#signal and noise

[processzine-org]

🕳️ “Jenna’s Fracture” — from Beyond the Edge of Light by somethingismissing drawn from the short story Antenna →

“Can you hear the echoes call? In the void, we lose it all.”

This track emerged from Antenna, a short story about signal loss, perception, and the fragile link between mind and world. But revisiting the lyrics now, it’s impossible not to hear the deeper resonance with auditory processing disorder — that strange, liminal space where sound arrives, but meaning doesn’t.

The song drifts through static, glitch, repetition, and disconnection — not as stylistic affectations, but as reflections of what it feels like when you’re caught between hearing and understanding, between noise and signal. It’s a kind of perceptual limbo. Voices blur, memory slips, and comprehension frays.

The repetition of:

“A tethered mind to distant cries, Breaking through where silence lies.” ...reads like a neuro-poetic depiction of APD: the tether to meaning pulled thin by invisible interference.

The artist name, somethingismissing, was born from the original concept behind Narrata.io — ERR_404. It’s a digital metaphor, yes, but also a sensory one: the search for meaning in a world of dropped packets and faded messages, where what’s “heard” isn’t always what’s received.

If you live with APD — or any kind of sensory processing difference — this one might speak directly to you. Or echo quietly in the spaces between.

—

Full lyrics:

Drifting through the static hum, Memories that come undone. Signals lost in shifting light, Fragments dance in endless night.

Can you hear the echoes call? In the void, we lose it all. A tethered mind to distant cries, Breaking through where silence lies.

Can you hear the echoes call? In the void, we lose it all. A tethered mind to distant cries, Breaking through where silence lies.

Fading faces, blurred with time, Glitches twist this fragile mind. Reaching out to touch the past, Slipping forward, falling fast.

The void, it waits, a hollow friend, Calling softly, ’til the end. In the static, voices blend, All we lost, and all we mend.

Can you hear the echoes call? In the void, we lose it all. A tethered mind to distant cries, Breaking through where silence lies.

Can you hear the echoes call? In the void, we lose it all. A tethered mind to distant cries, Breaking through where silence lies.

The static fades into the night, Whispered secrets, lost from sight. In the darkness, drifting free, Gone forever—just memory.

Can you hear the echoes call? In the void, we lose it all. A tethered mind to distant cries, Breaking through where silence lies.

The static fades into the night, Whispered secrets, lost from sight. In the darkness, drifting free, Gone forever—just memory.

The static fades into the night, Whispered secrets, lost from sight. In the darkness, drifting free, Gone forever—just memory.

The static fades into the night.

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"(and echoes are seldom more than a bark, no matter how pure-voiced the caller)"

- The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov

[grayrazor]

AI fiction proponents are like “if infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters could make Shakespeare, then they could make something better than Shakespeare. Think about that.”

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

The Limits of Statistical Thinking - Limitations of Abstraction

"Farmers aim to implement a breeding strategy that maximizes profits. In poultry, this amounts to maximizing hens’ lifetime egg production. One sensible approach might be to select the most productive individual chickens to reproduce. The reality, however, is not so simple."

"The causal pathways that affect individual hens’ egg production are complicated because each hen’s productivity is influenced by the behavior of other hens in their social environment. It turns out that the most productive hens in a coop are also the nastiest hens, feather-pecking and cannibalizing the other hens in their coop. Because individual hens who are most productive are those that harm others, selectively breeding the most productive hens can actually lead to lower overall egg production (Muir, 2005; Wade et al., 2010)."

"From an economic perspective, feather-pecking and cannibalism are problems when they cut into profits (El-Lethey et al., 2000). From an animal-welfare perspective, they are tragedies. Yet breeders have developed a strategy to address these problems: Instead of selecting the most productive individuals, breeders can select the most productive groups—that is, all hens in the most productive coops are selected to reproduce. Such a selection regime implicitly accounts for hens’ indirect effects on group members (Wade et al., 2010)."

"In one application of this approach, mortality dropped from 68% to 9% in just a few generations, and laying increased from 91 to 237 eggs (Muir, 1996)." - Shifting the Level of Selection in Science

In AI research, and general AI products, there is a tendency to reduce problems down to the bare minimum - reducing the number of dimensions of problems to make them more manageable and solvable. This is, in many ways, an excellent idea. It reduces the curse of dimensionality, it makes it significantly easier to solve issues and can then reduce the time and effort needed to do tasks. This is a process also done by biological organisms to adapt and change their approaches to life. What, then, can this tale of chickens teach us about the limitations of simplistic statistical thinking? The main issue arises, in what is removed. In the book The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver outlines how when we make decisions, we look for useful signs (signals) and remove irrelevant information (noise) to make good quality predictions or decisions. For the chickens, sociality is not considered important, so is removed as a measure. This crucial piece of information is not considered economically important as the number of eggs laid - causing a loss of eggs laid in future. Lesson one is that you must do your research thoroughly before defining your useful metrics. There are several not easily quantifiable variables which are often not considered. Sociality, aggressiveness. The social intelligence measures are not considered. Lesson two is that you must find a way to let qualitative measures be used to inform your approach. These can, potentially be quantified in some ways, but must be done very carefully as by quantifying you will create some way of "gaming" the definitions.

