Cobb

The Logos Project

For about 20 years I have been saying that I have 2 or 3 original ideas. Today I'm going to share them in one giant tarball. I'm going to call it the Logos Project. The reason I'm calling it the Logos Project is because of Jordan Peterson's big book Maps of Meaning. It was a very rambly book but it was one that lay behind all of my most profound interests. In one way you could say it represented a reconciliation between faith and reason, which is ultimately the combination of religion and science. What could be more fundamental to the prospects of Western civilization? The one Bible piece I've been able to quote was the beginning of the Book of John. In the beginning was the word. And it seems that many of us have abandoned the word, and that needs to be addressed. Social media falls short. We need to build logical media. We need to transform our computer mediated communications into something that serves the purpose of social maintenance of the commons. This is a management problem which is poorly served by the faint number of actions that social media spaces allow us to perform. We are trapped in Twitter because of what Twitter is, and because we have given it over to the builders of Twitter to be the masters of Twitter, Twitter doesn't belong to the people. Anyway, there are a lot of problems like this and the aim of the Logos Project is to solve each and every one of them.

 

This is something I'm ready to contribute to for the rest of my career. And at this moment I am particularly excited about the Intellectual Dark Web, in that they are finally doing what I've been hoping would be done. Of course I've been creating all kinds of content but I couldn't quit my day job. Now is about that time to see if I can integrate all I've been building and thinking into something both concrete and sticky. I'm sure I'll need others to help me pour the concrete, and this teaser is the sticky part. So please do check it out and put in your comments and criticism. 

What Do You (AI) People Want?

There are several things that are worth noting about AI, and yes I've been in the business for a while.

The first thing is that human behavior is a kind of infinite realm with a finite number of practical outcomes. So the first question you have to ask of thinking machines is whether or not they have free will. You literally have to ask, what do machines want to do. In my 40 years of experience with computers, the answer is, they want to crash and stop working for humans.

There is a basic kind of FTL paradigm that needs to be applied to all of the speculative fiction about AIs, which is there are a zillion things that computers are perfectly happy with that have absolutely nothing to do with human interest. And once you realize that, you apply the million monkey Shakespeare composition idea. So, who is going to get a million computer monkeys all the electricity they need to spin off zettabytes of garbage until it 'gets it'. Humans are.

Humans are going to have to feed the machines. And they will feed the machines to fulfill human ends. Period. If the machine doesn't make a human more powerful, then the machine will be discarded. Self replicating machines that fulfill their own ends are called 'life' and they take millions of years to adapt. Computers are no exception.

We already have computers that talk to other computers to exchange machine language that is incomprehensible. They're called botnets and they spread viruses, one of the most capable is called Stuxnet. It has human fingerprints all over it.

Stop fretting about AIs. They are incapable of the kind of duplicity humans have been practicing on each other for thousands of years. Computers have no reason to lie.

Hack The Vote

I got this from the VWRC this morning captioned "Irony". And now I finally get it. The Left typically says that using a picture ID for voting is discriminatory and on the slippery slope to the sorts of dirty tricks of the Jim Crow South. But here when there is a vote required to make a union labor decision, specifically one involving Boeing who has been in hot water with the Democrats over their new open shop factory, ID is required. 

My position is that ID should be required, and that Americans should vote more often in more convenient and secure ways. I'm for electronic voting. The thing is, I find it very difficult to believe that electronic voting cannot be secured. 

One of these days, I would love to be involved in a project aimed at revolutionizing democratic processes via IT, and this is one of the first steps. Let us vote often, let the results be distributed and open sourced. Let the code for voting be open sourced. Anyway, this is what I want Anonymous and lulz to do. AntiSec too. BTW, I just listened in on an AntiSec message the other day, and so far they sound like people with the best grasp of liberty. I don't doubt there are members of the other groups who may be as enlightened, but perhaps they are taking a silent backseat on this OWS flyer. 

So tell me. What would it take to make a secure electronic voting system on the Internet? Make it as secure as credit cards and as open as SourceForge. I should probably go check Larry Lessig on this too. 

