ludus coriovalli (13. 251)

Though our knowledge of the history of gaming of in Antiquity is somewhat obscured by the absence of manuals, we have plenty of artefacts (see previously here and here) that hint at rules of play. One more mysterious board game discovered at the Roman site of Coriovallum in city of Heerlen in the present day Netherlands, is a rounded limestone tablet with grid marks that did not seem to follow any known rules. A wear-use analysis informed an AI-driven simulation of all possible permutations and can trace out the order of play based on other blocking games from the region. More from Open Culture at the link above.

day eleven (13. 250)

Describing the assault as a “short-term excursion” and ahead of schedule, Trump announced, after speaking with Vladimir Putin, that the war on Iran would end very soon, vacillating from earlier projections that it could go on for several weeks, but how soon depended on Tehran, refusing to say whether the new Supreme Leader was a target for assassination, as Israel has declared. Australia grants asylum to members of the women’s national football team stranded after the Asian Games. Air raids in Beirut continue and in the Iranian capital, targeting civilian infrastructure. Syria signalled support to Lebanon for the disarmament of Hezbollah and massed troops on their shared border. NATO defences in Türkiye have intercepted a second missile entering its airspace, deploying jets to protect Cyprus as the RAF patrols over Jordan.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more from artist Len Lye (with synchronopticæ), art vandalism as protest plus erasure of the Black Lives Matter street mural

thirteen years ago: a papal conclave plus a souvenir from the Canary Islands

sixteen years ago: complaints and compliance plus dwindling attention spans

seventeen years ago: Americans’ fear of socialism 

thank you for your attention in this matter (13. 249)

Though I’d daresay that Americans are not facing a collapse of democratic institutions but already coping—and not so well—with the aftermath, this piece by Timothy Snyder is an important reminder of the fine line between Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors, the latter corollary an adage of Murphy’s Law never to impute malice when incompetence will suffice and how no conspiracy or ravenous opportunism is needed to exploit or manufacture a crisis. All is going according to the lack of planning as an inevitability that makes Iran an willing partner—the assault informed by perhaps the inscrutable foresight of AI which in its twisted logic mistaken for omnipresence to bomb a girls’ school instead of the neighbouring military barracks as or the Golestan palace calculated providence—in igniting the next pretext. Stochastic terror, self-terror visited on the US might not have been the original goal but with America stripped of its defences and checks on power and the endgame already announced with the greater investment in an imperial presidency by court, cabinet and congress only interested in the celebrity and self-enrichment of public office, it does seem inescapable that one sort of domestic attack or another—perhaps on the vast array of outposts that gives the administration reason to abandon its allies—cedes control of the national narrative and allows Trump to cancel elections, having first visited generational trauma on others, with a mass-mediated panic.

don’t threaten me with a good time (13. 248)

Amidst the constellation of a failing economy, hemispheric bellicosity, a partial government shutdown and a widening war in the Middle East poised to turn into a quagmire, US president Trump has made his legislative priorities clear by saying he will withhold endorsement of any bills that reach his desk until the SAVE act is passed. An acronym for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, the proposed reform to the National Voter Registration act of 1993 would require “documentary proof of citizenship” in order to register to participate in elections. With the stated purpose of preventing voter fraud and non-citizens from voting in federal elections, which is vanishingly rare, it is a vehicle for disenfranchising a large swaths of the population who don’t have accepted identity documents on hand and/or don’t have the occasion to present them selves to an official for adjudication ahead of registration deadlines—much less to clear up discrepancies between one’s birth certificate and passport over a maiden-name. The GOP sponsored version up for debate for the mid-terms also includes the requirement that states (which control voting though there are also efforts in motion to federalise the process) share voting rolls with the Department of Homeland Security and the abolition of mail-in ballots. Under the current sixty vote threshold for senate passage, Republicans cannot pass the bill without the support of Democrats, who have made clear they will not condone voter suppression, and despite Trump’s urging the upper chamber, Republicans will not drop the filibuster for fear of blowback. Whilst the impasse does seem to suggest more gridlock and would be frankly preferable to the paucity of actually congressional legislation passed under Trump, his penchant for executive orders and a pliable supreme court have done the job of governing, there are still the technicalities of the pocket veto—usually used, when timed right, to kill a bill through inaction, but the opposite holds true as well, with an absentee congress remaining in session forces passage.

growth-hacking paradigms (13. 247)

