Create sufficiently complex situations that they surpass the attenuation capacity of the governing system, and do so at a rate that is faster than the relaxation time of that governing system.
#cybernetics
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Looking for a edutainment MS-DOS game that teaches you cybernetics (systems thinking) with a (iirc) an economics and environment simulation. It must have been from the late 1980s or early 90s and I think it used EGA graphics. It may have been in German.
Rings a bell what game it is?
Update: found it! It’s called Ökolopoly https://youtu.be/iYPSANP9B4k?si=-hm5N-h59mh0C-U4
#retrogaming #retrocomputing #cybernetics #kybernetik
(1/3) What do #reflexive practices look like on #cybernetic fieldwork?
For our research team, we use a combination of #embodied methods and second-order #cybernetics to inspire fresh perspectives on historical #technologies, the natural #environment, and past identities in #Australia 
We “explore the emotions, sensations, and lived experiences of us as researchers and the researched (telegraph workers, surveyors, repeater stations, railway lines etc.).”
But how do we do this? …
A full body sketch of Minnie done with pens and markers. I suppose she‘ll be the more trigger happy on the team. 
Here's a lovely piece by my #ANU #Cybernetics colleague, @theEllamo which talks about my #TokenWars talk, and how it's related to concepts like #PeakToken and the value of human-generated #data as the internet becomes polluted by #AI-generated slop.
There's a video link here to the #TokenWars talk, if you haven't seen it already.
Thanks, Ella!
ANU School of Cybernetics · Token WarsPhD Researcher Kathy Reid (she/her) is an AI Voice researcher investigating speech technologies with a focus on the data that goes into these models. Kathy asks critical questions about these technologies, the people, and the voices they serve. Kathy’s motivation both personally and professionally is the value that knowledge is power and knowledge shared is empowerment. These underlying understandings are core to Kathy’s PhD work and also her keynote talk Token Wars. With these values and a highly open-source background it may come as a surprise to you that Kathy questions if everything should be open not just to anyone but to anything. The continuous scraping and pollution of the internet by AI companies looking to train their latest models is deeply challenging to the ‘everything open’ approach. Kathy and her research ask a lot of great questions about technology and power - who benefits from technologies and what are the costs? These cybernetics questions about unintended consequences underpin Kathy’s Token Wars, a talk that dives into the current technical, legal, and political, resource conflict surrounding AI training ‘tokens’ or data. Kathy’s talk, as many great talks do, comes in three parts: Part 1: Kathy gives us an accessible overview of tokens and transformers, the technologies that together build large language models like ChatGPT and Claude Part 2: Kathy unpacks the value of tokens, why they mean so much to AI companies, and what it means for these tokens to become a scarce resource. Here, Kathy also dives into the actions and intentions of the key actors in these token wars, as well as the damage they are causing. Part 3: Kathy considers tokens and data as a form of treasure or capital – and asks how we might protect and safeguard this treasure. Kathy also speculates on the future of tokens and future protection strategies. The Token Wars: why not all our content should be open Token Wars was first delivered by Kathy Reid at Everything Open and the Melbourne Machine Learning and AI meetup. This version of Token Wars was delivered on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country here at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics. Current LLMs are trained on nearly all the publicly available data in the world – and globally we’re running out of new human-generated ‘tokens’ to train newer and better models on. Kathy holds that we’ve passed a point in history she terms “Peak Token” - where we have the highest availability of human-generated tokens. As LLMs and synthetics data proliferate, the open web is becoming increasingly filled with low-quality “AI slop”, ushering in the “slopocene” - where rich, diverse, human-generated data is rarer and more valuable. LLM Models: Number of training tokens and parameter size by date. 2025-04-13 https://github.com/KathyReid/token-wars-dataviz. Visit Kathy’s blog for her recent thoughts on the speculative OpenAI hardware device that may come about as a result of these Token Wars and find out more about Kathy’s research on our PhD Spotlight from earlier this year.
#NerdPing: which of you weirdos are in to #cybernetics (in the sense of the field of study).
I've been reading Jon Walker's VSM guide and listening to General Intellect Unit and I keep finding valuable things.
Continued thread
Some quotes from the text:
"The goal is always to optimize the fulfillment of needs while keeping decisions and data as local as possible."
"Or in complex system lingo: The constraints are slightly different, which might result in the systems sliding into different attractor states."
"We can make use of the ideas of cybernetics if and when they seem useful to solve a problem, but they don't force us to act or think in a given way."
I wrote down some reflections on the complex anarchism symposium I attended in May and the talk I gave there about anarcho-communist economics. The text covers discussions around the question of which concepts and tools should be discarded as too central or too dominant in the anarchist context and which structures and tools are required to adequately handle complex systems in a non-hierarchical way.
transform-social.orgTransform Social | Reflections on Complexity and CentralityThis is a reflection on the experiences from and feedback received at the complex anarchism symposium. It covers discussions around the question of which concepts and tools should be discarded as too central or too dominant in the anarchist context and which structures and tools are required to adequately handle complex systems in a non-hierarchical way.
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Ahh, roger, thank you! That's a really useful explanation; yes, I see why slapOS in and of itself won't cut the mustard. Gosh, I can see why we need this capability from a strategic/geopolitical point of view. Indeed not just Europe; any competent government should want to make sure feedback-loops were set up so that they did not inadvertently lose "digital sovereignty" in such a manner here illustrated.
