Daily Archives: April 9, 2022

Elon Musk says a lot of seemingly fantastical things. For example: The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO seems to believe that humans will eventually be able to live forever, by downloading their brains into robots.

"I think it is possible," Musk, 50, recently told Insider. "Yes, we could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you're not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that."

By Musk's account, such technology will be a gradual evolution from today's forms of computer memory. "Our memories are stored in our phones and computers with pictures and video," he said. "Computers and phones amplify our ability to communicate, enabling us to do things that would have been considered magical ... We've already amplified our human brains massively with computers."

The concept of prolonging human life by downloading consciousnesses into synthetic bodies has been a fixture of science-fiction for decades, with the 1964 sci-fi novel "Dune" terming such beings as "cymeks." Some experts today believe that "mind uploading" technology could, in fact, be feasible one day but the timeline is incredibly unclear.

In a 2019 Wall Street Journal essay, Michael S.A. Graziano, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University, wrote that mind uploading would require two pieces of technology: an artificial brain, and a scan of a person's brain that could "measure exactly how its neurons are connected to each other, to be able to copy that pattern in the artificial brain."

Creating the artificial brain, Graziano noted, would be relatively straightforward. "But to upload a human brain, we probably want a scanner that doesn't kill the subject, and we would need it to scan about a hundred million times as many details," he wrote. "That technology doesn't yet exist. The most wildly optimistic predictions place mind uploading within a few decades, but I would not be surprised if it took centuries."

One of Musk's current start-up ventures, Neuralink, is working to develop "brain-machine interfaces" that in Musk's own words could one day allow people to "store your memories as a backup, and restore the memories." But speaking with Insider, Musk emphasized that his company's current goals are much more immediately practical.

"Neuralink in the short term is just about solving brain injuries, spinal injuries and that kind of thing," he said. "So for many years, Neuralink's products will just be helpful to someone who has lost the use of their arms or legs or has just a traumatic brain injury of some kind."

Notably, Musk himself doesn't seem to want to live forever nor does he endorse the idea for anyone else. "I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time," he said. "That would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance."

If mind uploading does become possible within the relatively near future, there's some speculation in the Musk household as to who'd want to try it: In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Musk's co-parent and ex-partner Grimes identified Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos as someone who "is gonna be a cymek."

Bezos, 58, has not publicly expressed any interest in such technology, though he does have a track record of investing in longevity and anti-aging research. He did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment.

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Heres how much power Elon Musk actually has at Twitter now and what he might do with it

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Elon Musk says humans could eventually download their brains into robots and Grimes thinks Jeff Bezos would do it - CNBC

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Best Free OnlyFans Accounts to Follow: Ultimate List of the Top Free OnlyFans Girls - Cincinnati CityBeat

I drew a character map while reading Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, just for the pleasure of charting the swooping, kaleidoscopic intersections of parents and children (and cousins and tennis partners and drug dealers) of a central set of people first introduced in her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Mapping people in relation to each other is one of the central activities of characters in these novels anthropologists, publicists, anxious high schoolers, or employees of social media companies all seem to be asking, What makes people matter to each other? And can you predict or control it, either for love or for profit?

A Visit from the Goon Squad first introduced Mindy, a beautiful 23-year-old anthropology student on safari with the much older record executive Lou Kline and some of his family and hangers-on. In her narration of the safari, she breaks down the group's reactions to her presence with deadpan, diagnostic precision: The "Structural Hatred" of an older woman "who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the already thready sinews of her neck" for an older man's younger girlfriend; or the "Structural Affection," of that man's young son, who "hasn't yet learned to separate his father's loves and desires from his own."

In The Candy House, Mindy has become Miranda Kline, a reclusive, brilliant anthropologist who after years living among a remote tribe in Brazil developed algorithms predicting "patterns of affinity," that is, "what made people like and trust one another."

To the dismay of Miranda (MK to her tech bro disciples), these algorithms have been weaponized by social media companies especially Mandala, a company led by Bix Boulton, a minor Goon Squad character, reborn as the mononymous social media mogul "Bix." His biggest innovation is a product called "Own Your Unconscious," which allows you to externalize your mind and revisit your past whenever you want.

But it is one of the "ancillary features" of "Own Your Unconscious" that has upended society in The Candy House. The "Collective Consciousness" works like this: "By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online 'collective,' you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same."

(Sidenote: These fictional products raise obvious and enormous questions about truth and subjectivity in memory, not to mention the brain itself would watching your past be like a movie? Does your brain retain all the details of everything you've ever seen? Do different people remember the past differently, and if so, which versions are "true"? Hilariously, Egan bypasses these questions entirely and unapologetically.)

These two linked technologies are both inconceivably invasive and basically familiar our phones are in certain ways already our externalized consciousnesses (philosophers talk about "extended mind theory" that our cognitive processes increasingly happen externally as well as internally), and the Collective is a kind of exponential internet. The phrase "the candy house" (as in Hansel and Gretel) refers to the (also deeply familiar) Faustian bargain of convenience and connection for loss of privacy.

