Petri Kajander

Junaid Dawud

chris stanchak

Joseph Jacks

Tom Howard

Keith

Chris Cheng

Jeff Sullivan

Unity Eagle

Raghav Gulati

Naval

Ksenia

Colby Serpa

Kamal

Alex V

Ryan Hoover

Pratyush

Lyondhür Picciarelli

Brett Hall

 The magic happens when all our current boxes that have shiny screens and buttons

 can disappear. They're not needed anymore. So we could live like a village life in

 a few hundred years back or that's how it looked like because the technology will

 shift to the background. It becomes part of the magic.

 So if you would go to the future and observe the 

 people there, they are talking and then things happen.

 And you, who doesn't have that something, and as a cargo culture person, mimic their actions.

 You speak and then you expect the same things happen.

 But nothing happens. What is that magic they do? Who is granting their wishes?

 And things happen. But not for you. What are you missing?

 I agree with this completely. And although I think he got pretty lucky in 

 actually nailing the timing from that far out, especially with the 

 transformer architecture and the follow on like analytical tools that come with it.

 I think Kurzweil is going to be roughly right about 2030 2035 for 

 like what I'll call transformative AI because I don't think it's going 

 to be alive but I think it's gonna be technologically transformative.

 Will it transform the human condition? Probably a little, probably a little. 

 Will we squander it? Probably a little. Will it be a huge transformation 

 spiritually? I doubt it. Is that the next big thing? Could be 50 years, 100 years.

 The easier it is to get information the harder it 

 is to understand it. Why is this so evident today?

https://om.co/2023/10/19/social-media-is-history-just-ask-the-kids/

One of the biggest problems with old people is that they forget that they were young once, or that they were easily bored and did things that annoyed their parents, or that they had their own creat…

For kids, Social Media is kaput.  

 You don't need to wait for the newspaper 

 to be delivered on your door in the morning.

 You can just open your phone and all the news in the 

 world are coming to you and all the information sources,

 even the original ones, are there for you now.

 No need to go to library, find the index card and then get 

 what is available on the shelves based on somebody's decision.

 All the information is on your fingertips. Now.

https://x.com/jmj/status/1717404573214671068

The TikTok War: Why High School & College Kids Are Getting The Wrong Information about Hamas & Israel 

I spent the weekend trying to reverse engineer the TikTok algorithm, as I am convinced this is the reason we're losing the information war with high school & college students.

Jeff Morris Jr. on X

 The information retrieval and consumption space has been divided.

 The oldest generations are using the most, the 

 newspapers, the traditional mainstream media, Fox News and the kind.

 And the youngest generations are using YouTube and TikToks.

 They are usually short formats and it is selected by 

 somebody and they tend to be a bit shallow, one-sided.

 And really to understand this you need to have 

 background and context and that usually takes time.

 And this format doesn't really work for that type of analysis.

 But it's not about the medium. You can get good information from YouTube with the long-form

 podcasts and documentaries. You can get up-to-date latest information directly from the source,

 from the microblogging services, from Twitter, Mastodon and other places. It's about the skills to

 analyze, evaluate and understand which sources are reliable and drawing your own conclusions,

 having an agency, taking responsibility, what do 

 you take in and more importantly how do you react

 and what is it what you put out to the world after 

 have consumed, analyzed, if any, all that information.

 A lot of factors are against balanced views and more considerate and rational responses.

 Starting from our biology which rewards the latest new thing, quick reactions, negativity

 draws our attention, gets our attention and we crave for those things.

 Short is always in some sense better than long, long is tedious, hard means working

 so rewards immediately, sounds nicer, it's easier, laziness works.

 Taking all the time to understand and build your perspective 

 based on the context doesn't happen immediately, it takes effort.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-mocked-ukraine-russian-trolls-went-wild/

Inauthentic accounts on X flocked to its owner’s post about Ukrainian president Vlodymr Zelensky, hailing “Comrade Musk” and boosting pro-Russia propaganda.

Elon Musk Mocked Ukraine, and Russian Trolls Went Wild

 The traditional, longer form, high quality content, the weekly magazines for example,

 have eroded over the last few decades, so they become more clickbait and the declining

 revenues have forced them to go along the 

 lines of the other media and the good content

 is nowadays somewhere else, you can find it in substacks and other places, but you have

 to do the effort, they are not bundled together anymore in the Economist, Financial Times,

 Weekend Edition or any of these, your favorite wrapped formats, which used to be the good

 labels and brands for information, they are gone.

 Combine all this with the traditional, as old as humanity, factors, power, money, politics

 and the new formats of manipulating people and this mix is almost complete.

 But I have a life, you may say, and correctly so.

 We don't have time to figure out everything.

 Nobody expects for you to have an opinion about everything.

 The easiest way is just say, I don't know. That's probably the hardest.

 You're supposed to have an opinion. You're supposed to pick a side. Why?

 A lot of previously private matters have become public thanks to politics.

 From your perspective, the singular items may be isolated and they don't affect you

 too much, so there's no point putting much time or effort to figure them out.

 But from the perspective to whom it matters, 

 have an agenda, they are counting on people not

 paying too much attention to the details. 

