DeepMind to Dox EVERY PROTEIN Known to Humankind

Freedomist Editor July 23, 2021

The folks who self-identify as DeepMind are promising to wreck protein’s remaining lives by doxing whatever proteins have yet to be doxed. That’s right, folks, DeepMind is promising to release all the structures of EVERY protein known to science, without protein’s consent, no doubt.

The move could hamper the ability of corporations to win the race to patent all the designs of nature so as to assure that only the wealthy few have access to the building blocks that nature ‘created’ without any contributions from these same patent hoarders. That might not be why DeepMind is doing this, but it works for me.

DeepMind says it will release the structure of every protein known to science

From www.technologyreview.com
2021-07-22 11:00:36
Will Douglas Heaven
Excerpt:

In the last few months Baker’s team has been working with biologists who were previously stuck trying to figure out the shape of proteins they were studying. “There’s a lot of pretty cool biological research that’s been really sped up,” he says. A public database containing hundreds of thousands of ready-made protein shapes should be an even bigger accelerator.

“It looks astonishingly impressive,” says Tom Ellis, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London studying the…

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AI Bias Risk Inherent in Enterprise Design, Experts Say

Freedomist Editor July 23, 2021

Experts are warning that AI might be programmed for bias and it’s running our enterprise networks even as we write this….

Bias in AI isn’t an enterprise priority, but it should be, survey warns

From feedproxy.google.com
2021-07-22 11:40:40
Michael Vizard
Excerpt:

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Watch now.

A global survey published today finds nearly a third (31%) of respondents consider the social impact of bias in models to be AI’s biggest challenge. This is followed by concerns about the impact AI is likely to have on data privacy (21%). More troubling, only 10% of respondents said their organization has addressed bias in AI, with another 30% planning to do so sometime in the next 12 months.

Conducted…

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Biden Zero Carbon Plan Is A Poverty Producing Plan

Bill Collier July 8, 2021

President Biden’s zero carbon plan, which he plans to ramrod through using the legerdemain of “budget reconciliation”, is a plan that will dramatically raise energy costs for the poor and middle class and, because of its approach, increase poverty.

The plan is to make all US power “100% carbon free” by 2035, an ambitious plan that necessitates switching to much more expensive “alternative energy”, possibly among which natural gas with carbon capture (not commercially viable) and nuclear energy (vehemently opposed by his core base).

The effect would be threefold: discarding power plants that took hundreds of billions of dollars to use, building new power plants that will be exponentially more expensive and will face “environmental impact” reviews and delays, and the actual cost of the energy, which will be exponentially higher for consumers.

Once again a politician, chasing a histrionic bogeyman (“climate change spells doom!”), offers a massive, disruptive, top-down solution that is expensive and authoritarian. The top-down approach means, instead of promoting individual and local energy independence through house-portable and house-affordable solutions, the Biden team, egged on by utopian extremists, is focusing on a typical OBS (“one big system”) approach that will continue to keep people dependent on massive structures over which they have no influence.

The “house portable and house affordable” solution requires changing local ordinances to promote alternative building methods that are massively more energy efficient, investing heavily in solar and wind technologies for home use and providing the blueprints free to the public, and providing real incentives to individuals to adopt an individual and local energy independence approach.

The truth is, those who claim to care about the dangers of climate change and/or pollution, both legitimate concerns, are refusing to adopt an approach that truly empowers individuals. Instead, not wanting a good crisis to go to waste, they opt for an OBS approach that perpetuates dependency and concentrates yet more wealth and power in their hands.

The level of poverty will rise not because of seeking alternative energy solutions but because the top-down OBS approach is expensive, inefficient, and disempowering to individuals and the marketplace.

Starlink (Satellite Internet) Goes Live In Weeks

Bill Collier July 1, 2021

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to go live with a massive global network of small satellites providing internet to people in less developed regions in rural zones where internet service is lacking. The service will reach a level wherein they can confidently say they are reaching the entire planet, except for the polar regions, by August.

The network, with only 69,000 subscribers, is predicted to potentially gain 5% of the world’s population as its user base within a few years. Musk’s great hope is that the company doesn’t go bankrupt first, as this project will cost $5 billion to $10 billion before it reaches projected positive cash flow.

The service costs $99/month in the US and uses a network of 1500 satellites (and growing as new launches are ongoing) with a planned total of 42,000 by the end of 2021. To get a sense of scale, there are around 7400 total satellites in space, with a little over half being active and the rest being inactive.

