Author: David K.

The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections – Polygon

The Oracle is, according to the Architect, the “mother” of the Matrix. She is an intuitive program originally designed to study the human psyche who proposed a solution by creating a simulated reality that would offer humanity a choice to mistrust the very nature of that reality, if only on an unconscious level. This solution more or less worked, with the exception that every iteration of this model of the Matrix inadvertently resulted in an anomaly known as “The One” — a human being with inexplicable power to bend the nature of the Matrix to their will. If left unchecked, both The One and the growing human resistance would pose a threat to the stability of The Matrix. To correct for this error, the Architect and the Oracle created a process by which the Matrix would be rebooted, one that would allow the system to continue to exist by assimilating the inevitability of human resistance itself as a crucial component in service of its continued existence. By the time Neo has awakened in the first Matrix movie, the Matrix has already been rebooted five times, with each version having been facilitated by the destruction of Zion, the last human city on Earth, and with it the death of any human being with knowledge of that previous version of the Matrix.

Source: The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections – Polygon

Swing and a miss. Rather than think that The One is an unavoidable outcome of the programming of the Matrix, it makes a lot more sense if you understand that the Architect intentionally programmed the function of The One into the simulation, in order to give those who reject it a standard to rally around. Everyone who gets freed from the Matrix joins the rebellion, comes to Zion, believes in the “religion” of Morpheus, and comes to center their efforts on a hope in their savior, Neo. It just makes it all easier to control, right? This way, the Architect can efficiently gather up all the people who reject the Matrix — that problem with the natural consequence of at-least subconscious choice — eliminate them before they become a real threat, and then start the process of removing and eliminating those that reject the sim all over again. I feel that this was all pretty clear in the second movie, so I don’t know why this article sums it up in the way that it does.

The Galaxy of a Single Cell

A Single Human Cell

This is the most-detailed photo of a human cell to date. The simplest single-celled organisms aren’t materially less complex. Each tiny strand in the center is a chain of thousands of very-specific combinations of four, very-complicated organic molecules. Then there are all the other complicated parts, and the tiny molecular “machines” that facilitate the functioning of the cell.

According to the world’s thinking and teaching, you are supposed to ignore everyone’s commonly-lived experience about how everything in this world tends to fall apart, and believe that something like this just magically came together in a series of perfect, yet so-far-inexplicable, experiments — in the middle of total chaos, mind you — and then went on to form all known life.

Every time I see something like this, it cracks me up. It’s far, far easier to believe in a supernatural power as the source of our origins than it is to believe that evolution explains our existence. Not because there’s more compelling evidence in religion (as I believe there is), but because the theory of evolution, as an explanation of the origins of life, doesn’t even pass the smell test compared to our known understanding of how our physical reality works.

Spam at Google

As a programmer, who maintained his own email server, directly on the internet, from his home, for many years, I understand the problem of spam better than a lot of other people. It’s tricky. I get that. But, come on, Google. You have 100% certainty that this stuff is garbage, and can be zapped before it even hits the junk folder.

SCOTUS v. Congress

The point everyone seems to be missing about the current hearing in the Supreme Court, reconsidering Roe v. Wade, is that we’re asking SCOTUS to adjudicate a nationally-binding, controversial interpretation of conflicting state laws. It doesn’t matter what you think of the issue of abortion: CONGRESS is the problem in our system here, NOT SCOTUS. If Congress would DO ITS JOB and WRITE LEGISLATION to make national policy on the subject, we wouldn’t be putting the Supremes in an unwinnable political situation. CONGRESS is the governmental body where the debate should be had, and where the process of democracy should be working, yet they are sticking their hands in their pockets, whistling tunelessly, and looking at the ceiling while everyone vents their spleen about the political leanings of the Supremes.

Congress is only interested in passing endless “continuing resolutions” to play games with the tax rules, dole out money to special interests, and collect campaign finance contributions, none of which is actually visible to the public. Every law being written now is just some lobbyist putting his employer’s wishes down on paper, and Congressmen shuffling around to see which way they need to vote, and what favors they’ll have to do, in order to NOT aggravate their largest donors. This is why every election is now based on how much you hate what the OTHER guy SUPPOSEDLY stands for, when no one has any real idea what hardly any of them will ACTUALLY put their name to. Congress is completely captured by Big Business, and until we “fix” the Citizens United ruling, they will never again make actual social policy by legislating again. If you manage to get something you want from our government, just consider yourself lucky that your desires happened to line up with some large donor or corporate PAC.

UPDATE: Someone on Twitter pointed out that the House has passed a bill, specifically to address the limitations of the recent, controversial Texas law, and pointed out astonishment how few people had heard about it. Indeed, that raises strange questions about why the media didn’t seem to do much to cover it.

Also, we were all (supposedly) educated in our public school system about the Senate filibuster, and how it was a strange loophole that’s been exploited for the entire history of the United States. It seems particularly silly, in these modern times, to block a vote by a 60% majority that could lead to passing a bill with a simple 51%, regardless of which party is in control of the body, or what law is being considered. I think it’s time to remove that parliamentary procedure once and for all.

