> Are digital assistants really representative signs of cultural harmony and world peace? Hardly. In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can either be a 1 or a 0 and you must pick a side. Pro life or pro choice? Trump or Hillary? Democrat or Republican? Amidst the ironclad logic of the syntax of binary code, the ultimate form of protest and rebellion is to declare oneself non-binary.
…what? Seems like a strained metaphor to me. Computers suddenly becoming ternary would not magically make the country into a three party system.
I agree that this is a weak metaphor. Perhaps it would be better to say that the digital era has made discrete values more common, rather than the continuous values of the analog era.
> Are digital assistants really representative signs of cultural harmony and world peace? Hardly. In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can either be a 1 or a 0 and you must pick a side. Pro life or pro choice? Trump or Hillary? Democrat or Republican? Amidst the ironclad logic of the syntax of binary code, the ultimate...
That's a common argument, but completely flawed. Yes, logic gates are binary. But when a bunch of them are wired up to compute in floating point, there's nothing binary about the external behavior.
Binariness depends on the resolution you look at. Individual bits are binary, but floating point registers are an excellent approximation to analog. Individual synapses are binary, but brains are analog. Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't.
The curious thing is, presumably the author has seen video games and heard music on computers. How has it escaped their notice that the outward behavior of these systems is not all-or-nothing?
Perhaps it's no more silly than the claims people have made about how the quantum nature of reality makes us all one in a spiritual sense.
In a genius stroke of irony, the claim that binarization has some inherent effect on things the author implies are "more than binary"... is expressed in good old UTF-8.
This letter takes on new dimensions of horror, in light of recent news that faith wasn't the only thing John was putting in the younger generation of cartoonists. The fact that he was a bitter jerk known for working poorly with others and missing deadlines, who thought only he was the rightful heir to the secrets of cartooning and animation, and who grew increasingly resentful that good work was being produced, on time, by people who weren't influenced by Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Ralph Bakshi, or himself doesn't help his case.
I get that you were linking to the letter only as an example of handwriting, but the story behind the letter has since taken on a much darker turn.
> Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't.
All of our digital media have limited resolution. CD-quality audio may (or may not) have enough resolution to completely fool human hearing. But CD-quality audio is not interactive or three dimensional in the way that a concert hall is; you can't tilt your head to the side or move to a different seat to get a different experience. Instead, you get a pinprick of audio information taken from a single point of view which you cannot manipulate or see through. And that's not even to mention the zillions of studio tricks and digital manipulations of that signal. Because of that limited resolution (e.g. 16-bit PCM on an audio CD), you can't "zoom in" and hear sounds that are much much quieter, both because the SNR gets too bad and the fundamental resolution limitation.
The real world has so much potential for "zoom" that it's fundamentally not the same as its digital representation. Buy a microscope and take a look at an insect and then realize the vast majority of our reality which is extremely near to us is actually so small that it is below our unaided senses. Digital representations of it completely truncate and destroy the information below the level chosen. No more zooming. It is fundamentally different in the real world. In the real world, you can zoom deeper than your mind has capacity to process.
But yeah, video games are fun. Don't get too sucked in, though. Not real. If you ever do get a chance to look at an insect through a microscope, then you'll realize that the outside world has about 50 orders of magnitude more complexity than a video game.
Literature? This is a blog post. It’s not like I’m losing a critical piece of the Superbowl advertising zeitgeist by ignoring the identity of the authors. The Superbowl is not a figurative tool to be used as the backdrop for religion in modern advertising. If this was reposted anonymously and still stood on its own, would we have to do this song and dance?
The content of this article stands on its own or it doesn’t. Ignoring it because it was written by someone with different values from your own is puerile. That was my original point.
I mean i was being in tongue in cheek, but it really seems like a "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" kind of situation.
I think the implication is that the criticism may be valid, but that there is hypocrisy involved wrt author - i.e it's not really about the criticism, but the author/religion.
No, other than the fact that the HN audience is largely western and the Catholic Church has had much more cultural influence in western society than any Islamic institution has.
It's hard to imagine many other organizations with their level of experience on the subject. The analysis of the issue seems fairly spot on, and their own agenda seems fairly transparent.
This whole article is a bit baffling to me. I'm having trouble understanding what the message is. That advertisers are using technology in their ads? Why wouldn't they? That they are trying to "normalize" the influence that code and technology has on our lives? It's already normalized. There isn't a dark conspiracy where advertisers subliminally incorporate language to drown out the luddites. There are big tech companies that want to advertise their brand and their tech. And there are non-tech companies that want to advertise using the language and norms we're already familiar with.
I'm sure there's a less salty way to say this, but if you're going to do this deep analysis of the Superbowl ads, than I expect you to use more than two ads by the same fucking company
Why do people who clearly don't know what computers are or how they work choose to write things like this? It makes them look like clueless buffoons.
> In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can either be a 1 or a 0 and you must pick a side. Pro life or pro choice? Trump or Hillary?
It is an attempt to appropriate the trappings of knowledge with none of the understanding or uncomfortable changes to way of thinking involved. You see scammers do that all the time like "homeopathic vaccines" the one time their daft dillution principles would ironically be closer to actual medicine they don't do it.
"The 7% are the software engineers who possess the shamanic knowledge of how to manipulate said codes to influence human behavior."
No, no. They mean military veterans. The numbers were probably Military Occupational Specialties. Army MOS 11B is infantry. MOS 25M is "multimedia illustrator".
