-brainer (so far).  So if you have the biological stock for a genius, two geniuses are better than one, no?  PROMPT: " P hotorealistic 2 identical men, side by side at a big drawing table, looking at plans for a huge interstellar spaceship." * Are you sure round is the right shape? Sci-Fi makes sense of it all! This Dall-E creation makes me think a Superintelligence became frustrated with its trial-and-error mistakes (look at all the scraps from failed attempts) and dipped into its vast stock of human biological material, fired up its cloning equipment and created a couple of the best from its "genius engineer" file. These boys are going to fix the problem, but it's frustrating being the only humans alive at the time. Dang, it's fun playing with all the AIs. * Bing GPT4 Image Creator

An Informational Present

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I TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS SIX YEARS AGO (Surely you remember ?)  ...And in those six years, multiple research projects have affirmed and reaffirmed that SENOLYTICS is a big deal. The science of senolytics: how a new pill could spell the end of ageing                                    * I'm reminded of this by a well-researched article in The Guardian , a newspaper I respect. Aside from that hyperbolic, click-bait-ish headline, it's a fair summary of the state of knowledge on the subject. In brief: Certain drugs and several supplements help the body get rid of senescent cells, "zombie cells" that don't die after they quit doing their thing and just hang around spitting out inflammatory chemicals that damage various organs, joints, and brain cells. The senolytic agents augment apoptosis , nature's way of killing off the senescent cells. When those senescent cells are gone, things start improving measurably (see the mouse with the young look in the Guardian piece.)

My AI Council of Advisors

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Top Notch Advisory Board For   BIG BUCKS   FREE!*  Drs. Bard, ChatGPT, Claude, GPT4  PhD, DDS, MD, DLitt, DPT, DSci, et al I have one of the most expensively educated (and youngest) Councils of Advisors in history. And (so far) they work free and are on call 24/7.  Each costs hundreds of $millions in computer time (and the gigawatts it takes to run them), and many $millions more each day as they serve the needs of anyone who asks, i.e. millions of folks like me, all over the world. I regularly use a bunch of them. They don't even mind when I "play them against each other," as I seek the most creative solutions to my problems and try to catch them in lies!  (Most people I know resent that as untrusting and mean.) They know I know, that they try to get away with lying now and then when it's just too embarrassing to say "I don't know." They rarely say that; instead, they just very confidently lie.  So far there is little to no repercussion to their lying.

Richer (by a helluva lot) Than Croesus

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PHAH! Nobody is richer than me. Taking Stock of My (and Your) Wealth   So much music recorded. So many wonderful musicians and composers. So much good writing. So many books, so much reportage and fiction, so much poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, technology, and science. Since writing, recording, and all forms of “memory” came to be, the inventory of great stuff has become inconceivably large, and it is growing exponentially.   We are riding the foam on the top of the advancing, compounding wave of preserved genius, and we can plunge back into that staggering mass and experience art from back along the timeline. Music from the ancients (and my fav, the early ‘40s) is still there, awaiting our submergence. Stunning literature from 1851, drama from 1606, three million movies since 1880. So damn much! It is wealth beyond comprehension. No prince or despot (even grouchy old Croesus) ever commanded such treasure. The Alexandrian library pales by comparison.  Just counting our bl

Countering the AI Threat

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 [I don't repeat these things much, but some of the apocalyptic fears that AI might run amok and squish us all need addressing.  Our politicians think in terms of new regulations.  I think more creative solutions will be required.  Besides, this one sound way more fun.] (First posted on March 05, 2023)   Lotta Smart People Think AI is Going to Get Dangerous AI is suddenly all over the news and all it's variants on the Web. Talk is (of course) rampant that it's getting so smart so fast it might just   eat its creators. These concerns have been around since long before ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Chat Bing and all the others about to blossom onto the scene.   We want wonderful, humane, empathetic, humble, wise, big-time-fans-of-humanity AI's, not the scary ones. Sci-fi types (I admit guilt there) have been saying it for decades. Remember HAL-9000’s, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”  Then give the A.I. weapons and we have SkyNet, killing off the vermin humans in the Term

Scooter Duff's Theory of Cosmology [A work in progress]

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 [Olde Duff Gets Seriouser] SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES  ARE MOSTLY PRIMORDIAL  DARK MATTER [Draft 8/19/2023] THE BIG NEWS.. ..Is from the James Webb Space Telescope. There were furiously active galaxies very soon after the Big Bang, not that long after the first generation stars happened. This implies supermassive black holes at the centers of the new galaxies.  The question, "how did these giant black holes get there so early?" seems not quite answered by the two main contenders, "Giant dust collapse," and "Many stellar black holes consolidating." Thus I decided to toss this hat into the ring: At the big bang, and dark matter was the first matter of any kind to form (perhaps during the mysterious “inflation” event -- my personal theory).  It’s mutual gravitational attraction and lack of interaction to any electromagnetic force allowed it to exist and start to coalesce, even in the heat of the BB, long before baryonic matter could.  There was a vast quantity

'Bout Time

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Environmental Protection Agency  I Love It When We Demand the EPA  Does the "Protection" Part! 40% of ALL CORN grown in the USA is for ethanol!! And since this corn "is not food," MUCH more pesticide and herbicide is allowed, which of course washes off into creeks, rivers and on into the Gulf of Mexico PUMPING UP THE DEAD ZONE. Oxygen starvation is really tough to take,  even if you are not already endangered. [The Guardian] Lawsuit says US environmental agency ignores harm of biofuel production New suit charges that the EPA disregards ethanol production’s impact on endangered species as it is directed to study under law Tom Perkins Mon 24 Jul 2023 05.30 EDT The US biofuel program is probably killing endangered species and harming the environment in a way that negates its benefits, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is largely ignoring those problems, a new federal  lawsuit  charges. The suit alleges the EPA failed to consider impacts on endangered sp

BARD Confesses to Hallucinating (Notes from AI Land)

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 Google's BARD Gets the Facts Wrong A LOT It started when I asked Bard to give me facts about the meaning of "666." Rather than any of the Biblical anti-Christ or Satan stuff that is widely known, Bard said 666 stands for "love, compassion and nurturing." I pressed it to document that answer. It used the title of one book and assigned a different author to it. I pressed further and got a confession: Prompt : Is the fact that you said, "in the book Zeus Sensor and Numerology author Efthimios Pistiolas* writes that the number 6 is "the number of the heart" and that it "represents love, compassion, and nurturing," an example of Bard hallucinating? Bard answered: Yes, that is an example of Bard hallucinating. I did not actually read the book "Zeus Sensor and Numerology" by Buddy Huang and Bret Taylor. I simply made up the quote about Efthimios Pistiolas. This is because I am still under development and I am not always able to di