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Radio War Nerd EP #243 — Neural Networks, Directed Energy Weapons & the RWN Community (Patreon)

Published:
2020-08-28 16:06:28
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

Guest: Nick Bedi

Recorded: August 25, 2020

First: We discuss northeast Mozambique's insurgency and ISIS...then, Ames reads a letter from Belorussian author Vladimir Kozlov on his insider view of the anti-Lukashenko protests...

At 27:27 - We go mondo war nerd with friend of the show Nick Bedi — DevOps engineer, ex-Raytheon security guard, and founder of the Radio War Nerd facebook community. Nick explains to two aging humanities majors what neural networks are and how they relate to AI and military use; and we get into laser weapons and the inverse square law that gets in the way of everything...

Total time: 2:03:14

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

John Teoli

If you want to find the comment sections you're looking for, just go to the website of any local news channel.

CR

MoldyTolge

Overjoyed to hear another Apostles of Watts spreading the good word. Reading Blindsight back in high school changed my brain for better or for worse, glad to know I wasn’t the only one.

xnfec

If you want a view of Belarus (and the former Soviet Union in general) look at this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_UAkHQFcgA This is from May this year. It's not overtly political at all but you get a good view of the place and its people and how they live. I found him slightly annoying at first but once I got used to his style he grew on me. Now I'm binge-watching his stuff.

xnfec

Gunnar did a very interesting interview on Carls earlier podcast regarding his life in China (I think a family member was some kind of Icelandic diplomat). Mr Wendover has some good Youtube essays about the economics of airlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_akzwzghWQ

xnfec

The bit about the launchcodes being 0's made ma laugh. I like to think it is just people resisting the systems. A bit like the secretaries at Rand Corporation doing game theory wrong (Adam Curtis - The Trap "F**k You Buddy")

John Miller

A lot of sites just integrate current social media sites into their comment sections, so you log in with your Facebook profile and comment as yourself unfortunately

Nick Bedi

I'm working on some infrastructure to hopefully move off of Facebook. Not sure the participation levels we'll get, but I'll post the info to the patreon comments as well.

ramshackle

I love that John is essentially teaching a course where he get to pick the subjects, invite guest lecturers, pick the students and how much he interacts with them, work remotely and keep what I assume is a greater percentage of the income. From students who are paying a lot less, dont have to worry about assessments and are taking in dense information they have a real interest in. By cutting them out of the deal, its the most poetic "Fuck you" to the academy I can think of. Not sure what it means for the future. I'm hoping for more wandering-public-lecturer than gig-economy.

d

How does one get into the discord? Non-facebook user here but I'd love to be in a RWN discord.

Henry Finucane

CAPTCHAs are really fascinating. You can teach computers to do them, and there's always an arms race between the CAPTCHA solvers and the CAPTCHA makers. There is also, in a cyberpunk-dystopia kind of way, a way around that: there are offices in the third world of people who make a tiny pittance solving CAPTCHAs so other people can send spam from high value services like gmail. They are commonly called 'click farms'. There is also this sidenote of Google using the reCAPTCHA problem solving as an input to their AI projects- you identifying fire hydrants is free labor to validate the outputs of their neural nets. Natural language processing is not solved, but I worry that your guest gave too limited an impression of the state of the art. Google gave a frankly terrifying demo two years ago now of something that could fake a conversation over the phone- https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html. For text, the current flagship thing is called GPT-3, which is currently good enough to act as a Sokal Affair generator. Check out some poetry- https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#poetry . It's a non-threatening toy, but so were Go playing programs 10 years ago. Mastodon is great, and has that Old Internet feel, as if the world was mostly furries, communists, and people who really like futzing about with computers.

ramshackle

While loading this page, I was greeted by a familiar checkbox. I ticked "I am a human", and got the response: "Incorrect, please try again" Either patreon.com know something I don't, are trying to hurt my feelings, or don't expect genuine humans to block so much javascript.

Professor Jokes

Anybody know the name of the author of patriots the congo book

a clash of purple

The Patreon captchas kept bugging out for me so I complained and now I don't have to do them anymore, it's great.