Not sure of any beginner FAQs on scanning.

I guess it all depends on how much scanning you plan to do, the size of things you want to scan, and how accurate you need the scans to be. Out of curiosity, what are you looking to scan? Is it something that can’t be modeled in CAD software?

At the risk of giving you yet another option - Teaching Tech did a video on a neat scanning rig called the OpenScan Mini. Looks like someone linked OpenScan below as well. You build it yourself from electronic components, a pi, a pi camera, and some printed parts. Results look pretty decent for what it would cost to build, and probably worth the time and effort if you plan to do lots of scanning.

I only bring it up to make the point that not everybody is calling what Nvidia is doing ‘groundbreaking innovation’.

I mean, Nvidia is being sued by rightsholders in a class action lawsuit.

Theoretical question - would it be possible to get so gassed up that if you peed in the pool you’d make everyone else test positive?

I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?

Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.

Ahh, the US-Russia summit in Geneva in June 2021.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose countries hold 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, agreed at a June summit in Geneva to embark on an integrated bilateral ‘Strategic Stability Dialogue’ to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.

Reuters - U.S. and Russia say they held ‘substantive’ arms control talks in Geneva

Simpler times.

GEC looks like a legit project, and I like how their news releases are multilingual. Thank you for sharing that.

I note that the US Foreign Malign Influence Center is also at work in this space, and authored the alert yesterday that I think is motivating this particular news item.

I think funding these governmental agencies, incentivizing inter-agency communication, and modernizing & centralizing the communication of their findings is something America needs badly, as well as the country I live in.

It’s a bit crazy that the only way to look at & share the FMIC alert is via a direct link to a pdf. In order to find it, you have to already know what you’re looking for. Give 20 millennials a job with a mandate to find a way to organize and disseminate this information, and things would be so much better. Right now, a person has to be a sleuth to put these pieces together, and that’s not right.

Anyway, I’m not taking issue with what you posted, I’m just soapboxing. An effective response to the issue of foreign disinformation campaigns seems relatively straightforward to me. The only thing missing is the political will.

Well done. I just discovered the Media Bias Fact Check - so, thank you for that!

Keep doing what you’re doing. Assembling this information and making it easy to access is critically important.

We desperately need improved lines of communication between the state and the public regarding foreign disinformation. Like, a free newspaper that comes out every Monday with confirmed examples of foreign propaganda from the previous week. And official social media accounts that give up-to-date information. Surely it’s in the public interest to establish offices that rapidly assemble and distribute this kind of information. Finding out, ‘oh hey, that protest way back in 2022 was organized as part of a foreign interference campaign’, it’s just too late. This sort of information needs to be centralized, summarized, and rapidly disseminated.

It’s not enough for the state to simply say ‘be cautious’. Citizens need to know what to be cautious of. A general message that you shouldn’t trust anything you see on social media, that’s actually a benefit to the propagandists creating chaos in information spaces.

I just don’t see how the problem of disinformation gets addressed without intelligence agencies getting more modern and engaged in their approach to communication with the public.

Before this is all over, MS will be charging users to extract their snapshots from a proprietary cloud-only one drive account. The recovery process will take about 3 hours, and involve scrolling through ai-authored help articles that don’t lay out clearly and methodically how to access the old snapshots. The comments on the help articles will begin with “Hello sir, can you confirm that you have followed the steps at this link?”. The link, before delivering you to an irrelevant solution, will shunt you to a landing page that forces you to log into your microsoft account before you can see the answer.

“We don’t understand. Why aren’t people simply searching for Taylor Swift”

Oh look, the sequel to birth certificate.

For real!

Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit’s licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That’s really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. “Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee.”

Think it’s more of an allusion to lurking habits, active times, metadata, stuff not related to public posts. I’d imagine the average user has plenty of stuff they’ve browsed through that they wouldn’t want their family / co-workers, etc. to know.

Would also need to get a burner phone number w/ answering machine to take calls from 240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses and cash-strapped public schools for any & all tech support questions until the end of time, because if there was an issue with system stability in any way whatsoever, or if the router went down or the printer stopped working, they’d assume it was the fault of ‘the guy who changed everything’.

Linux is great & everything, but this sounds like a recipe for utter disaster, not a way to make an easy buck.

Interesting. I’m curious to know more about what you think of training datasets. Seems like they could be described as a stored representation of reality that maybe checks the boxes you laid out. It’s a very different structure of representation than what we have as animals, but I’m not sure it can be brushed off as trivial. The way an AI interacts with a training dataset is mechanistic, but as you describe, human worldviews can be described in mechanistic terms as well (I do X because I believe Y).

You haven’t said it, so I might be wrong, but are you pointing to freewill and imagination as somehow tied to intelligence in some necessary way?

Thanks! I’m not clear on what you mean by a worldview simulation as a scratch pad for reasoning. What would be an example of that process at work?

For sure, defining intelligence is non trivial. What clear the bar of intelligence, and what doesn’t, is not obvious to me. So that’s why I’m engaging here, it sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into an answer. But I’m not sure I understand your terms.

Not being combative or even disagreeing with you - purely out of curiosity, what do you think are the necessary and sufficient conditions of intelligence?

I’m glad to hear this and hopefully it fulfills my fantasy of having sex with Clippy.