Different scale decisions will, of course, demand differing scales of information. For the very short term - individual chicken selection would make some logical sense. Lesson three is that your ultimate goal will define the metrics used. The ultimate goal of the chicken farmer is to get more eggs to sell. If they're focussed on very short-term results, for high gain, individual chicken selection would be acceptable. If, however, they want decades long improvements, then selecting social groups, with high egg laying, is the best approach and social ability becomes a crucial metric of success.

From the chicken's point of view their goals are to feed and reproduce. If the farmer rewards those who are hyper-optimised for both, then the chickens with adaptations to improve their egg laying will succeed - whatever that strategy might be. Frankly the chickens don't give a cluck about giving you eggs.

Any good model, or any good simulation of intelligence, must be able to at least be able to, in some way, consider these limitations if it is able to return good quality decisions or predictions.

Too often, too much of reality is abstracted away, and what is left is a meaningless sludge of "watching the numbers go up" which appears to have been the only possible choice when better alternatives were readily available to those who only looked for them. A reality all to familiar to many living in our current economic system of metrics and KPIs.

This is the key limit of statistical methods for applied systems. Unless you are able to adapt your metrics over time, to suit your goals and adapt to unexpected outcomes, your model is doomed to become less representative of reality over time.

Numbers can tell a story, but high resolution reality hold the whole picture - warts and all.

Source: Shifting the Level of Selection in Science - Leo Tiokhin, Karthik Panchanathan, Paul E. Smaldino and Daniël Lakens

[unsolicited-opinions]

Signal > Noise

(Bite-sized topics in media and information literacy)

Here's a great example of how amazingly sloppy professional western media has become.

This New York Magazine article came out four days ago. Check out the caption on this photo.

"Damage from Israel’s strike on Ramat Gan in Iran"

Here's the thing: Israel didn't strike Ramat Gan in Iran.

Ramat Gan is a city of ~170,000 people to the east of Tel Aviv, in Israel.

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information-getting the facts wrong.

Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead- intentionally misstating the facts.

If this had just been posted today, I'd assume it's a mistake and call it misinformation.

After four days uncorrected, though, this stops being misinformation and becomes disinformation.

Why? After four days, they unquestionably know it's wrong...and have not bothered to correct it.

What does that tell you about New York Magazine (or parent company Vox Media)? How important are things like journalistic ethics and integrity to them?

[ronthedunedain]

25AF/ZQ 25th Air Force

OL-WP Operating Location Wright Patterson

Special Analysis Branch SIGINT/NSA/Crypto Air Force Patch

[rabbit-rays]

the mad stone!

let it control you!

[vren-diagram]

Democrats could've won if both Joe and Kamala had committed ritual suicide in April. They still can.

[saturnniidae]

I like to think Hiccup has whole 'conversations' with Toothless that are essentially incomprehensible to anyone but them (they consist of little human language–mostly draconic noises and body language as well as signals/cues specific to Hiccup and Toothless) the other riders are used to it at this point, but a lot of people are very much not and find it incredibly confusing.

Its started a lot of rumors of Hiccup being some 'dragon whisperer' that can actually speak to and command them and the other riders tease him about it relentlessly because he despises the rumors and always tries to correct them. Like every time they're brought up he'll say something along the lines of "No. If u actually pay attention to and connect with them, adapting to their way of communication isn't hard. I don't actually speak with them ur just not observant enough" and is constantly ignored

(This is kind of a follow-up to another post but I didn't want to tack it onto a rb)

[everwalldigan]

Ok so the popular consensus is that the bat brood will absolutely terrorise any guests any of them have over but what if we take that concept and tweak it a little bit.

Instead of them doing weird shit openly, how about they act totally normal HOWEVER they do weird little unsettling things that suddenly disappear if you do a double take. The guest leaves really unsettled but with no tangible reason they can name to explain it. Allow me to provide some examples:

Dick: has spent an obscene amount of hours practicing “delayed speech glitch” where his mouth moves, sounding out words before he vocalises them.