 Because they are getting the benefits out of it and you

 are getting the costs and all the downsides of it, collectively at 

 least. And there's a name for this type of behavior. Regulatory capture.

 When we extend this concept to international matters and security, it 

 becomes way more serious, way more escalated and way more significant.

 What was just some local lobbyists' money games or local politicians' power games

 is now the big arena for dictators, even with 

 the hundreds if not billions of people under them.

 And this can have and has and is having dire consequences.

 Yes, you can live your life, enjoy the little 

 things, the big things in your personal sphere.

 But just remember, sometimes things are not exactly how they used to be.

 And sometimes things can go really wrong.

 Because everybody's just doing their thing and hoping 

 that somebody else is taking care of this difficult thing.

 All those things which may not make you look cool, nice.

 Or there's something controversial which needs to be said.

 Or you have to put up some kind of resistance. You have to form an opinion.

 You have to stand for your values and for your rights.

 For them to survive and exist in the future.

 What used to be your private life may not be so 

 in a very near future if your basic and fundamental

 security is no more and this is what an escalation is and how it happens

 if you're not paying attention and you're waiting for a 

 bit too long to form an opinion or focus on things around you

 Ignorance may be bliss, but can you afford it in the long term?

 Petri as always with terrific word smithing. 

 Ignorance may be bliss but my god do you overpay for it.

 He who fails to increase knowledge increases sorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeVyfiP0cLk

A visual representation of our 80-year history cycles, as laid out in the 1997 book, THE FOURTH TURNING.   This book is MIND BLOWING! https://amzn.to/33ziZMG...

We Are In A "FOURTH TURNING," What Does That Mean?

 Why does the boomers who are still in power, influential politicians or

 otherwise active and have the means to shape and interact with the cause of the

 societies, why they do not do anything about the security situation at this point?

 This puzzles me, because their parents and grandparents 

 were involved directly, first hand, with the world wars.

 All the trauma, all the difficulties, all the hardship.

 So they heard all the stories from their parents, they lived some of it themselves.

 And still they decide to do nothing when 

 the situation is what it is at the moment.

 And if you don't care about humanity, what about your children if you have some, or

 grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, or your personal life if you still have

 some decades to live for? How does the future look like? Does nothing matter?

 It's not about blaming and shaming. I'm just genuinely 

 interested and curious whether there's any answer for this or not.

 It's understandable for the younger generations, the TikTok 

 generation, people in their 20s or younger, and also a bit older.

 Their great-grandparents or grandparents may be already dead, so you haven't heard the stories.

 The situation is also different if your parents are 

 directly involved, so you'll live that still in some shape or form.

 But for the younger generations, things become more hazy and just something from the history books.

 The link in the first chit in this topic was about the 80 years cycle.

 So we tend to forget things and regard people who came 

 us as fools or something which doesn't influence or affect us

 because times are different and things are not as they used to be.

 And we tend to think also that the future is always 

 better than the past and the cycles are not repeating

 and we are not falling for the same mistakes the other generations did.

 History is full of stories and episodes and times and even nations where the

 progress has stopped in some of it permanently and for the whole humanity

 it's also been close call a few times and we've been stagnated for decades

 and centuries in the past because the forces of resistance to change or

 closing the society have been so strong that other 

 of openness, innovation and progress have not succeeded.

 Yeah, I mean I guess I feel like the boomers have in fact reacted along the

 lines they grew up with, which is maybe not so much World War II, that's

 probably a little more distant for them, and the early boomers were likely gone,

 but they reacted to Ukraine right away with support, and they reacted to

 Israel right away with support, you know, and I think it's a combination of, you

 know, those were the historical hot points as they were growing up, and we've

 all gotten used to economically being able to sort of stabilize situations

 without sending our own kids there for the most part, so I think it's a

 combination of many things, but I guess I'd ask which 

 security situation you think that they're outright neglecting.

 But the boomers, well the United States at least, and 

 think the Western complex, if you want to call it that,

 slept on a couple issues that they didn't 

 grow up with and they didn't have perception for.

 So they definitely slept on China, because China was never a geopolitical concern at that level,

 and there was an economic benefit to the trade.

 And they definitely slept, at this point I think we can say they definitely slept on

 trying to go the peaceful route with letting, not Islam spread,

 has been a large campaign for a long time

 to sow dissent with the idea that our moment will come.

 And I think that's what drives a lot of these worldwide protests.

 So I think that has been fomented, and I also think they learned from the Russians

 that propaganda, realpolitik, is more powerful to an underfunded,

 I don't want to call them a state because they're disgusting, but organization.

 I mean that if you're in Europe, the war, the world wars are still around us.

 You still see the things, at least in those places where the fighting was happening.

 Also if you were a boomer, your parents or maybe your grandparents were directly in the

 relatives which were injured or died and the trauma

 which came afterwards and the rebuilding and all those things are in a living memory and

 the horrors of the war are not something distant but very close to you.

 And by the security situation I mean that we are actually now probably already over 

 the peaceful times period and this can easily escalate into a world war situation or 

 instability situation for decades to come where there's nothing but bad times ahead of us.

 And this is what's happening now because we sleepwalk into the situation.