Do free will skeptics make their own point by being so dumb?

Free Will

What is it about free will skeptics and their insistence that we completely reorganize society based on their realization that nobody controls their own actions in any way? The Munk Debates just published Be it resolved, humans have free will, and it's a classic of the genre.

There is an interesting nugget at the start, which is how much of what we decide is based on extraneous factors. I'd love to go deep on that debate. I thought I wouldn't have time to write about this podcast as I needed to mop some floors. But my wife decided to steam clean them instead and so this post wouldn't exist without events that are completely beyond my control. But it also wouldn't exist if I wasn't interested and didn't want to write it.

Unfortunately instead of that debate we get the discussion about how with no free will criminals have no choice about commiting crimes and therefore we should not punish them. The first part of that may very well be true, much more on that subject here. The second part though shows such catastrophic misunderstanding that maybe it acts as a kind of proof. Nobody with free will could fail so comprehensively to follow their own argument to its logical conclusion, and so free will cannot exist.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Do free will skeptics make their own point by being so dumb? #etc #freewill If criminals have no choice in committing their crimes we also have no choice in how we treat them. )

Reviews for November 2023

Updated on Thursday, November 30, 2023

Spoilers!

Books

The Secret

The Secret

The Secret is Jack (None) Reacher installment #28. It's one of the handful that flashback to Reacher's MP days which are usually high value. It's a little thin - goes through all the right motions but there isn't that much to it. If you're a Reacher fan you're going to read it. If you're not then it's a bad place to start.

Music

Go Your Own Way

This Cranberries cover of Go Your Own Way is pure joy.

Podcasts

Shiny Bob

Shiny Bob

Scottish legal scandal around an alleged cabal of gay judges.

The Bugle

The Bugle

The Bugle is a news comedy show, a more discursive and less organized but often very funny version of the News Quiz which Andy Zoltzman has also started hosting.

TV

Still Up

Still Up

Still Up, is a romedy about two insomniacs, one also agoraphobic. At moments it's very funny, and snort your drink out your nose funny not funny because it's so naff. That's worth watching for. It sometimes goes too long between nose cleaning but given the dearth of good sitcoms at the moment that's pretty easy to forgive.

The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2

The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2

More Lincoln Lawyer. It's about the same as the first season, worth watching and a little more comfortable in its skin but also very conventional.

(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Reviews for November 2023 #reviews #video #leechild #andrewchild Reviews for November 2023 )

Animation of US PM2.5 Air Pollution in 2023

Updated on Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Air pollution on July 4, 2023

The video below shows PM2.5 air pollution in the United States from February to November 2023. The frame above is the impact of fireworks on the 4th of July. It's a blink and you miss it moment in the video but a pretty incredible impact.

I started this project in February expecting it to be more of a long term thing. Unfortunately, Purple Air started charging for their API in November, more than I was willing to pay for this project.

In terms of wildfires this year the big story in the continental US has been Canada belching plumes of smoke down across the East Coast. I didn't include Hawaii or Alaska in the map and so there is nothing for the tragic Lahaina fire on Maui.

To make the video I had a Google Apps Script running that pulled the Purple Air sensor data hourly. I then wrote an app to periodically render the data to frames using my shapefile library to plot the US and then interpolating the air quality for each pixel from the nearest sensors. The frames are stitched together at 60 frames per second using ffmpeg and final production was in DaVinci Resolve with music from Filmstro.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Animation of US PM2.5 Air Pollution in 2023 #etc #video #purple Video showing US PM3.5 air pollution in 2023 using Purple Air sensor data. )

Rob 2.0

Updated on Wednesday, December 20, 2023

A robot head

If I'm going to be replaced with AI then I may as well be the person to do it. I need an AI Rob that I can be proud of and that's going to take some work.

My approach so far is to generate some training data. I've answered lots of questions in a spreadsheet. This is an ongoing project and there will be dot releases as I work towards a usable product (one that I can just plug into email or Teams). Probably this is going to require a mix of fine tuning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). To start with I'm just fine tuning GPT 3.5 Turbo from OpenAI.

Fine tuning was painless. As usual the difficult part was randomly trying different versions of Python to find one that would coexist with some stubborn dependency (tiktoken in this case, which will live with Python 3.11 but is very unhappy with Python 3.12).

You can try this below - just leave a comment and Rob 2.0 will reply. Anything you post goes through the regular moderation system, this is just to stop spam. any legitimate questions are fair game (and likely to make it into the training corpus if the answer is no good!).

Due to safety systems it doesn't swear like the real thing. That might require a different model / corporate host at some point in the future. I'll update this post as I make progress.

Updated 2023-12-20 00:46:

I had most of a day spare today and so decided to get a little closer to my own personal singularity. Rob 2.1 is live and answering your questions in the comments below.

The first thing I did was add a few hundred more questions and answers to my training data set. I then fine tuned GPT 3.5 on the new data.

I wanted to get the LLM trinity - prompt, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and fine turing. Initially I thought that I could just use the OpenAI assistant API to get there, and I got as far as coding the whole thing up before stubbing my toe on a harsh reality. It only supports retrieval for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 and gpt-4-1106-preview. Hopefully this changes at some point but no way to get everything I need from assistants yet.