Duke: manipulates the lights to shine like a stage light on whoever is speaking at that moment, sometimes douses any family member who has pissed him off in darkness until the guest notices and immediately retracts it when they look back. (This backfires sometimes cause they enjoy pretending to brood in the shadows. Its genetic)

Damian: makes his animals appear in random corners and then disappear just as quickly. (His best feat was when he successfully pulled it off with the batcow and Wally left so fucking confused)

Cass: utilises her body language reading skills to give the guest what they want before they have the chance to ask for it. They spend the entire evening carefully monitoring their thoughts cause they’re 100% convinced she’s a mind reader

[omnifuneral]

vibes are data btw

[processzine-org]

🌀 "The Seer", encrypted.

A work in process for process zine #00 — this spread translates a full-colour painting into raw Base64 code. The wall of characters becomes a veil, a kind of static field — a metaphor for the liminal experience of Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), where the signal is present but inaccessible without the right decoder.

The artwork, The Seer, is hidden in plain sight. Digitised, fragmented, and embedded in the code itself.

When the zine is complete, the full Base64 string will be included as a hidden annotation in the digital PDF. Readers will be able to extract and decode the painting — transforming static back into signal, and signal into sight.

For now, it exists as encrypted presence.

This is the painting, encrypted. Decode the full Base64 string from the PDF’s hidden annotation to reveal The Seer.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

had such a terribly awful day from start to finish yesterday but i am snuggling my sugu plushie and drinking warm milk like a domesticated cat and the sun is shining ……. today will be a little better

[zytes]

9.16.24 / 9.17.24 - september supermoon

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played SIGNAL TO NOISE ?

By Craig Duffy

Signal to Noise is a bittersweet interstellar epistolary game for 2 players, played out one message at a time over email.

One player takes on the role of the Explorer, one of the lucky few chosen to join the generation ship while the other takes on the role of the Earther, forced to stay behind as their companion departs the solar system. Play each round is driven by a series of prompts, a combination of mundane everyday occurrences and life-changing events that develop over time. Sending messages back and forth to one another the players must try to maintain a connection in the face of an ever-increasing time lag and the creeping distortion of the messages as the signal becomes distorted during its transmission over interstellar distances. Eventually, the unfolding events or slow loss of connection will force one to break contact, forever severing the bond between the characters that they have struggled to maintain for so long.

[unsolicited-opinions]

I used to sorta' like Qasim. He's knowledgeable, and sharp- so this is particularly disappointing.

This is misleading on several levels.

"Iran has no nukes"

Technically correct, but deceptive.

Iran has enriched uranium to 60% purity, just short of weapons-grade (90%), and per the IAEA, has enough fissile material for several bombs if further enriched.

U.S. intelligence confirms Iran could build a bomb within weeks if it chose to.

"Iran never attacked the USA"

Straight up false.

Iran-backed proxies have killed over 600 U.S. troops in Iraq using advanced IEDs

Soleimani directly oversaw these militias. Iran also backed the 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 241 U.S. Marines.

"Iran offered to revive the deal"

Misleading. Iran demanded all sanctions be lifted before compliance, violating the JCPOA’s sequencing. Talks have stalled repeatedly over Iranian non-cooperation

"Iran allows full IAEA inspections"

False. Iran has denied access to key sites and disabled surveillance cameras since 2021.

"No approval from Congress"

True, but a legal gray area and common for presidents to do through broad Article II powers for such strikes.

Here's just the times Obama authorized strikes in/on sovereign nations without prior congressional approval:

1. Libya (2011)

Operation Odyssey Dawn / NATO Operation Unified Protector

Objective: Stop Gaddafi’s assault on civilians during the Arab Spring.

No Congressional approval; justified under humanitarian intervention and UN Resolution 1973.

Widely criticized for exceeding the 60-day limit of the War Powers Resolution.

2. Pakistan (2009–2016)

Drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

Conducted without the consent of Pakistan's Parliament or judiciary.

Not formally approved by Congress.

Included the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.

3. Yemen (2009–2016)

Drone and airstrike campaign targeting AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).

No Congressional authorization for strikes inside Yemeni territory.

Often coordinated with Yemeni government, but with inconsistent legal clarity.

4. Somalia (2009–2016)

Airstrikes and special operations against al-Shabaab militants.

5. Syria (2014–2016)

No explicit AUMF covering Somalia.

Legal rationale extended from 2001 AUMF for al-Qaeda affiliates.

Airstrikes against ISIS beginning in September 2014.

No Congressional authorization specific to Syria.

Justified under the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaeda, even though ISIS had split from al-Qaeda.

Rashid's narrative collapses under scrutiny. It weaponizes moral outrage by omitting critical facts, flattening decades of Iranian aggression, and falsely portraying Trump’s controversial (but not unprecedented) strike as genocidal warfare.

Trump may well have been wrong, but this is a shit argument he knows is shit and is deliberately deceptive.

That makes this propaganda.