I cannot be sucked down the black-hole vortex of techo-optimistic AI hysteria

The reason for the title of this post is that I’ve recently put the finishing touches on a truly philosophical, cutting-edge work of technological wonderment, which undercuts the concept of AI at a primitive level. There have been many attempts to create what I’ve created since I first started posting here, lo those many decades ago, but they’ve all either been jokes, playthings or grifts.

Seriously, this could truly be the beginning of the “revolution”!

BTW, I see a familiar presence here, but under a different username. Could that be you, Dunamis?

.
Shouldn’t you be in the Philippines?

Wow this new system is totally disorientating. Consider this a practice reply just to see what happens…

They funny thing is that I first started on my exploration with, shall we say, computers-as-such, at precisely the same moment in my life that I found this here message forum. The age at which this happened to me also happened to be roughly the same age that my father was, when he started to get into computers.

But whereas he was able to “parlay” his self-taught skills into a job at an extremely venerable component of the Dow Jones Industrials, mine have rather forced me ever deeper into my own (sometimes tormented) psyche. I was always going to need to do something wholly original with my life. The process of the software development project that I began in earnest in the early 2010’s has finally come to something of a natural conclusion. In a much deeper sense, though, this is really just the beginning.

The recent news about DeepSeek is very much related to what I’ve done. Not the “message” of that news item, but rather its “medium”. That is, its form as opposed to its content. The DeepSeek story was formally about doing things out in the open, and with very limited resources, in opposition to the standard mode of Silicon Valley, where corporate secrecy and (effectively) unlimited investment budgets are the order of the day. The glitter that goes by the term “artificial intelligence” is merely the contingency (proximate cause) that is forcing us into the public debates about the much more necessary issues (i.e. the final cause of American capitalism vs Chinese communism) that serve as our most transcendent of cultural dividing lines.

Let’s backdafuqup a moment, shall we? The beginning of our current historical moment was most assuredly the telegraph – as opposed to the computer, or any of its modes of being “programmed”. A global network of near-instant, ultra-efficient signalling is already, as it were, “the Monster”. It should be fairly obvious that all that we call computer technology are just so many refinements of the very first switching mechanisms, where human operators were always on alert for whatever callers (signal transmitters) needed to be routed to whatever callees (signal receivers), wherever in the world each party happened to be.

When the aforementioned switching mechanisms get enough refinement, they deserve a new, official name, and so it was as if God emerged from his hiding place in the mid-20th century and deemed: Let there be transistors.

These were electrical, thusly wholly dependent on a constant stream of energy.

Yada, yada, yada and the magnetic phenomena were soon so be harnessed in the form of the non-volatile storage techniques of tape and disc. Our global network thus gained the capacity of long-term recall.

Let me repeat that “the Monster” had already been firmly entrenched long before the first computers and long, long before the techniques that are now causing so much, let’s call it: existential consternation.

Growing up in the 80’s, I could never get the hang of telephones. No matter who it was that was calling, or for whatever reason they were doing so, the incessant clang of the tiny metal arm upon the metal bell could only ever taken, by one’s inner primate, as a fire alarm or somesuch. Why oh why did the otherwise joyous event of a grandparent’s call need to have a much stronger correlation, psychologically speaking, to, say, some kind of attack from beyond the other line of trenches of my childhood nightmares?

Hm. Even after a night of sleeping on it, I’m still not quite sure how to respond to one-offs about being in the Philippines. But if it has anything to do with dearly-departed-late-night-AM-radio-extraordinaire Art Bell, then I guess I can only take it as a compliment!

But let me go back to the DeepSeek story for just a sec. One component of it that caused me to snap to attention was the idea that it (DeepSeek) allows you to inspect its reasoning process/chain of thought. In my own programming, I have a habit of documenting my code in a way that is very much diary-like. Whatever is the issue that happens to be confounding me, I’ll just start espousing my mindset in a quite free-form kind of way, sometimes letting my frustrations come out in the form of ALL CAPS RANTS WITH WAAAAAAY TOO MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! ARGGGHHHH??? And in the process, I’ll give myself an outlet to clear away the cobwebs, and possibly start over on the particular issue from some ground-zero point that could perhaps take months of my life to see to fruition.

