The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population >>
"The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, #biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, #civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough #babies.
“The entire global #financial system, the value of your money, and every #asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth...." >>
Growing up, Mimi felt ashamed because she wasn’t like other #girls, but a chance discovery at 21 changed that. >>>
When she was first told about the enzyme deficiency, she says she was "reassured that I was...a girl, but that I just couldn't do the things that typical girls could do. I was also told that I couldn't tell my siblings or friends about this."
There are over 30 intersex variations with varying degrees of impact. For some, intersex features are noticeable from birth, while others don’t realise until they try for children. For more information, read:
I've posted articles on other #biological implants whose companies have folded leaving the recipients with no support or access to maintenance or repair because they're closed, proprietary systems and intellectual property, and are sometimes left in worse condition than before receiving the devices.
I believe I'd rather suffer or die than trust anything involving Musk.
Quite interesting but confusing, as I come from #backpropagation DL.
If I got it right, the authors focus on showing how and why biological neural networks would benefit from being Energy Based Models for Predictive Coding, instead of Feedforward Networks employing backpropagation.
I struggled to reach where they explain how to optimize a ConvNet in PyTorch as an EB model, but they do: there is an algorithm and formulae, but I'm curious about how long and stable training is, and whether all that generalizes to typical computer vision architectures (ResNets, MobileNets, ViTs, ...).
Code is also #opensource at https://github.com/YuhangSong/Prospective-Configuration
I would like to sit a few hours at my laptop and try to better see and understand, but I think in the next days I will go to Modern #HopfieldNetworks. These too are EB and there's an energy function that is optimised by the #transformer 's dot product attention.
I think I got what attention does in Transformers, so I'm quite curious to get in what sense it's equivalent to consolidating/retrieving patterns in a Dense Associative Memory. In general, I think we're treating memory wrong with our deep neural networks. I see most of them as sensory processing, shortcut to "reasoning" without short or long term memory surrogates, but I could see how some current features may serve similar purposes...
We think that everything we do and say is a direct outcome of deliberate #thought and #behavior motivated by our own goals and aspirations. A rising amount of scientific evidence, however, casts doubt on this long-held assumption. Our wills do not originate from within ourselves. Background causes of thoughts and intents exist.....
The latest outrage in academia is over a bunch of obvious culture war grifters who failed to get their anti-trans nonsense into a major #anthropology conference and are being celebrated as the latest victims of cancellation by the right wing outrage machine, aided by our good friends, the New York Times.
"One is not #born, but rather becomes, a #woman. No #biological, #psychological, or #economic destiny defines the figure that the #human#female acquires in #society; it is #civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and #eunuch, which one calls #feminine. Only the mediation of another can establish an #individual as an #Other. In so far as he exists for himself, the #child would not be able to understand himself as sexually differentiated. In #girls as in #boys the #body is first of all the radiation of a #subjectivity, the instrument that accomplishes the comprehension of the world: it is through the eyes, the hands, and not through the sexual parts that children apprehend the universe."
—Simone de #Beauvoir, philosopher and social theorist, in The Second Sex (1949)
Just my favorite Second Wave feminist, shattering the entire concept of the gender binary and "biological womanhood" in one masterful swoop.
If you're worried about #LLM-based #AI, you're focusing on the wrong thing and may lack imagination.
This, and related developments (I can't view them as advancements, knowing how this all will end) are what's going to end the human race as we've known ourselves.
Much good can be derived from technologies like this, but we—being as we are—will ultimately go much to far.
I don't think we're prepared for our instant evolution (and, separately, eventual mechanization).
What downsides will there be to all of the positive effects of these radical improvements?
"Is it coercive to attach goods to the abilities of the body?"—which we do now so, yes—and to whom and how will people be indebted for their #augmentations?
A #biological testing device company and industrial #graphene manufacturer are collaborating on large-scale production of graphene #biosensors for widespread use.
There are a lot of people looking for #biological explanations of being #trans. That can be good (as in, understanding this could help medical transition of trans people who need that for themselves), or bad (as in, identifying genetic markers could lead to eugenics). Not the point I want to address.
The point I want to address is that we seem to look in all the wrong places. We're looking at this from a cis perspective, if we look into XX vs XY, hormones, organs. Trans people are trans people even before any medical intervention, and feel who they are before any medical intervention, so any explanation that looks at genes, chromosomes, organs, or whatever known you want to use to differentiate sexes falls short already.
It's very much like the attempt of fixing the geocentric solar system model with epicycles to account for apparent retrograde planetary movement. You won't solve an oversimplified, flawed model by bolting on arbitrary, unexplained additional mechanisms.
No, the core problem here is, we have no idea at all how a human being arrives at the conclusion what sex they are, and cis people really do not want to delve into that uncertainty at the root of their being - which is what trans people go through. Whatever source that sense of identity comes from, it's likely a chaotic, messy, emergent property that most of the times ends up at one of two attractors that align with a majority of genetic, organic, and hormonal markers.
But then here we are. Trans people, nonbinary people, intersex people. We are living proof that the simple answer doesn't work. The well-known biological indicators do obviously not have the casting vote. Any fiddling with genes won't lead anywhere until we find out how anyone knows what colour their blankets should be. And that is possibly hidden in one of the weirdest, messiest things we could put our hands on: human consciousness, and how we can even have that.
Opinion | World War III Will Be Fought With Viruses - WSJ (www.wsj.com)
A two-front biological and cyber attack could lead to a U.S. defeat before we know what hit us.