"Oil, water, bread and wine are signs that bring about profound changes in the soul of the recipient because they are tied to a fundamental reality, God’s saving love for mankind affected through the Incarnation and the created order."
Huh? Oh, right, that ritualistic cannibalism thing Catholics are into. The tortured reasoning around that is amusing.[1]
The author is in media studies, not theology.[2] He also wrote "Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs". Reviews of that book are mixed, but trying to understand Apple as a religion is promising.
They do seem to understand that the ad and the 7% statistic are about the military, and are performing an "alternate reading" based largely around the shared word "code." The alternate reading may be more "paradigmatic," but it's not particularly insightful or useful. Let's not even get into the analogy from the, well, binary nature of binary code to the current polarized political atmosphere.
There's plenty of room to criticize the tech giants, and their advertising, but this is disappointingly shallow even for such a short piece.
> Signs no longer reflect a profound reality. [...] In Baudrillard’s view, signs no longer have this sacramental power because they have been detached from the Real, due, in no small part, to the dissembling media environment.
Given that we're already talking about cognitive psychology with a religious tinge, the Screwtape Letters (1942) [0] seem entirely relevant here. (Context: A senior devil is advising a junior one on how to corrupt his human)
> I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.
> But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.
I was following until "binary language and logic must be embraced as the new natural syntax for human interaction via our omnipresent devices" at which point the article seemed to abandon analyzing the motives of the ads, and went off on a rant somehow related to "binary logic", to which computers are apparently tied in contrast to more humane logic.
Also, they threw in "the ultimate form of protest and rebellion is to declare oneself non-binary" which I think might be just a pun, but I'm not sure if they are being serious or not..
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 63.5 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YBtspm8j8M
That's a flask, not a beaker.
…what? Seems like a strained metaphor to me. Computers suddenly becoming ternary would not magically make the country into a three party system.
yes, sorry in advance, but I accept your internet demerits for this bit of foolishness, at least it made me chuckle
That's a common argument, but completely flawed. Yes, logic gates are binary. But when a bunch of them are wired up to compute in floating point, there's nothing binary about the external behavior.
Binariness depends on the resolution you look at. Individual bits are binary, but floating point registers are an excellent approximation to analog. Individual synapses are binary, but brains are analog. Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't.
The curious thing is, presumably the author has seen video games and heard music on computers. How has it escaped their notice that the outward behavior of these systems is not all-or-nothing?
Perhaps it's no more silly than the claims people have made about how the quantum nature of reality makes us all one in a spiritual sense.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
I get that you were linking to the letter only as an example of handwriting, but the story behind the letter has since taken on a much darker turn.
All of our digital media have limited resolution. CD-quality audio may (or may not) have enough resolution to completely fool human hearing. But CD-quality audio is not interactive or three dimensional in the way that a concert hall is; you can't tilt your head to the side or move to a different seat to get a different experience. Instead, you get a pinprick of audio information taken from a single point of view which you cannot manipulate or see through. And that's not even to mention the zillions of studio tricks and digital manipulations of that signal. Because of that limited resolution (e.g. 16-bit PCM on an audio CD), you can't "zoom in" and hear sounds that are much much quieter, both because the SNR gets too bad and the fundamental resolution limitation.
The real world has so much potential for "zoom" that it's fundamentally not the same as its digital representation. Buy a microscope and take a look at an insect and then realize the vast majority of our reality which is extremely near to us is actually so small that it is below our unaided senses. Digital representations of it completely truncate and destroy the information below the level chosen. No more zooming. It is fundamentally different in the real world. In the real world, you can zoom deeper than your mind has capacity to process.
But yeah, video games are fun. Don't get too sucked in, though. Not real. If you ever do get a chance to look at an insect through a microscope, then you'll realize that the outside world has about 50 orders of magnitude more complexity than a video game.
Maybe we should just take the article on the merits of its content, and not its source.
The content of this article stands on its own or it doesn’t. Ignoring it because it was written by someone with different values from your own is puerile. That was my original point.
Let's not act like he wasn't spot on, either, though.
I'm also guessing it was tongue-in-check.
You should be careful with that, it rarely leads to healthy opinions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics
Is religion the same?
> In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can either be a 1 or a 0 and you must pick a side. Pro life or pro choice? Trump or Hillary?
what the frick is this?
No, no. They mean military veterans. The numbers were probably Military Occupational Specialties. Army MOS 11B is infantry. MOS 25M is "multimedia illustrator".
"Oil, water, bread and wine are signs that bring about profound changes in the soul of the recipient because they are tied to a fundamental reality, God’s saving love for mankind affected through the Incarnation and the created order."
Huh? Oh, right, that ritualistic cannibalism thing Catholics are into. The tortured reasoning around that is amusing.[1]
The author is in media studies, not theology.[2] He also wrote "Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs". Reviews of that book are mixed, but trying to understand Apple as a religion is promising.
[1] https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2011/08/06/the-eucharist-a-...
[2] https://mcgrath.nd.edu/about/faculty-staff/brett-robinson-ph...
There's plenty of room to criticize the tech giants, and their advertising, but this is disappointingly shallow even for such a short piece.
Given that we're already talking about cognitive psychology with a religious tinge, the Screwtape Letters (1942) [0] seem entirely relevant here. (Context: A senior devil is advising a junior one on how to corrupt his human)
> I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.
> But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.
[0] https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-screwtapeletters/lewiscs...
Also, they threw in "the ultimate form of protest and rebellion is to declare oneself non-binary" which I think might be just a pun, but I'm not sure if they are being serious or not..