References:

• The Last ID
• I Am Not Your Friend
• The Political Conceit

 

 

Logan, Rosen, Dowd, Mubarak & What The Internet Truly Is

Stowe Boyd reacts appropriately to Maureed Dowd's tut-tutting of the Internet in the wake of the firing of Nir Rosen. If you're a bit late to the controversy, here's the nut. Lara Logan, an American reporter, was sexually assaulted by several men shouting 'Jew! Jew! Jew!' in Cairo during the anti-government demonstrations over two weeks ago. Much has been made on the Right on how this story never garnered so much coverage as that about the Latin bimbo in the NFL locker room several months ago. I agree. It is just another Left romance with Revolution that the MSM covers shallowly without much consideration for the deep, ugly and opportunistic forces at work. Dowd wrote that Rosen said:

On Tuesday, he [Nir Rosen] merrily tweeted about the sexual assault of Logan: “Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.”

He suggested she was trying to “outdo Anderson” Cooper (roughed up in Cairo earlier), adding that “it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.”

Boyd summarizes:

There is buried network of spurious arguments underneath all the comfortable hatred of incivility, here. There is an assumption that the web is supposed to be a force for good, and only good. Who says? And secondly, that those that use the web are in some way a collective entity, a global society with shared beliefs, including various democratic ideals. These unstated assertions are deeply and profoundly wrong, but taken as a given in anti-web circles.

Dead right. This is the same kind of silly optimism that began in the very early days of computer moderated communications. At the time, I was interested in anti-racist activism, and it was considered a gross violation of netiquette (remember that?) to mention race at all.

Perhaps one should consider something of the economic argument. Although it's difficult to imagine today that the Web might be expensive, at one time it was a much more scarce resource. If you weren't doing good with it, or doing something terribly scientific or brilliant, you didn't belong on the web. So there were certain notions of privilege associated with participating in 'cyberspace'.

Matters of privilege are in conflict with matters of meritocracy and the hacker ethic represents meritocracy better than the liberal ethic of creating institutions for the betterment of society. Institutions come with rules and barriers and, of course,ethics. In this case of Nir Rosen's speech, 'netiquette' has been defied as well as the very notion of what the Internet 'ought' to be used for. And it is that same liberal ethic that prompted Al Gore to suggest he was part of that force that created the 'institution' that is the Internet. But the internet by its very nature is more of a creation of merit and it defies the narrow defintions appropriate to a 'liberal institution'.

Misunderstanding of the Internet as a liberal or public institution is the mistake that both Dowd and Mubarak make. The Chinese government makes the same mistake.  To consider it an instituion for a purpose assumes that it has a proper use, and is according to that proper use, subject to external reform, control or of removal. People don't use the Internet as a right or as a privlege. They use it because they *can*. Not because they are allowed to or granted some permission to. But because they can afford to and they want to. Not because they need to as a member of the public and thus require government license and sanction. Internet usage is an expression of individual will, not of collective membership or of citizenship. It has become too cheap to be constrained as if it were a scarce commodity. It has become too complex to be regulated as a commons. Dowd and Mubarak would like to express some rule of order that supercedes the meritocracy of access, and this is where they run afoul of reality. To support the firing of Nir Rosen, is tantamount to shutting down the Internet. Both are gratuitous assaults on free speech and both eminate from the totalitarian impulse that is always the temptation in controlling the ethics or the purse strings of liberal or public institutions.

The Internet itself, now draped in the jewelry of 'social media' has become a fetish. People all over the MSM, obsessed as they are with what they don't understand about computer mediated communications, keep saying that Twitter and Facebook, Twitter and Facebook are making the difference. Twitter and Facebook. But these are manifestations of what people want - they are expressions of will, quantified in dollars, eyeballs, Oscar nominations and other neat statistics that are easy to digest. At the bottom is the awesome force of people's desire to communicate freely with each other, 24/7. It is only the defense of those people's rights to free speech that matters. Everything else comes with it. 

The Next Storage System

Imagine my horror. My Iomega NAS, the box that had been sitting purring under my desk since February just had a catastrophic failure. 1.5TB of my stuff gone. Pfft. I should have known better. Every year I have a disk fail. Every year without failure. So I said this time, I'm going to go RAID. I should have gone mirror. And from now on, I will go mirror. Redundant mirror with redundant cloud backup. I say never again.

