Omg, thank god we’re back on earth again. I mean, okay, he’s a nonagenarian, but all the action and fast context switches from dream to reality to dream and back and to space… it doesn’t feel to fast for me. Unlike on Discovery where getting a burger seems to fast to absorb. I can finally understand a Star Trek episode. Picard is a powerful character not only in the actor who brings him alive, but also the psychic embodiment of an ideal that thrives in Trekies minds. What he says resonates, it motivates and perpetuates the story.

I would have preferred a more lit Enterprise D like every time we’ve seen it in TNG. It would have been nice to have a bigger moment of nostalgia.

They come in a pair? Can anybody say GAN? Maybe the neural nets has to be trained side by side, in some sense Data and Lore seemed like opposites because they had been used to create one another in coevolutionary artificial maturation. They had to have each other for either to become sophisticated. Wow, that’s really pretty cool!

I feel sad that Dahji just dies like that… I mean if they’re sentient, that’s like a really life that was lost there. The existence of Soji does not console a mind full of star fleet values… values for life.

This is an awesome start. I am looking forward to next Thursday… heh, they even put it on Thursday’s. That’s the same weekday I looked forward to every week in the early 90’s.

FAMX 0.2 (Actually watched it five times.)

So, Trumps legal team just responded to the impeachment and denies breaking any laws.

Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine, stating that it is so until Ukraine investigates Biden. Biden happens to be son of Trumps biggest competitor with most hope to earn nomination to run against trump in 2020. Trump refused to cooperate with investigation of this negotiation with Ukraine.

So, suppose Hitler was an American with Trump as president. Nobody would question him for trading military strategic dealings for that foreign country to find evidence of Hitlers bad acts. I guess my feeling is that this type of executive action can be justifiable. Just because Hitler is a political opponent of Trump, doesn’t mean he can’t break laws or be evil. Also, since the action is military related, it seems also plausible that its secrecy has strategic value–for the country. The complexity of the problem arise in that we, ordinary civilians, are not privy to the entire scope of global military affairs. We don’t really know the direct or indirect effects the withholding of aid has on our allies and global geopolitics. I mean, it may even have been a ruse to delay the aid for some other reason that we are still not aware of.

I guess it would be simpler if we knew whether the Bidens were Hitlers. That doesn’t excuse a political act on Trump’s part, but at least it’s hard to demonstrate damages when you successfully investigates Hitler. Another matter is universality. It seems conceivable that if we read all of Trumps briefings and found there were similar evidence for a Republican citizen Hitler with similarly suspicious offenses as Biden, and he did not act to incite foreign investigation of the Republican Hitler, then clearly he acted against the country driven by political motivations.

But one has to argue to the Republican response brief that if Trump is allowed to perform clearly politics motivated acts using power of his office, Congress is equally allowed exercise its power to impeach despite appearances of politics-based motivations.

And honestly, the more important point is what trump responded to these… Everyone on the hill does this kind of dealings. I mean seriously, if they are all doing it, we should impeach trump and then make each of them pay for not acting in the interest of America.

I guess there’s the conundrum. If they are all doing it, Trump will be held innocent, due to Senators’ own self serving politics.

Sigh.

Last democratic presidential candidate debate of 2019. NO! For all the candidates who insist immigrants like dreamers ARE America, I wholeheartedly disagree.

Americans who are Americans, all Americans are America. Immigrant needs should not supersede those of Americans. They are NOT the only hope for America’s future.

I will not be a party to a party that puts non-American’s human needs above American’s human needs. Immigrants needs to be given a chance to be a part of a more advanced society through an integration process. They should NOT be imported to solely to work low wage jobs and pay for drugs. I’m glad a Andrew Yang is able to steer clear of this issue and focus on Americans.

And, Democratic Candidates, really?! Your realistic performance in mud wrestling should get you a role on Peppa Pig and not in the Whitehouse, so, please, resist the urge and certainly don’t flaunt it. You embarrass me.

On the other hand, I wonder if Andrew Yang will regret saying that Human value and Economic value should be separated. I guess he can’t really, since one of his two major proposals is actually proposing a social credit to account and store Human values. My own interpretation of Capitalism is that Capitalistic Humans believe that money represents and serves Human value. An American Capitalist would not separate the two any more than an Italian Catholic would not separate the holy trinity,… or a Chinese Taoist would separate the Yin and the Yang. The unique relationship between Money valuation and Human valuation of things, actions and situations is exactly why we think it’s so great. Lacking that, Capitalism is just another banal attempt at organizing human interactions with nothing sacred attached.

Money buys happiness with superior reliability.

On this day after the Democratic Presidential candidate debate, days before Christmas, all I can think of doing is to praising Money.

OMG thank you fucking gods Silicon Valley looks over.

Honestly, this TV show come at a difficult time to write a TV show like this. I mean between bitcoins and deep AI… and the Trump presidency life is more fun than fiction.