I did this about a decade and a half ago
It is mostly about defining the self; the illusion of control; what luck is; what affects our thinking; the attention economy; the literacy virus; the motor that motivates us
It’s a recap of everything I’d been writing about and teaching, up to that point – shortly after this I did a few actual personal appearances in venues to deliver this talk to audiences.
Success In Seven Parts – 18 mins 14 seconds, © Ian K Tindale 2011
youtu.be/6V6jKRF9B4s #Self #Control #Cybernetics #Luck #Literacy #LiteracyVirus #Attention #AttentionEconomy #Motivation
youtu.be- YouTubeEnjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Started a new starter pack on cybernetic communists with currently myself and @ida_zeitoekonomie
I can't add @cibcom as they restricted discoverability and cannot be added.
If you know more accounts or would like to be added, let me know!
fedidevs.comCybernetic communists - Mastodon Starter PackThis starter pack is for accounts that talk about a cybernetic approach to economics and are communists.
It suddenly struck me the other day that generative AI used in government and media has a very Memoirs Found in a Bathtub quality about it. One of the premises of Lem's (amazing) novel is that paper disintegrates for unknown reasons, leaving very few hard records of anything. The book is a mock diary of a person who lived through the disorienting chaos that ensued.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #StanislawLem #fiction #SciFi #ScienceFiction #cybernetics
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #StanislawLem #fiction #SciFi #ScienceFiction #cybernetics
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@tante
…and they are trying to bring back #nuclear with #AI …
While #nuclearenergy is not #fossil it not #green at all - but #colonial , #deadly & totally unfair because, like in AI, the #profits are being privatised, the costs are hitting the whole #society & the #planet
But from the point of view of someone believing in #cybernetics or one of its #TESCREAL grandchildren it is great - because in cybernetics EVERY problem will be solved in "the future" by "technology"
breaking ranks. 
"The major problems in the world are the differences in how nature works and how people think."
-- Gregory Bateson
en.wikipedia.orgGregory Bateson - Wikipedia
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@urlyman
#manufacturingConsent
*edited to add: there are often open-source alternatives, many of which need help with everything from translation to documentation to writing code. That is to say, I acknowledge that for many interactions, my posting the hashtag on it's own is reductionist, but perhaps where Manufacturing Consent seems relevant, we can trace our steps back and figure out the point we started consensually engaging with the entity that is or seems to be manufacturing consent.
There's probably a spectrum of degrees of choice represented at those points we started consensually engaging with the other entity, depending on (em)urgency of the customer's need and degree of monopoly supplier holds. Eg.: emergency medical care > insulin pump > railway ticket.
The user has to consent to all of those things, but obviously at one end of the spectrum is "or death", and moving away from that things get more relaxed.
Crikey. Sorry. Don't stand there. I think there's a soapbox on the floor. Dangerous stuff this social media!
It's an interesting point you highlight because I've never thought of things through that paradigm. Now that I see it, I realise I'm hoping to transition to #openBSD because I believe of mainstream operating systems, it probably has the best #DX.
In this particular case, I believe that the developers exploit that in order to optimise for what might be called #security which impresses me.
I realise it's probably an outlier in this regard!
Gleich auf #Deutschlandfunk : #Feature #Projekt #Cybersyn - Chiles kybernetischer Traum von #Gerechtigkeit (1/2)
Das Projekt, #Kybernetik zum Wohle einer #Gesellschaft durch eine sozialistische Regierung und ihre Forscherinnen, umzusetzen, würde schon mehrfach beleuchtet.
#Heute um 20:05h kommt der erste Teil des aktuellen Feature von Jakob Schmidt und Jannis Funk auf #DLF
Finally updated my #profile at https://speakerinnen.org 
Are you looking for a #talk, a #workshop or an #interview on the #socialimpact of #digitalization?
On #ai, #sustainability or #ideologies behind digitalization as #cybernetics, #gamification, #longtermism, or #effectivealtruism?
Why the thoughts and theories of those in power heavily influence societies?
Are you looking for a #workshop on how to really interest people in #computersecurity?
Contact me.
And #boost if you like
I need to be clear that my #math skills are embarrassingly limited and something I've always struggled with as an #ADD and dyslexic person. Going through school, subject after subject was presented as, "Now memorize this because you have to." Which was not very compelling without the context of what it can really be used for. I tried, I got high marks, but I wasn't included in the better classes with better teachers which created a cycle of disinterest.
As I read, "Dark hero of the information age : in search of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics" which tells the stories of how mathematics, biology, electrical engineering, electronic engineering, and computing were brought together to holistically in the 1940s to examine problems that span subject matter, it makes me want to go back and restart my mathematics journey looking at the contextual challenges those solutions were applied to. I think I could probably overcome many of my limitations by taking a different learning route.
Does anyone have other interesting books on mathematicians or resources that can build up math skills with independent study? Are there corners of the #fediverse that I can look at? I would appreciate recommendations.
I don't ever expect to be very good, but I would like to challenge myself to be more mathematically capable if I take the time to learn more behind the equations themselves.