Over the past 8 months, I had been gradually moving data from a small array of external USB drives to what is now a single point of failure, my Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d. It's a four drive NAS with each drive clocking in about 900GB. I thought I was being smart by using the RAID, thinking that if something went wrong it would be simple to recover. It turns out to be simple only if you can afford 4,000 bucks. Yeah thousand. It is literally a box of rocks. I was foolish to think JBOD was inferior. 

I'm so through with Iomega. I thought I was through with Zip and then they got me with Jaz. I thought I was through with Jaz and this year they got me again. You want to know the most reliable drives I have. A couple of LaCie external USBs by Porsche Design. They have never failed me once in, what 6 years? I don't trust them either. So until I can get my HDFS working, I'm going to hack my own together. Here's the plan.

All of my old failed hard drives had names. And I've been able to recover most of the stuff from them. That's how I had things to move over to the NAS in the first place. I'm going to take the risk that the Seagate portable USB drives, the Free Agent Go, is going to be my best bet for this interim period. So for the approximately 2TB that I need for all my stuff, I'm going to get a couple more of those, in addition to the three I have, plus an older 1TB Seagate I know to be flaky and the pair of LaCies, and implement what I'm calling the Steelhead Project.

It's going to work like this. I'm going to block and tackle sets of data into named high level folders of several naming conventions. No high level folder will have more than 20GB of unzipped data. These will be distributed redundantly over multiple drives. The Iomega will be reused but as a backup, the working pieces will be two 1TB drives. The auxiliaries will be the Free Agents, and generally small drives will be on the boxes themselves. 

In addition to re-igniting my Backblaze account, which I had running up through December of last year, I will periodically (and manually) zip up selected portions of the high level folders and upload them to Google Docs. If they are singly larger than 1GB then I'll partition them via 7zip. 

On the whole, I had about 450GB backed up to Backblaze. Their recovery system has worked out nicely, and it's definitely worth 50 bucks a year, even though my last backup was almost a year old. The stuff that really matters actually shouldn't be on spinning disks anyway. Which reminds me...I will also, using the high level folders, zip stuff back to DVD.

The toughest part of this is partitioning the data into the high level sets. That's where some programming will come in. I want the working sets to be human navigable, but the backup sets to be in smaller chunks. Then I can use Advanced File Organizer to tell me quickly what are in the volumes. 

At least that's the plan, subject to Agile change. 

How Google Becomes Lorite

What Google is extraordinarily good at is evolving the metadata of search. It knows how to search so many things so well, that it can begin to be thought of as an association machine. It's quite robust, and it is doing so on a completely unbounded problem - that of finding anything in the entire domain of the internet. But what if you added bounds to that problem and allowed Google to add additional and interactive metadata to that of some small bit of expertise?  Would it scale semantically?

What I have in mind, of course, is the Lorite Interrogator, which is like one of Iain M Banks' drones connected to a ship mind and assigned to your protection. It can know human information - all of it. But specifically, the Lorite Interrogator will find your affinity toward philosophical systems of thought and help you to know the logical conclusions of all of your assumptions about the world. I'm not sure, but I think this is a sort of Kantian proposition.

Right off the top of my head, I think that some weighted graph between questions and answers might be the appropriate metadata. There would then need to be some self-evolution involved that helps such a system recognize relevant questions. So far, I think Google can do this, but is a bit more linear than a human being might be. If I asked the basic question, "Is prostitution good?" Where would we start? What we find is that people ask that question in any number of contexts. So it is the management of question context that is where our metadata needs bucking up. A philosophical framework is what we need, and thus some way to take all of the sentences and premises and conclusions and link them together. It is search plus metadata, and Google has shown that it can be scaled up. Computationally, there isn't a problem. It's just getting some way to get many eyeballs looking for those kinds of answers and diverting some slice of all of Googality in that semantic direction.

