NevermindNoMind

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” Sanders asked.

“Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

America PAC door knockers were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised they were working to elect Donald Trump.

Just kidding, mostly. I'm working on a presentation for my company about AI, and one of the things we want to do is illustrate the risk of deep fakes, and to do that our idea is to generate an AI image of one of the managers at a Taylor Swift concert or something like that totally out of character for him. It's playful, not meant to be malicious, and I've got buy in from upper management. I'm also not looking to do an actual deepfake, it would be enough if the image had a strong resemblance. The problem I'm running into is ChatGPT and Bard, the two I thought to try, will not generate a description of a person (in this case the managers headshot), and I'm not great at describing people, so I'm kind of at a dead end.

Any advice appreciated.

Also I recognize that while I swear my intended use is completely innocent, the answer here could be used in unethical ways, so I completely understand if mods want to take this down.

Kind of a fun game to learn or practice image prompting. Google AI (unspecified which model) generates an image. You have to create a prompt to replicate the generated image. Once you submit your prompt, an image is generated based on your prompt, and then the game judges how close you got to the reference image. After you pass or fail, the game reveals the prompt that generated the reference image. A little character gives you tips and hints as you go. Kind of fun, just thought I'd share.

I was laughing too hard from that to listen to the rest of the story, so I have no idea what's happening in Guatemala.

In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”

The revelation provides a stunning signal about the Biden administration’s reluctance to push for Israeli restraint as the close U.S. partner expands the offensive it launched after Hamas ― which rules Gaza ― attacked Israeli communities on Oct. 7.

The emails were sent hours after Israel told more than 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza that they should leave their homes and shelters ahead of an expected ground invasion of the region. On Thursday, the United Nations said Israel had given Gazans a 24-hour deadline to move to the south of the strip, adding it would be “impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.”

Asked about Israel’s evacuation order on Friday, U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declined to reject or endorse it, calling it “a tall order.”

“We’re going to be careful not to get into armchair quarterbacking the tactics on the ground by the [Israel Defense Forces],” he added. “What I can tell you is we understand what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to move civilians out of harm’s way and giving them fair warning.”

IMO - The Biden Administration is tacitly endorsing what seems to me to be a coming genocide, and it's kind of freaking me out. I don't know if this is about domestic politics or if the Biden administration is actually low key cheering the slaughter on. Hamas is evil and should be destroyed, no argument here. But in the same way Hamas doesn't believe Israel should exist, a good chunk of Isreal, particularly their current far right government, feels the same way about Palestinians, all of them. It seems Israel is not going to let a good crisis go to waste. Israeli military leaders have been using dehumanizing language, which is a tell tale sign of a coming genocide, they have suspended rules of engagement, my non expert opinion is the current blockade of food, water, and electricity, while inhumane on its face, is also in part to limit the ability of the world to learn about the war crimes about to be committed. The 24 hour order to move out of northern Gaza is impossible, Israel knows that, the Biden administration knows that, it's clearly an effort to give Israel political cover for the mass amounts of civilians about to be slaughtered - if they stayed, they were part of or supportive of Hamas and so were legitimate targets, and even if not we gave them a warning to move and they failed to do so, so not our fault. I'd except this from a government who before all of this happened openly believed apartied was the ideal solution to the Palestinian conflict. I'm legitimately surprised the Biden administration is straight up cool with this going down, to the point that "end the violence/bloodshed" is by written policy a verboten phrase. It seems like some sick shit is about to go down, and the Biden Administrations hands are going to be dirty.

Joe Biden is worried about turning out the youth vote for he's relection. He's decided to be a passive accomplice to genocide. It's a bold strategy Cotton let's see how it plays out.

Plan is to reinvent the smartphone with AI, in the same way the touchscreen on the iPhone reinvented the smartphone.

Particularly interesting given ChatGPTs latest move to have voice recognition and an AI voice respond. If you haven't tried it, it's kind of neat. This morning I had a conversation with ChatGPT with my phone in my pocket, all done overy Bluetooth headphones like I was on a call. It was actually a lot more natural then I expected. I wonder what it would look like if that kind of tech was front and center in a smartphone.

