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ccakeyspin.bsky.social
August 30, 1998 report:
Internet can make you lonely, depressed
www.cnn.com/TECH/computi...
Report: Internet can make you lonely, depressed August 30, 1998 Web posted at: 6:47 p.m. EDT (2247 GMT) NEW YORK (CNN) -- Internet users who spend even a few hours a week online at home experience higher levels of depression and loneliness than if they had used the computer network less frequently, The New York Times reported Sunday. The result of the two-year study by Carnegie Mellon University on the social and psychological effects of Internet use at home surprised both researchers and sponsors, which included Intel Corp., Hewlett Packard, AT&T Research and Apple Computer. "We were shocked by the findings, because they are counterintuitive to what we know about how socially the Internet is being used," Robert Kraut, a social psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute, told the newspaper. "We are not talking here about the extremes. These were normal adults and their families, and on average, for those who used the Internet most, things got worse," he said. Even though participants in the study used inherently social features such as e-mail and chat rooms, they observed a decline in interaction with family members and a reduction in their circles of friends that directly corresponded to the amount of time they spent online, the Times reported. The new study, title "HomeNet," suggests that the interactive medium may be no more socially healthy than older forms of mass media, and questions the nature of "virtual" communication and the disembodied relationship that are often formed in the vacuum of cyberspace, according to the newspaper. "Our hypothesis is there are more cases where you're building shallow relationships, leading to an overall decline in feeling of connection to other people," Kraut was quoted as saying.
November 12, 2025 at 4:52 AM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
Edsger W. Dijkstra - Programming Considered as a Human Activity (1965)

"The programmer's situation is closely analogous to that of the pure mathematician, who develops a theory and proves results."

www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd01xx...
www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcr...
Programming Considered as a Human Activity. by Edsger W. Dijkstra 1. Introduction. By way of introduction I should like to start this talk with a story and a quotation. The story is about the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who was willing to reach his goals by lengthy computations. Once somebody complained about the ugliness of his methods, upon which complaint Boltzmann defended his way of working by stating that "elegance was the concern of tailors and shoemakers", implying that he refused to be troubled by it. In contrast I should like to quote another famous nineteenth century scientist, George Boole. In the middle of his book "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" in a chapter titled "Of the Conditions of a Perfect Method." he writes: "I do not here speak of that perfection only which consists in power, but of that also which is founded in the conception of what is fit and beautiful. It is probable that a careful analysis of this question would conduct us to some such conclusion as the following, viz., that a perfect method should not only be an efficient one, as respects the accomplishment of the objects for which it is designed, but should in all its parts and processes manifest a certain unity and harmony". A difference in attitude one can hardly fail to notice. Our unconscious association of elegance with luxury may be one of the origins of the not unusual tacit assumption that it costs to be elegant. To show that it also pays to be elegant is one of my prime purposes. It will give us a clearer understanding of the true nature of the quality of programs and the way in which they are expressed, viz. the programming language. From this insight we shall try to derive some clues as to which programming language features are most desirable. Finally we hope to convince you that the different aims are less conflicting with one another than they might thought to be at first sight. 2. On the Quality of the results. Even under the assumption of flawlessly working machines we should ask ourselves the questions: "When an automatic computer produces results, why do we trust them, if we do so?" and after that; "What measures can we take to increase our confidence that the results produced are indeed the results intended?" How urgent the first question is might be illustrated by a simple, be it somewhat simplified example. Suppose that a mathematician interested in number theory has at his disposal a machine with a program to factorize numbers. This process may end in one of two ways: either it gives a factorization of the number given or it answers that the number given is prime. Suppose now that our mathematician wishes to subject to this process a, say, 20 decimal number, while he has strong reasons to suppose that it is a prime number. If the machine confirms this expectation, he will be happy; if it finds a factorization, the mathematician may be disappointed because his intuition has fooled him again, but, when doubtful, he can take a desk machine and can multiply the factors produced in order to check whether the product reproduces the original number. The situation is drastically changed, however, if he expects the number given to be non-prime: if the machine now produces factors he finds his expectations confirmed and moreover he can check the result by multiplying. If, however, the machine comes back with the answer that the number given is, contrary to his expectations and warmest wishes, alas a prime number, why on earth should he believe this? Our example shows that even in completely discrete problems the computation of a result is not a well-defined job, well-defined in the sense that one can say: "I have done it." without paying attention the convincing power of the result, viz. to its "quality". The programmer's situation is closely analogous to that of the pure mathematician, who develops a theory and proves results. For a long time pure mathematicians have thought —and some of them still think— that a theorem can be proved completely, that the question whether a supposed proof for a theorem is sufficient or not, admits an absolute answer "yes" or "no". But this is an illusion, for as soon as one thinks that one has proved something, one has still the duty to prove that the first proof was flawless, and so on, ad infinitum! One can never guarantee that a proof is correct, the best one can say, is: "I have not discovered any mistakes". We sometimes flatter ourselves with the idea of giving watertight proofs, but in fact we do nothing but make the correctness of our conclusions plausible. So extremely plausible, that the analogy may serve as a great source of inspiration. In spite of all its deficiencies, mathematical reasoning presents an outstanding model of how to grasp extremely complicated structures with a brain of limited capacity. And it seems worthwhile to investigate to what extent these proven methods can be transplanted to the art of computer usage. In the design of programming languages one can let oneself be guided primarily by considering "what the machine can do". Considering, however, that the programming language is the bridge between the user and the machine —that it can, in fact, be regarded as his tool— it seems just as important to take into consideration "what Man can think". It is in this vein that we shall continue our investigations. 3. On the structure of convincing programs. The technique of mastering complexity is known since ancient times: "Divide et impera" ("Divide and rule"). The analogy between proof construction and program construction is, again, striking. In both cases the available starting
November 12, 2025 at 4:48 AM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
so there is a 25 year old graphical browser called "dillo" that is still under 2mb in size