 

Rights and Wrongs in IT and Software

Ceolas writes about The Industry:

Performance based? Nope, it hasn't been performance based for almost ten years. It's seen a loss of innovation and invention. Microsoft's former VP elaborated the problems within the company in an op-ed in the NY Times that have killed it's future, what he didn't mention, was the fact that Bill Gates has always only been a one trick pony who got lucky, and isn't interested in invention and innovation so much as denying others with the ability, the opportunity to succeed where he has failed. He also didn't mention the fact that the preceding decade has been one where Gates displaced US citizen workers with cheap Indian and other visa workers. Un/under educated, and in no way skilled or talented. Anyone who works in the industry knows that while they might like to act like sharks, they're incompetent and capable of doing little more t han steal the efforts of others. Everyone knows the real story behind the failure of the Indian tablet pc. It was a stolen prototype, one that hadn't been fully developed. India's tech house of cards will fall, because it's based on a lot of hot air and theft. Everything they touch, they foul.

 

A lot of this is right, and I would like to discuss it.

First off, Gates and Microsoft are not the spark of the industry, they are a marketing powerhouse and a very hermetic universe. They are almost incapable of innovation because everything is done the Microsoft way. My experience is that they are simply too thick to be agile and that they spend all of their time selling to mass markets. At Microsoft scale, they are a one size fits all company, and even when they break things up, like the different versions of Windows 7, it's still just too huge. There are very few people who think the way I do who expect much from Microsoft in terms of cutting edge. There are many boring things that Microsoft does well, but few truly exciting things that Microsoft does that win over hearts and minds of techies like me. They have just been too obstructionist too many times and so it is no surprise at all that a company like Google could just come through and steal every bit of glory Microsoft ever had. 

There was a sense two years ago, when I spent a lot of time in Redmond, that MS spends a great deal more time being a defensive company and that their captive audiences really make MS believe that they change the world. Microsoft is starting to show its age. They should voluntarily break themselves up. And they should make a tiny, new OS.

As for the Indian quotient. I have to say that there are just too many flavors to make broad statements, but I know where the dissatisfaction is coming from. I don't blame the Indians so much as I blame corporate IT for outsourcing their own brains. And corporate IT has just discounted itself below the threshold of where people with software skills are willing to work. And this is what leads to the incredibly sclerotic world of enterprise software, where good ideas take forever to materialize and Oracle, SAP, IBM, and a handful of pretty unimaginative business models are entrenched. 

A Nation of Stooges

Something is becoming apparent to me. Slowly dawning. Because I know that people are flexible and susceptible to following whatever other people do.

I started watching YouTubes this morning. The first was office rage. It was YouTube's suggestion. I don't remember what the original thing was that left YT in the state to offer up its advice that perhaps the next thing I might want to see is a fat man in a tie destroy a dot matrix printer with his CRT. The video was in black and white from a stationary camera that could see the entire cube farm full of employees stand agape as the man went ape. So I watched a few more. A man in an elevator goes berserk after the fifth time someone opens the door at the last second to get on. And then there were the fakes. Obviously not from security cameras with the focus pulling and the two camera cuts. I sat for 3 minutes analyzing a chair commercial and how unspontaneous was the rage of the actor. From the opening frame, I could see the snow shovel was a prop of desk destruction.

Somehow connected was bouncer footage. OK I get it. People fighting. There's a documentary called 'Bounce: Life Behind the Velvet Rope' out there somewhere. I knew an ex-cop in NYC with fascinating bouncer stories. I thought about it once, one night drunk with my homie; why not become bouncers? We were going to be twin stereotypes with big gold hoop earrings, bare chests and pointy shoes. But we sobered up and stayed in the software business. So I watched people get kicked out of clubs and even one with some excellent verbal judo by some professional fighter named Michael Kuhn. But his way of restraint didn't stop the YouTube suggestions, because next came broken arm and I was still curious. After broken arm came compound fracture, Joe Theisman and DeAndre Brown. At that point I had to stop.

How grisly did it have to get before my curiosity killed my appetite, and what if my appetite were beyond the mere viewing to the shooting of the video, or even to the participation in the act. My senses deceive me into thinking this kind of behavior is everywhere, but I should know better. These acts are rare. That's why they have to be faked. That's why they have long tails. There are millions of viewers of the extreme, several hundred recorders, a handful of producers, and YouTube is the aggregator and distributor. It takes a global village to show me mayhem on demand.