I've included a few snippets from the article below, but the TLDR is, big names and big money are behind brainstorming plans to make an AI first centered smartphone, a plan to reinvent the form factor. The article also points to declining smartphone sails as evidence that the public is tired of the same old slab every year, so this could be an interesting time for this to come out.

I guess it's relevant to mention whatever the fuck the Humane AI pin is: The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897065/humane-ai-pin-coperni-paris-fashion-week

From the article: After rumors began to swirl that Apple alum Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were having collaborative talks on a mysterious piece of AI hardware, it appears that the pair are indeed trying to corner the smartphone market. The two are reportedly discussing a collaboration on a new kind of smartphone device with $1 billion in backing from Masayoshi Son’s Softbank.

...according to the outlet, the duo are looking to create a device that provides a more “natural and intuitive way” to interact with AI. The nascent idea is to take a ground-up approach to redesigning the smartphone in the same way that Ive did with touchscreens so many years ago. One source told the Financial Times that the plan is to make the “iPhone of artificial intelligence.” Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is also involved in the venture, with the financial holding group putting up a massive $1 billion toward the effort. Son has also reportedly pitched Arm, a chip designer in which SoftBank has a 90% stake, for involvement.

While it’s still not clear what the end goal of the product talks will be (or if anything will come of them at all, really), it does seem like the general public has become fatigued with the same-y rollout of a slightly better smartphone slab year after year. Tech market analysis firm Canalys revealed in a report earlier this month that smartphone sales have experienced a significant decline in North America. The report indicates that iPhone sales have fallen 22% year-over-year, with an expected decline of 12% in 2023. The numbers are pretty staggering, especially fresh off the release of the iPhone 15, and could be an indicator that people are getting fatigued of the hottest new tech gadgets.

Chapter 3

Mind is like the void in which there is no confusion or evil, as when the sun wheels through it shining upon the four corners of the world. For, when the sun rises and illuminates the whole earth, the void gains not in brilliance; and, when the sun sets, the void does not darken. The phenomena of light and dark alternate with each other, but the nature of the void remains unchanged.

That is how this chapter opens. I put that passage into Bing’s AI image generator, and the image accompanying this post is what popped out. I just thought we could use a little color in this community.

Huang Po goes on to use this metaphor to compare our conceptions of enlightened beings and ordinary sentient beings, the former being viewed as light and the latter dark. This view is itself driven by attachment, as there is nothing else but the one mind, which I suppose is the void in this metaphor.

If you students of the Way do not awake to this Mind substance, you will overlay Mind with conceptual thought, you will seek the Buddha outside yourselves, and you will remain attached to forms, pious practices and so on, all of which are harmful and not at all the way to supreme knowledge.

My interpretation is that Huang Po’s one mind is the same as emptiness. I asked the Bing chatbot which seems to confirm my interpretation:

The void that Huang Po refers to is the concept of śūnyatā in Sanskrit, which means emptiness or voidness.

Granted, what does AI know? But it’s hard not to interpret void as emptiness, and then Huang Po goes on the equate this with the one mind.

Huang Po again warns against attachments to particular practices or teachings (going so far as to call them “harmful” this time), which again reminds me of the Heart Sutra:

There is neither ignorance nor Extinction of ignorance… neither old age and death, nor Extinction of old age and death； no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path； no knowledge and no attainment. With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna parami ta, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana.

My interpretation is that Huang Po would have his students focus on understanding emptiness. Maybe I’m biased in my interpretation as this has been the focus of my practice as of late.

Google is coming under scrutiny after people discovered transcripts of conversations with its AI chatbot are being indexed in search results.

You can replicate what others are seeing by typing ‘site:bard.google.com/share‘ into the Google Search bar.

I tried this out for myself, and as one example found a writer brainstorming story ideas and using her full name. It seems that when you hit "export/share" on Bard, while you might think only people with access to the link that's created can view the conversation, in fact Google makes the conversation public and searchable. This is far more problematic than the vague privacy threat of your prompts being used to train the models and later being spit back to some random person in a reply. This lets you read full conversations. AI in general has a privacy problem, but this is a good reason not to use Bard in particular (if it sucking wasn't enough reason for you)