Stephan W.

Father, Husband, Computer Scientist, Enterprise Cloud Architect, and Leader.

Curiosity is a dying art.

All opinions are my own.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@LukeWeinhagen Perhaps if we define civilization as "those we feel safe sleeping near" then it's millions of civilizations exerting pressure and influence over each other.

Maybe the singular Civilization we reference is more accurately "the norms of the civilization that is currently winning"

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

The Latin noun cīvis (genitive cīvis; third declension, common gender) derives from Old Latin ceivis, which traces to Proto-Italic keiwis. This, in turn, stems from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱey- (or kei-), meaning “to settle, to lie down, or to rest.”

So "camp" or more likely "those we allow into camp"

Civilization is specifically those that we feel safe sleeping near.

So there are either zero civilizations, or millions exerting pressure over each other.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@LukeWeinhagen I believe the word would be Barbarism ;)

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

(sorry, bit of a ramble, but this is a new thought for me today and you're the only person I know that I can reliably have such a conversation with without their eyes glossing over haha)

I think enlightenment may have lost the fundamental thread(or, likely, i haven't read enough), especially since the deep root of civis is something like "camp" or "resting area". The norms would rise from the vetting process for determining who is allowed in camp, downstream of the concept of what a camp means. But along the way the linguistic directionality inverted. The name of the Thing came to be shorthand for the practices which allowed for the Thing it originally meant. All of enlightenment seems derived on definitions created after that inversion of priority.

Not a perfect analogy, but it's similar in nature to the fact that we call bears, bears. It's rooted in a phrase meaning something like "the brown one" because people became superstitious that using the original name for bear, summoned bears. So over time the substitute became the first order name of the animal.

Im drawn to this idea because I think too often people tend to equate civilization with some particular construct of the rule of law, and lose sight of why such norms exist and are enforced in the first place: trust that you can sleep in proximity to other people without them slitting your throat in the night. So in that's sense, civilization is not culture, but peaceful coexistence. The moment you don't have peaceful coexistence, the moment you feel the need to be guarded in public or sleep in watches, or set the alarm at night, you immediately no longer have civilization. It's not buildings or a political system, but a state of social order, in the same family as peace or war. The systems are the means by which we create and enforce civilization. It's the tool, not civilization itself.

That then brings a rather strange thought: given the level of distrust and fragmentation in modern life, we are not one civilization in the US, and that number might possibly be zero civilizations at the global level. Civilization may be recognized or signalled by the very existence of a high-trust society, and since there seem to be few or no remaining high-trust societies, there is little or no civilization.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

Today's word: civilization

We seem to have lost the thread of its primal origin.

Note: The concept of kennings in Norse society has led me to explore language, and etymology in particular, through a different lense. I'll write up my observations as an article at another time, but those observations govern why I asked the question the way I did.

https://t.co/9yHa6vGhcn

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@FBIDirectorKash @FBI_Response There's a deeper problem when We the People are reduced to taking it on faith from one side or another.

Transparency, not secrecy.
Verifiable Fact, not rhetoric.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

Ah I see what I did. I mistook your use of "possible" to mean "likely, feasible, not difficult", rather than precisely in the boolean sense, and let that run the argument.

I'm typically leery of any argument that dissuades personal agency. Baiting to remain in the hazard? Ha

But I think your point is that it's just as dangerous to be a martyr for a false cause, and there is guilt in those who give them the cause, so be responsible with what one shouts from the soapbox.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

Where's the limit? How do you know if it's possible if you don't speak to the issue?

For example, as a father I find the prospect of leaving parasitic systems, even those as entrenched as unjust taxing methods, unchallenged to survive to parasitize my children, intolerable.

At some point the cost to myself is worth the prospect of making things better for them, or at the very least not letting it get worse.

There are measures of resistence.

Some are low cost, the lowest of which is to speak of the transgression.

Some are higher than can be paid by any individual, we name that War.

We can't know the true cost of a particular goal without starting at the bottom and working our way up the spectrum, as far as we are each willing to pay.

We also can't know how many are willing to share the cost, or individually to what degree, without speaking of it.

I would not equate calls for justice with baiting into hazard. Some hazards are necessary. It's only baiting if one does not intend to pay any of the cost themselves.

Since people lie and manipulate, we should all take care to act on the words of others without discernment.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

I'm so glad I pay a subscription to multiple streaming services for all of them to be pushing fucking ads in the middle of my shows..

You forgot your business model.

You also apparently forgot how my generation works.

I grew up with cable having this many ads and it cost less than you.

DVDs still exist.
Don't make me go 2004 on your ass.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@kairosx1_ @hthieblot I too am cultured

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@LukeWeinhagen @curtdoolittle I disagree in part. There is utility in identifying the desired target state. Without it, you can't plan a course of action to improve anything. But I do agree with the sentiment: care must be taken to avoid conflating the act of defining the problem, with an act of solving it.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@LukeWeinhagen @curtdoolittle Agreed. "In theory" and "in practice" are rarely the same these days it seems.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

@curtdoolittle @LukeWeinhagen I think you did a much better job of articulating the issue from the perspective I was trying to raise than I did, thank you.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

Under American tradition most would assume to be arguing under the landed tradition under natural common law.

I suspect that's where a lot of the "debate" fundamentally spawns from: those that see property (i would say rightly) as a translation or storage of one's finite time on earth, vs those that wish to justify access to any resources they wish any time they wish (claiming imminent domain on a generational family farm in order to place a private for-profit data center under the auspices of national urgency). Both sides claiming to be right and just, but only one isn't seeking to hijack a collective commons for private imperial ambitions.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

LLMs are fancy rainbow tables.

Your prompt is the hash key.

The table was populated during training with every *typically useful* combination of tokens derived from the training set.

Thats it.

Your agent is looping, repeatedly calling this rainbow table, starting with your prompt as the first key, and using the result as the next key, over and over, sometimes in parallel, until something halts it.

Stop with the "it's intelligent" rhetoric.

It's useful, sure.

The architecture makes it hard to recognize, yes.

But it's a fancy rainbow table.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

My only reason for bringing up reconstruction at all is that there was a concerted push by the union to destroy the classical definition of State in the mind of Americans because it brought up unconfortable philosophical questions. We stopped operating like a union of countries in the post war era.

And no, the founders specifically debated unity vs confederation prior and during the revolution. Hamilton argued for total unity, reforming as a single new country and abolishing State governments. We obviously did not end up under that plan with the AoC, nor the later Constitution.

[Stephan W. @CloudByter]

The definion of what constitutes a Treaty, and the definition of Republic has nothing to do with the civil war. But post war reconstruction has a lot to do with why people get confused by such things today.

The debate of unified vs republic goes back to before the revolutionary war... The founders deliberately chose republic, and that's historical fact.