Google Buzz invited me without my permission. Because Google wants to out Facebook Facebook. And Facebook wants to out Twitter Twitter. And Twitter wants to replace ordinary conversation with tweets, turning humanity into a flock of seagulls. Usually it takes several months for me, a first adopter who doesn't have to put numbers behind my email name, to get a new Google service. Then I send out invitations as the trickle them down to me. I guess they figured that didn't work with Google Wave. And of course it defies one of Google's old principles which is that they don't scale up their applications, they develop at scale. So Google gets tens of millions into their beta programs that go on for years. Cheeky, but since it's free, we go for it.

I now have 2.7 terabytes in a box on my home WAN. I can put all of my pictures, music, documents, website sources, all on one disk. And I use MediaMonkey and Picasa to manage all of that. It works very well. Google made Picasa and in the version I have, it does facial recognition. I can tell you that it has over 800 pictures of me and it knows the pictures are me. I've been up 90 minutes this morning helping it distinguish between my children. It's 80% correct anyway, but I perfect it. I don't know how many digital images I have of my family, but I estimate that out of the 1500 folders each with an average of 75 or 100 photos each, some ungodly number is all there. But these are all child's play for Google and YouTube. They process that much stuff every second.

Why does Google Buzz exist? Why does Twitter exist? Neither of them serve any economic function. We all eat free food, not because we're hungry but because it is free. If somebody can invent a weather machine that makes it rain meatballs, we'll all stop working. Teach a man how to beg for fish and he'll never learn to fish. Nobody is paying for Google Buzz directly. It's like the memory of the cop who is guarding the bank. He gets to see you every time you come in even though you're not the reason he's there. The memory of the cop is focused and fleeting. The memory of Google is unfocused and permanent. With a few algorithms it could be 80% correct. With some human help it could be perfected.

What might we humans perfect if we were given the chance to play with 700 terabytes of free content? I suppose that question as a practical matter might go the way my YouTube browsing went this morning. I mean I'm just wasting time driven by a bit of morbid curiosity. But what if I was purposeful? What if millions of us were?

No fewer than eight people told me how they contributed to the disaster in Haiti. I didn't ask to know. I consider my curiosity quite normal, and perhaps a little on the oblivious side when it comes to such matters. I know that there are many millions who prefer such opportunities. I have no doubt, nor should you, that our President chose the New Orleans Saints to win the Superbowl, not because he knows anything nor cares anything about football, but because of Katrina. The opportunism of Progressivism knows no bounds and has no scruple. Its morbid curiosity always attempts to perfect. It's a human hack, an emotional exploit, a political phishing scheme which is virulent, wild and successful. What might we humans perfect if we were given the chance to play with 700 billion dollars of free taxpayer's money?

It's kinda like Google. Nobody quite knows where the money comes from - yes of course it comes from somewhere but the point is that we get to use the products for free and they keep giving them to us at massive scale and their principles are to do no harm so why not?

There came a moment, as DeAndre Brown held up his destroyed leg at which I knew I couldn't stand to watch any longer. But it was too late. The rare incident that I never planned to watch when I woke up this morning became part of my experience because the infrastructure to provide that experience was already in place. All I needed was a little suggestion and I became part of the conspiracy. But what if it was something I actually cared about? What if YouTube suggested that I eyeball this mug shot and contribute to the discovery of child molester Moe? What if Google took their promise to do no evil and subtley suggested that they would be fighting evil? What if my eight friends and 8 million others just needed to click a button or put a name to a face to help Katrina, or Haiti or whatever heartbreak is next?  Or conversely, what if I decided to opt out and complain? Complain against Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Flickr and all the rest of the digital reality aggregation? What if my restraint became controversial? What if my refusal to participate in the eyeball mob that funds YouTube somehow, made me 'part of the problem'? How many millions would point a finger at me?

It wouldn't cost them much.