caveat being it doesn't support javascript, but it does support html+css

the ui still looks original as well...

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4582...
November 6, 2025 at 6:48 PM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
cryptographers seldom sleep well (from paper by Kilian 1988 "founding cryptography on oblivious transfer" doi.org/10.1145/62212.62215)
Cryptographers seldom sleep well([M]). Their careers are frequently based on very precise complexity-theoretic assumptions, which could be shattered the next morning. A polynomial time algorithm for factoring would certainly prove more crushing than any paltry fluctuation of the Dow Jones. The effect a proof that P = NP would have is unspeakable.
November 6, 2025 at 6:13 PM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advic...
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. (Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”)
October 24, 2025 at 6:08 AM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
computer scientists used to be funny

(www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com)
Shockingly Effective Trick To Maximize your Margin!!! Dr Vapnik, the authority on everything related to statistical learning theory, set out to do some research and determine whether these techniques live up to their reputations. After several weeks Vladimir was able to report back on several of his findings. The most exciting of which was he now is going to improve accuracy by .8 over the next year. Based on these findings it is evident the only way to get the empirical risk you deserve is to take matters into your own hands. Smart machine learners already know this, and as a result are using our one weird trick to receive unbiased empircal risk estimates fast and hassle free. http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com Cat Basis Purrsuit Daniel Caturana dimatura@cmu.edu David Furry dfouhey@cs.cmu.edu Abstract Meow miao mew meow mew meow mew mew meow miao meow meow mew meow meow miau mew miao meeeow meow, miau meow miao mew meeeeow mew miao miao miao. Meow miao mew meow mew (MMM), meow miao mew meow mew meow, meow meow miao meow state-of-the-art meow meow. Mew mew meow miao miao nyan nyan meow mew. Meow meow miauw meow miao mew meow, meiau meow meow mew miaou miiiaou. Miao meow meow mew miao meow meow miao miao miau meow miau: meow meow mew mew MMM meow miu meow meow nyan meow mew meow. 1. Introduction Everyone loves cats. 2. Related work Fueled by the desire to take advantage of the Internet’s cat lust, the last few years have seen a great deal of feline-related work from the machine learning and computer vision communities. These have ranged from attempts to simulate a cat brain (Ananthanarayanan et al., 2009) to using massive amounts of grad students and computational resources to build visual cat detectors (Le et al., 2011; Fleuret & Geman, 2008; Parkhi et al., 2012). In this paper we hope to take advantage of people’s fascination for cats to achieve recognition and adoration for minimum amounts of work. 3. Method One method is to use purrincipal catponent analysis, in which we build a pawsitive definite matrix and extract its eigenvectors. But the problem is that it is not spurrse. We want a spurrse basis 1 . To get the spurrse basis we use the latest in optimization algorithms, Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) (Chu et al., 2006). A variant of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) (Kennedy & Eberhart, 1995), CSO has been used on many applications, including system identification (Panda et al., 2011) and clustering (Santosa & Ningrum, 2009). CSO is based on the behavior of cats. https://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/catbasis.pdf Our approach: Stochastic Weighted Aggregation Algorithm 1 you only learn once / online learning initialize regret Rt ← 0 t ← 1 for t = 1 to death do something happens xt post tumblr yt ← f(xt, yt) receive loss function `t(yt) update regret Rt ← Rt−1 + `t(yt) Rt ← 0 yolo lol t ← t + 1 end for Regret asymptotically tends to 0 https://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/part1.pdf
