#innovation and progress

[frank-olivier]

The Future Unscripted: Professor Nolan’s Musings on AI, NHI, and Humanity

Professor Garry Nolan’s conversation offers a profound exploration of the intersections between unconventional phenomena, artificial intelligence (AI), and humanity’s future. His personal anecdotes of unexplained childhood experiences serve as the catalyst for his professional inclination towards the unorthodox, underscoring the importance of considering unconventional data in scientific inquiry. By embracing anomalies, Nolan exemplifies the transformative potential of curiosity-driven research in the pursuit of novel knowledge.

Nolan’s scientific approach is notably inclusive, as evidenced by his exploration of Non-Human Intelligence (NHI), a term that broadens the scope of inquiry beyond traditional notions of extraterrestrial life. The analysis of enigmatic materials, such as Bismuth Magnesium, and the theorized capabilities of NHI, including mastery over anti-gravity and energy, prompt intriguing questions about coexistence. His analogy between human-ant interactions and potential human-NHI relations offers a thought-provoking perspective on mutual existence, shifting the focus from competition to symbiosis.

The future, as envisioned by Nolan, is intimately tied to AI’s development and application. He posits AI as a dual-edged solution: a tool for expediting scientific breakthroughs and resolving global crises, as well as a potential precursor to artificial superintelligence (ASI) that could embody a form of consciousness. This speculative horizon highlights the imperative of careful AI management to ensure equitable global access to education and growth. Nolan’s emphasis on AI-driven objective decision-making processes also presents a compelling case for reforming the current political landscape, which is often mired in tribal histories and scarcity mindsets.

A notable aspect of Nolan’s discourse is his critique of contemporary leadership and power structures, juxtaposed with the conflict resolution methods of bonobo chimps as a paradigm for more harmonious human interactions. This dichotomy underscores the urgent need for innovative, peace-centric approaches to global relations. Ultimately, Nolan’s optimism about humanity’s future, rooted in our capacity for crisis-driven ingenuity and the judicious leveraging of AI, presents a compelling vision of a world where challenges are met with collective brilliance and equality in education and growth becomes a universal reality.

Gary Nolan: Alien & UFO - The Critical Question Nobody's Asking (Gita Wirjawan, Endgame Podcast, December 2024)

Friday, December 6, 2024

[sunlight-shunlight]

thinking about veilguard and bioware in general, i think we are reaching a point where people need to grapple with the inherent limits of what stories can be told in our Current Society and in AAA gaming companies.

on a labour level: mass layoffs, tons of developers leaving despite previously talking about how passionate and happy they were to be involved, not even paying severance, and crunching employees to the point of burnout. this is unfortunately pretty standard for AAA game companies.

on a cultural level: it is SO white and SO centrist-ly Canadian. i wrote up these asks outlining how. it is a repeated pattern of writing in which they go into tortured racial oppression allegories at best, while constantly peppering in a "but BOTH SIDES were wrong and made mistakes :( :( :(", in between their fictional atrocities that are clearly mirroring irl genocides and enslavement. or at worst, it's "the qunari are radical islamic borg" which has even less nuance. i personally thought, since dai came out in 2014, and a lot has changed since then about the world and in public awareness, that this would have filtered into the narrative and resulted in more satisfying and historically grounded writing. unfortunately not the case. it's shocking if you compare it to how sharp and aware and unflinching something like disco elysium is.

so what does this mean?

under these conditions, it is unavoidable that we get development by people who are rapidly cycled out of the company or demoralized into burnout. we get digestible, easy little soundbites of lore without much substance, because any complexity needs more time and coordination rather than the process of "quick, we have these assets, a lot of people involved in making them just got laid off, we need to make Something by next quarter to show the CEO". we get very little cohesion between games, despite the clear intent from dai to have so many plot points set up to follow through in a sequel, because the team and development are so chaotic that they can't hold onto a vision and complete it.

we also get this inherent caution and "conservatism" from the narrative, because on an ideological level, they're largely white people who want cops to be included in pride. so any major change to even a fictional society is Bad and Scary, and shouldn't be done without making sure that every character finger-wags appropriately at non-state violence. there is clearly not much ideological or even ethnic diversity within the leadership; or at least not enough that anyone there felt comfortable even speaking up on minor issues like the Incredibly Orientalist Isabela Outfit, let alone anything larger.

