Radio War Nerd EP #243 — Neural Networks, Directed Energy Weapons & the RWN Community

Anybody know the name of the author of patriots the congo book

CAPTCHAs are really fascinating. You can teach computers to do them, and there's always an arms race between the CAPTCHA solvers and the CAPTCHA makers. There is also, in a cyberpunk-dystopia kind of way, a way around that: there are offices in the third world of people who make a tiny pittance solving CAPTCHAs so other people can send spam from high value services like gmail. They are commonly called 'click farms'. There is also this sidenote of Google using the reCAPTCHA problem solving as an input to their AI projects- you identifying fire hydrants is free labor to validate the outputs of their neural nets. Natural language processing is not solved, but I worry that your guest gave too limited an impression of the state of the art. Google gave a frankly terrifying demo two years ago now of something that could fake a conversation over the phone- https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html. For text, the current flagship thing is called GPT-3, which is currently good enough to act as a Sokal Affair generator. Check out some poetry- https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#poetry . It's a non-threatening toy, but so were Go playing programs 10 years ago. Mastodon is great, and has that Old Internet feel, as if the world was mostly furries, communists, and people who really like futzing about with computers.

How does one get into the discord? Non-facebook user here but I'd love to be in a RWN discord.

I love that John is essentially teaching a course where he get to pick the subjects, invite guest lecturers, pick the students and how much he interacts with them, work remotely and keep what I assume is a greater percentage of the income. From students who are paying a lot less, dont have to worry about assessments and are taking in dense information they have a real interest in. By cutting them out of the deal, its the most poetic "Fuck you" to the academy I can think of. Not sure what it means for the future. I'm hoping for more wandering-public-lecturer than gig-economy.

A lot of sites just integrate current social media sites into their comment sections, so you log in with your Facebook profile and comment as yourself unfortunately

The bit about the launchcodes being 0's made ma laugh. I like to think it is just people resisting the systems. A bit like the secretaries at Rand Corporation doing game theory wrong (Adam Curtis - The Trap "F**k You Buddy")

Gunnar did a very interesting interview on Carls earlier podcast regarding his life in China (I think a family member was some kind of Icelandic diplomat). Mr Wendover has some good Youtube essays about the economics of airlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_akzwzghWQ

If you want a view of Belarus (and the former Soviet Union in general) look at this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_UAkHQFcgA This is from May this year. It's not overtly political at all but you get a good view of the place and its people and how they live. I found him slightly annoying at first but once I got used to his style he grew on me. Now I'm binge-watching his stuff.

Overjoyed to hear another Apostles of Watts spreading the good word. Reading Blindsight back in high school changed my brain for better or for worse, glad to know I wasn’t the only one.

If you want to find the comment sections you're looking for, just go to the website of any local news channel.