Podcasts about fermi

Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss AI versus advanced planning systems (APS), the release of GPT-4, emergent intelligence from modest components, whether deep learning alone will produce AGI, Rice's theorem & the impossibility of predicting alignment, the likelihood that humans try to generalize AI, why the upside of AGI is an illusion, agency vs intelligence, instrumental convergence, implicit agency, deterministic chaos, theories of physics as theories of measurement, the relationship between human desire and AI tools, an analogy with human-animal relations, recognizing & avoiding multipolar traps, an environment increasingly hostile to humans, technology & toxicity, short-term vs long-term risks, why there's so much disagreement about AI risk, the substrate needs hypothesis, an inexorable long-term convergence process, why the only solution is avoiding the cycle, a boiling frog scenario, the displacement of humans, the necessity of understanding evolution, economic decoupling, non-transactional choices, the Forward Great Filter answer to the Fermi paradox, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 153 - Forrest Landry on Small Group Method Forrest Landry on Twitter JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI JRS EP25 - Gary Marcus on Rebooting AI JRS Currents 036: Melanie Mitchell on Why AI is Hard EP137 Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution "Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)," by Scott Alexander Forrest Landry is a philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher focused on metaphysics, the manner in which software applications, tools, and techniques influence the design and management of very large scale complex systems, and the thriving of all forms of life on this planet. Forrest is also the founder and CEO of Magic Flight, a third-generation master woodworker who found that he had a unique set of skills in large-scale software systems design. Which led him to work in the production of several federal classified and unclassified systems, including various FBI investigative projects, TSC, IDW, DARPA, the Library of Congress Congressional Records System, and many others.

859 The Fermi Paradox and Life on Other Planets Richard welcomes a systems analyst, researcher and author to discuss the logical fallacies underlying the Fermi Paradox, which is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life compared to the apparently high a priori likelihood of its existence, ie The Drake Equation. GUEST: Ken Goudsward is a systems analyst with expertise in industrial robotics, software engineering, and data design. He enjoys applying these skills to ancient Hebrew and Sumerian documents and the UFO phenomenon. Pre-Order his new book Fermi's Paradox is Bullsh*t - Strange Planet subscribers get special discount WEBSITE: www.dimensionfold.com BOOKS: Fermi's Paradox is Bullsh*t Before Roswell: The Secret History of UFOs UFOs in the Bible SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! ScoreKnowledge is here to give you the tools to a better credit future. Starting with credit scores, credit monitoring, and so much more. See how we can assist you on your credit journey.' Go to GetScoreKnowledge.com to receive a full one-week trial for just $1 COPY MY CRYPTO Discover how over 2,800 people - many of who know nothing about crypto or how to invest - are building rapid wealth the cabal can never steal - "You don't need to know a thing about cryptocurrency if you copy someone who does." Gain Access for just $1 CopyMyCrypto.com/Richard SUBSCRIBE TO STRANGE PLANET PREMIUM https://strangeplanet.supportingcast.fm Use the discount code "Planet" to receive one month off the first subscription. We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://strangeplanet.supportingcast.fm/

For bonus content, check out our Patreon! patreon.com/wehaveconcernsHey! If you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate/review it on whatever service you use to listen.Here's the iTunes link: http://bit.ly/wehaveconcerns And here's the Stitcher link: http://bit.ly/stitcherwhconcernsJeff on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeffcannataAnthony on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acarboniIf you've seen a story you think belongs on the show, send it to wehaveconcernsshow@gmail.com or leave it on the subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/wehaveconcerns

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some more projects I'd like to see, published by finm on February 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I recently wrote about some EA projects I'd like to see (also on the EA Forum). This went well! I suggested I'd write out a few more half-baked ideas sometime. As with the previous post, I make no claim to originating these ideas, and I'll try to attribute them where possible. I also make no claim to being confident that all the ideas are any good; just that they seem potentially good without much due diligence. Since many of these are based on shallow dives, I've likely missed relevant ongoing projects. If you're considering writing a similar list, at the end of this post I reflect on the value of writing about speculative project ideas in public. The order of these ideas is arbitrary and you can read any number of them (i.e. there's no thread running through them). Summary Fermi games BOTEC tools Billionaire impact list Forecasting guide Short stories about AI futures Technical assistance with AI safety verification Infosec consultancy for AI labs Achievements ledger World health dashboard The Humanity Times Fermi games Many people are interested in getting good at making forecasts, and spreading good forecasting practice. Becoming better (more accurate and better calibrated) at forecasting important outcomes — and being willing to make numerical, testable predictions in the first place — often translates into better decisions that bear on those outcomes. A close (and similarly underappreciated) neighbor of forecasting is the Fermi estimate, or BOTEC. This is the skill of considering some figure you're uncertain about, coming up with some sensible model or decomposition into other figures you can begin guessing at, and reaching a guess. It is also the skill of knowing how confident you should be in that guess; or how wide your uncertainty should be. If you have interviewed for some kind of consulting-adjacent job you have likely been asked to (for example) size a market for whiteboard markers; that is an example. As well as looking ahead in time, you can answer questions about how the past turned out (‘retrocasting'). It's hard to make retrocasting seriously competitive, because Google exists, but it is presumably a way to teach forecasting: you tell people about the events that led up to some decision in a niche of history few people are familiar with, and ask: did X happen next? How long did Y persist for? And so on. You can also make estimates without dates involved. Douglas Hofstadter lists some examples in Metamagical Themas: How many people die per day on the earth? How many passenger-miles are flown each day in the U.S.? How many square miles are there in the U.S.? How many of them have you been in? How many syllables have been uttered by humans since 1400 A.D.? How many moving parts are in the Columbia space shuttle? What volume of oil is removed from the earth each year? How many barrels of oil are left in the world? How many meaningful, grammatical, ten-word sentences are there in English? How many insects [.] are now alive? [.] Tigers? Ostriches? Horseshoe crabs? How many tons of garbage does New York City put out each week? How fast does your hair grow (in miles per hour)? What is the weight of the Empire State Building? Of the Hoover Dam? Of a fully loaded jumbo jet? Again, most forecasts have a nice feature for evaluation and scoring, which is that before the time where a forecast resolves nobody knows the answer for sure, and after it resolves everyone does, and so there is no way to cheat other than through prophecy. This doesn't typically apply for other kinds of Fermi estimation questions. In particular, things get really interesting where nobody really knows the correct answer, though a correct answer clearly exists. This pays when ‘ground ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Estimation Game: a monthly Fermi estimation web app, published by Sage on February 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Announcing the first monthly Estimation Game! Answer 10 Fermi estimation questions, like “How many piano tuners are there in New York?” Train your estimation skills and get more comfortable putting numbers on things Team up with friends, or play solo See how your scores compare on the global leaderboard The game is around 10-40 minutes, depending on how much you want to discuss and reflect on your estimates You can play The Estimation Game on Quantified Intuitions, solo, or with friends. The February game is live for one week (until Sunday 26th). We'll release a new Estimation Game each month. Lots of people tell us they'd like to get more practice doing BOTECs and estimating, but they don't get around to it. So we've designed The Estimation Game to give you the impetus to do a bit of estimation each month in a fun context. You might use this as a sandbox to experiment with different methods of estimating. You could decompose the question into easier-to-estimate quantities - make estimates in your head, discuss with friends, use a bit of paper, or even build a scrappy Guesstimate or Squiggle model. We'd appreciate your feedback in the comments, in our Discord, or at adam@sage-future.org. We'd love to have suggestions for questions for future rounds of The Estimation Game - this will help us keep the game varied and fun in future months! Info for organisers If you run a community group or meetup, we've designed the Estimation Game to be super easy to run as an off-the-shelf event. Check out our info for organisers page for resources and FAQs. If you're running a large-scale event and want to run a custom Estimation Game at it, let us know and we can help you set it up. We're planning to pilot custom Estimation Games at EAGx Nordics (and maybe EAGx Cambridge). About Quantified Intuitions We built Quantified Intuitions as an epistemics training site. See our previous post for more on our motivation. Alongside the monthly Estimation Game, we've made two permanent tools: Pastcasting: Predict past events to rapidly practise forecasting Calibration: Answer EA-themed trivia questions to calibrate your uncertainty Thanks to our test groups in London, to community builders who gave feedback, in particular Robert Harling, Adash Herrenschmidt-Moller, and Sam Robinson, and to Chana Messinger at CEA for the idea and feedback throughout. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! "La creencia común de que el Universo posee numerosas civilizaciones avanzadas tecnológicamente, combinada con nuestras observaciones que sugieren todo lo contrario, es paradójica, sugiriendo así que nuestro conocimiento o nuestras observaciones son defectuosas o incompletas." Dicho de otro modo, si todo lo que sabemos indica que en el universo existen otras civilizaciones, ¿por qué no sabamos nada de alguna otra? Fermi, uno de los científicos más dotados, si no el que más, del S.XX nos regaló esta paradoja que es imposible que te deje indiferente. En este podcast analizaremos las posibles soluciones a la paradoja mediante un apasionante debate en el que desgranamos cada solución comúnmente aceptada. Repasaremos los modelos de esferas de Dyson, las escalas de Kardasov y debatiremos sobre la ecuación de Drake. Si eres una persona curiosa y con inquietudes que tampoco entiende como es posible que en universo tan grande aún sigamos estado solos, este es tú podcast. Esperamos que los disfrutéis y nos comentéis vuestras porpias soluciones a la paradoja de Fermi. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

This is part FIVE of a five part series analyzing Brian McLaren's book “Do I Stay Christian”. In each of these episodes, Val and Nathan go through McLaren's 10 compelling reasons to LEAVE institutionalized Christianity and 10 compelling reasons to STAY. In this episode the two reasons discussed to LEAVE are as follows: 9) Because of its tendency to constrict intellectualism [please jump over to episode 79 of this podcast for a deep dive into the damage done due to constrictive intellectualism and many cognitive biases common to underdeveloped Christian thinking] and 10) Because Christianity is “SHRINKLING” [shrinking+wrinkling]. The two final reasons discussed in this episode to stay Christian are, 9) To Free God from the dangerous image as the angry old white guy full of judgement and wrath, and 10) Because of Fermi's Paradox and the Great Filter [yep…you'll clearly need to tune in to have the first clue about what he means here!!] ***************Val and Nathan respect McLaren's straightforward, honest look at our Christian history and share in his trust that each of us is wise enough to look truth straight in the eye in order to forge our own path towards health and wholeness. Sunstone Symposium address referenced in this episode [Val's favorite symposium address of all time]: OWN YOUR RELIGION: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sunstone-magazine/id1113651395?i=1000580244207. Book referenced in this episode [other than ‘Do I Stay Christian', is ‘Faith After Doubt' by Brian McLaren.******************************* Contact Valerie at info@valeriehamaker.com to get on a waitlist for one of her space limited processing/support groups mentioned in detail in th

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Cross-post] Is the Fermi Paradox due to the Flaw of Averages?, published by Aryeh Englander on January 18, 2023 on LessWrong. [This article is copy-pasted from the Lumina blog, very lightly edited for LessWrong.] Where is everybody?— Enrico Fermi The omnipresence of uncertainty is part of why making predictions and decisions is so hard. We at Lumina advocate treating uncertainty explicitly in our models using probability distributions. Sadly this is not yet as common as it should be. A recent paper “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” (2018) is a powerful illustration of how including uncertainty can transform conclusions on the fascinating question of whether our Earth is the only place in the Universe harboring intelligent life. The authors, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord (whom we shall refer to as SDO), show elegantly that the apparent paradox is simply the result of the mistake of ignoring uncertainty, what Sam L. Savage calls the Flaw of Averages. In this article, we review their article and link to an Analytica version of their model that you can explore. The Fermi Paradox Enrico Fermi. From Wikimedia commons. One day in 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Nobel prize-winning builder of the first nuclear reactor, was having lunch with a few friends in Los Alamos. They were looking at a New Yorker cartoon of cheerful aliens emerging from a flying saucer. Fermi famously asked “Where is everybody?”. Given the vast number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and the likely development of life and extraterrestrial intelligence, how come no ETs have come to visit or at least been detected? This question came to be called the “Fermi Paradox”. Ever since, it has bothered those interested in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and whether we are alone in the Universe. The Flaw of Averages on Steroids Dr. Sam Savage who coined the term “Flaw of Averages” Sam L. Savage, in his book, The Flaw of Averages, shows how ignoring uncertainty and just working with a single mean or “most likely” value for each uncertain quantity can lead to misleading results. To illustrate how dramatically this approach can distort your conclusions, SDO offer a toy example. Suppose there are nine factors that multiplied together give the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) arising on any given star. If you use a point estimate of 0.1 for each factors, you could infer that there is a 10−9probability of any given star harboring ETI. There are about 1011 stars in the Milky Way, so the probability that no star other than our own has a planet harboring intelligent life would be extremely small, (1−10−9)100B≈3.7×10−44. On the other hand, suppose that, based on what we know, each factor could be anywhere between 0 and 0.2, and assign a uniform uncertainty over this interval, using the probability distribution, Uniform(0, 0.2). If you combine these distributions probabilistically, using Monte Carlo simulation for example, the mean of the result is 0.21 – over 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more likely! The Drake Equation Frank Drake, a radio astronomer who worked on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), tried to formalize Fermi's estimate of the number of ETIs. He suggested that we can estimate N, the number of detectable, intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy from what is now called the “Drake equation”. It is sometimes referred to as the “second most-famous equation in science (after E= mc2)”: Frank Drake (1930-2022). N=R∗×fp×ne×fl×fi×fc×L Where R∗ is the average rate of formation of stars in our galaxy,fp is the fraction of stars with planets.ne is the average number of those planets that could potentially support life.fl is the fraction of those on which life had actually developed;fi is the fraction of those with life that ...