i don't personally think there's too much value in trying to analyze veilguard's plot or lore at this point. the final product is chaotically developed and does not seem to reflect the goals of the creators as set up in prior games, it's basically a ship of theseus in terms of the people and ideas involved in making it. this is sad for all of us, who were interested in the story, and attached to the characters, and were creatively fulfilled by engaging in the fandom. it's probably worse for the developers who have lost their jobs, burnt out, or feel unhappy with the game that they spent years of their life working on. it's certainly miserable as an indictment of The Industry, as well as the general societal climate of white Canadian centrism.

the solution is to create a society where people can develop games in peace and prosperity and stay on projects for longer, rather than constantly getting turfed out without severance pay. and to get some genuine leftists, poc, and indigenous people on staff who can weigh in and provide significant input, rather than a Council Of Liberal White Edmontonians every time.

in the meantime, at the very least, let's please stop preordering AAA games and supporting companies who notably abuse their employees.

[ophanim-vesper]

An hour and 17 minutes into Defunctland's new video. It's crazy to think that the first person to basically say "we should replace artists with robots/AI!" was... Walt Disney himself.

[around 1:17:14 in the video]

Defunctland's new video, you should watch it.

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review X (federal 2025): FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation

Running where: five states for the Senate (not TAS), plus a smattering of House seats across four states (not TAS or WA)

Prior reviews: federal 2022 (which links to my past reviews of most constituent parties), VIC 2022

For newly allied party Australian Progressives, see: federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “It’s not as left-wing as some, it emphasises pragmatic reaction rather than ideological ambition, and some of the policies are clearly a little underdone in trying to reconcile five platforms, but most of their positions contain worthwhile goals.”

What I think this year: This is the longest review I’ve ever written, so if nobody sticks with me to the end then I understand. It’s also a much more negative review than in previous editions. This might surprise some readers, including a couple that I know have volunteered for Fusion before. But the more I worked my way through Fusion's materials, the more I came to dislike this party. The heavy use of images that are quite clearly from generative Artificial Intelligence made matters worse: superficial soulless visuals for a superficial soulless party.

Fusion coalesced in 2022 after Australia’s lax party registration laws were tightened. Its original name was FUSION: Science, Pirate, Secular, Climate Emergency, which embodied the names or main focus of the broadly centrist and left-wing parties that had joined forces. These parties retain an independent existence with individual websites, though these also direct the reader to the main Fusion site. The name has been updated to articulate some core principles of this union, or fusion if you will. As I have said before, putting party positions or slogans in the registered name looks ridiculous.

Earlier this year, Fusion formed an alliance with two extra parties. One, the Australian Progressives, is not too objectionable, although I hadn’t realised they still existed. They have gone from being broadly centre-left in their presentation to pitching themselves as not “‘left’ or ‘right’—we’re about moving forward, ie. PROGRESS”. They describe themselves as motivated by “evidence, not ideology”, which makes them a good fit with Fusion (I’ll discuss that claim more below), and state that they sit in the “sensible centre”, a phrase almost invariably used by people who are neither sensible nor in the centre (usually well to the right).

The other partnership that Fusion established is incredibly, unbelievably stupid. They have welcomed into their camp Democracy First, a decidedly right-wing anti-migrant vehicle of serial candidate Vern Hughes. Yes, the Vern Hughes. This is shockingly bad and raises serious questions about the judgement of Fusion's leadership. Hughes has belonged to more parties than you’ve had hot dinners in the last week: by my count, he has stood as a candidate for at least eight groupings, promoted numerous extra parties that never attained registration, and his most recent outing was in 2022 for the lunar-right Australian Federation Party (now the Trumpet of Patriots). Democracy First is openly Trumpian—they have a 12-point platform (more a rant) to “drain the swamp in Canberra”—and it is an unwelcome inclusion in the Fusion fold.

Democracy First worked through a bunch of monikers before settling on the current name, including Sensible Centre (that phrase again!). Their Twitter handle is still @sensiblecentre_ and I had to make a thread in September 2021 warning people to pre-emptively block them because they were searching keywords and aggressively trolling people and peddling anti-vax “plandemic” nonsense. Whether it was Hughes or not (and I won’t be surprised if it was him), it was and is discrediting to the group. Hughes is a self-interested crank whose ideology and principles are flexible, but flexibly right-wing. If he is presenting himself to Fusion as having had some revelation to disown far-right positions, more fool them; the bloke has long since proven himself disreputable.