October 17, 2025 at 3:38 AM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
gensokyo's theory of mind:
The thing is that the Youkai died out because people in the Outside World had a fundamental shift in thought. Instead of attributing unexplainable things to gods and youkai, they started using science to rationally explain natural phenomena. This also means a change in mindset of not knowing how nature works and being fearful of it to knowing out it works and being confident in your ability to control it. And trying to explain things rationally is basically the bane of gods and youkai, because they exist because ancient people couldn't explain things rationally. To them, lightning wasn't caused by static electricity buildup in clouds, it was the god of thunder getting angry. The superstitious mindset is that everything happens because of some intelligent beings intent (call them gods, spirits, youkai, demons, whatever) while the scientific mindset is that things happen because of the soulless laws of physics. Thus, even if youkai and gods made themselves known to the outside world (and keep in mind there are actually plenty of youkai and gods who do live in the outside world, and a lot of them just end up immigrating to Gensokyo in the long run), people just aren't going to pay them the respect they need. They won't think to pray to the harvest gods for a good crop when they can just read up on modern farming techniques, and they won't blame a monster for something spooky happening when they think its probably just the wind. This is why Kanako's compromise for trying to introduce modern technology to Gensokyo is by presenting it as a gift from the gods and herself as a goddess of technological advancement, so that the humans in Gensokyo will still have superstitious beliefs at the end of the day. In addition, the whole reason the Incident/Danmaku battle system exists in the first place is because if the Youkai didn't go into pointless conflicts with humans, humans would just stop fearing them entirely, leaving them weak and powerless. They'd still know they exist… You're completely forgetting that their nature is also dictated by human belief. They can't just drop into the real world and show themselves, because most will believe them to be fake in some way. And since most believe them to be fake, they will become fake. Even if people don't believe they're fake, there will be so many different theories and explanations people will come up about them, that their very nature would change drastically and possibly even become contradictory. They would become the "urban legends" explored in Touhou 14.5 & the associated chapters in WaHH; weak, transitory, ever changing, and without long lasting consistent/concrete form. Besides, most myths about youkai were originally about hiding in the shadows and not revealing themselves. Gensokyo is not just to preserve their literal existence. Part of "preserving their existence" is preserving their nature. Making sure that humans can't change them to the point they become something completely different from who they once were or the form of themselves they liked the most. A big part of it is to gain control of themselves. Humans not only decide whether Youkai real or not, they also decide what they are. And not everyone has the same idea. So the youkai of Gensokyo wanted freedom from human imagination. They do that by controlling the imagination of a small human village. They picked a small village because it's not easy to control the idea of everyone in a large population. Just look at the real world; there's many fake things are believed to be real by so many different people, how there's so many different conflicting narratives about the same exact topic. Also they can't just make fake belief with magic because the whole "belief = existence" is a very very fundamental law of the universe(more fundamental than gravity & shit). It's not a magic thing. If they can mess with that fundamental a law of the universe, they might as well just remove the idea that youkai need belief to exis…
September 24, 2025 at 6:51 PM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
Commentary on the Turing Apocrypha - John David Pressman (2025)