Joe finally took five minutes to put the podcast on Spotify. We listen to: Mabe Fratti, Karate, Young Fathers, and the latest circus music from The Smashing Pumpkins. There's a long, meandering discussion about Fermi's Paradox but for music? RIP Jeremiah Green. We promise to listen to new music in 2023.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Cross-post] Is the Fermi Paradox due to the Flaw of Averages?, published by Aryeh Englander on January 18, 2023 on LessWrong. [This article is copy-pasted from the Lumina blog, very lightly edited for LessWrong.] Where is everybody?— Enrico Fermi The omnipresence of uncertainty is part of why making predictions and decisions is so hard. We at Lumina advocate treating uncertainty explicitly in our models using probability distributions. Sadly this is not yet as common as it should be. A recent paper “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” (2018) is a powerful illustration of how including uncertainty can transform conclusions on the fascinating question of whether our Earth is the only place in the Universe harboring intelligent life. The authors, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord (whom we shall refer to as SDO), show elegantly that the apparent paradox is simply the result of the mistake of ignoring uncertainty, what Sam L. Savage calls the Flaw of Averages. In this article, we review their article and link to an Analytica version of their model that you can explore. The Fermi Paradox Enrico Fermi. From Wikimedia commons. One day in 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Nobel prize-winning builder of the first nuclear reactor, was having lunch with a few friends in Los Alamos. They were looking at a New Yorker cartoon of cheerful aliens emerging from a flying saucer. Fermi famously asked “Where is everybody?”. Given the vast number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and the likely development of life and extraterrestrial intelligence, how come no ETs have come to visit or at least been detected? This question came to be called the “Fermi Paradox”. Ever since, it has bothered those interested in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and whether we are alone in the Universe. The Flaw of Averages on Steroids Dr. Sam Savage who coined the term “Flaw of Averages” Sam L. Savage, in his book, The Flaw of Averages, shows how ignoring uncertainty and just working with a single mean or “most likely” value for each uncertain quantity can lead to misleading results. To illustrate how dramatically this approach can distort your conclusions, SDO offer a toy example. Suppose there are nine factors that multiplied together give the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) arising on any given star. If you use a point estimate of 0.1 for each factors, you could infer that there is a 10−9probability of any given star harboring ETI. There are about 1011 stars in the Milky Way, so the probability that no star other than our own has a planet harboring intelligent life would be extremely small, (1−10−9)100B≈3.7×10−44. On the other hand, suppose that, based on what we know, each factor could be anywhere between 0 and 0.2, and assign a uniform uncertainty over this interval, using the probability distribution, Uniform(0, 0.2). If you combine these distributions probabilistically, using Monte Carlo simulation for example, the mean of the result is 0.21 – over 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more likely! The Drake Equation Frank Drake, a radio astronomer who worked on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), tried to formalize Fermi's estimate of the number of ETIs. He suggested that we can estimate N, the number of detectable, intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy from what is now called the “Drake equation”. It is sometimes referred to as the “second most-famous equation in science (after E= mc2)”: Frank Drake (1930-2022). N=R∗×fp×ne×fl×fi×fc×L Where R∗ is the average rate of formation of stars in our galaxy,fp is the fraction of stars with planets.ne is the average number of those planets that could potentially support life.fl is the fraction of those on which life had actually developed;fi is the fraction of those with life that ...

Should we change "Dark Matter" to "Dark Curvature"? How do you navigate through dense asteroid fields? What's the future of space toilets? Do aliens block their outgoing signals? All these and more in this week's Q&A with Fraser Cain.

SpaceTime Series 26 Episode 5 *Explaining the mysterious Fermi Bubbles at the centre of the Milky Way A new study has shown how the Fermi bubbles – a pair of massive gamma-ray emitting bubbles emanating from around the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy -- could have been produced by a super massive black hole. *Milky Way like Galaxies discovered in the early universe New images from NASA's spectacular James Webb telescope has detected Milky Way-like galaxies in very early universe. *China launches two more spy satellites Beijing launches two more spy satellites in its on going preparations for war. *The Science Report Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously thought. Meteorologists have discovered a new type of tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean. A new study looking at the development of sharing behaviour and fairness in kids and teens. Alex on Tech: Samsung's bad software update Listen to SpaceTime on your favorite podcast app with our universal listen link: https://spacetimewithstuartgary.com/listen For more SpaceTime and show links: https://linktr.ee/biteszHQ If you love this podcast, please get someone else to listen to. Thank you… To become a SpaceTime supporter and unlock commercial free editions of the show, gain early access and bonus content, please visit https://bitesz.supercast.com/ . Premium version now available via Spotify and Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts visit our HQ at https://bitesz.com Sponsor Details: This episode of SpaceTime is brought to you with the support of NordVPN…The world's leading VPN provider. Making your online data unreadable to others. EXCLUSIVE SpaceTime NordVPN Deal at https://nordvpn.com/stuartgary Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!, plus you get to help support SpaceTime… or use the coupon code STUARTGARY at checkout. Thank you…

Shermer and Rees discuss: existential threats • overpopulation • biodiversity loss • climate change • AI and self-driving cars, robots, and unemployment • his bet with Steven Pinker • his disagreement with Richard Dawkins • how science works as a communal activity • scientific creativity • science communication • science education • why there aren't more women and people of color in STEM fields • verification vs. falsification • Bayesian reasoning and scientific progress • Model Dependent Realism and the nature of reality Fermi's Paradox • why he's an atheist but wants to be buried in the Presbyterian church in which he was raised • mysterian mysteries. Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal, former President of the Royal Society, Fellow (and former Master) of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He sits as a member of the UK House of Lords. He is the author of many bestselling popular science books, including: On the Future; Just Six Numbers; Before the Beginning; and Our Final Hour. His newest book is If Science is to Save Us.

Esoteric News Briefs 3.8 – Ancestral Ghost Genome   Join the Esoteric Archive!   Esoteric Book Club teeshirts   http://www.folkherocoffee.com/ Coupon Code: esoteric22       “Gold coin hoard worth $300K found beneath kitchen floor in England”, by Jennifer Nalewicki: https://tinyurl.com/yeymteea   “Classified UFO videos would 'harm national security' if released, Navy says”, by Brandon Specktor: https://tinyurl.com/3mrwh2d4   “New Study Suggests Aliens Don't Visit Us Because Our Sun Is Too Boring”, by Evan Gough: https://tinyurl.com/yybrehwp   “Aliens haven't contacted Earth because there's no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests”, by Stephanie Pappas: https://tinyurl.com/3m29epbc   “Mineral Samples May Have Just Revealed The Mysterious Birthplace of Asteroid Ryugu”, by David Nield: https://tinyurl.com/4sfbs99w   “Asteroid Ryugu Reveals Ancient Grains of Stardust Older Than The Solar System”, by Michelle Starr: https://tinyurl.com/mubtcjdj   “Cobra bites boy, boy bites it back (the boy was fine, the snake wasn't)”, by Harry Baker: https://tinyurl.com/fyjtchda   “An AI Found an Unknown 'Ghost' Ancestor in The Human Genome”, by Peter Dockrill: https://tinyurl.com/bdhrkxfj   “Half-a-Million Year Old Signs of Extinct Human Species Found in Poland Cave”, by Michelle Starr: https://tinyurl.com/yc427pzy   “Russia Has Got a Problem with Witches”, by Robyn White: https://tinyurl.com/bdf6nuwp   “The Haunted Frequency”: https://tinyurl.com/eukt2e5m   “2 Viking swords buried upright might have connected the dead to Odin and Valhalla”, by Laura Geggel: https://tinyurl.com/yckz4fyn   “'Mind-boggling' alloy is Earth's toughest material, even at extreme temperatures”, by Robert Lea: https://tinyurl.com/4ykk5se5   “What really happened to Ronald Hunkeler, who inspired ‘The Exorcist'”, by Isabel Vincent and Jack Morphet: https://tinyurl.com/yckcrpxt       Esoteric Book Club can be found on: Facebook: @esotericbookclub Instagram: esotericbookclub Web: www.esotericbookclub.org Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Esotericbookclub Paypal: paypal.me/esotericbookclub  

Jim continues his discussion with Bruce Damer on the origins of life. They discuss Darwin's "warm little pond" hypothesis, hydrothermal fields as selection engines, wet-dry cycling, proto-cells, competing theories, implications of the hypothesis, niche construction theory, the origin of life as mostly collaborative, the probability interaction process (PIM) model, effects of crowding together, sharing results, the emergence of memory, PIM as a general principle of emergence, Covid-19 as an example of amplification, applying PIM to civilizational health, the loss of face-to-face community membranes in late-stage capitalism, "harthology," applying PIM to the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI), collaborations with Ben Goertzel & Google's AI group, protocellular systems as general learning systems, creating a genesis engine, the Fermi paradox & the Drake equation, the new concept of urability, the low probability of sustaining life long enough to reach complexity, new data from Mars & exoplanet atmospheres, the possibility that Earth is extremely rare, bringing the galaxy to life, creating hundreds of thousands of warm little ponds using asteroids, and much more. JRS EP 167 - Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life BIOTA Institute JRS EP140 - Robin Dunbar on Friendship JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI The Open Cognition Project (OpenCog) Tierra (Wikipedia) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, by Stephen Jay Gould SETI Institute Canadian-born Dr. Bruce Damer has spent his life pursuing two questions: how did life on Earth begin? and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the future and a presence beyond the Earth? A decade of laboratory and field research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at UCSC and teams around the world resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life, published in Scientific American in 2017 and the journal Astrobiology in 2020. The scenario has now passed its first key experimental tests in the laboratory and at volcanic hot springs around the world and has emerged as a leading contender for a general theory of abiogenesis. Implications of the work are now spreading through evolutionary biology, philosophy, AI and the search for life beyond Earth. New work with collaborators has proposed the urability framework, how life can start on many different worlds, and addresses some aspects of the Fermi Paradox.

About JackJack is Uptycs' outspoken technology evangelist. Jack is a lifelong information security executive with over 25 years of professional experience. He started his career managing security and operations at the world's first Internet data privacy company. He has since led unified Security and DevOps organizations as Global CSO for large conglomerates. This role involved individually servicing dozens of industry-diverse, mid-market portfolio companies.Jack's breadth of experience has given him a unique insight into leadership and mentorship. Most importantly, it fostered professional creativity, which he believes is direly needed in the security industry. Jack focuses his extra time mentoring, advising, and investing. He is an active leader in the ISLF, a partner in the SVCI, and an outspoken privacy activist. Links Referenced: UptycsSecretMenu.com: https://www.uptycssecretmenu.com Jack's email: jroehrig@uptycs.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: If you asked me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled and, in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program over at cloud.google.com/startup. It'll give you up to $100k a year for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies that range from bootstrapped all the way on up to Series A. Go build something, and then tell me about it. My thanks to Google Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Uptycs. And they have sent me their Technology Evangelist, Jack Charles Roehrig. Jack, thanks for joining me.Jack: Absolutely. Happy to spread the good news.Corey: So, I have to start. When you call yourself a technology evangelist, I feel—just based upon my own position in this ecosystem—the need to ask, I guess, the obvious question of, do you actually work there, or have you done what I do with AWS and basically inflicted yourself upon a company. Like, well, “I speak for you now.” The running gag that becomes more true every year is that I'm AWS's chief marketing officer.Jack: So, that is a great question. I take it seriously. When I say technology evangelist, you're speaking to Jack Roehrig. I'm a weird guy. So, I quit my job as CISO. I left a CISO career. For, like, ten years, I was a CISO. Before that, 17 years doing stuff. Started my own thing, secondaries, investments, whatever.Elias Terman, he hits me up and he says, “Hey, do you want this job?” It was an executive job, and I said, “I'm not working for anybody.” And he says, “What about a technology evangelist?” And I was like, “That's weird.” “Check out the software.”So, I'm going to check out the software. I went online, I looked at it. I had been very passionate about the space, and I was like, “How does this company exist in doing this?” So, I called him right back up, and I said, “I think I am.” He said, “You think you are?” I said, “Yeah, I think I'm your evangelist. Like, I think I have to do this.” I mean, it really was like that.Corey: Yeah. It's like, “Well, we have an interview process and the rest.” You're like, “Yeah, I have a goldfish. Now that we're done talking about stuff that doesn't matter, I'll start Monday.” Yeah, I like the approach.Jack: Yeah. It was more like I had found my calling. It was bizarre. I negotiated a contract with him that said, “Look, I can't just work for Uptycs and be your evangelist. That doesn't make any sense.” So, I advise companies, I'm part of the SVCI, I do secondaries, investment, I mentor, I'm a steering committee member of the ISLF. We mentor security leaders.And I said, “I'm going to continue doing all of these things because you don't want an evangelist who's just an Uptycs evangelist.” I have to know the space. I have to have my ear to the ground. And I said, “And here's the other thing, Elias. I will only be your evangelist while I'm your evangelist. I can't be your evangelist when I lose passion. I don't think I'm going to.”Corey: The way I see it, authenticity matters in this space. You can sell out exactly once, so make it count because you're never going to be trusted again to do it a second time. It keeps people honest, at least the ones you actually want to be doing work with. So, you've been in the space a long time, 20 years give or take, and you've seen an awful lot. So, I'm curious, given that I tend to see about, you know, six or seven different companies in the RSA Sponsor Hall every year selling things because you know, sure hundreds of booths, bunch of different marketing logos and products, but it all distills down to the same five or six things.What did you see about Uptycs that made you say, “This is different?” Because to be very direct, looking at the website, it's, “Oh, what do you sell?” “Acronyms. A whole bunch of acronyms that, because I don't eat, sleep, and breathe security for a living, I don't know what most of them mean, but I'm sure they're very impressive and important.” What does it actually do, for those of us who are practitioners, but not swimming in the security vendor stream?Jack: So, I've been obsessed with this space and I've seen the acronyms change over and over and over again. I'm always the first one to say, “What does that mean?” As the senior guy in the room a lot of time. So, acronyms. What does Uptycs do? What drew me into them? They did HIDS, Host Intrusion Detection System. I don't know if you remember that. Turned into—Corey: Oh, yeah. OSSEC was the one I always wound up using, the open-source version. OSSEC [kids 00:04:10]. It's like, oh, instead of paying a vendor, you can contribute it yourself because your time is free, right? Free as in puppy, or these days free as in tier when it comes to cloud.Jack: Oh, I like that. So, yeah, I became obsessed with this HIDS stuff. I think it was evident I was doing it, that it was threat [unintelligible 00:04:27]. And these companies, great companies. I started this new job in an education technology company and I needed a lot of work, so I started to play around with more sophisticated HIDS systems, and I fell in love with it. I absolutely fell in love with it.But there are all these limitations. I couldn't find this company that would build it right. And Uptycs has this reputation as being not very sexy, you know? People telling me, “Uptycs? You're going to Uptycs?” Yeah—I'm like, “Yeah. They're doing really cool stuff.”So, Uptycs has, like, this brand name and I had referred Uptycs before without even knowing what it was. So, here I am, like, one of the biggest XDR, I hope to say, activists in the industry, and I didn't know about Uptycs. I felt humiliated. When I heard about what they were doing, I felt like I wasted my career.Corey: Well, that's a strong statement. Let's begin with XDR. To my understanding, that some form of audio cable standard that I use to plug into my microphone. Some would say it, “X-L-R.” I would say sounds like the same thing. What is XDR?Jack: What is it, right? So, [audio break 00:05:27] implement it, but you install an agent, typically on a system, and that agent collects data on the system: what processes are running, right? Well, maybe it's system calls, maybe it's [unintelligible 00:05:37] as regular system calls. Some of them use the extended Berkeley Packet Filter daemon to get stuff, but one of the problems is that we are obtaining low-level data on an operating system, it's got to be highly specific. So, you collect all this data, who's logging in, which passwords are changing, all the stuff that a hacker would do as you're typing on the computer. You're maybe monitoring vulnerabilities, it's a ton of data that you're monitoring.Well, one of the problems that these companies face is they try to monitor too much. Then some came around and they tried to monitor too little, so they weren't as real-time.Corey: Sounds like a little pig story here.Jack: Yeah [laugh], exactly. Another company came along with a fantastic team, but you know, I think they came in a little late in the game, and it looks like they're folding now. They were wonderful company, but the one of the biggest problems I saw was the agent, the compatibility. You know, it was difficult to deploy. I ran DevOps and security and my DevOps team uninstalled the agent because they thought there was a problem with it, we proved there wasn't and four months later, they hadn't completely reinstall it.So, a CISO who manages the DevOps org couldn't get his own DevOps guy to install this agent. For good reason, right? So, this is kind of where I'm going with all of this XDR stuff. What is XDR? It's an agent on a machine that produces a ton of data.I—it's like omniscience. Yes, I started to turn it in, I would ping developers, I was like, “Why did you just run sudo on that machine?” Right. I mean, I knew everything was going on in the space, I had a good intro to all the assets, they technically run on the on-premise data center and the quote-unquote, “Cloud.” I like to just say the production estate. But it's omniscience. It's insights, you can create rules, it's one of the most powerful security tools that exists.Corey: I think there's a definite gap as far as—let's narrow this down to cloud for just a second before we expand this into the joy that has data centers—where you can instrument a whole bunch of different security services in any cloud provider—I'm going to pick on AWS because they're the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and frankly, they could use taking down a peg or two by and large—and you wind up configuring all the different security services that in some cases seem totally unaware of each other, but that's the AWS product portfolio for you. And you do the math out and realize that it theoretically would cost you—to enable all these things—about three times as much as the actual data breach you're ideally trying to prevent against. So, on some level, it feels like, “Heads, I win; tails, you lose,” style scenario.And the answer that people have started reaching out to third-party vendors to wind up tying all of this together into some form of cohesive narrative that a human being has a hope in hell of understanding. But everything I've tried to this point still feels like it is relatively siloed, focused on the whole fear, uncertainty, and doubt that is so inherent to so much of the security world's marketing. And it's almost like cost control where you can spend almost limitless amount of time, energy, money, et cetera, trying to fix these things, but it doesn't advance your company to the next milestone. It's like buying fire insurance on your building. You can spend all the money on fire insurance. Great, it doesn't get you to the next milestone that propels your company forward. It's all reactive instead of proactive. So, it feels like it is never the exciting, number-one priority for companies until right after it should have been higher in the list than it was.Jack: So, when I worked at Turnitin, we had saturated the market. And we worked in education, technology space globally. Compliance everywhere. So, I just worked on the Australian Data Infrastructure Act of 2020. I'm very familiar with the 27 data privacy regulations that are [laugh] in scope for schools. I'm a FERPA expert, right? I know that there's only one P in HIPAA [laugh].So, all of these compliance regulations drove schools and universities, consortiums, government agencies to say, “You need to be secure.” So, security at Turnitin was the number one—number one—key performance indicator of the company for one-and-a-half years. And these cloud security initiatives didn't just make things more secure. They also allowed me to implement a reasonable control framework to get various compliance certifications. So, I'm directly driving sales by deploying these security tools.And the reason why that worked out so great is, by getting the certifications and by building a sensible control framework layer, I was taking these compliance requirements and translating them into real mitigations of business risk. So, the customers are driving security as they should. I'm implementing sane security controls by acting as the chief security officer, company becomes more secure, I save money by using the correct toolset, and we increased our business by, like, 40% in a year. This is a multibillion-dollar company.Corey: That is definitely a story that resonates, especially with organizations that are—or they should be—compliance-forward and having to care about the nature of what it is that they're doing. But I have a somewhat storied history in working in FinTech and large-scale financial services. One of the nice things about that job, which is sort of a weird thing to say there if you don't want to get ejected from the room, has been, “Yeah well, it's only money,” in the final analysis. Because yeah, no one dies if you wind up screwing that up. People's kids don't get exposed.It's just okay, people have to fill out a bunch of forms and you get sued into oblivion and you're not there anymore because the first role of a CISO is to be ablative and get burned away whenever there's a problem. But it still doesn't feel like it does more for a number of clients than, on some level, checking a box that they feel needs to be checked. Not that it shouldn't be, necessarily, but I have a hard time finding people that get passionately excited about security capabilities. Where are they hiding?Jack: So, one of the biggest problems that you're going to face is there are a lot of security people that have moved up in the ranks through technology and not through compliance and technology. These people will implement control frameworks based on audit requirements that are not bespoke to their company. They're doing it wrong. So, we're not ticking boxes; I'm creating boxes that need to be ticked to secure the infrastructure. And at Turnitin, Turnitin was a company that people were forced to use to submit their works in the school.So, imagine that you have to submit a sensitive essay, right? And that sensitive essay goes to this large database. We have the Taiwanese government submitting confidential data there. I had the chief scientist at NASA submitting in pre-publication data there. We've got corporate trade secrets that are popped in there. We have all kinds of FDA pre-approval stuff. This is a plagiarism detection software being used by large companies, governments, and 12-year-old girls, right, who don't want their data leaked.So, if you look at it, like, this is an ethical thing that is required for us to do, our customers drive that, but truly, I think it's ethics that drive it. So, when we implemented a control framework, I didn't do the minimum, I didn't run an [unintelligible 00:12:15] scan that nobody ran. I looked for tools that satisfied many boxes. And one of the things about the telemetry at scale, [unintelligible 00:12:22], XDR, whatever want to call it, right? But the agent-based systems that monitor for all of us this run-state data, is they can take a lot of your technical SOC controls.Furthermore, you can use these tools to improve your processes like incident response, right? You can use them to log things. You can eliminate your SIEM by using this for your DLP. The problem of companies in the past is they wouldn't deploy on the entire infrastructure. So, you'd get one company, it would just be on-prem, or one company that would just run on CentOS.One of the reasons why I really liked this Uptycs company is because they built it on an osquery. Now, if you mention osquery, a lot of people glaze over, myself included before I worked at Uptycs. But apparently what it is, is it's this platform to collect a ton of data on the run state of a machine in real-time, pop it into a normalized SQL database, and it runs on a ton of stuff: Mac OS, Windows, like, tons of version of Linux because it's open-source, so people are porting it to their infrastructure. And that was one of these unique differentiators is, what is the cloud? I mean, AWS is a place where you can rapidly prototype, there's tons of automation, you can go in and you build something quickly and then it scales.But I view the cloud as just a simple abstraction to refer to all of my assets, be them POPS, on-premise data machines, you know, the corporate environment, laptops, desktops, the stuff that we buy in the public clouds, right? These things are all part of the greater cloud. So, when I think cloud security, I want something that does it all. That's very difficult because if you had one tool run on your cloud, one tool to run on your corporate environment, and one tool to run for your production environment, those tools are difficult to manage. And the data needs to be ETL, you know? It needs to be normalized. And that's very difficult to do.Our company is doing [unintelligible 00:14:07] security right now as a company that's taking all these data signals, and they're normalizing them, right, so that you can have one dashboard. That's a big trend in security right now. Because we're buying too many tools. So, I guess the answer that really is, I don't see the cloud is just AWS. I think AWS is not just data—they shouldn't call themselves the cloud. They call themselves the cloud with everything. You can come in, you can rapidly prototype your software, and you know what? You want to run to the largest scale possible? You can do that too. It's just the governance problem that we run into.Corey: Oh, yes. The AWS product strategy is pretty clearly, in a word, “Yes,” written on a Post-it note somewhere. That's the easiest job in the world is running their strategy. The challenge, too, is that we don't live in a world where monocultures are a thing anymore because regardless—if you use AWS for the underlying infrastructure, great, that makes a lot of sense. Use it for a lot of the higher-up the stack, SaaS-y type things that you don't want to have to build yourself from—by going to Home Depot and picking up components, you're doing something relatively foolish in most cases.They're a plumbing company not a porcelain company, in many respects. And regardless of what your intention is around multiple clouds, people wind up using different things. In most cases, you're going to be storing your source code in GitHub, not in AWS CodeCommit because CodeCommit doesn't really have any customers, for reasons that become blindingly apparent the first time you try to use it for something. So, you always wind up with these cross-cloud, cross-infrastructure stories. For any company that had the temerity to be founded before 2010, they probably have an on-premises data center as well—or six or more—and you're starting to try to wind up having a whole bunch of different abstractions viewed through the same lenses in terms of either observability or control plane or governance, or—dare I say it—security. And it feels like there are multiple approaches, all of which have their drawbacks, which of course means, it's complicated. What's your take on it?Jack: So, I think it was two years ago we started to see tools to do signal consumption. They would aggregate those signals and they would try and produce meaningful results that were actionable rather than you having to go and look at all this granular data. And I think that's phenomenal. I think a lot of companies are going to start to do that more and more. One of the other trends people do is they eliminated data and they went machine-learning and anomaly detection. And that didn't work.It missed a lot of things, right, or generated a lot of false positive. I think that one of the next big technologies—and I know it's been done for two years—but I think we're the next things we're going to see is the axonius of the consumption of events, the categorization into alerts-based synthetic data classification policies, and we're going to look at the severity classifications of those, they're going to be actionable in a priority queue, and we're going to eliminate the need for people that don't like their jobs and sit at a SOC all day and analyze a SIEM. I don't ever run a SIEM, but I think that this diversity can be a good thing. So, sometimes it's turned out to be a bad thing, right? We wanted to diversity, we don't want all the data to be homogenous. We don't need data standards because that limits things. But we do want competition. But I would ask you this, Corey, why do you think AWS? We remember 2007, right?Corey: I do. Oh, I've been around at least that long.Jack: Yeah, you remember when S3 came up. Was that 2007?Corey: I want to say 2004, 2005 in beta, and then relaunched as the first general available service. The first beta service was SQS, so there's always some question about which one was first. I don't get in the middle of those fights because all I'm going to do is upset people.Jack: But S3 was awesome. It still is awesome, right?Corey: Oh yes.Jack: And you know what I saw? I worked for a very older company with very strict governance. You know with SOX compliance, which is a joke, but we also had SOC compliance. I did HIPAA compliance for them. Tons of compliance to this.I'm not a compliance off, too, by trade. So, I started seeing [x cards 00:17:54], you know, these company personal cards, and people would go out and [unintelligible 00:17:57] platform because if they worked with my teams internally, if they wanted to get a small app deployed, it was like a two, three-month process. That process was long because of CFO overhead, approvals, vendor data security vetting, racking machines. It wasn't a problem that was inherent to the technology. I actually built a self-service cloud in that company. The problem was governance. It was financial approvals, it was product justification.So, I think AWS is really what made the internet inflect and scale and innovate amazingly. But I think that one of the things that it sacrificed was governance. So, if you tie a lot of what we're saying back together, by using some sort of tool that you can pop into a cloud environment and they can access a hundred percent of the infrastructure and look for risks, what you're doing is you're kind of X-Ray visioning into all these nodes that were deployed rapidly and kept around because they were crown jewels, and you're determining the risks that lie on them. So, let's say that 10 or 15% of your estate is prototype things that grew at a scale and we can't pull back into our governance infrastructure. A lot of times people think that those types of team machines are probably pretty locked down and they're probably low risk.If you throw a company on the side scanner or something like that, you'll see they have 90% of the risk, 80% of the risk. They're unpatched and they're old. So, I remember at one point in my career, right, I'm thinking Amazon's great. I'm—[unintelligible 00:19:20] on Amazon because they've made the internet go, they influxed. I mean, they've scaled us up like crazy.Corey: Oh, the capability store is phenomenal. No argument there.Jack: Yeah. The governance problem, though, you know, the government, there's a lot of hacks because of people using AWS poorly.Corey: And to be clear, that's everyone. We all are. I take a look at some of the horrible technical decisions I made even a couple of years ago, based upon what I know now, it's difficult to back out and wind up doing things the proper way. I wrote an article a while back, “17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS,” and listed all the services. And I think it was a little on the nose, but then I wrote 17, “More Ways to Run Containers on AWS,” but different services. And I'm about three-quarters of the way through the third in the sequel. I just need a couple more releases and we're good to go.Jack: The more and more complexity you add, the more security risk exists. And I've heard horror stories. Dictionary.com lost a lot of business once because a couple of former contractors deleted some instances in AWS. Before that, they had a secret machine they turned into a pixel [unintelligible 00:20:18] and had take down their iPhone app.I've seen some stuff. But one of the interesting things about deploying one of these tools in AWS, they can just, you know, look X-Ray vision on into all your compute, all your storage and say, “You have PIIs stored here, you have personal data stored here, you have this vulnerability, that vulnerability, this machine has already been compromised,” is you can take that to your CEO as a CISO and say, “Look, we were wrong, there's a lot of risk here.” And then what I've done in the past is I've used that to deploy HIDS—XDR, telemetry at scale, whatever you want to call it—these agent-based solutions, I've used that to justification for them. Now, the problem with this solutions that use agentless is almost all of them are just in the cloud. So, just a portion of your infrastructure.So, if your hybrid environment, you have data centers, you're ignoring the data centers. So, it's interesting because I've seen these companies position themselves as competitors when really, they're in complementary spaces, but one of them justified the other for me. So, I mean, what do you think about that awkward competition? Why was this competition exists between these people if they do completely different things?Corey: I'll take it a step further. I'm a big believer that security for the cloud providers should not be a revenue generator in any meaningful sense because at that point, they wind up with an inherent conflict of interest, where when they start charging, especially trying to do value-based pricing as they move up the stack, what they're inherently saying is, great, you can get our version of our services that is less secure, so that they're what they're doing is they're making security on their platform an inherent investment decision. And I've never been a big believer in that approach.Jack: The SSO tax.Corey: Oh, yes. And many others.Jack: Yeah. So, I was one of the first SSO tax contributors. That started it.Corey: You want data plane audit logging? Great, that'll cost you. But they finally gave in a couple of years back and made the first management trail for CloudTrail audit logging free for everyone. And people still advertently built second ones and then wonder why they're paying through the nose. Like, “Oh, that's 40 grand a month. That should be zero.” Great. Send that to your SIEM and then have that pass it out to where it needs to go. But so much of it is just these weird configuration taxes that people aren't fully aware exist.Jack: It's the market, right? The market is—so look at Amazon's IAM. It is amazing, right? It's totally robust, who is using it correctly? I know a lot of people are. I've been the CISO for over 100 companies and IAM is was one of those things that people don't know how to use, and I think the reason is because people aren't paying for it, so AWS can continue to innovate on it.So, we find ourselves with this huge influx of IAM tools in the startup scene. We all know Uptycs does some CIAM and some identity management stuff. But that's a great example of what you're talking about, right? These cloud companies are not making the things inherently secure, but they are giving some optionality. The products don't grow because they're not being consumed.And AWS doesn't tend to advertise them as much as the folks in the security industry. It's been one complaint of mine, right? And I absolutely agree with you. Most of the breaches are coming out of AWS. That's not AWS's fault. AWS's infrastructure isn't getting breached.It's the way that the customers are configuring the infrastructure. That's going to change a lot soon. We're starting to see a lot of change. But the fundamental issue here is that security needs to be invested in for short-term initiatives, not just for long-term initiatives. Customers need to care about security, not compliance. Customers need to see proof of security. A customer should be demanding that they're using a secure company. If you've ever been on the vendor approval side, you'll see it's very hard to push back on an insecure company going through the vendor process.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: Oh, yes. I wound up giving probably about 100 companies now S3 Bucket Negligence Awards for being public about failing to secure their data and put that out into the world. I had one physical bucket made, the S3 Bucket Responsibility Award and presented it to their then director of security over at the Pokémon Company because there was a Wall Street Journal article talking about how their security review—given the fact that they are a gaming company that has children as their primary customer—they take it very seriously. And they cited the reason they're not to do business with one unnamed vendor was in part due to the lackadaisical approach around S3 bucket control. So, that was the one time I've seen in public a reference where, “Yeah, we were going to use a vendor and their security story was terrible, and we decided not to.”It's, why is that news? That should be a much more common story, but these days, it feels like procurement is rubber-stamping it and, like, “Okay, great. Fill out the form.” And, “Okay, you gave some wrong answers on the form. Try it again and tell the story differently until it gets shoved through.” It feels like it's a rubber stamp rather than a meaningful control.Jack: It's not a rubber stamp for me when I worked in it. And I'm a big guy, so they come to me, you know, like—that's how being, like, career law, it's just being big and intimidating. Because that's—I mean security kind of is that way. But, you know, I've got a story for you. This one's a little more bleak.I don't know if there's a company called Ask.fm—and I'll mention them by name—right, because, well, I worked for a company that did, like, a hostile takeover this company. And that's when I started working with [unintelligible 00:25:23]. [unintelligible 00:25:24]. I speak Russian and I learned it for work. I'm not Russian, but I learned the language so that I could do my job.And I was working for a company with a similar name. And we were in board meetings and we were crying, literally shedding tears in the boardroom because this other company was being mistaken for us. And the reason why we were shedding tears is because young women—you know, 11 to 13—were committing suicide because of online bullying. They had no health and safety department, no security department. We were furious.So, the company was hosted in Latvia, and we went over there and we installed one I lived in Latvia for quite a bit, working as the CISO to install a security program along with the health and safety person to install the moderation team. This is what we need to do in the industry, especially when it comes to children, right? Well, regulation solve it? I don't know.But what you're talking about the Pokémon video game, I remember that right? We can't have that kind of data being leaked. These are children. We need to protect them with information security. And in education technology, I'll tell you, it's just not a budget priority.So, the parents need to demand the security, we need to demand these audit certifications, and we need to demand that our audit firms are audited better. Our audit firms need to be explaining to security leaders that the control frameworks are something that they're responsible for creating bespoke. I did a presentation with Al Kingsley recently about security compliance, comparing FERPA and COPPA to the GDPR. And it was very interesting because FERPA has very little teeth, it's very long code and GDPR is relatively brilliant. GDPR made some changes. FERPA was so ambiguous and vague, it made a lot of changes, but they were kind of like, in any direction ever because nobody knows FERPA is. So, I don't know, what's the answer to that? What do we do?Corey: Yeah. The challenge is, you can see a lot of companies in specific areas doing the right thing, when they're intentionally going out on day one to, for example, service kids as a primary user base demographic. The challenge that you see with this is that, that's great, but then you have things that are not starting off with that point of view. And they started running into population limits and realize, okay, we've got to start expanding our user base somewhere, and then they went a bolting on those things is almost as an afterthought, where, “Oh, well, we've been basically misusing people's data for our entire existence, but now—now—we're suddenly magically going to do the right thing where kids are concerned.” I wish, but unfortunate that philosophy assumes a better take of humanity than is readily apparent.Jack: I wonder why they do that though, right? Something's got to, you know, news happened or something and that's why they're doing it. And that's not okay. But I have seen companies, one of the founders of Scantron—do you know what a Scantron is?Corey: Oh, yes. I'm much older than I look.Jack: Yeah, I'm much older than I look, too. I like to think that. But for those that don't know, a scantron, use a number two pencil and you filled in these little dots. And it was for taking tests. So, the guy who started Scantron, created a small two-person company.And AWS did something magnificent. They recognized that it was an education technology company, and they gave them, for free, security consultation services, security implementation services. And when we bought this company—I'm heavily involved in M&A, right—I'm sitting down with the two founders of the company, and my jaw is on the desk. They were more secure than a lot of the companies that I've worked with that had robust security departments. And I said, “How did you do this?”They said, “AWS provided us with this free service because we're education technology.” I teared up. My heart was—you know, that's amazing. So, there are companies that are doing this right, but then again, look at Grammarly. I hate to pick on Grammarly. LanguageTool is an open-source I believe, privacy-centric Grammarly competitor, but Grammarly, invest in your security a little more, man. Y'all were breached. They store a lot of data, they [unintelligible 00:29:10] lot of the data.Corey: Oh, and it scared the living hell out of companies realizing that they had business users using Grammarly as an extension to work on internal documents and just sending proprietary data to some third-party service that they clicked through the terms on and I don't know that it was ever shown the Grammarly was misusing any of that, but the potential for that is massive.Jack: Do you know what they were doing with it?Corey: Well, using AI to learn these things. Yeah, but it's the supervision story always involves humans reading it.Jack: They were building a—and I think—nobody knows the rumor, but I've worked in the industry, right, pretty heavily. They're doing something great for the world. I believe they're building a database of works submitted to do various things with them. One of those things is plagiarism detection. So, in order to do that they got to store, like, all of the data that they're processing.Well, if you have all the data that you've done for your company that's sitting in this Grammarly database and they get hacked—luckily, that's a lot of data. Maybe you'll be overlooked. But I've data breach database sitting here on my desk. Do you know how many rows it's got? [pause]. Yes, breach database.Corey: Oh, I wouldn't even begin to guess. I know the data volumes that Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned? Site winds up dealing with and it is… significant.Jack: How many billions of rows do you think it is?Corey: Ah, I'd say 20 as an argument?Jack: 34.Corey: Okay. Yeah, directionally right. Fermi estimation saves us yet again.Jack: [laugh]. The reason I build this breach database is because I thought Covid would slow down and I wanted it to do executive protection. Companies in the education space also suffer from [active 00:30:42] shooters and that sort of thing. So, that's another thing about security, too, is it transcends all these interesting areas, right? Like here, I'm doing executive risk protection by looking at open-source data.Protect the executives, show the executives that security is a concern, these executives that'll realize security's real. Then these past that security down in the list of priorities, and next thing you know, the 50 million active students that are using Turnitin are getting better security. Because an executive realized, “Hey, wait a minute, this is a real thing.” So, there's a lot of ways around this, but I don't know, it's a big space, there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of companies that are coming in and flashing out of the pan.A lot of companies are coming in and building snake oil. How do people know how to determine the right things to use? How do people don't want to implement? How do people understand that when they deploy a program that only applies to their cloud environment it doesn't touch there on-prem where a lot of data might be a risk? And how do we work together? How do we get teams like DevOps, IT, SecOps, to not fight each other for installing an agent for doing this?Now, when I looked at Uptycs, I said, “Well, it does the EDR for corp stuff, it does the host intrusion detection, you know, the agent-based stuff, I think, for the well because it uses a buzzword I don't like to use, osquery. It's got a bunch of cloud security configuration on it, which is pretty commoditized. It does agentless cloud scanning.” And it—really, I spent a lot of my career just struggling to find these tools. I've written some myself.And when I saw Uptycs, I was—I felt stupid. I couldn't believe that I hadn't used this tool, I think maybe they've increased substantially their capabilities, but it was kind of amazing to me that I had spent so much of my time and energy and hadn't found them. Luckily, I decided to joi—actually I didn't decide to join; they kind of decided for me—and they started giving it away for free. But I found that Uptycs needs a, you know, they need a brand refresh. People need to come and take a look and say, “Hey, this isn't the old Uptycs. Take a look.”And maybe I'm wrong, but I'm here as a technology evangelist, and I'll tell you right now, the minute I no longer am evangelists for this technology, the minute I'm no longer passionate about it, I can't do my job. I'm going to go do something else. So, I'm the one guy who will put it to your brass tacks. I want this thing to be the thing I've been passionate about for a long time. I want people to use it.Contact me directly. Tell me what's wrong with it. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm right. I really just want to wrap my head around this from the industry perspective, and say, “Hey, I think that these guys are willing to make the best thing ever.” And I'm the craziest person in security. Now, Corey, who's the craziest person security?Corey: That is a difficult question with many wrong answers.Jack: No, I'm not talking about McAfee, all right. I'm not that level of crazy. But I'm talking about, I was obsessed with this XDR, CDR, all the acronyms. You know, we call it HIDS, I was obsessed with it for years. I worked for all these companies.I quit doing, you know, a lot of very good entrepreneurial work to come work at this company. So, I really do think that they can fix a lot of this stuff. I've got my fingers crossed, but I'm still staying involved in other things to make these technologies better. And the software's security space is going all over the place. Sometimes it's going bad direction, sometimes it's going to good directions. But I agree with you about Amazon producing tools. I think it's just all market-based. People aren't going to use the complex tools of Amazon when there's all this other flashy stuff being advertised.Corey: It all comes down to marketing budget, and AWS has always struggled with telling a story. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Jack: Oh, gosh, everywhere. But if you want to learn more about Uptycs, why don't you just email me?Corey: We will, of course, put your email address into the show notes.Jack: Yeah, we'll do it.Corey: Don't offer if you're not serious. There's also uptycssecretmenu.com, which is apparently not much of a secret, given the large banner all over Uptycs' website.Jack: Have you seen this? Let me just tell you about this. This is not a catch. I was blown away by this; it's one of the reasons I joined. For a buck, if you have between 100 and 1000 nodes, right, you get our agentless system and our agent-based system, right?I think it's only on AWS. But that's, like, what, $150, $180,000 value? You get it for a full year. You don't have to sign a contract to renew or anything. Like, you just get it for a buck. If anybody who doesn't go on to the secret menu website and pay $1 and check out this agentless solution that deploys in two minutes, come on, man.I challenge everybody, go on there, do that, and tell me what's wrong with it. Go on there, do that, and give me the feedback. And I promise you I'll do everything in my best efforts to make it the best. I saw the engineering team in this company, they care. Ganesh, the CEO, he is not your average CEO.This guy is in tinkerers. He's on there, hands on keyboard. He responds to me in the middle of night. He's a geek just like me. But we need users to give us feedback. So, you got this dollar menu, you sign up before the 31st, right? You get the product for buck. Deploy the thing in two minutes.Then if you want to do the XDR, this agent-based system, you can deploy that at your leisure across whichever areas you want. Maybe you want a corporate network on laptops and desktops, your production infrastructure, your compute in the cloud, deploy it, take a look at it, tell me what's wrong with it, tell me what's right with it. Let's go in there and look at it together. This is my job. I want this company to work, not because they're Uptycs but because I think that they can do it.And this is my personal passion. So, if people hit me up directly, let's chat. We can build a Slack, Uptycs skunkworks. Let's get this stuff perfect. And we're also going to try and get some advisory boards together, like, maybe a CISO advisory board, and just to get more feedback from folks because I think the Uptycs brand has made a huge shift in a really positive direction.And if you look at the great thing here, they're unifying this whole agentless and agent-based stuff. And a lot of companies are saying that they're competing with that, those two things need to be run together, right? They need to be run together. So, I think the next steps here, check out that dollar menu. It's unbelievable. I can't believe that they're doing it.I think people think it's too good to be true. Y'all got nothing to lose. It's a buck. But if you sign up for it right now, before the December 31st, you can just wait and act on it any month later. So, just if you sign up for it, you're just locked into the pricing. And then you want to hit me up and talk about it. Is it three in the morning? You got me. It's it eight in the morning? You got me.Corey: You're more generous than I am. It's why I work on AWS bills. It's strictly a business-hours problem.Jack: This is not something that they pay me for. This is just part of my personal passion. I have struggled to get this thing built correctly because I truly believe not only is it really cool—and I'm not talking about Uptycs, I mean all the companies that are out there—but I think that this could be the most powerful tool in security that makes the world more secure. Like, in a way that keeps up with the security risks increasing.We just need to get customers, we need to get critics, and if you're somebody who wants to come in and prove me wrong, I need help. I need people to take a look at it for me. So, it's free. And if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and you give me some good feedback and all that, I'll take you out to dinner, I'll introduce you to startup companies that I think, you know, you might want to advise. I'll help out your career.Corey: So, it truly is dollar menu then.Jack: Well, I'm paying for the dinner out my personal thing.Corey: Exactly. Well, again, you're also paying for the infrastructure required to provide the service, so, you know, one way or another, it's all the best—it's just like Cloud, there is no cloud. It's just someone else's cost center. I like that.Jack: Well, yeah, we're paying for a ton of data hosting. This is a huge loss leader. Uptycs has a lot of money in the bank, I think, so they're able to do this. Uptycs just needs to get a little more bold in their marketing because I think they've spent so much time building an awesome product, it's time that we get people to see it. That's why I did this.My career was going phenomenally. I was traveling the world, traveling the country promoting things, just getting deals left and right and then Elias—my buddy over at Orca; Elias, one of the best marketing guys I've ever met—I've never done marketing before. I love this. It's not just marketing. It's like I get to take feedback from people and make the product better and this is what I've been trying to do.So, you're talking to a crazy person in security. I will go well above and beyond. Sign up for that dollar menu. I'm telling you, it is no commitment, maybe you'll get some spam email or something like that. Email me directly, I'll kill the spam email.You can do it anytime before the end of 2023. But it's only for 2023. So, you got a full year of the services for free. For free, right? And one of them takes two minutes to deploy, so start with that one. Let me know what you think. These guys ideate and they pivot very quickly. I would love to work on this. This is why I came here.So, I haven't had a lot of opportunity to work with the practitioners. I'm there for you. I'll create a Slack, we can all work together. I'll invite you to my Slack if you want to get involved in secondaries investing and startup advisory. I'm a mentor and a leader in this space, so for me to be able to stay active, this is like a quid pro quo with me working for this company.Uptycs is the company that I've chosen now because I think that they're the ones that are doing this. But I'm doing this because I think I found the opportunity to get it done right, and I think it's going to be the one thing in security that when it is perfected, has the biggest impact.Corey: We'll see how it goes out over the coming year, I'm sure. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Jack: I like you. I like you, Corey.Corey: I like me too.Jack: Yeah? All right. Okay. I'm telling [unintelligible 00:39:51] something. You and I are very weird.Corey: It works out.Jack: Yeah.Corey: Jack Charles Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at Uptycs. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment that we're going to be able to pull the exact details of where you left it from because your podcast platform of choice clearly just treated security as a box check.Jack: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Think of the Tower of Babel as like the Manhattan Project, which is a great example because in the 1930s and 1940s everyone on earth was speaking the same “language” of hyper-nationalism. Immense projects among the nations took place in this grand competition. Through that period we found better ways to kill one another than ever before. If you struggle to believe that demonic forces are at work in the world, I don't know how else you can explain what happened in World War II. You can ask, “Why did God allow it?” but you should be asking, “Why did we?” The problem of pain is always with us, but never was it so obvious as in the 1930s and 1940s. It's still here, right now. We can choose to sin or not sin. I would guess that if we had lived in the era of the great Assyrian empire, or any empire, we would observe horrors and atrocities, but the scale could not have been so massive as what was on full display in World War II when clearly demonic forces took over Germany. The goal to get rid of Jews is the first sign of demonic forces at work, just as it has always been. To get rid of God requires getting rid of those who speak of God. To overcome the great evil happening in Germany, another effort sprung up to create a massive bomb. After all, we have to fight fire with fire, right? That is the common language of Babel. So in order for us to stop one country from engaging with demons, we had to all get together and do something that introduced and even larger problem into the world. In New Mexico, a mini-Babel story happened, but this one ended with a horrific boom. Scientists came to Mew Mexico from different nations and spoke different languages, but they all used the same language of English for this one project, rallying around science and competition to defeat a common enemy. However, as we all know, the nations all speak the same underlying language, the common language of Babel. But in this case we had this brotherhood in arms to defeat a common enemy, making it like a pre-Babel party in the southwest.These thinkers put aside their nationalism and joined together to take on a great project, a project unlike any other before it (except for the Tower of Babel where we invited the demons into the world). Total war across the world led to a recruitment of the world's greatest minds to the desert. However, this is one instance where “going to the desert” did not result in purified spirituality. The great minds - Oppenheimer, Fermi, Fuchs, Teller, Lawrence et al. - did not go out to the desert like Moses and Jesus did. In fact, these scientists went to the desert to say yes to the devil instead of do battle against his temptations. They joined, speaking a common language, to build a new Gate to God. They went to the desert to find out how God's universe works, but not out of curiosity regarding creation like the flower-cataloguing naturalist might, but rather to immolate and destroy those flowers. As God says in Genesis 11 while observing the Tower construction: “…they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach.” Could we not also imagine God saying the same thing as he allowed Oppenheimer to tinker with atoms in Los Alamos? As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so did our “American Prometheus.” And by the way, the myth where Prometheus is portrated as doing a good thing by stealing fire, is propaganda from the Silicon Valley of the ancient world. We have this idea stamped on us today that technology is good, and we just pursue technology for technology's sake. This is what the Tower of Babel was doing: trying to extract the secrets of God and the universe for our own dirty deeds. As Jesus said, “by their fruits you will know them” (Mt 7:15-20). The fruit of the Enlightenment is a world of nuclear weapons, among other things like carbon-dioxide-gone-wild. In the meantime, we call the old sustainable world of agrarian Christendom “The Dark Ages,” while we scramble to figure out how to block or undo the problems created through our dogged pursuit of God's secrets. There is a fascinating exchange about this from two Orthodox priests that I'm stealing at length here about Prometheus, which also applies to the Manhattan Project. This is from the Lord of Spirits podcast, a great source for breaking through the walls of the modernist propaganda that reigns in the media. They take it all the way back to the fall of Cain, and draw out the things we fail to notice in the dense meaning of his fall. Just as you can't get to heaven without going through the cross, you can't get to Babel without first going through Cain.Fr. Stephen: Cain founds the first city. The major figures in Cain's line who are named, it talks about the technological innovations that they produced, which are weapons of war, all of these things. So this idea is, yes, these spirits gave technology to man, but it was not to benefit man; they were giving man technology that humanity wasn't ready for, but for destroying themselves.Fr. Andrew: Right, and this same story is played out in multiple other ancient mythologies. The one that probably most of our listeners are familiar with is Greek mythology, and you've got the story of Prometheus, who gives fire from the gods to mankind. But of course in that story, it's depicted as Prometheus… It's correct in the sense that Prometheus is sort of rebelling, he's doing something he's not supposed to be doing, but it's presented as positive, like: look at this wonderful gift that he gave mankind.But the problem, of course, is that, again, it's propaganda. This is these demons saying, “Look at all these good things that we gave you. Why don't you just go ahead and bow down and worship us?” If you think about that, isn't that the same thing that's happening when Christ is tempted by the devil, that the devil offers him stuff? “Look what I'll do for you if you just bow down and worship me!” Even in our own lives, right? There's this promise of being great, being smart, being beautiful, being popular, being wealthy, being prestigious—if only you would serve whatever it is that you are asked to serve. It's a trick. As you said, it's for their destruction. Notice whom this technology is given to; it's given to Cain, the first murderer, and to his descendants.But the problem, of course, is like, you look at this stuff, and you're like: What's so wrong with iron-working and with music? What's wrong with that stuff?Fr. Stephen: Right, and it gets expanded firstly in the book of Jubilees, to include all kinds of things in terms of pharmaceuticals and sorcery and means of seduction of the opposite sex. But even if we're just talking about raw technology, again, it's not that it's evil any more than the tree of knowledge of good and evil is evil in and of itself, but it was wisdom for which humanity wasn't ready to use it appropriately. So it comes to these men as: “I'm giving you this knowledge so that you can use it to gain power and to conquer your neighbors, to set yourself up as a king, to seduce members of the opposite sex, so you will have this power and wealth and authority,” and that's what humanity uses it for.In New Mexico, Prometheus returned with fire again, and we were instructed in public school what a marvel this discovery was, where science and engineering “saved us” from Germany. I even recall watching Fat Man and Little Boy in science class as a kind of celebration of science. But science makes for a bad savior if it wins a battle by setting the stage for a much bigger and far worse war in the future. That's not a savior at all. That's a captor. We are in the same boat now with other problems stemming from our rush for technology, like cars that spewed carbon dioxide for a century, and a generation of lost souls who were raised on iPhones. You might even argue that we haven't even figured out how to handle fire properly yet, let alone nukes or smart phones. The great scientific and engineering minds proved that the secrets of the atom were not out of their reach. What they presumed was possible, became a reality. Like Geppetto, the dream to will an idea into existence turned Little Boy into a real atomic bomb. But it did not open a Gate to God. The Gate of Fission was opened, bringing down a new kind of demon. The solution created a short lived peace as the arms race and space race began. We found one of the great secrets of how God's universe functioned. The great minds had “pulled” God closer to earth and elevated humans, or so we thought, in the process. The payoff was to be endless free energy, but it didn't pan out. We were just left with the bombs. Most of the nuclear power plants are being shutdown today, while the warheads remain ready to fire. So in cracking the atomic code and creating what seemed like a gateway to the power of God, we ended up more like toddlers playing around with grenades in a crib. At the end of the project, the scientists disbanded and returned to their universities, but the knowledge stayed and proliferated to “the nations” and we now have the modern doctrine of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. This is the language of Babel fully articulated. Competition and greed lead to a prison-like behavior among the inmates, where you must dominate or be dominated, and as Ghandi may have said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” After the Tower of the Mushroom Cloud was built successfully and displayed to the world in its awesome terror, the scientists' newfound instructions for building the Gate trickled out to all corners of the world, and now we have about ten nations who have these giant firecrackers ready to destroy billions of people, hinged on the decision of fallible people in leadership roles. So we came together for a while under a common goal: to defeat nations clearly under demonic possession. How did we solve it? By inviting demons to possess us. To defeat one powerful nation speaking Babel, we got together and spoke Babel to create something even more awful. Then once the war ended, it seemed that nothing like that dramatic or awful could ever happen again. The nations proceeded to ensure that it will happen by building many, many more bombs. The nations are now nervously smiling at one another, meeting in uneasy groups, wearing the fig leaves of NATO and the United Nations and the European Union, while holding loaded revolvers to each others' heads. Something interesting began to happen after the war. Nationalism became a dirty word. The pendulum had swung to peak nationalism, and the reality of what the nations were capable of doing to one another began to look like a bad idea. Another way of saying it is that the idea of “the nations” itself looked like a bad idea. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, back toward the pre-Babel world where all the world was one nation. We are going back in time, to the days of Noah. There is a sense of inversion and reversal happening in quite a few parts of the Bible. Most of the Christian message is an inversion of the pagan, pluralistic world, which is exactly what it means to unlearn the language of Babel. The separation of nations was reduced somewhat in the aftermath of the war, as large conglomerates formed. There was a period where the opposite direction of Babel seemed to happen, where nations were kind of congealing, in some cases by force, and others by legitimate healing. While Russia used the sword, the West seemed to be in a state of repair, for a while anyway. After the war, Western nations thought it was obviously a bad idea to get caught up in nationalism and patriotism. Boundaries began to be removed or reduced to help foster cross-border trade and travel. While the Eastern Bloc was being beaten into submission, the Western nations were coming together, all while keeping a cold steely eye on its enemies. There was a pre-Babel impulse called globalization that took shape, and is still underway now. The lingua franca of the world became English. But underneath English was still the really old common language, that of competition and control. Even if the world became one nation again, as some suspect is happening, control would still be the underlying game. Was all of this a part of God's plan? Apparently it was. Rather, it is. His plan is still happening right now. As Peter said to Jesus about the Eucharist: This is a hard thing to accept. But accept it we must, if we are to trust in God's will, his plan. If we are to make progress in the Christian life, total trust in Jesus and the Body of Christ, his Church, is needed. We float on the sea in the ship of the Church, singing songs and sharing the sacred meal, while the storm rages around us. We just have to stop fighting in the ship itself. We must stick to sound doctrine, proper worship, and unwavering focus on Jesus. The great trial is coming, but we already knew that. To stop speaking Babel, we have to start speaking Pentecost, and I'm not talking about making nonsense noises. I'm talking about the process of letting go, forgiving, and not needing to win. I'm talking about doing what is right even when the world says it is wrong. I'm talking about turning away from the game. We now face the same pluralistic world that the apostles did, with the added threat (bonus points?) of nuclear annihilation and cyberwar. This should not make Christ's followers angry however; we should be overjoyed, as always, because death has no sting. As I've mentioned, Jesus did not get angry at the lost sheep; he went out to save them. That is the task now, and it was the task then. If the world intends to blow itself up, then that is God's will for reasons unfathomable to us. Our commission is not winning the war with guns, ours is in fighting the spiritual war. The same weapons are to be used: to believe, to be baptized, to pray, to fast, to sin no more, to keep his commandments, and to go make disciples of all the nations. The harvest is enormous but the laborers are few. What else is new? Today we are all speaking the same language in both English and that of Babel. The language is that of competition and pride, shame and honor. Whether or not capitalism or communism won, this language of the culture would be the same. Communism just has a higher body count. We don't seem to have been scattered again…not just yet. We have the means to self-scatter now through weapons, but there will be a different kind of scattering soon, and it seems there is a scattering or atomization as we lose focus on our families and the nation, and we move into the isolated world of technology where we live in the cold kingdom of “My truth.” We are living right now in the post-Manhattan Project, post-Cold War, era of globalization, and as the world comes together in consolidating nations, we grow further apart in our families and communities. We are going backward, toward the Big Bang that happened at Babel, before the scattering, when everyone spoke the language of Babel and understood each other. We are going back toward the era before the nations, but I don't think it will be what we expect or want when we get there, and I know it won't be if we try to do it without God's blessing. You might say that technology is the tool that allows us all to communicate with the same protocols today. What this means, however, is that we are returning to a state of pluralism. Thus we are not only going back toward the time of Babel, but we are going further back, returning to the time of Noah. In fact, with the advent of the Internet in 1995, you could say we have already passed the time of Babel, and are now hurtling toward the state of the world when Noah and his family were the last ones standing after the flood. And if we go that far, we may be going back further still, to the state of the world where God saw the flood as necessary to cleanse the world. As God said in the flood story, he would never again drown the world. He said he wouldn't use water the next time. But he didn't say anything about fire. Jesus on the other hand said something concerning, as we observe our world spinning into chaos, becoming more and more like the days of Noah before the flood. But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come. (Mt 24:36-44)Stay awake. If you are short on time, you really only need the first three chapters in Genesis to get the main point of the fall in the Bible. Many people of great faith can stop at Genesis 3 and take a time machine to leap ahead to the Gospels. Many understand all they need for their faith to thrive with that alone. This saves them the burden of trying to slog through Leviticus and Numbers, too. All of what you need to know is in the first Fall in the Garden, and while the living God may be hard to make sense of in those early pages of the Bible, the clarity of that living God comes fully alive in Jesus, in the Gospels. If you read the Gospels, and re-read them, and read them for the rest of your life, you will see that that Jesus is God. Or you at least have to wrestle with Jesus as God, because he says it over and over. It's important to actually read the Gospels and not take what a YouTube personality says it is, especially one that doesn't know what sin actually is. You have to read or hear the words of a man who cannot be explained, who can perform miracles, and who doesn't sound crazy somehow when he claims that he IS the living God. This can be done alone, but is best done in groups of people, with those who are trying to unlearn the language of Babel. You unlearn it by spending time with the Gospel, and pondering lines like these:“Whoever sees me, sees him who sent me.” “I and the Father are one.” “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”You have to decide if he is God. If you have heard the words of the Gospel, you must respond to it. While Jesus is making these claims, you have to compare his claims against the fact that sin and disorder and suffering are in the world, and compare his message to that reality. What do you make of a God who came here to suffer like us? To partake in the same pain and suffering that we experience? That to me is far more powerful than some self-help book that peddles worn out platitudes of “Be yourself.” If you want your suffering to be transformed into something meaningful, Jesus Christ is the only God that can show you how that is actually possible. The reason why Genesis keeps striking people as true in each passing century is because of observable facts of history, and more importantly, the experience of our own journeys. The story of life is on repeat. We all suffer. It's unavoidable. The question is: how are you going to deal with it? Will you take revenge? Will you run away? Or will you look to Christ for the answer when you cannot stand another day? The chaos waits to rise in our lives. We see order in nature, but disorder in people. What is the answer to handling this chaos? Let's just summarize the whole Bible in four lines: Nature is ordered.People are not. We need a savior. Enter Jesus.The end. Or maybe this one is better:Nature is ordered.People are not. We need a savior. Jesus is God.The end. There, that gives us the creation, the fall, the problem, and the solution, without the need to carry around a large book. The ordering and disordering of our world is a constant obsession with us, especially when we think we are the ones putting things in order. Dictators and ‘Tiger Mothers' have an extremely high sense of order, but while both attempt to cram their world into a box, everything they stuff inside gets damaged. Why? Because they are not God but they are assuming that role. The root motive for every dictator is the same as every sports-obsessed parent: to win, to be the best, and thereby be justified, and thereby be proud, and thereby feel loved. Actions taken out of pride are cries for help to be loved and approved. If only they knew that the love is available without all the struggle, that they can be loved without winning, without any effort at all! No matter how you chop up the story, the root problem of disordered choices is pride. Adam, Cain, Babel: all three “falls” stem from pride of self over humility before God. The worldview of Babel is simple when you burn off all the slag on top of it: the word is competition. Now there is competition in nature, but not like that of humans. “Survival of the fittest” does not explain the Empire State Building. It does not explain the heart of darkness in humans that goes far beyond that of plants fighting for sun or wolves scrapping for alpha. Plants and animals stop consuming and fighting when they get the food or the high ground in genetics. When nature becomes unbalanced, they balance out. Whereas we do not. Jeff Bezos continues amassing wealth long after he had enough, long after he could have stopped. Coca-Cola didn't stop spewing out plastic bottles once we all noticed it has created a horrid mess, nor did they stop shoving sugar at people once obesity became the norm. To win, you have to maintain the attitude of “to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.” Money, fame, sex, power, honor: these are a few of our favorite things, and once tasted and chosen, there is never enough. Addicts don't quit wanting the thing that makes them miserable. The competition is on. If we are not playing ourselves, then we cheer it on. The language of empire speaks of victory, winning, getting a better deal, finding a loophole, getting away with something. When this is your worldview, it devolves gradually into “rules for thee but not for me.” Why? Because winning. Because we want to get what we want. Because the need to win overrules morality and fair-play. That is the whole game. Once you start to realize the winners are cheating, then the jig is up. Hasn't the Olympics and Tour-de-France races taught us this repeatedly in recent decades? Hasn't every hero-athlete who is later revealed as a dope user shown us this fact? Didn't the Houston Astros show us how winning the World Series has less to do with talent and hard-work than finding a way to cheat? Didn't inflate-gate and spy-gate and every other “gate” scandal show us that the culture of competition leads to a downhill slide?Likewise, hasn't every empire that ever existed cheated and brawled its way to success painted itself as an honest, plucky hard worker? The Romans picked Virgil to write the legend of their path to glory. America had Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson to sell the narrative. There is a maxim that behind every fortune lies a great crime, and that applied to nations as well. What does all of this tell us? It does not tell me that we need to overthrow the government or adopt a socialist government, as it does to some today. No, it tells and re-tells me that the “shiny one” whispers ideas into our ears and we agree. We nod all too willingly, eager to win, with a chaser thought close behind of how we'll craft our mischief into an obstacle that we had to overcome. We sell sin to ourselves as a virtue. The secret sauce of all success is to tell a story that spins our sin into gold. You can hear this in small-talk everywhere, and even though I may only hear it in America today, the same choice of wealth and pleasure over humility before God was obviously the attitude in Babel. The line in the Tower of Babel story states it like the unspoken intention of every LinkedIn profile: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” (Gn 11:4)How do you make a name for yourself? By winning. By getting ahead. By stepping on the guy's head who is directly beneath you and pulling on the lady's leg who is directly above. By using whatever means necessary to get something more than the guy in the next cubicle. The language that was used in Babel was that of competition. You might even say it was more of a feel or vibe than a language. America was not founded entirely on the principle of competition in the pit, but along the way, the “City on a Hill” morphed into the “Tower of Babel.” Every person and people must make a choice. This is a choice that defines their life in the end. We think of choices in belief as small, as not mattering all that much, but what you believe factors into nearly every decision you make. “How you do anything is how you do everything.” That quote causes me to shudder, as I know how my lack of attention to detail could land me East of Eden forever. Belief matters and the quote could be, “What you believe drives how you do everything.” Belief drives action, and action drives belief. Let faith in Christ become the center of all events in your life. Do not waver, do not look away. Peter sinks in the water because he gets scared when the wind comes up. He looks away. Stop being yourself. Put aside the modern nonsense of your own specialness and be special for someone else. Call your mother. Go visit an old person. The only thing that is holding you back is your personal goals. Stop chasing pipe dreams. Be like Christ. See Christ in others. Let the rituals of the Mass guide your days, and revel in the fact that you can partake physically in the Body and Blood of Christ. Not only can you imitate Christ, you can be physically formed to him. The choice of who we believe in can be seen in the language we speak and the actions we take. Remember that most of all, this choice is not shown externally. This choice must be made in the heart. Pray to God that he reaches to you, asking for his spirit to be sent to you. The only thing you can offer to God in trade is your whole life. He wants you to ask. He likes you. He's waiting. You can either ask, or he will ask you, and it usually works out best if you ask first. Humility is when you ask him, and humiliation is when he is done messing around hinting, and asks you directly. Shoot for the first option. Ask him to find you: “Draw me, Lord, and we will run.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The US Attorney for the SDNY asked that FTX money be returned to victims. What are the moral and legal consequences to EA?, published by Fermi–Dirac Distribution on December 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In a December 13, 2022 press conference announcing the indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried, Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the following: To any person, entity or political campaign that has received stolen customer money, we ask that you work with us to return that money to the innocent victims. In the same press conference, he alleges that FTX has been stealing customer money since 2019: First, we charge that from 2019 until earlier this year, Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators stole billions of dollars from FTX customers. He also alleged the following about SBF's political contributions: Those contributions were disguised to look like they were coming from wealthy co-conspirators, when in fact, the contributions were funded by Alameda Research with stolen customer money. This might be relevant to EA orgs, since a lot of SBF's political contributions seem to have been made around the same time as his EA donations (i.e. this year), and so likely came from the same source. I made a comment pointing out some of this information yesterday, but so far that this is getting less attention than I expected given the seriousness of the matter, hence this top-level post. What are the moral and legal consequences of the information in the indictment, and of Williams's request, to EA orgs and individuals that have received money from FTX? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

En este episodio, Tavo nos platica sobre qué es la astrobiología y sobre la paradoja de Fermi, llevándonos a la pregunta del millón: ¿estamos solos en el universo? Tavo plantea cinco escenarios científicos, desde que sí estamos solos hasta la posibilidad de ser parte de un zoológico extraterrestre.

On this episode of Iconoblast Coop takes Joel into space and tries to get him to understand the complexities of distance, time, the speed of light, aliens and the Fermi paradox.   #fermiparadox #iconoblast #spacesharks

durée : 00:37:46 - Côté saveurs en Béarn Bigorre

Valeria ci parla di un articolo pubblicato su Nature in cui si dimostra che alcuni virus che causano gastroenteriti possono replicare nelle ghiandole salivari. Per ora gli esperimenti sono stati svolti su topi, salisfere e linee cellulari ma se i risultati fossero confermati sull'uomo potremmo poter prendere misure aggiuntive per la trasmissione di questi virus.Giorgio ci racconta la storia delle prime fissioni nucleari da reazione a catena, di cui si ricorda l'80° anniversario in questi giorni. Nel 1942, in pieno conflitto mondiale, viene prodotta la prima reazione a catena con la fissione nucleare. Questo evento porta un “navigatore italiano ad approdare in un nuovo mondo”: quello dell'era atomica. Giorgio ci racconta la storia e la scienza dietro a questo evento storico, il tutto partendo da un fisico armato di ascia.Dopo una barza “fisicamente” brutta, Romina ci parla di come si usa la matematica per far ruotare un oggetto nello spazio reale, come un braccio robotico, oppure in quello virtuale, come animare il personaggio di un videogioco. In entrambi i casi si possono usare gli angoli di Eulero oppure i quaternioni, degli oggetti matematici scoperti da un matematico irlandese dell'ottocento.

Se hai mai provato a meditare è probabile che come prima indicazione ti abbiano chiesto di “restare fermo”. Noi esseri umani (e anche molti altri animali) restiamo davvero fermi solo in poche situazioni, tra le quali c'è quella di Terrore. Dato che corpo e mente sono praticamente la stessa cosa, quando agiamo in un certo modo facilitiamo l'emergere di specifiche rappresentazioni mentali ed emozioni. La meditazione dunque può farci sentire terrorizzati ma allo stesso tempo è proprio questa una delle sue proprietà più importanti…Clicca qui per approfondire (link attivo dalle 5:00 am del 05/12/22) https://psinel.com/meditazione-e-il-terrore-ancestrale-di-restare-fermi/LINK UTILI: - Se ti piace il podcast adorerai il mio libro: “Facci caso”...https://www.amazon.it/Facci-distrarre-sciocchezze-attenzione-davvero/dp/8804728833 - Vuoi Imparare a Meditare? Scarica Gratis Clarity: https://clarityapp.it/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gennaro_romagnoli/ - Test sull'Ansia: https://psinel.com/test-ansia-ig-pd/I NOSTRI CORSI:- Dall'Ansia alla Serenità: https://psinel.com/ansia-serenita-sp/- Emotional Freedom: https://psinel.com/emotional-freedom-sp/- Self-Kindness: https://psinel.com/self-kindness-sp/- MMA (Master in Meditazione Avanzata): https://psinel.com/master-meditazione-avanzata-sp/- Scrivi la Tua Storia: https://psinel.com/scrivi-la-tua-storia-sp/- Self-Love: https://psinel.com/self-love-sp/Credits (traccia audio): https://www.bensound.com

A new NASA-funded study backs the 'Great Filter' theory as a solution to the Fermi paradox that, even though alien civilizations are highly probable, we've never heard. The off-world radio silence is because other civilizations kill themselves off with climate change, racism, inequity, political division, nuclear weapons and such, before they develop a way to contact us. Is this a scientific paper, or a political prescription to save our own planet from existential threats? Right Angle is a production of our Members. To join: https://BillWhittle.com/register/ To donate with PayPal or bank card: https://BillWhittle.com/donate-to-Bill-Whittle/

Gamma-光暴天體 GRB 221009A 應該是有新 ê 烏洞出世 ê 信號，是 ùi 遙遠宇宙足久以前 ê 一粒崩塌 ê 恆星核心生出來--ê。這張 gif 動畫就是咧描述這款超強 ê 爆發，這是 ùi Fermi Gamma-光 太空望遠鏡 ê 資料建構出來--ê。Fermi tī gamma-光偵測著伊 ê 能量，算出遮 ê 光子有超過 1 億 電子 bó͘-lu-to͘h。Kah 可見光相比，光子 ê 能量差不多才 2 電子 bó͘-lu-to͘h 爾爾。咱銀河盤平常時有發出穩定 ê 高能 gamma-光，就 tī 畫面倒爿對角 20 度闊 ê 範圍內。毋閣畫面中心 ê GRB 221009A 發--出 ê gamma-光，發出一目

Back in October, astronomers were dazzled when a flash of light from the depths of space was detected by NASA's Fermi telescope, a trace of what scientists call a gamma ray burst. Is it something we should be worried about? Dr. Brian Thomas, leader of the research team studying astro-biophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Washburn University, joined “Something Offbeat” to explain this phenomenon and more.    NASA audio included.

Let's talk about Halloween, filters, and Fermi.... --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/beau-of-the-fifth-column/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/beau-of-the-fifth-column/support

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to Take Over the Universe (in Three Easy Steps), published by Writer on October 18, 2022 on LessWrong. EA-Forum crosspost This is the script of Rational Animations' video linked above. It's about how to take over the universe with amounts of energy and resources that are small compared to what is at our disposal in the Solar System. It's based on this paper, by Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong. This is our highest-quality video so far. Below, the script of the video. Let's take over the universe in three easy steps Welcome. We've heard that you want to take over the universe. Well, you've come to the right place. In this video, we'll show you how to reach as many as four billion galaxies with just a few relatively easy steps and six hours of the Sun's energy. Here's what you need to do: Disassemble mercury and build a Dyson swarm: a multitude of solar captors around the sun. Build self-replicating probes Launch the self-replicating probes to every reachable galaxy. In science fiction, humanity's expansion into the universe usually starts within our galaxy, the Milky Way. After a new star system is occupied, humanity jumps to the next star, and so on, until we take the whole galaxy. Then, humanity jumps to the nearest galaxy, and the process is repeated. This is not how we're going to do it. Our method is much more efficient. We're going to send self-replicating probes to all the reachable galaxies at once. Getting to the furthest galaxies is not more difficult than getting to the nearest ones. It just takes more time. When a probe arrives at its destination galaxy, it will search for a planet to disassemble, build another Dyson swarm, and launch a new wave of probes to reach every star within the galaxy. And then, each probe in that galaxy will restart civilization. We already hear you protest, though: “this whole thing still seems pretty hard to me,” you say. “Especially the “disassembling mercury” part”. But actually, none of these steps are as hard as they first appear. If you analyze closely how they could be implemented you'll find solutions that are much easier than you'd expect. And that's exactly what Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg do in their paper “Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox.” This video is based on that paper. Exploratory engineering and assumptions What we mean by “easy” here, is that we will require amounts of energy and resources that are small compared to what is at our disposal in the solar system. Also, the technology required is not extremely far beyond our capabilities today, and the time required for the whole feat is insignificant on cosmic scales. Not every potential future technology will make sense to include in our plan to spread to the stars. We need to choose what technologies to use by reasoning in the style of exploratory engineering: trying to figure out what techniques and designs are physically possible and plausibly achievable by human scientists. The requirement “physically possible'' is much easier to comply with than “achievable by human scientists”, therefore, we introduce two assumptions that serve to separate the plausible from the merely possible: First: Any process in the natural world can be replicated with human technology. This assumption makes sense in light of the fact that humans have generally been successful at copying or co-opting nature. Second: Any task that can be performed can be automated. The rationale for this assumption is that humans have proven to be adept at automating processes, and with advances in AI, we will become even more so. Design of the Dyson swarm Now, we've said we are going to launch probes to every reachable galaxy. This means a hundred million to a hundred billion probes. Where do we get the energy to power...

Real deadlines make allocating resources hard.   Subscribe at: https://paid.retraice.com   Details: do or die; the fog of the future; hypotheses and deadlines; your groups and resources; feedback loops; the Fermi paradox. Complete notes and video at: https://www.retraice.com/segments/re20 Air date: Sunday, 16th Oct. 2022, 11 : 25 PM Eastern/US.   0:00:00 do or die; 0:02:19 the fog of the future; 0:04:21 hypotheses and deadlines; 0:10:25 your groups and resources; 0:13:13 feedback loops; 0:17:28 the Fermi paradox. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc. https://retraice.com

Jim talks with Bruce Damer about the origins of life. They discuss what Earth was like 4 billion years ago, how the oceans formed, the new concept of urability, the distinction between supporting life & bringing it into being, the source of organic building blocks, combinatorial selection, the ocean vents theory vs the warm little pond hypothesis, the Murchison meteorite, wet-dry cycling, the water problem, using stromatolites & other natural analogs to test conjectures, finding the oldest evidence of life in a hot spring setting, shouting matches as evidence of paradigm shifts, what warm pools were made of, a one-pot solution that's testable at every stage, the source of vesicles, why the ocean is implausible as a starting point, chemical gardens, the great search for the origins of emergence, semipermeable membranes, "sludge of progenitor," the jacuzzi origin of life, the origin of life as a communal unit, the ratchet to greater complexity, thermal change in near-real time, the error catastrophe in evolutionary computing, actual experiments being performed, the Fermi paradox & astrobiological implications, a hot spring on Mars, urability scores, the Drake equation, where complexity theory meets biology, the rarity of complex life & the responsibility that comes with it, bringing the universe to life, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP40 - Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems Biota.org "The Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life," by Bruce Damer & David Deamer JRS EP18 - Stuart Kauffman on Complexity, Biology & T.A.P. "The Water Paradox and the Origins of Life" (Nature), by Michael Marshall "Urability: A Property of Planetary Bodies That Can Support an Origin of Life," by David Deamer and Bruce Damer Canadian-born Dr. Bruce Damer has spent his life pursuing two questions: how did life on Earth begin? and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the future and a presence beyond the Earth? A decade of laboratory and field research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at UCSC and teams around the world resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life, published in Scientific American in 2017 and the journal Astrobiology in 2020. The scenario has now passed its first key experimental tests in the laboratory and at volcanic hot springs around the world and has emerged as a leading contender for a general theory of abiogenesis. Implications of the work are now spreading through evolutionary biology, philosophy, AI and the search for life beyond Earth. New work with collaborators has proposed the urability framework, how life can start on many different worlds, and addresses some aspects of the Fermi Paradox.

Abbiamo 12 impianti fotovoltaici installati da mesi sui tetti dei nostri supermercati nelle province di Livorno, Grosseto e Massa Carrara, per una potenza complessiva di 1.580 Kw - spiega Piero Canova, direttore generale di Unicoop Tirreno - che però non possono funzionare perché non vengono allacciati alla rete elettrica: sono ritardi inaccettabili, tanto più in un momento di emergenza come questo». Il caso più clamoroso è quello di Castiglion della Pescaia (Grosseto), dove la pratica con E-Distribuzione è stata avviata il 12 novembre 2011 e quella con l'Agenzia delle Dogane, che deve rilasciare la licenza di esercizio, è partita il 5 aprile 2022. Da allora - e sono passati quasi sei mesi - l'impianto aspetta l'allaccio. Situazione simile nel supermercato di Bagno di Gavorrano, dove la pratica con E-Distribuzione risale al dicembre 2021 e quella con l'Agenzia delle Dogane al luglio scorso. Proprio ieri in serata, l'Agenzia delle Dogane ha comunicato a Unicoop che sono pronte le licenze per Bagno di Gavorrano e Castiglione della Pescaia. Ne parliamo proprio con Piero Canova, direttore generale Unicoop Tirreno. Nessuno vuole più lavorare. Imprenditore non trova operai "Offro 2mila euro al mese, ma nessuno risponde". È quello che ha denunciato qualche giorno fa l'imprenditore 38enne Elia Stevanato, presidente della Stevanato Prodotti e Lavori Speciali Srl di Salzano (Venezia). Le posizioni cercate sono 10 e tutte per la stessa mansione ovvero: operai nell edilizia e nei lavori stradali. Vanno bene anche senza esperienzapurché siano sotto i 45 anni. Al contrario vanno bene anche più anziani. E nonostante la paga promessa solo 2 persone hanno accettato finora. Ma quanta fatica per trovarle. Stevanato: "Mi dicono: voglio essere a casa alle cinque, voglio andare in palestra, devo uscire con la morosa. Così ho deciso di rivolgermi ai giovani del Sud. La maggior parte dei nostri dipendenti viene da lì. Ne parlano male, ma nel Meridione c'è gente che ha voglia di lavorare. Approfondiamo il tema proprio con Elia Stevanato, Presidente della Stevanato Prodotti e Lavori speciali srl. Sindaci, per caro bollette serve una svolta: pericolo città spente e trasporti fermi I comuni da qui a fine anno rischiano di dover fermare i tram, tenere parti delle città al buio, spegnere completamente le luci sui monumenti e razionare i riscaldamenti a causa di bollette dell'energia troppo salate. Per questo il delegato alla finanza locale dell'Anci, Alessandro Canelli, torna a chiedere il supporto del governo centrale: "Contro il caro bollette come comuni chiederemo al prossimo Governo, una volta insediato, uno stanziamento di 200 milioni da inserire nel dl aiuti quater, poi in legge di bilancio chiederemo lo stanziamento di 800 milioni che potranno valere anche per il 2023 per le situazioni più critiche dei bilanci comunali. Da qui al varo del nuovo governo prepareremo un pacchetto di misure anche tecnico-contabili per fermare il calo delle entrate dei comuni previsto per il 2023 e per far fronte al perdurare dell'incremento dei costi energetici". Ne parliamo con Alessandro Canelli, delegato Anci alla Finanza locale e sindaco di Novara.

The Flying Saucer fears are at a fever pitch up on Capitol Hill not seen since the saucer flap of the late 40s and 50s. Legislation describing these UAPs as non human threats are on the table. What is going on? Do we have alien overlords to prepare for or a benevolent interstellar big brother guiding us away from the Gian Bottleneck of Fermi's Paradox?

In 1998, economist and philosopher Dr. Robin Hanson suggested that there must be a "Great Filter" that prevents life from reaching an advanced stage.This hypothesis remains one of the most popular proposed resolutions to Fermi's Paradox, and could have frightening implications for humanity!_______________________GuestDr. Robin HansonGeorge Mason University [@GeorgeMasonU]GMU Profile: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-hanson-5156b/On Twitter | https://twitter.com/robinhanson_______________________HostMatthew S WilliamsOn ITSPmagazine  

PM - El físico italiano Enrico Fermi almorzaba con otros científicos en 1950 cuando espetó: «¿Nunca os preguntáis dónde está todo el mundo?». Con «todo el mundo» se refería a cualquier especie de viajeros espaciales, y con el tiempo su pregunta se convirtió en la igualmente célebre (aunque con un nombre un tanto engañoso) «paradoja de Fermi»: a menos que haya sumamente pocas, las especies tecnológicamente avanzadas ya deberían haberse diseminado por casi toda la galaxia. Y sin embargo, no vemos indicios de su existencia. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

Ever since human beings have had some sense of the immensity of the Cosmos, when we look up to the starry array above their heads in the dark of night, an enduring question emerges: How many other planets with sophisticated civilizations like ours are out there? With a thousand pinpricks of light coming through that black tapestry of the night sky, many of us logically assume the cosmos is likely teeming with life. Of course, that initial impression, based more on a hunch perhaps than solid data, has only grown stronger and stronger as our understanding of the immense scope of the universe has come more fully into view. Dazzling as the earth, our home planet is, it is but one rock circling one star in one star system amongst hundreds of billions in our Milky Way galaxy alone. And likewise that galaxy is merely one of trillions scattered across the vast expanse of the cosmos. The so-called Fermi paradox arises from the apparent conflict between the lack of clear, obvious signs of extraterrestrial life despite consistently high estimates for their probable existence. This paradox is named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, who, as the story goes, in the midst of a casual conversation with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski, in almost the precise middle of the 20th century, exclaimed, when thinking on these matters: “But where is everybody?”, or something to that effect. It is indeed a perplexing matter. As time has gone on, we've gathered more and more evidence not just about how gargantuan the cosmos actually is, but how, as Dr. Ian Malcolm, a character in the original Jurassic Park movie played by Jeff Goldblum famously says, “Life finds a way”. In other words, life seems to spring up even in the most inhabitable of environments. That being the case, and considering how many goldilox-like planets must exist, even amongst the many planets that are perhaps not suited for life, where are all those civilizations? Why are we not finding clear evidence of their existence? Of course the Fermi paradox makes certain assumptions, firstly about the nature and ultimate reality of the spacetime construct we find ourselves seemingly firmly embedded within. But also about the notion that civilizations that are perhaps out there – and perhaps much more advanced than we earthlings, would not choose to interfere with our ability to perceive their existence. When you really think about it: this is a rather strange assumption to make. After all, we manipulate our environment almost the moment we gain the ability to. Why would this not occur with interstellar civilizations that have mastered interstellar and perhaps even intergalactic travel in the same way we've mastered intercontinental travel? And of course, last but certainly not least, there is the clear evidence, gathered not just over the course of what you might call the modern UFO era, reaching back to the early to mid 20th century, but even to our distant religious lore and early Creation myths, suggesting these Others have been here for a very long time, perhaps even predating us as beings walking this blue pearl of a planet. So, all this being the case, what does this mean? Why are we simultaneously being visited and interacted with by these various non-conventionally human others, while also being presented with a visible universe that appears starkly devoid of life? These are the compelling and head-scratching matters that we'll endeavor to make sense of in this, the 71st episode of the Point of Convergence podcast. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pointofconvergence/support

In 2010, gamma ray observations by NASA's Fermi Space Telescope revealed an unknown mysterious structure of our home galaxy Milky Way. Astronomers discovered two giant bubbles that emerge below and above the center of our galaxy. They are known as Fermi Bubbles. Each bubble is about 25000 light years long, spanning a total length of about 50,000 light years. The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old.   Further Reading: https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/pages/bubbles.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/new-structure.html   We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs.  Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too!  Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.  Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

La tertulia semanal en la que repasamos las últimas noticias de la actualidad científica. En el episodio de hoy: Espectacular avistamiento de Starlink (min 5:00); Problemas con la criogenia del LHC (13:30); Detección de CO2 en un exoplaneta (20:30); Adiós a Frank Drake. Orígenes de SETI y ecuación de Drake (31:00); Embriones sintéticos a partir de células madre (1:37:00); Subestructura en las burbujas de Fermi (1:55:00); NNPDF y la componente de quark encanto en el protón (2:13:30); Señales de los oyentes (2:38:40) . Contertulios: Sara Robisco, Gastón Giribet, Francis Villatoro, Héctor Socas. Portada gentileza de Manu Pombrol. Todos los comentarios vertidos durante la tertulia representan únicamente la opinión de quien los hace... y a veces ni eso. CB:SyR es una actividad del Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos de Tenerife. Museos de Tenerife apoya el valor científico y divulgativo de CB:SyR sin asumir como propios los comentarios de los participantes.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Simple estimation examples in Squiggle, published by NunoSempere on September 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post goes through several simple estimates, written in Squiggle, a new estimation language. My hope is that it might make it easier to write more estimates of a similar sort, wider adoption of Squiggle itself, and ultimately better decisions. Initial setup One can use Squiggle in several ways. This blog post will cover using it on its website and in a Google Spreadsheet. An upcoming blog post will cover using it in more complicated setups. squiggle-language.com The simplest way to use Squiggle is to open squiggle-language.com/playground. You will see something like the following: You can write your model on the editor in the left side, and the results will be displayed in the right side. As you make edits, the url in your browser bar will change so that you copy it and use it to refer people to your model. Squiggle Google docs When working with multiple models, I've also found it useful to use Squiggle in Google sheets. To do so, make a copy of this spreadsheet, and allow app permissions. Edit the “Main” sheet, and click on “Squiggle” > “Feed into Squiggle” to compute models. If you have difficulties, read the “Instructions” sheet, or leave a comment. So without further ado, the simple example models: Partially replicating Dissolving the Fermi Paradox (complexity = 1/10) Page 2 of the paper defines the factors for the Drake equation: Page 10 of the paper gives its estimates for the factors of the Drake equation: Because Squiggle doesn't yet have the log-uniform probability distribution, we're going to have to define it first. A log-uniform is a probability distribution whose log is a uniform distribution. // () loguniform(a, b) = exp(uniform(log(a), log(b))) // Estimates rate_of_star_formation = loguniform(1,100) fraction_of_stars_with_planets = loguniform(0.1, 1) number_of_habitable_planets_per_star_system = loguniform(0.1, 1) fraction_of_habitable_planets_in_which_any_life_appears = 1 // ^ more on this below fraction_of_planets_with_life_in_which_intelligent_life_appears = loguniform(0.001, 1) fraction_of_intelligent_planets_which_are_detectable_as_such = loguniform(0.01, 1) longevity_of_detectable_civilizations = loguniform(100, 10000000000) // Expected number of civilizations in the Milky way; // see footnote 3 (p. 5) n = rate_of_star_formation fraction_of_stars_with_planets number_of_habitable_planets_per_star_system fraction_of_habitable_planets_in_which_any_life_appears fraction_of_planets_with_life_in_which_intelligent_life_appears fraction_of_intelligent_planets_which_are_detectable_as_such longevity_of_detectable_civilizations // Display n This produces the following estimate: The estimate is fairly wide, but the model gives a 10%-ish chance that there is, in expectation, less than once civilization in the Milky Way. After updating on a bunch of observations, the paper raises that probability, hence the conclusion that the Fermi paradox has been “dissolved”. Why did we set fraction_of_planets_in_which_any_life_appears to 1? Well, the paper considers an estimate of 1−exp(−r), where r is distributed as a lognormal(1,50). But because r ranges from very small numbers to very large numbers, they get collapsed to either 0 or 1 when going through 1−exp(−r), which produces some numerical errors when multiplying by 0. In addition, that estimate has been questioned. So following a similar move in the paper, we can set that factor to a high value (in this case, to 1, meaning that all planets capable of life do host life). And then, when we notice that the probability of no other life in the Milky Way is still significant, the Fermi paradox will still have been somewhat dissolved, though to a lesser extent. From here on, we could tweak the ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introduction to Fermi estimates, published by NunoSempere on August 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The following are my notes from an intro to Fermi estimates class I gave at ESPR, in preparation for a Fermithon, i.e., a Fermi estimates tournament. Fermi estimation is a method for arriving an estimate of an uncertain variable of interest. Given a variable of interest, sometimes you can decompose it into steps, and multiplying those steps together gives you a more accurate estimate than estimating the thing you want to know directly. I'll go through a proof sketch for this at the end of the post. If you want to take over the world, why should you care about this? Well, you may care about this if you hope that having better models of the world would lead you to make better decisions, and to better achieve your goals. And Fermi estimates are one way of training or showing off the skill of building models of the world. They have fast feedback loops, because you can in many cases then check the answer on the internet afterwards. But they are probably most useful in cases where you can't. The rest of the class was a trial by fire: I presented some questions, students gave their own estimates, and then briefly discussed them. In case you want to give it a try before seeing the answers, the questions I considered were: How many people have covid in the UK right now (2022-08-20)? How many cumulative person years did people live in/under the Soviet Union? How many intelligent species does the universe hold outside of Earth? Are any staff members dating? How many “state-based conflicts” are going on right now? (“state based conflict” = at least one party is a state, at least 25 deaths a year, massacres and genocides not included) How much does ESPR (a summer camp) cost? How many people are members of the Chinese communist party? What is the US defense budget? How many daily viewers does Tucker Carlson have? 1. How many people have covid in the UK right now (2022-08-20)? My own answer Some student guesses 130k 600k 1M to 2M Check To check, we can use the number of confirmed deaths: 2. How many cumulative person years did people live in/under the Soviet Union? My own answer Students guessed pretty much the same. Check Per this graph: the average population seems to have been around 200M, implying 14.8 billion years. 3. How many intelligent species does the galaxy hold? My own answer Probably just one (!?). Student guesses 104 0.4T 0 to 1 Check The dissolving the Fermi paradox paper gives the following estimate: which gives something like a 40% chance of us being alone in the observable universe. I think the paper shows the importance of using distributions, rather than point-estimates: using point estimates results in the Fermi paradox. This is the reason why I've been multiplying distributions, rather than point estimates 4. Are any staff members dating? Note: Question does not include Junior Counselors, because I don't know the answer to that. Own answer The camp has 11 male and 3 women staff members. So the number of heterosexual combinations is (11 choose 1) × (3 choose 1) = 11 × 3 = 33 possible pairings. However, some of the pairings are not compatible, because they repeat the same person, so the number of monogamous heterosexual pairings is lower. Instead, say I'm giving a 1% to 3% a priori probability for any man-woman pairing. How did I arrive at this? Essentially, 0.1% feels too low and 5% too high. That implies a cumulative ~10% to 30% probability that a given woman staff member is dating any man staff member. Note that this rounds off nontraditional pairings—there is 1 nonbinary Junior Counsellor, but none amongst instructors, that I recall. If we run with the 30% chance for each woman staff member: If 10%: So the probability that there is at least one pairi...

Your hosts talk with author Chris Farnell about his darkly humorous science fiction novel "Fermi's Progress". The conversation ranges from planets that didn't make it into the book to how he managed to make the superman character sympathetic rather than obnoxious. They also talk about diverse alien cultures in a "planet of the week" format.You can find more from Chris here:https://twitter.com/thebrainofchrishttps://chrisfarnell.com/https://scarletferret.com/books/fermis-progress-season-passThanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris”- Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Chaque week-end, nos correspondants aux quatre coins de la France répondent à une question simple : Que se passe-t-il chez eux aujourd'hui ?

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, Neil and Adil discuss the next book on their Great Books Project: the book of Genesis. The book begins with the story of creation and wraps up with the lives of Jacob and Joseph, with numerous stories, lessons, and genealogies in between the 50 chapters.   We cover a wide range of topics including: Science and religion: Do they conflict or complement each other? The beginning of time and formation of Earth How depictions of God, or a higher power, differ across religions The stories of Adam, Eve, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Isaac, and more Whether the Bible should be interpreted literally vs. allegorically And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Links from the Episode: Mentioned in the show: Jordan Peterson's Bible series (1:17) Aaron Rodgers on the Aubrey Marcus podcast (10:58) Ayahuasca (11:05) Unicellular organisms (26:32) Fermi paradox (29:59) Idiocracy (37:26) Idiocracy opening scene (37:42) Islamic attitudes towards science (39:55) Unmoved Mover (1:07:40) Watchmen (1:13:35) Books Mentioned: Epic of Gilgamesh (0:58) (Book Episode) The History of God (7:45) The Bible (Karen Armstrong) (7:49) Bhagavad Gita (19:10) (Nat's Book Notes) Rare Earth (28:04) Vehicles (31:25) East of Eden (58:30) (Nat's Book Notes) Of Mice and Men (1:00:44) The Grapes of Wrath (1:00:52) Biocentrism (1:11:16) People Mentioned: Jordan Peterson (1:14) Karen Armstrong (7:24) Nassim Taleb (41:15) Jennifer Lawrence (58:55) Steven Spielberg (59:28) John Steinbeck (1:00:30) Show Topics: 0:28 We continue the Great Book Series with the book of Genesis from the Old Testament. 3:30 Adil and Neil talk about their familiarity with Genesis before they read it for the show. The book was passed down through the oral tradition, and wasn't written down until hundreds of years after it was spoken. It has also been translated into over 700 languages. It poses the question, who wrote down the story, and how much of it has changed being passed down orally?  7:11 Adil talks about books he has read previous to Genesis by Karen Armstrong. One thing he notes is that the Bible was not meant to be read literally. Of course, there are parts that can be taken literally, but many of the stories are allegorical and symbolic in meaning. 12:45 Jacob's story: Jacob wrestles with someone who is unnamed, though interpreted as God. At one point, they touch hips and he walks away injured, but he has that injury for the rest of his life. This story, if not taken literally, can allude to the internal scars that you have battling and wrestling with your inner demons. 14:01 The structure of Genesis. First comes the story of creation, followed by the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. The term Toledot meaning “generations” or "descendants. The last section of Genesis is dedicated to Jacob, which sets up for the following book in the Bible, Exodus. 15:27 The story of Joseph and Jacob. This story resonates on a moral level with people because it serves as a reminder that the journey is just as important as the destination. Your journey may not always go as planned. Even if you have everything you want, you may still have regrets about how you got there. 19:00 Neil makes a connection to the Bhagavad Gita. One of the morals of this story is very similar. In the end, the good guys got what they wanted and won the war, but lost everything in the process. Was it worth it? It's a similar message that Jacob's life represents in Genesis.  20:05 The redeeming arc for Jacob came through his brother Esau and how he forgave Jacob for his wrongdoings. When they met, it may appear that Esau was upset and Jacob was ready to meet his fate, yet he ended up being forgiven. Through that forgiveness, Jacob was transformed. 23:21 We're all on our own path to learning, both spiritually and religiously. Growing up, you tend to adopt the beliefs of your family and other surroundings. We often believe that when something isn't completely certain, that it must be wrong. 27:16 Evolution, the beginning of time, and extraterrestrial life. When you think about how everything has been formed in a way that led to life here on earth, it's astonishing. If the universe is indeed infinite, then it's very possible that it lines up for other life forms to exist elsewhere, and they could exist under completely different conditions than on Earth. 31:23 Adil makes a connection to the book Vehicles. The knowledge we have isn't always solid and requires faith to believe in.  34:10 Organized religion has tended to go with a more literal meaning, for example modern Christianity in America. One common belief is that if you're scientific, you can't also be religious and it's made into a dichotomy. It's possible that they can be completely aligned with each other. Both can be viewed as tools for understanding the world better, and they don't have to necessarily be viewed as opponents. 36:03 Why do subjective experience exists? If the goal of life is just to produce offspring and continue the circle of life, why do we have this personal experience of life, and how is it beneficial? There isn't much of a scientific explanation for it. 38:55 A lot of the early scientific research in Europe was done by religious people to prove God was real, and that aspects of religion that can be backed by science. The two stories diverged and this led to religious texts being interpreted more literally. However in other religions, Islam for example, it's typically believed that science and religion work together. 41:34 Adam and Eve story, and the significance of the serpent if you take the Bible symbolically. The snake has a unique hold in human psychology. Neil and Adil talk about different animals and how they're perceived in different communities and religions. 46:15 Eve's name means "living" in Hebrew, but it comes from a root that can also mean "snake". There are a lot of unanswered questions that came up, and as we continue to Exodus, we may learn some of these answers to these questions. 51:20 The curses in the book of Genesis are all tied to the knowledge of self awareness and the future. Childbirth was the curse passed on to women, and even early on, women have a knowledge of the pain of it. Men have the curse of labor and work. While the benefits of knowledge and self awareness are received, this also comes with these curses. 53:00 Two main ways that God both gifted and punished His people were through fertility and land. Neil and Adil discuss the story of Abraham, Issac, and Ishmael.  1:01:33 "In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return." In Abrahamic religions (including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), they bury their dead. In other religions, there is no burial. 1:06:33 Depictions of God in different religions. In some religions they feel a depiction of their god it's a good way to connect, but in others it can feel alienating. 1:07:13 With each theory about how the universe was created, you can keep asking the question, "What came before that?" The infinite universe as constantly expanding and contracting. The idea of biocentrism, and how it's the observer that makes something a reality. 1:14:36 Thanks for listening! Stay tuned for our next episode on the book of Exodus, and be sure to keep following along as we work through our Great Books List.  If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!