Also, I hope the authors and allllllll his technical advisors and consultants actually ran out of material. Does that mean that we’re at the wits end of the likes of Gates and Ellison and … all the VC’s that consult does this show? for absurdity?

this last bit where compression un-does encryption was all the rage, possibly because compression suddenly got really good due to “deep” style algo’s, maybe two to five years before the show. Basically if you can reliably compress all encrypted messages, it means you know something’s about the message which is either the encryption method or the encrypted message.

It’s interesting that the show illustrates the problem with Tesla auto-pilot. Some how, the end… seems like the beginning of something really bad…. and the worst part is that the bad sequel might take place in real life.

I’m glad the show is over. I hate it when the single Chinese character person, sampled out of a quarter of the world’s population, just happen to be evil… and everyone else is great. Like literally, they’re like great more than great can be…. every stinking racist character on the show except for the Chinese character.

I guess this is like a thing white guys do where the guy takes his dick out and waves it in the wind and says, look at my huge dick, no shrinkage even in the morning San Franciscan wind. That they write and act these thoughts out just to show that they can do it, get paid, and have a good laugh at it all at the same time.

Great. Now you’ve done it. Please put it back and let’s return to normal civil living. I hope you enjoyed wasting your life.

Just saw the new movie on Prime Video about the making and publication of the report on (the failures) of American Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. The story centers around the research and publication of the report circa first few years of Obama’s presidency.

I used to think Feinstein should be removed from senate for her failings being on the Senate Select Committee from a time before 9/11 through the exercise of EIT. But if she did what she did in the movie to bring the bad stuff to day light, maybe I was overly critical?

But still, shouldn’t someone get some blame for 911 and the subsequent useless application of EIT’s ?? Foremost, not discovering and stopping 911 seems like such a bad thing. Why isn’t there a report on that ? Why isn’t there a report on what the IC is prepared to do in the future in terms of forcing cooperation from enemies?

Watching the Senate discuss and debate is so boring. Nobody is changing anybody’s minds…. it’s such an act… but so poorly performed. Can they at least act like anything matters?

I feel very unhappy with how my tax dollars were spent and it seems the only way to change it is to elect someone else or run for the office.

Consider my tax dollars paid for my income in 2018. A big part of it may have gone to paying inefficient and uncompetitive farmers of America in subsidies to offset the Chinese tariffs. On top of that, I have to spend more for Chinese goods. In what part of the world out side of a farm is this fair? Why can’t American farmers be men and standup and compete with the world on production? It’s not like we don’t have the sciences or machinery. We invented most of the science and machinery for this stuff. Farm subsidies should only include Yang style UBI and maybe some tax relief on the real estate taxes for the farm lands. They can choose to stay lean, leave the land fallow, or they can choose to work, but effectively. What they cannot do is to just take my money and grow fat, all the while wasting energy, polluting environment, while pretending to farm.

Yeah, but strategically, we must have food, you say, that’s why we subsidize farmers. If the whole world dies of hunger, we can still eat. The problem is not that we need strategic capabilities to feed American mouths. The problem is that they are inefficient and unable to farm as effectively(cheaply) as foreigners. I mean, this is where the country either stands up and say we are independent of the rest of the world(and put the nose to the plow and get to work), or it plays nice to get what it needs. It should not choose to cuddle it’s farmers at cost to the entire population.

Why don’t they do a study on that too? I am so dissatisfied with the people we pay to do things…

But it was a good deed, to expose those inefficient and ineffective torturers.

Applauses

How come nobody has taken it upon themselves to find these robo-callers that target Chinese speaking people? Today, in late 2019, I received 3 different calls in an hour all speaking Chinese. Initially, I thought they were targeting those silly Chinese people who rely on the Chinese embassy or DHL, but soon I realized that whoever is responsible for making these robo-calls are not event waiting to take my credit card numbers. They just hang up as soon as I pick up. This is starting to feel like some kind of public defamation of Chinese people. By impersonating Chinese spam callers, the perp is trying to grow hatred for Chinese speaking people.

I wonder who in the public is a suspect for systematically and persistently inciting hatred among Americans in late 2019.

The worrisome thing here is that we always believed there are white hat hackers out there who are willing to serve justice and the public good. But in this case, no one stood up to identify the hackers making these spoofed spam phone calls. It has been years since these spam callers came online and nobody is willing to take up the effort to stop them.

Maybe all the white hats are mostly Chinese-hating white supremacists? That’s not unbelievable. Maybe the FCC or whoever else has legal jurisdiction over the phone lines are all white rats who couldn’t dream of a better way to make America hate Chinese people more.

Why has no one made any effort to stop these spam callers?

No, it would not make me happier if they started speaking Cantonese or Hokkien or Russian or Hebrew or Spanish or Vietnamese or any other language. And I would be just as worried about the sullied reputation of those races–all minority races here have suffered very bad racism when it was unchecked and they should never again. Hatred by a single race, is a root for hatred by any race, and we should not have any of it.

Of course, my future self could laugh at my naïveté when it is discovered that this was the first AI generated virus that took people decades to eradicate… in that case, we really should try to stop critical infrastructure from disruptive foreign invasions. Can we get Bill Gates on that? Let’s drop some big bombs on this bug!