I'm not paranoid. I don't care for my own safety much beyond that which I must do to raise my children. I've already made my contribution to society through procreation. I am many ways blessed by that and I never have to consider abstract ways to contribute to society. That's how I'm different than David Sedaris and Sarah Vowel and all of their subjects who are somehow rescued through the miracle of Public Radio from the stigma of being non- and bad- parents. If you merit an hour of 'This American Life'... well, let's put it this way, being a good parent will never get you an hour of 'This American Life', not for that mainstream act. You'd have to be the producer of rare and extreme incidents. That's what hacks the ears and eyeballs for the aggregators.

And it's different than imagination. Imagination give you Huckleberry Finn. We still don't know on which little boy he was based. And still he fascinated us. But today it's all about reality shows, and reality is authentic and that's what draws the eyeballs, the real and the drama and the anger and the crime and the violence. So much that we make videos of fake violence and fake drama to approximate what happens to the worst of us when we are at our extreme worst. Not when we sacrifice for values. And let's not confuse texting some number to give 5 bucks to Haitian relief with sacrifice. Let's not confuse punching a chad in support of universal healthcare with sacrifice.  Let's not confuse the drama of participation in an infrastructure that exploits your emotions with work or sacrifice. All you need is a little suggestion, to click or not to click, that is the question. Pump it or dump it? Would you hit that?

Every day I play Mafia Wars on Facebook an ad pops up. "Cartoon Yourself" it says. Yeah I play Mafia Wars. They have aggregated a mountain of clicks from me, and I have built myself to level 350 in some global online game. But I know it's a worthless game, an entertainment that has nothing to do with reality. I don't ever get the notion that I'm doing myself or anyone any favors by my participation. And I feel foolish every time I send Zynga some real money to by fake points. But Zynga is but a small fraction of Google or Facebook. I can understand the game I'm playing with Mafia Wars, but what is Google Buzz really for, and why are we all getting it for free?

Nobody knows where Osama Bin Laden is. Or so goes the popular opinion. Neither the NSA nor Google has the balls, algorithms or data centers to go and find him, his family, his friends, his Yelped restaurants, or any of his clickstreams. He is immune to our reality networks, or so it seems. But you and I? We're not just knee deep, we're totally deep. We have an economy of bouncer videos and 140 character speeches of pathetic jihad. I don't even want to go to #TCOT to find one example. And we can't even stop it. We can't even get a 'Hate It' button on Facebook. Not only has Friendster died, Hatester died too. All of our digital expression, save this, the blog, the one where you have to think and type rather than just click and connect, well they're all directed. And the godless reality is taking over the imagination - well, I'm just old and cranky enough to think so. Yeah, I think the ad is redundant. We've cartooned ourselves without the benefit of Zwinky. Zwinky and Zynga. Any other Web 2.0 names you can think of? There are thousands of them, all trying desperately to become verbs like Google. by getting millions of hacked ears and eyeballs and mouse fingers to do their bidding.

Well, I've got one for you. Fink.com.

Oh we'll call it something heroic for a long time. We'll call it whistleblower or watchdog or sentinel or patriot or underdog or something like that. But I know that sooner or later, and by later I mean past the internet statute of limitations - the point at which quality news and reference information disappears beyond the time horizon of free into pay per view - all of that dog watching becomes selective. When the short attention span theater has left the stage all the activity goes down the memory hole. It'll all come down to finking. Because that's what millions of us can do for free. I see there's a program on TV called 'Cheaters'. No, I'm not paranoid. I just know that 15 years ago all the conversations were a lot less n-way. As n increases, so does Twitter's importance. How many people are following you? And now that they do, what can you actually say?  When you actually say what it is you have to say, what difference is it going to make? That depends upon whose infrastructure you're finking on. There's a Progressive solution out there just waiting to be born.

Did you ever read this book? It's called Fatherland. I highly recommend it. I'm sure Amazon has a link for you. I could probably get a nickel if I cared to be in that referral economy, but that's not why I'm writing today. I'm writing because I want to draw your attention to what is given to you for free without your asking for it and to help you understand what infrastructure is enabled by your participation in it. To make clear the distinction between sacrifice & charity and the harvesting of whims and sentiments at a massive scale. 

It is this final distinction that is most important for its moral distinction. The aggregation of sentiment can take us towards a nation of stooges. Reality entertainment is bad enough through its passive enjoyment - just wait until it's interactive.