What all this means is that if you have a Fusion candidate in your House division or Fusion is running a Senate ticket in your state, the people involved could believe in anything from techbro futurism, urgent climate action, or “sensible centre” right-wing aggression. This significant variation in approach and priorities means that you should look up the people standing for Fusion on your ballot because you might find yourself more or less favourably disposed towards them than the party as a whole.

I’m now going to turn to the policies and principles that the party has posted on the main Fusion website. Before I launch into my criticisms, let me note key things that I like: the emphasis on whistleblower protections, the promotion of university teaching and research, the strong emphasis on combatting climate change and restoring damaged environments, and many of the digital privacy policies inherited from the Pirate Party. I do, though, wonder if the Pirate movement’s time has passed: I agree that copyright and intellectual property laws need reform, but perhaps in different ways now that we need to protect authors and artists from AI companies who unethically use and even steal material to train their lake-draining hallucination machines (which, as I noted above, this party seems quite happy to use for illustrations rather than photos and art by real people).

Fusion articulate both a set of values and separate principles. They spent a shocking amount of words, including some diagrams, to say not much at all. Both pages are laden with buzzwords that can basically mean whatever you want them to mean, although some of the discussion of values is useful, e.g. that their approach to personal liberty is one of “maximum net freedom”, where one individual’s freedom to act can be restricted justifiably if it limits the freedom of others. The principles page is tedious jargon that reads like the sort of emails many of us would have received from senior managers who use fancy language to express banalities.

Two major conceits animate Fusion. First, they have a frankly naïve fantasy that they can bring together divergent political interests (e.g. greener-than-Green environmentalists and Democracy First right-wingers) to achieve something despite their disagreements. Second, they believe they can do this because they are uniquely focused on evidence, not ideology. These are the sort of people who think “ideological” and “evidence-based” politics are polar opposites.

In reality, all political actors are ideological, and to deny this is either ignorant or dishonest. It is akin to people who claim they do not speak with an accent, only people from other places have accents. Leo Puglisi interviewed Miles Whiticker (NSW lead Senate candidate) and raised this topic. Whiticker defended the party as not taking a “zealous theory-driven position” that is pursued whatever the evidence might be. He defines being centrist as having the attitude that “if the theory clashes with the evidence, we are more likely to support the evidence than the theory”, which is absolutely not what centrism is and basically everyone at every position on the political spectrum believes they follow the evidence.

(also, yes, I keep using interviews from 6 News because Leo is doing the lord’s work for political nerds everywhere, conducting detailed interviews with politicians beyond the major parties)

Let’s turn now to a specific policy: Fusion’s housing policy is a mess. It is a total mess. You are not prepared for how much of a mess this is. Most of Fusion’s policy pages are brief, with bullet points and short paragraphs. The housing policy reads as someone’s passion project and it runs to 10,700 words. The average person is not reading nearly 11,000 words from a party they’ve never heard of, even if they’re good words. And these are not good words. The main proposals revolve around tinkering with taxes. There are a bunch of proposals for much greater government intervention in the rental sector through apps and transparency websites that veer into micromanagement, running counter to Fusion’s own “our party” page that suggests if you support mandated regulatory approaches you’d prefer the Greens. Fusion’s rental proposals would be much more invasive and meddlesome than anything the Greens propose to reform the sector.

The policy jumps all over the show. For instance, it favourably cites NIMBY economist and former Sustainable Australia candidate Cameron Murray. For the purposes of this review, I asked a well-read YIMBY friend for his reaction if told a party was citing Murray favourably and he replied that it’s “almost certainly bad”. At the same time, however, the housing policy favourably refers to Auckland’s zoning reforms, which Murray has downplayed (to such an extent Stuart Donovan and Matthew Maltman absolutely savaged him in a piece reviewing the effects of Auckland’s zoning reforms last December). It’s a muddled assortment of ideas.

But the funniest part is the favourable inclusion of Saudi Arabia’s linear-city megaproject The Line, part of its larger Neom development. You’ve got to be huffing farts to think The Line is a good idea, but the best bit is the bumbling invocation of David Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage. This concept, central to classical economics, states that countries should focus economic activity on specialisation in industries where they have the greatest efficiencies and lowest opportunity costs. Apparently, the comparative advantage of The Line is that it “will have the economic advantages of being in the desert, and having an uncharacteristic layout”. Is that the best you can do? The comparative advantage of being in the desert.