Of course, it would be better if we repealed the 17th Amendment, and restored some semblance of States rights, as a check-and-balance to the Federal government — which the Founders envisioned, and wrote into The Constitution — but that matter was effectively settled when the Feds won the Civil War.

Gaming on a Mac, Update

We’re upgrading all the main service production computers at my church. As part of this effort, I bought 3 M1-based Mac mini’s. As an experiment, I installed Elder Scrolls Online on one of them, to see how well it would run. I expected it to be at least passable. Oh how wrong I was. It ran, and at 60 fps, but I couldn’t run it at any decent resolution. The best the game offered was 1367×768 or something. Of course, this looked like pixelated garbage on a 4K monitor. So, I consider the whole thing an abysmal failure. I’m actually glad. It’s a relief to know that a stock M1-based Mac does not, in fact, run the game amazingly, and that I’m not really missing out on this single data point with my Intel-based Mac.

The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had “little, if any” impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document.

The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing.

Source: The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

Basically, this is everything you need to know about the state governance in the US. Literally all of our current national social issues take a backseat to what the Fortune 500 wants. Our governments, federal and state, do nothing but the bidding of big businesses, collectively decided by who’s in power, and which corporations are currently donating the most to campaigns. There’s nothing else to debate until Citizens United is fixed. Nothing. You can argue about gerrymandering and voting rights all you want, but personal voting does not matter in the slightest. Big business will always get what they want. If you happen to get something you want in the process, then just consider it a happy accident, and be on your way.

Nota bene, I’m NOT singling out a Democratic administration on this. There are innumerable examples of this sort of insider-turned-“lobbyist” on both sides of the aisle. Comcast, AT&T, and the FCC have had three-way incestuous relationship, stretching back for decades, across many administrations.

Facebook declared Kyle Rittenhouse guilty from the start

The blackout went far and wide: Facebook actively policed its users for pro-Kyle Rittenhouse posts and removed the content. It even targeted posts from legal scholars arguing the merits of his self-defense case.

Source: Facebook declared Kyle Rittenhouse guilty from the start

Whatever you think about the case, this is not the internet I signed up for.

Facebook is following the playbook for any and all companies now: monopolize a market, and then extract all of the profits from it. The problem is that Facebook has essentially monopolized online speech. Sure, they can point the FTC at other successful social media companies, in order to mitigate antitrust action, but every other company is a drop is the bucket in comparison. The most influential company besides Facebook is Twitter, and they have, like, one tenth the number of users. So, yes, there are other social media platforms, but if you want to put something “out there” for the world to see, you can’t NOT use Facebook. Is it the de facto social media platform.

Awhile back, someone pointed out the cynical interpretation of the “Facebook whistleblower,” who recently gave testimony to Congress. Rather than this being an embarrassment to Facebook, and begging for intrusive government intervention, it was, in fact, an engineered and coordinated effort to provoke Congress into creating an oversight board.  Why? Because, rather than put shackles on Facebook’s hands, it would be liberating for the officers of the company to be able to point their detractors towards the governmental body regulating social media, which would, nominally, be setting policy. Except that, as we all know full well, they would be doing so at the bidding of Facebook, for the maximization of profit, and campaign contributions.

In my opinion, the so-called “mainstream media” created Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge by their systemic bias. They only really achieved national success after it became clear that the entire American press was going to give Clinton an editorial pass for every one of his scandals, including (and especially) Lewinsky. After that, they remained forces that every other news commentary program had to contend with and respond to. There are conservative social media and independent journalistic platforms ramping up right now in response to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter’s hamfisted efforts at censorship. I predict that they will achieve the same sort of niche-yet-unignorable success that Rush and Drudge had. If so, it will just prove that line in Star Wars true: “the more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers.” The success of Parler and Substack, et. al., are directly tied to the tactics of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to control any and all important social narratives online. They more content they disallow, the more those other platforms will thrive.

Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Source: Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Lawn mowing — I prefer to call it “LARPing Qix” — has its own video game.

I was going to post some super-snarky comment about how much I hate  yard work, and therefore not being able to imagine either the desire to make a game about it, or the desire to play it, but then I remembered that I’ve been doing some fishing in ESO, despite hating it in real life, and I guess that would make me a hypocrite. In my defense, fishing in ESO is the only way to farm one of the most valuable commodities in the game, and, done in particular ways, can get you achievements, and any time there’s a two-for-one deal in a video game, I’m in.

When the traffic firehose is pointed at you – by Ryan Broderick – Garbage Day

The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Source: When the traffic firehose is pointed at you – by Ryan Broderick – Garbage Day

I’ve seen several of these posts on my own feed, because my connections will comment on them.

This is the mechanism that’s leading society by the nose now. It’s well understood. Cambridge Analytica revealed it, and this lever is now longer, more unstable, and more susceptible to error and money than ever. And, instead dismantling Facebook, or muzzling the influence of the algorithm that can direct the attention of the entire country, Meta was allowed to be created in order to further insulate Zuckerberg and Facebook board from further journalistic scrutiny and legal oversight.