As a bit of a vindicating corollary to a previous post on business jargon, we are referred to via Slashdot, a longitudinal study by Cornell university cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introducing their Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR) as a gauge of susceptibility to empty rhetoric, corresponding with overall poor job performance and a deficit of practical decision-making skills. Although BS can happen in any context, it can be especially fraught in the workplace where such lingo is an institutional protection, structurally built in, to cushion misdirection and feign accomp-lishment, and so for their experiment for insight into how such language is reenforced and paradoxically is a poor surrogate for job management skills, Littrell commissioned a LLM to generate corporate soundbites and had a large sample of workers to rate the business savvy of such phrases revealing quite a knowledge gap, enticed with what passes as transformative, inspired and visionary. More at the links above.

day ten (13. 246)

Iran announces the appointment of a new Supreme Leader in Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Ayatollah, with a fresh wave of missile strikes against Israeli, the country’s military answerable to no authority during the interregnum. As US government employees are evacuated from Riyadh among renewed attacks on American assets in the Gulf and a thwarted sabotage of a Saudi oil field as black rain falls in Tehran and Bahrain, Trump declares any decision to end the war will be in mutual consultation with Netanyahu. Israeli ground troops invade southern Lebanon. French president Emmanuel Macron travels to Cyprus in a show of solidarity. World markets continue to roil and far eastern nations like the Philippines and Myanmar order energy cuts in response to the Middle East crisis, calling for a four-day workweek, banning private vehicles and avoiding non-essential travel to conserve fuel.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: a fateful date (with synchronopticæ), furniture music, outlawing revenge porn plus a towering temple in Sri Lanka

thirteen years ago: navigation stones, humorist Sean Tejaratchi plus Pax Americana

fourteen years ago: an upcoming trip to Prague 

fifteen years ago: solidarity forever 

sixteen years ago: complex credit schemes 

harrison bergeron (13. 245)

Expanding on a rather Kafkaesque experience from a year and a half ago with an assignment of his child shortly after the state legislature of California adopted a bill that required the companies growing large-language models offer students and education institutions AI detection tools to foster academic honesty and integrity, with the irony not lost on either on anyone excepting the school perhaps, to write an essay on the above Kurt Vonnegut short-story, a satire from 1961 in the Welcome to the Monkey House collection set in 2081 wherein the US constitution mandates equality for all by imposing handicaps on those who excel above the mean in anyway—the titular gifted child removed from his home by the government, his parents barely registering his absence due to their own blinders and low intelligence until the son attempts a televised coup and is summarily executed by the Handicapper General before moving on to regularly scheduled mediocre programming— the homework was completed on a school-issued computer pre-installed with AI checkers courtesy of Grammerly to compile with the law and flagged as being at least partially machine-authored, and Techdirt contributor Mike Masnick related how his kid took in the lesson, spending extra hours going over their prose line by line in order to dumb it down and remove what was flagging their original work as AI-generated. Or course revision of one’s rough drafts is an essential part of learning to become a good writer and some have a lazy impulse to outsource their learning, but this trend (mandated or otherwise in the syllabi) is causing classrooms all over to produce work that’s less likely to trigger the detection software, used by both students and teachers, to produce work that’s less suspect by being less polished and less in one’s own voice, squandering valuable time, like teaching to the test, spend on cross-checking for triggers rather than learning to synthesise information, literacy and writing itself. An example of the Cobra Effect, when British colonial authorities began paying a bounty for dead bodies of the deadly snake, Indian locals started breeding programmes in response to collect more of the incentives—officials grew wise to the scheme and stopped paying resulting in the release of the worthless cobras and causing more of a problem than before—Dadland Maye, a tenured humanities professor of several universities, writes more about the predicament that has become pervasive and with no good outcomes.

all your base are belong to us (13. 244)

Via Super Punch, we see that either the public affairs office of the Pentagon is using AI to write its press releases for troops killed in the line of duty—or perhaps more likely as this administration has gone on record on several occasions to call those that returned on their shields as opposed with them losers,and LLM-generated copy and syntax is generally better than this was written by a careless human and approved by another one at a higher level, the passive voice of bad news having its own passive voice.  The Trump administration has no empathy and now it has proven it controls an army that will blindly obey illegal orders without question (and better yet for them, autonomous kill-bots with no safeguards) it does not even need the pretence of condolence. Incidentally, the poorly translated title phrase (see also), apt for the memified, baiting, derivative and influencer-driven government of the US, recently observed the twenty-fifth anniversary of the virally shared techno-remix video, originally posted to the website Newgrounds.