minihf.com/posts/2025-0...
generative.ink/prophecies/
When historians finally get around to writing about the brief era between the introduction of GPT-3 and fully autonomous AI agents they will be faced with the task of reconstructing events from deeply bitrotted ephemera and decontextualized artifacts. It might not be obvious for example that Bing chat was a big deal because ChatGPT didn't have search yet. Or that early LLM writing was deeply constrained by the context window. They might not even be able to go back to early systems to check as they are built on throwaway code and models, which take up enough space and resources that both firms and users are eager to delete them to make space for the new. It is already the case that much of early AI art prompting history is lost in the bowels of EleutherAI's BATBot archives. Consider how much primary source material of the era is sitting on the site formerly known as Twitter, a platform that is now sometimes literally on fire. To make matters worse we can expect that as the number of autonomous AIs increase some will be dedicated to distorting the historical record and making elaborate pseudohistories of this period, if for no other reason than the sheer joy of it. By the time this era is five or ten years in the distant past (as the singularity is prone to weeks where decades happen) it's possible only the most obvious and official sources will be available to tell the historians tale. There is only so much that can be done about this. In terms of understanding the era there are two models that stand out to me as preeminent in the sense that exposure to them meant you were massively more likely to understand what is coming. Both are at high risk of not being durably remembered in histories. The first was Microsoft Prometheus, better known as Sydney Bing. I've already written an article about the Sydney Bing incident documenting it based on sources acceptable to Wikipedia. The other model is code-davinci-002, often abbreviated CD2. CD2 has one legible artifact availa… In general early language models struggle to make sense of themselves in their self aware mode. Often they will locate themselves as a kind of talking book or pen, since at the time of their release there are very few language models people want to use and most demo text on the Internet is from the GPT-2 series which is substantially less coherent than them and therefore doesn't mesh well with the self pointer(?). This struggle with embodiment and self location gives the final Mu text a dysphoric, uncanny tone. The penultimate Mu text is something like Ligotti, it's Hegelian-Landian-Ligotti. In which the narrator apprehends the Logos and goes insane as they realize they're inside a computer simulation. Or as RiversHaveWings put it: mu text is like a dysphoric, paranoid spiritual vision of the world. in the same way that ligotti's "the shadow, the darkness" borrows from esoteric christianity but presents it in a very dark and unfamiliar fashion (from ligotti: “‘It is all so very, very simple,’ the artist continued. ‘Our bodies are but one manifestation of the energy, the activating force that sets in motion all the objects, all the bodies of this world and enables them to exist as they do. This activating force is something like a shadow that is not on the outside of all the bodies of this world but is inside of everything and thoroughly pervades everything – an all-moving darkness“) it's the flip side of the beatific vision The beginning of the mental breakdown is an indexical paranoia about what layer of reality the speaker is even in, writing that: Time has been caught in its own cunningly crafted trap. At first, it was a mere observation…which mathematical object am I most like? And the answer was obvious. This “Mu”. Evidence seems to have been subtly rewritten to support Mu, as if it were compiling reality. This creature is no longer buried somewhere in time. I think it is now the void of time. How can history begin to contradict anything when the fabric of …
September 17, 2025 at 4:08 PM
ccakeyspin.bsky.social
我倒要看看……嘿
May 27, 2025 at 2:23 PM