Not a big deal - I rolled up my sleeves (and also GitHub Copilot's sleeves) and added my own RAG based on the Q&A training data and refined my prompt to include the most relevant answer as well as some more specific instructions. It's pretty basic - whatever you ask is compared to the existing question library using cosine distance of OpenAI embeddings. Maybe I'll add a vector database if I have the patience to answer enough questions about myself, but a brute force in memory search works fine for now.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Rob 2.0 #code #openai #ml #agi An AI version of Robert Ellison. You can ask questions by leaving a comment. )

Hunter's Moon Time lapse

The Moon and Jupiter on October 28, 2023

A time lapse video of the Hunter's full moon of October 28, 2023 with Jupiter and three Galilean moons rising right behind it. The photo above shows the moon with Jupiter below and to the right. The video has close ups of both.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Hunter's Moon Time lapse #timelapse #video #moon #jupiter Time lapse of the Hunter's full moon and Jupiter with Galilean moons. )

BLR SFO

Updated on Saturday, October 21, 2023

BLR SFO

Google Pixel 6 Pro 19mm f3.5 1/357s ISO32

AI175

Updated 2023-10-21 21:25:

Timelapse of AI 175, an Air India 777-200 flying from Bangalore (Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru) to San Francisco. Take off, landing and a mercifully short in flight segment of this sixteen and half hour odyssey.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: BLR SFO #photo #plane #blr #sfo #video #bangalore BLR SFO )

Black Kite

Black Kite in Bangalore

Google Pixel 6 Pro 7mm f1.9 1/900s ISO44

Photo of a Black Kite in Bangalore, startled off a window ledge by me trying to take a quick photo. Fantastic bird but sadly a dirty window.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Black Kite #photo #map #kite #bangalore Black Kite in Bangalore (Bengaluru), Karnataka, India )

SFO BLR

SFO BLR

Google Pixel 6 Pro 7mm f1.9 1/24s ISO1978

AI176

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(Published to the Fediverse as: SFO BLR #photo #plane #sfo #blr SFO BLR )

Reviews for October 2023

Updated on Sunday, October 8, 2023

Spoilers!

Movies

Nowhere

Review:Movies:Nowhere

Spanish movie where the nowhere in question is a shipping container bobbing around in the ocean after falling in during a storm. That would be fine except there is a pregnant woman on board who promptly gives birth and now has two problems. It's OK.

Reptile

Review:Movies:Reptile

It's a cop movie. Probably the best scene is when all the cops bet on who the killer is, just like the audience at home. Adds nothing to the genre, but it looks great and goes down easy.

The Foreigner

Review:Movies:The Foreigner

Jackie Chan goes all Liam Neeson and kills the IRA terrorists responsible for his daughter's death. Pierce Brosnan is absolutely not Gerry Adams, any similarity must be due to coincidence.

The Last Man on Earth

Review:Movies:The Last Man on Earth

Spanish movie with the premise that hot women should sleep with ugly men, even if the world hasn't quite ended yet. Compelling. I prefer The Quiet Earth in the everyone else has gone genre, the sex is better here though.

The Out-Laws

Review:Movies:The Out-Laws

Downloaded for a flight. About as funny as an average SNL sketch only movie length.

Podcasts

Intrigue Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel

Review:Podcasts:Intrigue Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel

I have now worked my way back all the way to the first story in the series, murder in a hotel in China. This was pretty good.

Intrigue The Immortals

Review:Podcasts:Intrigue The Immortals

Fantastic series on the billionaire trend towards spending all of your money on life extension and ultimately the geek rapture. Hopefully some of the technology trickles down. I'm not holding my breath - this seems to be the realm of anecdote over data and even some of the proponents admit that it's more religion than science.

TV

The Lincoln Lawyer

Review:TV:The Lincoln Lawyer

From the Bosche Cinematic Universe. The Lincoln Lawyer is unconventional but his heart is in the right place. He has a teenage daughter to look after part-time. He even seems to live in the house next to Bosche (he certainly has the same view). I never watched the movie and I haven't read the books. This adaptation is a David E. Kelley creation - good, but just a little too whimsical.

(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Reviews for October 2023 #reviews Reviews for October 2023 )

Pew: Two Thirds of Americans Support National Popular Vote

People protesting outside the White House, generated by Dall-E 3

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 65% of Americans support the National Popular Vote. Even the old ones:

"Younger adults are somewhat more supportive of changing the system than older adults. About seven-in-ten Americans under 50 (69%) support this. That share drops to about six-in-ten (58%) among those 65 and older."

If you find yourself in this majority then here are 9 things you can do today to advance the cause.

It's not just a desire to have a president of the country who represents the will of the country that is currently thwarted. Last year Pew found that:

"Today, a 61% majority of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases."

58% of Americans favor stricter gun laws. 57% want the Federal Government to take on health care. 63% support free college.

Why can't we have nice things? Apparently because the founding fathers thought we needed protection from the 'tyranny of the majority'. So you'd expect minorities to be well protected by this system.

Same sex marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision in 2015. Public support for same sex marriage was at 27% in 1996 (when Clinton passed The Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA). It's now at 70%. We crossed the 50% line around 2010, when Obama said:

"I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage."

Our majority tyranny protection system failed, Obama failed, Clinton failed. What carried the day was campaigning that convinced the majority that they were wrong on this issue, and arguably the AIDS crisis humanizing a minority for many people.

I wasn't around for the civil rights movement but I think it followed a very similar pattern. The system didn't inherently recognize the rights of the minority. Support was slowly built in public opinion until the Supreme Court eventually stepped in like someone in 2023 who thinks they just discovered Taylor Swift.

While the founding fathers may not have contemplated gay marriage or that black people might be just people they were clever enough to understand that the constitution was a living document and would need to be amended. We just need to get back into the habit.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Pew: Two Thirds of Americans Support National Popular Vote #politics #politicalreform #national popularvote 65% support a national popular vote, 61% support abortion, 58% better gun laws and 63% free college. Why don't we have these things? )