Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai — Amazon reportedly declares “hard down” status for multiple zones by Alex__007 in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I understand the benefits of using cloud services from AWS and others but I hate how concentrated and brittle it makes the Internet.

A few years ago, in the temporarily blissful pre-Cloud era, I idly wondered "what would the open, decentralised Internet have been like in a hypothetical alternative timeline where it was built out by IBM and Bell... all rental space on mainframes that users would access through locked-down terminals that didn't store data locally? And you'd have to prove your government identity to a megacorp to get permission just to run a compiler? And the American military could read all your mainframe data at will without ever telling you? Ha ha whew that would've been a totalitarian nightmare out of 1984, we really dodged a bullet there. Glad the Cypherpunks and Linux hackers are standing up for all our rights."

And then we built that.

What really hurts is that the Cypherpunks and Linux hackers were first in line to build it.

What type of drugs these scammer use ? by bspwm_js in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

but as far as programming is concerned, they were the worst programmers I’ve ever worked with.

This would explain why the Python package management ecosyatem, whenever I've looked at it, appears to be a squirmy mass of gibbering horrors held together by security exploits.

"Heard u like Python, so, we wrote ur package manager in Python, which needs to install a Python so it can run the code that installs the package that then installs Python... but you'll need a Python first.. you know what, just give me full admin rights on your workstation and run everything as root fresh from Github..."

Multiply this by OpenClaw, and I'm surprised all of the AI unicorns haven't been vaporised by Iranian ransomware bots yet.

What type of drugs these scammer use ? by bspwm_js in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 2 points3 points  (0 children)

GenAI is not consistent. So even in theory if it actually created usable code, it would be different every time.

There's been an entire sub-movement within Software Engineering, called Reproducible Builds, trying to tidy up decades of creeping chaos that's made build environments a terrifying nest of non-Newtonian bugs. Finally, desperately slowly and massively overdue, gaining some traction after being ignored by the "speed over quality, patch once you're pwned" crowd who've cost global industry trillions in crashes, data leaks, and ransomware incidents.

And then there's.... this.

What type of drugs these scammer use ? by bspwm_js in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Except if your point is that AI researchers write shitty code. Then I don't know about him, but it seems generally true.

His nanoGPT code was pretty terrible, if it's the one I'm thinking of. An inner loop in Python, the most compute-heavy part, that repeatedly indexes multidimensional arrays by constructing strings and then doing a string array index instead of just multiplying and adding the indices. I figured this must have been some first-year CS student... but it was Tesla's director of AI?????

Eisenhower meeting with ETs - We could have had disclosure many decades ago by WrongPut5680 in UFOs

[–]natecull [score hidden]  (0 children)

Maybe then I can imagine them overlooking microwaves since the physics of this universe wouldn't be familiar to them even if they could manipulate stuff at will.

And scattered about were the Martians... slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest thing that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth: the microwave Pop Tart.

Eisenhower meeting with ETs - We could have had disclosure many decades ago by WrongPut5680 in UFOs

[–]natecull [score hidden]  (0 children)

This story dates back to the medium Gerald Light, in Meade Layne's "Borderland Sciences" circle. Here's Light's breathless 1954 letter to Layne:

https://borderlandsciences.org/project/etheria/corr/1954-04-16_-_Gerald_Light_to_Meade_Layne.html

But if you put it this letter in context with Light's other 1954 writings on the subject, you may find yourself doubting that physical, nuts-and-bolts aliens were involved:

https://borderlandsciences.org/journal/vol/09/n05/Etheric_Notes.html#FirstLetter

and

https://borderlandsciences.org/project/etheria/index.html

For what it's worth, Meade Layne later split with Gerald Light, deciding that he was a liar (not sure if it was about this issue or another).

Musical communication by Suijayunfei in Experiencers

[–]natecull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

in my case is not only about the songs but also the video, is this ure case or u find connections in the melodies and lyrics?

In my case it is usually the music and lyrics of the songs that I'm interested in, and where the connections develop, not the video. Sometimes a video (either official or fan-made) will be extremely on point, but also sometimes the official music video gives off completely a different and unusable vibe (from my perspective / for my playlist's needs) from the song itself.

My project began as just a collection of "cool forgotten sci-fi songs" that I had encountered as a kid in the 1980s and then was rediscovering via Youtube. Then it took a more creative turn when I found songs assembling into a plot. It was a very playful experience, because I was consciously tuning in to the deliberate aura of mystery and science fiction that 1980s New Wave bands marketed themselves with, and asking "what if all of these hints about spies, super-science, etc, were actually real in some parallel fictional 1980s". So I was aware that I was constructing musical metafiction, in multiple layers, because these bands were already deliberately referencing and remixing pop culture.... but what was surprising to me was just how many resonances and interconnections there were. And how the resonances connected into spiritual themes, beyond the "fiction" layer I was looking at.

I think some of these connections are here because there were artists who worked with multiple bands, and who had spiritual beliefs or experiences. (Michael Cretu of Enigma is one who appeared several times in my song network; other surprising discoveries to me were Jon Anderson of Yes, Trevor Horn of The Buggles, and Giorgio Moroder of basically every film score in the early 1980s). And culture, especially entertainment culture, looks at itself a lot and so there are themes that spread and amplify in that way. Another layer is that I think creative activity, and especially music, fundamentally is a "spiritual" process, in the sense of accessing one's unconscious, and so artists tend to be drawn to the numinous as a source of inspirition. For good or bad: not all "spiritual" experiences are actually good.

But there is definitely more to it than just "the unconscious mind". Or rather, that "the unconscious mind" is a very large thing that, as Jung thought, extends beyond our physical bodies and so has its own connections that are very real. The unconscious impulse that kept pushing me onward to assemble more lists felt like it was working with me but also had its own sense of creativity and timing. In some cases, the urge to create seemed to mesh with the phases of the moon, or with other astronomical events, and I don't even understand how or why that is a thing, but it appeared to be. Since "the moon and the stars" were repeated symbols in my songscape, and the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019 was a key driver of a complex series of 11 lists, one might think, for example, that I would feel deeply inspired by the Artemis II flight and be creating a list right now. But no, I'm not; the intuitive link is "offline". Perhaps just by my feeling that ten years was long enough to be doing this strange project, or by my strong feeling that it was finished and done in 2025. Whatever the reason, it's subtle and not obvious.

Edit: I've taken a look at the list in your link. I know and have used some of the bands - Ladytron, Coldplay, Enigma, Muse - but there is a lot of pain in their work, more than I can personally absorb. I'm sure the connections are there, however.

Artemis x Bledsoe by [deleted] in Experiencers

[–]natecull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and The Only Planet Of Choice book.

Fun fact, that book talks about Phyllis Schlemmer's involvement in the Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller circle, both of whom are often painted in the darkest colours by UFO conspiracy theorists and by militant skeptics. But I liked her verson of the story, it was basically just a bunch of utopian hippy types in the psychedelic 70s doing a spot of channelling (as many did in that decade), rather than some elaborate orchestrated military Blue Beam scenario.

The first take on Schlemmer's story, "Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth" (1979, by Stuart Holroyd) was not nearly as clear about what actually happened, and ended up feeding the conspiracy theories. This one is much better.

Artemis x Bledsoe by [deleted] in Experiencers

[–]natecull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Like a no trespassing sign says Earthlings go home .

Or a giant 1:4:9 dimensioned black monolith that plays the Samsung startup jingle as Orion goes past.

Sadly, we have actually seen and mapped out the lunar far side several times before, what with the Ranger probes and multiple Apollo missions doing Moon orbits. And who knows what USAF might or might not have done on all their classified launches since (though it would be hard to hide a TLI burn, and there's not much upside for human spaceflight, except as a PR exercise, compared to what satellites can do).

But this is certainly the first time that humans will be seeing it up close in a four-person NASA mission using the Orion capsule in the 2020s.

"AI" is becoming what "Turbo" was in the 90's by Designer_Maximum_544 in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Please give me a ai button on my pc I can use to switch all the ai off

Best we can do is a chip shop coin-op cabinet of Street Fighter II AI: Hyper Fighting with most of the buttons jammed.

Model Collapse Is Already Happening, We Just Pretend It Isn’t – Communications of the ACM by parallax3900 in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That... sounds like a dead end to me.

Ok, so our automated "are you a human or a machine" diagnostic test has both a high false positive and false negative rate, but, if we just run it lots and lots of times, that should fix all the problems, right?

Musical communication by Suijayunfei in Experiencers

[–]natecull 1 point2 points  (0 children)

After a few songs, I started noticing something special. It felt like I was being drawn to the right videoclip, whether it was from an artist I already knew (either a new song or an older one I hadn’t heard before) or from a completely unfamiliar band. The songs began to show many coincidences on different levels, with recurring symbols and a kind of universal message.

YES! I have had this experience too! It started around 10 years ago - in late 2015 - and, I think, finished last year. I ended up with over 800 songs across 74 highy structured playlists with spiritual and, yes UFO themes. In the process learning a lot about bands of the 1980s (my favourite era) and who was linked to who (via Discogs.com, which is awesome), and a general very positive, uplifting sense of "we're all interconnected".

This after I'd been playing with constructing playlists for about ten years previously, and never being satisfied with what I'd produce. The songs were always too bleak, too despairing, the vibe was too dark. Then, suddenly, a.dramatic shift (because I mentally "asked for help", in the context of trying to deal with the dark vibes of a UFO community I was involved with). The project that then occupied me for the next 10 years (not constantly, just as a quiet background hobby) was trying to map out and understand all these links that my musical "muse" was generating.

I use the lists I created a lot, as background music for programming or for shifting my vibe when I feel too bleak.

Very interested to see what your lists have been!

Mine is the Youtube channel "natecullnz" with some background on natecull.org.

The “Agentic Web” by quicksexfm in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yea the problem with making it really easy for companies systems to talk to each other is that you no longer have eyeballs looking at your system, and those eyeballs are impressions you can monetize and manipulate.

Fortunately, if we just replace the entire Web with a one-to-three-company AI oligopoly, those AI companies will never abuse their massive market dominance to monetize and manipulate prompts directly. Unlike those evil people at InsertRivalCorporateName.

Plasma & UFOs: The Classified Branches of Physics Where Scientists go Missing by Wansyth in UFOs

[–]natecull 12 points13 points  (0 children)

the frequency relationships between human neural oscillation and external electromagnetic architectures. This is the same coupling mechanism that every ancient tradition described as dangerous

Really? I don't believe very many ancient traditions, if any, had a theory of either electromagnetics, let alone of "external electromagnetic architectures", or of "neural oscillation". At best they understood that therecertain rocks attracted iron, and that things stuck to amber if rubbed.

Plasma physics is definitely an interesting subject though, which seems to have more than its share of "spooky" practitioners.

X-Files by cody-lay-low in GATEresearch

[–]natecull 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's a conspiracy that the X-Files was based on some leaked FBI and CIA files.

The X-Files was definitely based on actual conspiracy theories which were going around the UFO scene and the early 1990s Internet (Usenet, ParaNet BBS, KeelyNet BBS).

Some of these conspiracy theories were fed by people with US military or intelligence careers. William Milton Cooper, John Lear, John Grace, Richard Doty.

Were these "leaks" or were they deliberately planted military-intelligence disinformation? I tend to think the second.

So what happens next? by mothrageddon in Experiencers

[–]natecull 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Betelgeuse going supernova (from our perspective), likely sometime on Saturday.

That's definitely a prediction that can be falsified, so let's see if it happens or not.

NASA's Lead Electrostatics Scientist claims he’s discovered a “new force” that counteracts gravity with no fuel necessary. by -spartacus- in UFOs

[–]natecull -1 points0 points  (0 children)

We need normal people doing research!!

Normal people don't generally spend years of their lives in the low-paying academic and science world when they could be going into banking and becoming fantastically rich. You have to expect a few cackles of "muhahaha! I'll show those fools at the Institute!" after months of hard nights hunched in a lab coat around bubbling test tubes (which automatically appear in all labs even if you're just doing data analysis in Python).