Another questionable policy is that Fusion wants to declare that ageing is a disease. They pitch this as promoting quality-of-life measures, not as a life-extension policy: if ageing is declared a disease, rather than a natural part of existence, they think this is the magic trick that will enable doctors to prescribe medications that have secondary anti-ageing effects to people who do not have the condition or problem the medication is primarily meant to treat. This has a host of questionable implications and potential for misuse. It’s all a bit silly: there are much better ways to promote quality-of-life measures and healthy ageing than to say the process itself is a disease. The strong whiff of techbro futurism that permeates the party makes me think this is really a policy for anti-ageing fans who think Bryan Johnson is something other than a muddle-headed weirdo.

I could pick on other aspects of their policies and principles but this is quite long enough and I don’t want to repeat the length of their housing policy. Although Fusion contains multitudes, much of it feels driven by the old Future/Science Party, which was very blinkered—the classic science bros who badly need at least a basic education in the humanities. If this is a party made for and by STEM bros, then you can consider me a HASS fellow.

Are there worse parties on the ballot? Yes, many. But they are straightforwardly terrible. Fusion had potential, and I was a fan of some of the parties that came together to form it. I’ve spent so much time on this review because Fusion sit much closer to the positions that I support than, say, Family First, and I think it’s worth articulating why—in 2025 at least—they do not represent a good option, especially not for left-wing voters.

(also, sorry Fusion bros, please don’t @ me: I’ve argued with some of you in DMs before about my reviews and it was very boring)

Recommendation: Give FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation a weak to middling preference. Some individuals might warrant a slightly better preference; any that are aligned with Democracy First should be ranked lowly indeed.

Website: https://www.fusionparty.org.au/

Update, 23 April: Fusion have stepped on even more rakes when announcing their HTVs, which I have discussed here.

[tau1tvec]

EA just doesn’t love this series like we do.

[sisterofthesouth]

signs of the shadow lord are all over noradz even before we see the brand on reece’s face because noradz has anachronistically modern technology such as:

industrial kitchens

glass jars

a system of metal catwalks above the kitchen

gloves that cling to the skin (latex gloves)

conveyor belts

[savagechickens]

Looking Forward To It.

And more from the future.

[purenonsens]

Rrrrargh I want to do the Arcane matchbox label designs!! Doing the gomens was a real fun challenge, now I want to do two sets for Piltover and Zaun... not sure if I should stick to the art deco/ art nouveau style difference for the cities or just go with vaguely late XIX/ early XX cent matchbox designs with a steampunk twist and different color schemes? Oh I'm excited to start working on this~

[gardenofwordss]

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Each failure brings you closer to success. – Thomas Edison

[messagefromtheunderworld]

hello i am not dead just lazy

[asanee44]

New Moon January 2025 in Aquarius: Breaking Barriers with Bold Beginnings

On January 29, 2025, we experience a new moon at 9 degrees of Aquarius. This transit impacts individuals with planets and aspects between 4-14 degrees of this sign the most. But it likewise influences individuals with planets and aspects in Gemini, Libra, Taurus, Leo, and Scorpio at the same degrees. New moon phases are great times to conduct intention rituals to plan and prepare for the months…

[laniusbignaturals]

“Fandom is a space to escape and relax” says the white twenty something who tacitly expects black and brown fans to scroll through mindless repetitions of racist storytelling before they can get to their, uh, “relaxation”

[avelera]

I would say that smut is about 10x harder to write than the "normal" parts of a fic like action, dialogue, etc. I know this specifically because for the last two days I've written about 6,000 words a day for each chapter of "Distinguished Innovators" and today I wrote 600 that I actually kept

[feralbnuuy]

"he/theyfabs who take T"

[larimar]

itspetergabriel

Profession: Rock Vocalist

Nationality: English

Biography: The lead vocalist for progressive rock band Genesis, which first formed when he was 15 years old and included Mike Rutherford and later Phil Collins. After leaving the band in 1975 Gabriel released his first solo album in 1977. His greatest success as a solo artist came with the album "So" released in 1986. It included the singles "Sledgehammer, "Big Time" and "In Your Eyes". Gabriel was known for his innovative videos at this time, and won a record ten MTV awards, nine of which were just for "Sledgehammer". Gabriel is also known for setting up the WOMAD festival - World of Music, Arts and Dance, now successful worldwide, and for his support of Amnesty International.

Born: February 13, 1950 Birthplace: Surrey, England, United Kingdom Age: 74 years old

Generation: Baby Boomer Chinese Zodiac: Ox Star Sign: Aquarius

Happy Birthday, you legend 🥂🎂🎶🙌🏻💗

Thank you for your music, Peter, eternally grateful.

[a-typical]

“Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos