My Posting Place

Well you can't really blame her can you.

 

She is afraid to criticize authority. But privately, she has implied that Jastreboff controls lots of grants, and young scientist getting involved in noxacusis research somewhat depend on his grants. If Jastreboff suspects that his work is being undermined. He will refuse to give out grants, and the whole field will slow to crawl. She paints the picture that he is a necessary evil that everyone has to tread lightly around TRT; not directly challenge it. As that would be political suicide, and academia is ruled by political grants holders, not scientific evidence.

 

If that's true then this can't stand, surely? Noxacusis sufferers may be a silent minority, but tinnitus affects enough people that there's so much potential money in a cure that private independent research towards said cure can't be halted by one academic has-been? Noxacusis may or may not be alleviated by the same remedy I suppose?

 

I hear you. I haven't been to a concert since I was 15. I used to play piano tiles on my tablet. It had such nice music and they have vocal songs now, not just piano sounds for those games. I can't enjoy it because it sounds distorted and yucky since I got invasive tinnitus.

 

@Zugzug

He reminds us that any notion of meaning or purpose is a evolutionary beneficial illusion. It's just the results of us having over sized monkey brains, he says. After all, We are just biological robots roaming a mechanical deterministic universe of inert lifeless matter. Once the meat super computers inside our skull go bad, we will soon become one with the Universe, and by one he means becoming inert lifeless matter; like the chair he is sitting on, or 99.99⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹% of matter in the Galaxy that is not associated with living brain matter.

 

I believe the name of the Criminal Minds episode is “Mayhem” after doing some research.

 

I missed out on a good era of this thread. I know it's trite to rehash the whole "jastreboff bad" idea but I have nothing better to do.

 

I was reading a Jastreboff research paper the other day. It's actually amazing how close he was to being a positive figure. For only being the year 2000, he actually knew a lot about tinnitus and loudness/annoyance hyperacusis. What killed him from a respect standpoint is how much he turned the problem into pseudoscience psychology and his insistence that TRT works no matter what. Also, he simply knows diddly squat about noxacusis.

What he should have done is exactly the same thing, but with a few very important changes.

1) Do not say TRT works for any condition. It does not.
2) Instead of saying that TRT has a X % success rate, say that some combination of time and the treatment led to 80% of people improving. We hope the TRT is helping, but we aren't sure.
3) Just get rid of the "sit down and be counseled" aspect. It's just pitifully patronizing. People are not too stupid to know if sounds harm them or not based on the data that their bodies produces.

One may argue those are major changes, but it's a shame he didn't proceed with a little more caution. His lack of caution changed him from a possibly helpful figure to one where ENTs and audiologists think we have hyperacusis "under control" when we don't.

 

Are you starting to suspect that some people in Academia are full of shit, but they just pretend to be intellectual and sophisticated to secure grant money? Look into pelvic floor disorders being misdiagnosed as bacterial infections, or TMD/TMJ biteguards being a gamble; only working for a very small percent of sufferers. Since you already know about noxacusis and HHL going under the radar. You can even look at the history of fibromyalgia and small fiber neuropathy denialism.

Next time you see someone like Harriet Hall criticizing alternative medicine, you'll remember extreme BS is also happening in mainstream medicine. Well, you already know this well. But lots of people don't. You'd look like a conspiracy theorist crackpot (like contrast) if you had to explain to your academic colleagues that "hidden hearing loss & noxacusis" are real diseases, blatantly obvious, that alluded clinical detection for decades; despite US vets having these problems in abundance.

 

I know it's probably pointless to ruminate on the thought, but it really makes you wonder how much progress we could have made already if the goal of medical science was, first and foremost, to heal and improve our species rather than seek status and profit.

I have nothing against them achieving the latter, rest assured, but it should only come with a focus of the former.

 

You should look into the current "biopsychosocial" paradigm of chronic fatigue syndrome/ME. It's honestly maddening! There are a whole bunch of academics who legitimately try to argue that it is perpetuated by false 'illness beliefs" lmao. Thankfully the tide is turning and they are starting to be discredited - David Tuller's work exposing this is excellent if you're interested in exploring more!

 

This is responding to another thread.

@Zugzug

The concept of a masculine alpha male personality outside of the Universe, but has a special mission for humans; (Judaism, Christianity, Islamic) is extremely anthropomorphic and I never really believe that; outside of child hood, since I was raised Christian. I rejected Christianity from teenage years and up. I just think you totally underestimated the role mind plays in the Universe, as you haven't been following the mainstream meta where leading neuroscientist remain agnostic about the computational model of mind, and unicelluar microbes display more intelligence then computers trying to emulate them.

Just try to replace the western concept of a alpha male God with the Eastern concept of infinite mental experiences (the good, bad and ugly and everything in-between). You can call that "God or "All That Is" if you like, but it's literally just the natural state of the Universe. Nothing super natural. For example: Some animals can experience ultra violet colors and infrasounds we can't. They have access to mental experiences we don't. So it's not a human centric view at all. Early in MPP I linked a study about single cell organisms far out succeeding AI models trying to replicate its behavior. Evidence computation loses to even the simplest living things.

Since you don't like reading blocks of text, this debate illustrates Benardo's view.

Seeking I Debates / Does the Brain Produce...

@Chinmoku
Regarding your post on free will.
I believe something like free will exist, I prefer the word volition. Controversially, I subscribe to the idea that unknown aspects of quantum physics has something to do with how it works. Without cartersaian mechanics. But I don't believe free will reflects perfect morality, or else we would need access a perfect moral repository along with it. . I also believe that free will can be impaired and weaker when over exerted. Let's use Benardo' Kastrup's model as an example.

Benardo makes four assumptions

1. Universal Consciousness and sub conscious processes is the only thing that exist. His model requires consciousness to modify and influence the quantum wave function. If this is true mental experiences happen before anything, and boot up space-time from there.

2. Math and Structure is the logical description of mental activity, math has a fundamental role without a platonic realm. It's not problematic at all if a mental process require or are influenced by certain brain structure.

3. From the third person perspective, fragments in Universal consciousness look like metabolizing biology and particularly neural networks. That is why the Universe looks like a neural network at the cosmic web, which is it's largest known scale.

4.Universal consciousness has a habit of fragmenting itself. Benardo references known mental disorders to explain this phenomena.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...der-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/
Also Scientific America like this crackpot publish his new age hypothesis. No outrage??? Why did scientific America allow this. Imagine if they let a Creationist publish?!?!?!

So understand what Dr. Kastrup is saying. (The guy who publishes in Scientific America is saying) Living things are fragments in cosmic consciousness, and once we die, we refuse with the Universal consciousness. The self is an illusion. No soul needed. Matter is what content in a dream looks like. We are all sharing the same dream that the Universe at large is having.

So how does this apply to free will? If my brain and body is the intrinsic appearance(third person view) of a fragment in universal mentality, it's trivial if stabbing my prefrontal cortex impacts my free will. The knife that exist, and every other object is just the content of a transpersonal dream. So, if one mental process (a knife) which is a transpersonal mental process in the Universe, effecting another mental process: which happens to be a fragementation (my brain) that mental fragment will function at reduced capacity or defragment (aka die).

 

https://www.sciencealert.com/bacter...orks-in-a-surprisingly-similar-way-to-neurons

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200428093506.htm





"This membrane potential is a fundamental property shared by all living cells, and particularly well-studied in neurons," Süel explained.

"Bacteria that were exposed to light, persistently exhibited a different membrane potential compared to those bacteria that were not exposed, thus it was clear that these bacteria 'remembered' being exposed to light."

 

It's official, this thread is back to being a new age bookstore that disses on Decarte.




Meanwhile in the real world. The one where amoebas show more sophistication then super computers.

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/amoebas-are-crafty-shape-shifting-engineers





No neurons, No high level computation, but it builds it's own shell( also known as a test).

 

I have subconsciously been waiting for someone to mention the Akashic Records! :3

You brought a smile to my face today. Thank you.

 

@Contrast, interesting. I'm not up to speed but from the little I know I don't find physicalism convincing, mainly for the reasons highlighted by Chomsky and Searle. Also, I'm not convinced about the way it deals with qualia and the hard problem of consciousness. There are proposals for this but they don't convince me. I'm more and more convinced we are missing some fundamental pieces here. This is just a gut feeling at the moment, with this horrible tinnitus it has been impossible for me to stay up to speed with the literature and I would need to read a number of papers.

 

I was referring to when people in near death experiences report experiencing their life experiences from a third person perspective. I don't like to use the word "akashic record" because of how woo woo taboo it is. So if this is true, every experience is indefinitely recorded in the Universe. Some of these experiences just get replayed at death.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-life-eyes-near-death-people.html



They always report that they get to re-experience events from the POV of the person they interacted with. I wonder if it applies to animals too?

 

Yeah, the alpha male God pisses me off. I'm actually really open-minded to "energy". I don't think this is straightforward or something that one can directly talk to or whatever. I am also pretty open-minded to eastern philosophies. For example, I used to meditate. However, I think all of the gains from this practice have a materialist root (he agrees).

Excluding the alpha male God theory, the question of a God is less interesting to me. I agree with you that we can call this unknown energy whatever we want, but I don't think I can "serve" it and I don't think it can respond to me.

 

Forgot all this new age woo stuff.

Finding ways to outcompete Photoshop with "some guys github project" is cooler. In this case that "some guy" is Facebook's neural network technology that has been open source. After all, no neckbeard can do such an amazing feat. It was a pain in the ass to install this, it took me a full day, yesterday.

Facebook's AI is suppose to help me remove backgrounds from photos automatically. It's possible to run 100% offline, so I don't have to depend on a server in a Facebook closet. It's non-GPL but still open source under the BSD and Apache licenses.

https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2

https://github.com/DDemmer1/ai-background-remove





So basically, the neural network and all the software that goes with it is close to five gigabytes of disk space. (about 5 times larger then Gimp) So in theory if something like this would ever be available in the Gimp, it would most likely be a officially promoted third party extension, not shipped with it. As most users would be butthurt by the 5 gig increase. (That's bloat man!!!) Gimp is under a very anti corporate license known as the GPL, where as Facebook's tool as Apache and BSD open source license. So it's definitely possible for someone to make this into a Gimp extension, but it would probably not be officially supported by the Gimp team.


The neural network only works from a command line and dropping files inside "input and output" folders. No GUI for normies. Just the way I like it.


Now I know why some software uses foreign servers to remove backgrounds, the software uses excessive disk space and literally only runs on Linux and Mac. Which means Windows users would need Qemu or Windows subsystem for Linux. That would require even more disk space, and RAM. Oh well, I guess they are in the mindset that Photoshop is a tool, not something they need to own.


It's actually pretty straightforward because you just copy and paste the same command everytime. I could probably find a way to auto activate it. But The user has to manually put content in the "input folder"


Results are interesting. All of these photos were selected manually by me.























I still haven't figured out how to remove the background, but atleast I know it's working.

 

There's just something oddly charming and perhaps even human with how confident this invalid classification is.

 

it's a freshwater gar fish. There's tons of them where I live.

I don't know how it confused it for a bird. Even an odd looking fish shouldn't be mistaken for a bird, and I don't know if the network can detect underwater. I wonder if the "tree" label was due to the gar being long, or the aquatic plants in the background?

 

I got something else working. The original sucked, and the new tool I found was extremely easy too install. it's also only two gigs. Where as the other tool was five.

Both use the same Python Torch libraries. Special python libraries that recognize and remove backgrounds from images. They can be trained using neural networks software.


https://github.com/danielgatis/rembg

Literally just

Code:

 pip install rembg

but I prefer a static Anaconda python library so doesn't F with my system.

test

 

These have come out pretty clean!

Beware the smoky book...

 

There's no getting away from Facebook. Facebook engineered most of the core libraries behind all of it. If there was no data selling and info collection on Facebook, no open source Photoshop alternative. No neckbeard can make tools like this in their spare time. Someone needs to be getting paid $$$, and Facebook gladly sells your data and personal info as payment to put money in this stuff.

As someone who has not used Facebook in 6 years, I need to thank everyone (normies getting telemetrized) for this technology. Your data being sold benefited my life greatly.


Gimp can easily interact with the tool. So I'm happy. The clipboard data is copied and pasted into Gimp or whatever.

 

Okay I have this new app. It has a buggy interface that forces me to alt resize windows to access different parts of the application.



It makes triangular fractal backgrounds. Backgrounds that can be used in my anti scam art, or whatever else.



This is the original javascript code
https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify

GUI version (downloadable) is here. It has a Linux appimage (which is exactly like a .dmg on Mac) so I don't have to build from source.
https://github.com/VictorioBerra/trianglify-desktop-wallpaper


So much potential in background generation. I just wish it could copy to clipboard, instead of having to save an image in a folder and then open it with Gimp.

 

First meme of 2021.

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