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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham
@rhamdu.bsky.social
44 followers 83 following 450 posts
Now pursuing whatever interests me after a career in journalism and international development. Formerly @rhamdu on Twitter.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6h
Nice guitar-piano duel.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d
OK, I get that. I don't think I could sit down and code up a task decomposer on the information provided, but I guess today's news is that an LLM can save me the trouble. Which is actually quite remarkable.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d
App/feature that surely must exist already. Facial recognition emoji selector. Make a face or gesture into your camera, and a matching emoji is inserted in your text.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d
Scary, huh? Money now. Or we vaporise your data.
At first I thought this might be one of the endless wrongly-addressed emails that I get: legit message, typo @. But Chrome says the link is insecure (no https). So perhaps this is a straightforward boring old phishing attempt.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d
To clarify. Recursive intelligence isn't necessarily a bottomless rabbit hole. If 'be clever' has an end condition, where no more clever stuff is required, you've got yourself a cognitive architecture.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d
This is super interesting and, I'm sure, super legit. But when modules have labels like 'task decomposer' and 'orchestrator' I am inevitably on the lookout for what Turvey called 'intelligence loans'.
You know. When the algorithm for 'be clever' includes a recursive call to 'be clever'.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d
What us jazzers don't say out loud to our pop and classical colleagues.
georgemusser.com
George Musser @georgemusser.com · 2d
The usual explanation for great music is that it's predictable but not too predictable. But there's more to it, said @frosas.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. We prefer music when we perceive agency behind it. Improvisation trumps a prepared performance. See paper at www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy.... ⚙️🧫
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Reposted by Tony Durham
nicolecrust.bsky.social
Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 2d
At least in systems neuro, there's a strong sense of excitement. It's the opposite of "papers and research projects could have been done 15 years ago". New ways to measure things we've never been able to before - dynamical systems; connectome constraints. New ideas about how brains/minds work.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 3d
Everybody gives different descriptions but it's hard to know whether they are having different experiences or just using different language. Perhaps the vividness scale should go up to 11 for a godlike experience of the full 3-dimensionality of things.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 5d
During religious services at school, I amused myself by flying imaginary aircraft around the chapel, diving from the roof, skimming the floor of the aisle, zooming between the rows of the choir. It must really suck to only imagine things inside your head.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 5d
Douglas Hofstadter designed an object which cast 3 different shadows. This object would presumably appear as E, G and B in 3 suitably placed mirrors. Admittedly no two of those letters form a symmetric pair (and only 2 out of any 3 letters ever could).
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 5d
Isn't this entire dumpster fire fuelled by dualism? My sense of existential freedom is supposed to be enhanced if 'I' can make random choices. But the same sense of freedom is infringed if 'I' believe that 'my body' or 'my brain' is behaving randomly.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
Off the wall question. Anyone on your team interested in boat design? The boat isn't just a wind-powered conveyance. It's an instrument through which the navigator senses the state of sea and wind, in great detail. Which features of the boat design contribute to that?
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
Assuming this is some kind of armoured vehicle... the drone tactic now has to be to land and wait for them to roll over you.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
Yes, I find the formal side of it fascinating. A teacher provides essential guidance. But ultimately the navigator must acquire the intuitive wisdom through personal experience. In that respect I don't think it's altogether different from skills that are taught in our own universities.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
Looking forward to the results of this research, though lord knows how you'd analyse the accelerometer data.
When Pacific navigators are asked how they do it, they rarely give a satisfying explanation. Perhaps they are being evasive. More likely, this is genuine tacit knowledge "like riding a bike".
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
Update. I read what Virgin has to say about the new box. It can respond to voice commands!
Well, shouting at the TV isn't new. But now you have to be careful what you say.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
Israel's assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, like UK "terrorism" arrests of peaceful pro-Palestine protesters, is utterly predictable - and guaranteed to arouse more sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d
With Jane Goodall's observations of chimpanzees, the tide turned against the prevailing human exceptionalism. Our appreciation of the cognitive capabilities of other species - including primates, corvids, octopuses, even bees - has continued to grow.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 7d
The music is from Herbie Hancock and the video is lifted from OpenAI's website, and I have been too fucking lazy to edit them together. I think you can see that it works, though.

Rough
music.youtube.com/watch?v=4mcX...

Rough! Rough!
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 7d
Separated at birth: Marc Bolan and Patti Smith.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d
...I admit that is a deliberately provocative take. To put it another way: contrary to popular belief, it is possible to unsee something you have just seen.
That's the suggestion, anyway. I am not necessarily endorsing it. I'm not sure I even want to get involved.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d
I think I may have to send a book back to the seller even though I want to read it. The print is simply too small and lightweight for my eyes.
I might be better off with the e-book, which I can read in dark mode and magnified as necessary.
rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d
Only glanced over the original paper but some of the ideas in the short response from ‪@ianbphillips.bsky.social‬ are *wild*. A person's consciousness forks into two branches. Soon afterwards, one of them is erased forever. If two bodies were involved, that would be Philip K Dick material.
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rhamdu.bsky.social
Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d
... Wikipedia says this:
Postdiction is argued to play a central role in shaping our sense of agency,[15] by compressing the perceived interval between a voluntary action and its external sensory consequence.[16]
Ref 16 is to Moore and Obhi 2012
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