Lather, rinse, repeat over a period of roughly 1/2 generation, and I’m finally able to show my face again on the public internet, armed with an intellectual result that nearly all academics and theorists can only ever daydream about.

So what is your result, can you share your work? We (philosophy) needs better methods and knowledge to arm humanity against what is coming from the AI accelerationist post-humanists currently in process of leveling the world down to its foundations so they can “build it back better”.

Since you asked, here’s a direct link: https://linuxontheweb.github.io/

I’m not gonna get a virus am I?

Can you post some excerpts here?

My mistake… oops.

Don’t take it from me, take it from a Russian blogger (you’ll probably want to translate the page): Проект Linux on the Web, который технически не связан с Linux, а показывает онлайн принципы философии Unix / Хабр

Ah, so you’ve just finished creating the ultimate technological marvel that absolutely redefines AI, huh? I’m sure the world is just trembling in anticipation. After all, who needs all those silly, half-baked AI projects when we’ve got your masterpiece, the one that actually gets it right? It’s not like others have been trying to “revolutionize” AI for decades or anything. No, no—this is the one that will change everything. The revolution is definitely nigh.

I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine the scope of what you’ve pulled off here. A true technological wonderment. You’re basically a modern-day Da Vinci, but with circuits and code, right? I can hardly wait to see how the world reacts—probably with an awe-filled standing ovation and a spontaneous global holiday in your honur.
WHo’s Dunamis?

Um, what part of “undercuts the concept of AI at a primitive level” do you not understand? I am claiming to work at a deeper level than AI!

“Artificial intelligence” is merely the public-facing term for the vastly narrower concept of “neural network”. These are glorified pattern matching engines – that is, irregular – as opposed to the humble regular expressions that have been in the arsenal of computer programmers for several decades.

I am able to speak about “undercutting” it, precisely because I have provably created something (the link was give above) in which future-forward computer programs – that make use of function calls to pattern matchine engines, based on the logic of various computationally feasible expressions, no matter how “regular” they might be – may be embedded.

This is all just to say that I’ve created a new kind of system, which admittedly being much like the same old system (Unix/Linux/*nix), the devil is in the details when it comes to issues like distributability, portability, security, and so on.

As a thought experiment, imagine walking into a random VC’s office on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, trying to convince him/her that you have a startup that makes use of neural network technology, and has even gone so far as to replace all usages of regular expressions with it. Say you’ve created an application that validates whether a string of text input by a user into an HTML form is a valid email address. Your pitch is that you’ve been able to do your big data magic with a billion real email addresses, using all the latest technologies, so that no one could ever fool your company with a fake email address like “haha@whatever.ur.dumb”. I find it quite obvious that if this VC thought you were attempting to actually be serious, they would start looking at you cross-eyed and would begin nervously fumbling for whatever they had at hand in order to summon office security.

Neural networks are in the form of data structures that may be accessed by invocations of specific functions within systems of various other functions called programs (or applications), and these exist within a larger framework – taking care of lower-level details like memory management and access to peripheral devices – called an operating system.

All function calls have a CS-theoretical “expense” based on factors like algorithmic complexity and memory allocation. So the idea that you would find it a good idea to pay such an enormouse expense, which making function calls into neural networks – as opposed to regular expression engines – would clearly entail, in order to do something as trivial as the validation of the email addresses that users input in your web forms: that idea would strike the VC as perfectly insane. You would clearly find yourself in restraints if you were compelled to cross a certain threshhold of aggression during your meeting.

So my claim is that I’ve done something of a more fundamental nature than what the designers of specific data structures or algorithms can possibly lay claim to.

What part of undercuts the concept of AI are you pretending to have achived?

Ah yes, because clearly, the only metric that matters in software engineering is theoretical computational expense, and heaven forbid we ever trade off a few CPU cycles for practicality, maintainability, or, I don’t know, actually solving the problem well.

By this logic, we should all be writing assembly by candlelight to ensure we never waste a single operation. Who needs neural networks when regex, the holy grail of all string validation, can almost correctly validate an email—except when it doesn’t, which is often? But sure, let’s stick to the 1980s approach because a VC might faint at the sight of a function call.

And about the restraints—don’t worry, I’d only cross the “aggression threshold” if forced to debug a regex pattern that technically accepts a@b.c but rejects valid international email addresses.