Michael Levin - "Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)"

https://www.noemamag.com/living-things-are-not-machines-also-they-totally-are/

LTNM’s attractive coating comes in an unfortunate package:

 -   Many who support LTNM never specify whether they mean the boring 20th-century machines, today’s quite different artifacts, or the fruits of all possible engineering efforts in the deep future. By failing to answer the hard question of defining what a “machine” is — they neglect a point at the core of their claim.

 -   It locks its adherents into unsolvable pseudo-problems as to the status of cyborgs, hybrots, augmented humans and every possible kind of chimeric being that’s partly natural and partly engineered. An increasing number of mental contortions will be needed as these beings come online, to accommodate the many special cases that don’t fit into LTNM’s binary classification.

 -   It signals support for the power of evolution but fails to define its secret sauce and to explain why a process consisting of eons of trial and error by mutation and selection should have a monopoly on making minds. Why can’t engineers use those same techniques, augmented by rational design, to embody nature’s amazing properties in new ways and in other media?

 -   It sounds grandiose and universal, but rarely do its proponents say what it means for detecting life broadly, in the universe. Would they assess functional capabilities, composition or origin story as definitive evidence when evaluating the moral standing of an eloquent and personable alien visitor who is shiny and metallic-looking, and possibly came into being with the help of other minds?

Quantum doomsday planning (1/2): Risk assessment & quantum attacks

https://www.taurushq.com/blog/quantum-doomsday-planning-1-2-doing-your-risk-assessment-and-the-real-cost-of-quantum-attacks/

Experts in complexity theory have a solid understanding of the quantum speedup concept. While certain computational tasks require an exponential number of operations (relative to input size) on a classical computer, some of these problems can be efficiently solved using a quantum computer (that is, in polynomial time). Consequently, a quantum computer can transform a practically unsolvable problem into a solvable one.

But only a small fraction of computationally hard problems are susceptible to such exponential quantum speedup. Specifically, quantum computers offer limited assistance in searching for optimal solutions to constraint-satisfaction problems (see NP-hard problems). Let's repeat: quantum computers are not "exponentially faster" computers that would turn any computation-intensive problem into a swiftly solvable task.

Kirk Hamilton - "Spec Ops Writer on Violent Games: 'We're Better Than That'"

https://kotaku.com/spec-ops-writer-on-violent-games-were-better-than-th-460992384

Over the course of the talk, which Williams gave yesterday afternoon as a part of the GDC "Narrative Summit," his primary focus was the idea that any game is defined by action, and so the actions you undertake in the game will define the game's meaning. As an example, he said, if you're playing a platformer, the game will be defined by jumping. When you're playing a shooter like Spec Ops, the game will be defined by the act of killing a person with a gun. "When you're using an action as a tool, it's easy to disassociate from what that action is," Williams said. "When you play a shooter, that action is killing a person. When you sit down to play a shooter, you're essentially signing up to kill hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of the game."

Walker, the protagonist of Spec Ops, can't be all that righteous, Williams said, because he's got to kill enough people to fill many hours of gameplay. (Williams did jokingly point out that Nazis appear the only kinds of people who were excepted from this in video games. "Nazis are basically human demons," he said. Heh.) It's easy at the beginning of a game to have the killing make sense, but as the game goes forward, it becomes weirder and weirder that he's killing so many people. However, Williams pointed out, it's very easy to turn this weakness to a strength, at least for the story.

Key to that, Williams said, is having the characters themselves rationalize their actions, even the most extreme ones. They don't have to be successful at it, but they should at least try to explain themselves to themselves. In other words, the soldiers in Spec Ops should be killing people because they're soldiers, but as the game got more intense, they began to feel compelled to rationalize to themselves and one another why they were on such a violent, ultimately destructive quest. 

Anthony Lane - "The Intoxicating History of Gin"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-intoxicating-history-of-gin

Luis Buñuel suggested holding the bottle of vermouth in a shaft of sunlight, so that it would irradiate the gin without touching it: a wicked twist on the doctrine of the Incarnation. Drier still, if spiked with apocrypha, is Noël Coward’s definition: “A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”

A novice who dives into gin, or simply dips a toe, will soon notice the designation “London Gin” or “London Dry Gin” on many bottles, and will, understandably, assume that the stuff was made in London. Not so. The word “London” denotes a method, and you won’t need me to remind you that Annex II, Section 22, Subsection (a)(i) of Regulation (EC) No 110/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council ordains that London Gin be “obtained exclusively from ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin, with a maximum methanol content of 5 grams per hectolitre of 100% vol. alcohol, whose flavour is introduced exclusively through the re-distillation in traditional stills of ethyl alcohol in the presence of all the natural plant materials used.” In other words, mix your bits together at the start and toss ’em all in the pot. Late arrivals will not be admitted.

The craze didn’t erupt from nowhere. The British have been imbibing gin, or some approximation of it, for hundreds of years. Seventeenth-century British soldiers, fighting in the Low Countries, showed a sweet tooth for the local rotgut, and the word “gin” derives from jenever, the Dutch for juniper. (Just to complicate matters, genever—a respectable spirit, sweeter and warmer than regular gin, and ideal for fending off the northern chill—is still widely drunk in the Netherlands.) Juniper had long been embraced as a curative, especially against the plague (it didn’t work), and that benign reputation lingered. We don’t know exactly what went into the “strong water made of juniper” that the diarist Samuel Pepys knocked back on October 10, 1663, but it did the trick and, he said, allayed his constipation.

No law on booze will ever surpass the ingenuity of those determined to break it, as any student of Prohibition is aware, and as any reader of “The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Captain Dudley Bradstreet,” published in 1755, can confirm. The author was on the make during the later Gin Acts, and, having studied them for loopholes, displayed both wit and élan in staying, if only by a whisker, within the rules. He realized, for instance, that the authorities, who by now were clamping down on distillation in the home, had no right to break into the home to do the clamping. So he “purchased in Moorfields the Sign of a Cat, and had it nailed to a Street Window; I then caused a Leaden Pipe, the small End out about an Inch, to be placed under the Paw of the Cat; the End that was within had a Funnel to it.” At night, Bradstreet entered the house, shut the door, and waited:

    At last I heard the Chink of Money, and a comfortable Voice say, “Puss, give me two Pennyworth of Gin.” I instantly put my Mouth to the Tube, and bid them receive it from the Pipe under her Paw, and then measured and poured it into the Funnel, from whence they soon received it.

try Samuel Johnson, whose brisk Tory tolerance had an answer for most conundrums. Asked why it was worth giving halfpence to beggars, since they would “only lay it out in gin or tobacco,” he asked, in return, “Why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?” He continued:

    It is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.

Thea Lim - "The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age"

https://thewalrus.ca/collapse-of-self-worth-in-the-digital-age/

At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”

The market is the only mechanism for a piece of art to reach a pair of loving eyes. Even at a museum or library, the market had a hand in homing the item there. I didn’t understand that seeking a reader for my story meant handing over my work in the same way I sold my car on Craigslist: it’s gone from me, fully, bodily, finally. Or, as Marx says, alienated. I hated that advice to keep writing, because if I wrote another book, I’d have to go through the cycle again: slap my self on the scale like a pair of pork chops again. Now, I realize the authors I met meant something else. Yes, sell this part of your inner life but then go back in there and reinflate what’s been emptied. It’s a renewable resource.

Brendan Keogh - "Talking is Harmful"

https://unwinnable.com/2013/04/09/talking-is-harmful/

Interesting enough essay on Spec-Ops

there was one thing that I saw and I thought, “He’s wrong on this. Do I tell him? I should tell him! No, I shouldn’t tell him! That sounds rude!” And that’s the thing. With the world being so much smaller these days, I don’t know how to interact with you in that regard.

Péter Szász - "How To Represent Decisions You Disagree With"

https://peterszasz.com/how-to-represent-decisions-you-disagree-with/

Be a Shock Absorber, not a Shield

Managers who see their role as protectors can imagine themselves as shields that isolate the team from all the bad that goes on outside. The expression “shit umbrella” does a great job of conveying this idea visually. I have multiple problems with this interpretation of the role, to sum it up: it treats team members as children who need protection, it hides useful context that could be helpful for them to accept and work with change, and puts unsustainable pressure on the manager.

I prefer a different analogy: the Shock Absorber. Ed Batista in his article here does a great job explaining this concept, so I’ll just summarize it here: cushion the blows by giving context and reframing; provide the appropriate level of resistance (to both directions!); and pay attention to your own resilience.

 Create a safe space for them on 1:1s where you hear them out without judgment. Avoid starting with counterarguments against their concerns. It’s more important to let them share their unfiltered frustrations first and acknowledge that they feel upset (without agreeing with them - you might, but that's not the point now). When they are ready, you can start discussing the details.

Darlene Forde - "Nominal Aphasia: Problems in Name Retrieval"

https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/darlene-forde/nominal-aphasia-problems-name-retrieval

Anomia is one general term for problems with word finding or recall that occurs with no impairment of comprehension or the capacity to repeat the words; the terms anomic and nominal aphasia are also used