Has anyone ever considered refining the label of Artificial Intelligence into different and intersecting labels:

• Human-made Intelligence (HMI) is a machine or system that is deemed intelligent and is originated by human with the intent of it being intelligent.
• Nature-made Intelligence (NMI) is a machine or system that is significantly influenced by the occurrences of nature that are not through human intelligence.

Most machine learning system could be considered HMI but after it learns from or interact with the world outside of human influence sufficiently, the learned intelligence will needs to be considered as NMI as well.

Another example would be evolved algorithms. The randomness explicitly used by the evolving machinery is uncontrollable by humans, therefore an evolving program is HMI but an evolved intelligence is also NMI.

I’ve decided to rename “Good Artificial General Intelligence” to “Good Computational Intelligence”

The word artificial used to be a useful word to distinguish computational intelligence with organically grown, evolved intelligence. But now we may refocus our attention to the core aspect of our new intelligence that it is the result of massive computations.

We of course keep the good for all the reasons why we added it before.

Little brother dragon went shopping with dad. It was the biggest shopping mall little brother dragon has ever seen. He follows daddy but there are so many blinking lights and so many toys and people and animals and dragons.

Pretty soon, little dragon was no longer following daddy. The big dragon in front of him was an elderly dragon, purple not blue like daddy.

Little brother dragon wonders around a bit and finally locates a police dragon. “Officer, I’m lost! I can’t find my daddy!”

“Gibberish gibberish gibberish?!” Says the police dragon.

“What?”

“Gibberish gibberish giblets!?”

This was not Dragonese that little brother dragon thought all dragon spoke. Why is this dragon police speaking Gibberish?

“Ugh!” Grunts little brother dragon, and he turns towards an old lady, “excuse me missus, could you please help me find my dad?”

“meow!!! Meeeeowwww? Meeeoooeoeoeoeooooow.” Meowed the lady dragon.

“What? What happened ? Why are you meowing in Catish?” Little brother dragon can’t believe what’s happening!

“Woof! Woof! Woooooof! Wuf woof wuf.” Barked the cashier dragon in front of whom little brother dragon now stood.

“Woof, meow, bark, Gerber Ferber” tried little brother dragon, regretting to his core that he didn’t pay more attention on the iPad app that taught foreign language.

“Gibberish gobbledygook blah Bow wow oink moo baba bark bark blergh!” Everyone talked in a complete mess of dissonant and incomprehensible unison.

Little dragon wishes this was a nightmare but it is worse than he can imagine. Has everyone gone mad? What is this different world he suddenly entered?!

Tears of terror emerge of his large dragon eyes! “Wahhhhhhhh!” He cried. In the back of his nape, he suddenly felt a tug of the string. The secret string he recently gained connecting with witch princess Alice on the other end. Little brother dragon tugs on it with his dragon whiskers.

POOF!

The loudest poof little brother dragon has ever heard drown out all the barn animal sounds. Alice appeared mid-air, in her bathing suite.

Ahhhhhrrrg!!

Came a blood curdling witch scream that drowned out the poof that drowned out all the dragon speak.

“I’m sorry” said little brother dragon, “I need your help!”

Ahhhhhrrrg!!

“Please, Alice, only you can help me” mumbled little brother dragon sure he is not heard.

Ugh!

Alice finally fell to the ground with a grunt.

“Little brother dragon! Why have you brought me away from my shower?”

“I don’t know, I can’t understand anyone except for you. I lost my dad and I can’t find him”

“Oh.” Alice looked at little brother dragon.

“Is that… is that a party headphone on your head?”

“Party headphone, what’s that?”

Alice reaches over and pulls off a set of headphones situated around little brother dragons large dragon ears. “Party headphone translates everyone’s voice into a different foreign language.”

“Are you going to pay for that?” Asked the cashier,

“Oh you poor dear” said the old lady,

“What is you address?” Asked the police dragon,

“Oh…” Little dragon suddenly remembered the last thing daddy said to him: “don’t play with toys we have not bought!”

Alice looks at her phone and says, “there, your dad went home after he lost you, let’s go home.”

Little brother dragon put back the headphones and Alice took him home.

I will listen to my daddy from now on, thought little brother dragon… that was terrible when I didn’t.

That was probably the only upside to Jack Ryan season 2 on Amazon Prime.

The story seems so forced. Why did they even make this? There was no new cool tech. The methods to evil were conventional. The fights were predictable. The result was unbelievably simple. The dialog doesn’t all fit. Fat chick got ditched for a younger leaner one… I find it difficult to care about the elements of the show…

I see, so it seems the problem may be that the story and characters were developed since the 1980’s. Maybe that’s why the Ryanverse seems boring.

For me, season one was more interesting mainly due to its believability. I felt more absorbed into the story. Season two seems maybe too real but honestly, it might just be that our media trained us to care more about middle eastern terrorists than Latin American injustices. I don’t know.