A key innovation of the service is that, while current satellite internet providers have satellites at 22,200 MILES from the earth’s surface, Musk’s are only 342 miles. This means that the signal has less time to travel, decreasing latency.

Latency is the time it takes for your internet signal to travel from your computer to your ISP, to the website server, and then back to you. Longer latency can cause delays in live communications. While other satellite internet providers have a latency of around 500 to 600 microseconds, about half a second, Starlink has a latency of around 39.

Latency is a major hurdle satellite internet providers face.

The other is price. For instance, the price for Starlink in South Africa is 1,450 rand, around $99. So it’s not any cheaper in South Africa, which means for more rural Africans, it may be quite out of reach. The cost is the same in Nigeria, at 40,000 nara, which is $99.

Musk’s Starlink may or may not change the world, as it is claimed, and it won’t bring cheap internet to the poorer communities. But it will dramatically change our immediate space, adding over 35,000 new satellites, all in low earth orbit. Time will tell if this will become a major cause of space pollution and if the benefits or low latency, broadband satellite internet for the more well off in rural locations will be worth that price.

Trump Rumbles! The battle between alt tech and big tech truly begins!

Bill Collier June 27, 2021

Donald Trump joined the alt tech platform, Rumble, a YouTube competitor launched in 2013, soaring past 175k channel subscribers in 24 hours. With this we may say the battle between alt tech and big tech truly begins, albeit with alt tech starting very far behind big tech in every metric.

The move comes after much speculation the deplatformed former President would join multiple other platforms, including Twitter-like alt tech platform Parler. But some consider Rumble both a more stable and long-lived platform that isn’t as prone to crashes as the other platforms.

Expectations that many more users will flock to Rumble and that Trump’s account there will eventually eclipse his Twitter following may be premature as Trump had 88.9 million followers on Twitter. However, if in fact one saw anything approaching that on Rumble, it could disrupt the digital landscape as entities seeking to reach that audience would be forced to take Rumble into account for their advertising.

It remains to be seen whether this will significantly boost Rumble’s user base and make this platform a bit competitive with YouTube or even whether Trump’s presence there would be long-lived as this platform may have massive pressures from the corporate and media establishment to remove him. It is probable, however, that this will in fact double or triple Rumble’s user base over the next few months.

One flaw with the platform is that it is a digital platform and is less interactive than, say, Parler or Gab, unless you are producing video content. For non-producers it is more an entertainment platform they access than a platform they use to express themselves. People can watch video content on Trump’s account without subscribing to the platform.

As for President Trump, just how this enables him to connect to his user base and the world remains to be seen. Early promises of a Trump social media platform resulted in a solo micro blog that was abandoned and nothing more. It is not known if this move constitutes his final decision as to how he will approach having a social media presence, but the fact he has an account on Rumble may not necessarily mean his plans to create a new social media platform have been abandoned.

Our own effort to create a new social media platform, called “Upadaria”, as an e-learning, e-commerce, and social networking platform using gamification and a fictional future history, has shown the complexity in creating even a basic platform targeting tens of thousands of niche users. In our case, we are targeting more cosmopolitan but socially conservative Christians who enjoy gamification and immersive learning experiences and who desire to excell at life.

This audience is perhaps a few million people in the US and a few million abroad, especially considering this is a paid subscription based, not a free, platform. Creating a platform to reach the kinds of numbers Trump needs to make it viable is of a much higher magnitude in complexity. Our platform has absolutely no delusions we can become some form of alternative to big tech platforms or a minor competitor, but Trump will aim precisely at that goal and higher.

The work to build a platform that might be competitive with a major platform would be immense and simply having a lot funding would not necessarily shorten the development time. Trump’s platform, if it comes to pass, must be far more robust than our “Upadaria” platform because his target audience is at least 50 million people. The building of the features and user interface, security, hosting, and data infrastructure for such a task, not to mention the moderation and governance tools and manpower, may prove the biggest hurdles for Trump’s team.

We would not discount the notion a Trump social media platform is coming but its development may take more time than perhaps Trump’s digital team have estimated. It may also be far more expensive than projected with little in the way of a funding model to make it financially self-sustaining within even a few years. However, it is possible this new platform will have free and paid membership levels and, with Trump at the helm and all the personalities that would follow, it may be financially viable.

So far, the move to Rumble is perhaps a small opening salvo in the battle between alt tech and big tech for dominance of the digital space. Alt tech is not merely a David to a Goliath, however, it is a fly versus an elephant at this stage. Trump’s move to Rumble may actually, but it remains to be seen, make alt tech more like a David versus a Goliath within a few years.