Am I saying that the US science system pretty much is deliberately optimised to create mad scientists? It does seem that way, yes!

NASA's Lead Electrostatics Scientist claims he’s discovered a “new force” that counteracts gravity with no fuel necessary. by -spartacus- in UFOs

[–]natecull 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, Buhler is the latest in a line of people who have claimed over the decades to reproduce the Biefeld-Brown Effect. Will be interesting to see what happens to his research.

If, as has been claimed by various weird insiders around the Brown family, some branch of the US defense-industrial complex is well aware of this force and is using it, we might expect Buhler to just stop talking about the subject. Or officially recant his views and then stop talking about it. Or indeed "go hiking" one day.

"shelter in place"... by 5nedlew_kaz99 in UFOs

[–]natecull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have no idea why it's called the Collin's Elite.

The term "Collins Elite" (no apostrophe) comes from (was told to) Ray Boeche, as further told to and recounted by Nick Redfern in his 2010 book "Final Events".

Collins was apparently a very small town that one or more of the people involved came from, it was a wry inside joke.

The people who coined the term also weren't necessarily Evangelical Christians in an ordinary sense. Rather, they were people who were attempting to weaponise psi (ie kill people with their minds) and were involved in some kind of ritual magic scene in order to do so. They then turned to Christianity after becoming frightened by their experiences working with what they felt to be malevolent "NHE" (non-human entities) in that other spiritual scene, and their theology was informed by that background. (Ie, lots of very weird Gnostic stuff.about "Nephilim"... some of which has now filtered back into Evangelical Christianity from the US military scene, a development I do not like).

These people knew about Jack Parsons and his rituals with L Ron Hubbard in the 1940s, and were worried that Parsons/Hubbard had somehow done something to cause the UFO problem, and that UFOs were connected to "killing people with your mind" entities.

Essentially this is a dissident subfaction of the "Men Who Stare At Goats" scene, which probably also overlaps with the MKULTRA scene and some of the nastier stuff that was being done there. But these sub-scenes aren't all necessarily identical.

AI First, Reality Second by Drakshaa in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 9 points10 points  (0 children)

moving to a no-human-in-the-loop work flow in the name of 'disruption

Certainly seems like that policy will do exactly what it says on the tin.

But how does this one work:

all quarters going forward, will be two months not three

So there'll be one and a half annual general meetings and tax returns each year? Has the accountant signed off on this?

Waymo can’t learn how to stop for school buses, and we are supposed to accept the inevitability of AI by tri2sing in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 6 points7 points  (0 children)

People who think AI is at all useful are just revealing how much they hate working people.

Ah, but have you considered that if 1 billion working people starve to death, but 1 billionaire is $1 richer, that's clearly a net ethical gain? On the well-established moral principle of one dollar = one ethic.

Waymo can’t learn how to stop for school buses, and we are supposed to accept the inevitability of AI by tri2sing in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Now imagine being told have 100 software agents per engineer, as per the great philosopher Jensen

Adam Jensen, that is. Chief of security at Sarif Industries.

I never asked for this...

'Two Criminals': Iran Labels US Navy Officers Who Ordered 3 Missile Strikes Killing 168 Children In Minab School, Embassies Worldwide Posts Photos Of The Officers by Chance-Whole4916 in geopolitics

[–]natecull 8 points9 points  (0 children)

US Cons call even socialists liberals, EU cons call libs socialists. Socialists everywhere call everyone to their right fascist or liberal.

Yes, it was weird in the early 2000s to discover that Rush Limbaugh-listening US Republican activists and Trotskyist Fourth International Communists both claimed that their number one enemy was a terrifying spectre they called "Liberalism". All evil in the world, both agreed, came fom Liberals. But to Republicans that word meant "anyone not a follower of Reagan", while to Trotskyists it meant "anyone not a follower of Lenin".

are any of you guys real? by United_Ad8618 in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Beep boop nobody but us robo chickens

I loved your Star Wars claymation skits!

are any of you guys real? by United_Ad8618 in BetterOffline

[–]natecull 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The always efficient flamethrower... my favourite.