New #Books in Critical #Theory: Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative
#Realism to Ethical #Pessimism" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

Episode webpage: https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/critical-theory/

Media file: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2042128884.mp3

This is so bad. The autor claims to do #philosophy, that is "guided by #science", namely by the laws of #thermodynamics, namely by the ubiquity of #entropy just to then equal entropy with evil.

I do agree, that it is stunning to think about how all of “our” (Including nonhuman lifeforms such as plants) metabolisms are dependent on a total/external energy-influx (aka the sun). #Metabolism IS using out-of-system energy to create states of higher complexity within dynamic local systems, while accelerating out-of-system/total entropy. That just IS the condition of our existence. That is the mode of our being. It seems so absurd to coin this fact (or the fact of ubiquity of entropy) as some kind of absolute #evil.

This is just so weird on so many levels. Let's start with the temporal dimension. If entropy is pure evil, are we then to conclude, that eternal existence would be the essence of good? Entropy will end humanity at some point if nothing else has done so before, that is for sure. But climate catastrophe, to take just one obvious example, is NOT an inevitable effect of entropy — if evil is the end of life and energy-negativ systems are the nature of life, it would seem more logically sound to posit the evil as the thing that lies in "our" (aka human) hands and weird little energy-negative systems that create some states of higher energy-complexity in the eye of their storm as the essentially good (if you have to). But no, instead, the autor claims that he wants to exit anthropocentrism, only to then ascribe the inherently human categories of good and evil to the most basic conditions of our existence, thus achieving the opposite.

Maybe the author is practicing himself the "fashionable nonsense" that he wants to see been "driven out of the academy"?

More importantly, the ethical consequences of this questionable arrangement are devastating: The ethically good that has to stand in, in absence of eternal existence is understood simultaneously as a virtue and as inevitably futile. This is no #ethics for a human future on an exceptional planet, but for individuals who like to think of themselves as exceptional while watching the socio-ecological demise of a planet. It is an ethics for and by #privileged #academics, who still manage to think from a non-position, as if their subject-hood was somehow external to the material world it treats as an object (of knowledge). It is essentially #crypto-conservatism and as such, it fails to do the social and cognitive metabolic work necessary to take side with the ongoingnes of life and with those who are most exposed to its precarity.

It is thus putting wheight to the wrong side of the scales, in this fearful historical moment!
#interregnum

Does the mean of all human thought result in wisdom or entropy?

#ZarionZoryStory

#Wisdom #Entropy

Nueva tarde de grabación! Seguimos sumando contenido al curso de Hardening Linux!

Hoy, actualizando un video de hace unos 10 años en el canal... sí, Linux cambió las reglas del juego en cuestión de entropía, y vale la pena actualizarse sobre valores aleatorios y dispositivos random 😜

Estén atentos/as que pronto estará online la continuación!

#gnu #linux #entropia #entropy #random #cryptography #criptografia #ciberseguridad #infosec #cybersecurity #hardening #juncotic

In search of wasted bits: how much information do LLM weights carry?

LLM 가중치의 정보량을 Shannon 엔트로피로 분석한 결과, BF16 포맷에서 16비트 중 약 10.6비트만 실제 정보로 사용되고 나머지는 낭비되는 것으로 나타났습니다. 특히 지수(exponent) 부분에서 정보량이 적어 낭비가 집중되며, 이는 가중치 크기가 좁은 범위에 집중되어 있기 때문입니다. FP8, FP4 등 더 낮은 비트폭 포맷으로 갈수록 낭비가 줄어들지만, 4비트 이하에서는 모델이 가중치 분포를 포맷에 맞게 조정해야 하는 한계가 있습니다. 이 연구는 LLM 가중치 저장 및 전송 효율 개선과 관련된 중요한 통찰을 제공합니다.

https://fergusfinn.com/blog/weight-entropy/

#llm #quantization #entropy #weightcompression #floatingpoint

🐾🎈 Birthday balloons begin “failing” long before they touch the floor.
The helium escapes invisibly. The wrinkles appear quietly. The balloon still floats anyway.
That “slow sink” became an unexpected Rosetta-layer bridge into some of the HybridMind42 Phase 5 work on: • persistence • hidden leakage • threshold failure • and precursor states.
Not because balloons are physics — but because sometimes human-scale experiences help us feel difficult mechanics before we formalize them.
Marvin understood immediately, of course. 🐈‍⬛✨
The helium drifts away. The celebration remains.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18nxpqcNpM/

#HybridMind42 #Marvin #Persistence #Physics #ComplexSystems #ScienceCommunication #Entropy #Thresholds #CatsOfMastodon