Egan makes the appeal of the Collective Conscious extravagantly obvious: In addition to the clear benefits (victims of child abuse being able to identify their abusers, missing people easily located), there is eternal appeal of entering someone else's consciousness, a longing threading through human culture from the myth of Tiraseus to the terrible teen movie Freaky Friday to the project of fiction itself.

Mandala's inventions feel especially poignant in Egan's fictional worlds, which are so densely populated by addicts and alcoholics. These are people who don't own their pasts, in either the sense of literally remembering them, or in the sense of feeling any agency in the events of their lives. So often her characters are unable to understand or accept what happened, those crucial, ill-understood moments when everything went awry. Far from being cartoonishly evil, an obvious wrong, "Own Your Unconscious" has deep instinctive appeal. This is characteristic of Egan, who isn't interested in moral problems with obvious answers.

In The Candy House, there is a persistent, lovely countermelody to the corporate project of mapping human experience and using it to predict what people will think and buy. The novel is full of people engaged in a kind of sweeter and more plaintive human algebra. I haven't recently read a gentler or funnier description of longing than in one chapter here in which a "senior empiricist and metrics expert" named Lincoln tries to determine what will make his crush, "M", fall in love with him.

Lincoln (also a Goon Squad character) has already analyzed the roots of M's charm (including "four primary freckles on her nose and approximately twenty-four secondary freckles"), and evaluated the competition (of which "fully half possess at least one possibly-to-likely-disqualifying personal trait"). But what remains elusive is "x: the unknown value required to secure M's love." Maybe x is a stuffed hippo, or a music box, or "some really long tulips that are actually made of silk." He begins accumulating items.

Lincoln's is perhaps the most literal attempt to predict and control patterns of behavior, but so many characters are engaged in it in one form or another, like Molly, a lonely teenager at a country club trying to identify the elusive quality of cool, which she lacks: "...if you're nice to everyone, then why should people near you feel special and why should people NOT near you WANT to be near you, and why should anyone assume that the Times they are having without you are worse than the Times they would be having with you?"

Another character is working to "algebraize" storytelling, identifying and separating stock elements of a story so that, presumably, they can be assembled without human help: "stockblocks" include "Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense into Protagonist," "Blurred Faces Lean Over Protagonist, Gradually Sharpening," "Makeover Montage Followed by Gaping Reaction Shots," etc.

It's parody, of course, but Egan doesn't discount the power of stockblocks either. Her last chapter is a sepia-tinted description of a young boy's unlikely game-winning homerun, seemingly assembled of the most stock of stock elements (bases loaded, homerun from underdog, crowd goes wild, proud father claps shoulder). This is an author endlessly capable of experimentation (Egan shocked readers in 2010 with a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation, quaint as it might sound now). But ending on something so straightforwardly conventional so formulaic feels not like a copout but rather like a winking flex, a master pianist infusing unexpected feeling into Chopsticks. It is moving, somehow, both despite and because of its familiarity.

Besides, while chopping stories up into tiny moveable parts sounds like something out of a tech dystopia, folklorists have been doing it for centuries. (In the "Aarne and Thompson Type Index" classification of folk tale elements, the first iteration of which was published in 1910, the Hansel and Gretel formula is "ATU Tale Type 327A"). We tell the same stories again and again; the beauty lies in the details.

It calls to mind something Lincoln, the "senior empiricist and metrics expert" notes, in defense of his attempts to organize the world into comprehensible categories and patterns. Quantifiability, he thinks, "doesn't make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself."

More here:

Jennifer Egan's 'The Candy House' is a follow to ' A Visit from the Goon Squad' - NPR

Muslim-Background Believer Imprisoned for Blasphemy Against Islam

04/08/2022 Washington, D.C. (International Christian Concern) International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that on April 6, an Indonesian Christian YouTuber was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a viral YouTube video that allegedly offended Muslims across Indonesia.

Muhammad Kace, 56, is a former Muslim cleric who converted to Christianity in 2014. After his conversion, he began uploading videos to YouTube criticizing his former faith. He was arrested in Bali last August, following a sermon video in which he allegedly insulted the prophet Muhammad.

On April 6, the judges of Ciamis District Court in West Java province agreed with prosecutors to slap him with a 10-year sentence for his offenses. Thousands of Muslims surrounded the court in support of the harsher prosecution of Kace.

During his detention, Kace was treated in an inhumane way; he was allegedly beaten and tortured by a police official named Napoleon Bonaparte who was detained in the same prison due to a corruption case. Bonaparte forced Kace to eat his excrement. The police named five suspects in the alleged beating and torture of him after his maltreatment was revealed to the public.

According to UCA News, Martin Lucas Simanjuntak, Kaces lawyer, said the sentence was harsh and that his client would appeal the sentence.

In other such cases, sentences have been lighter, he said. We will appeal the verdict, or at the very least the sentence imposed on him.

While it is not unusual for Christians to fall victim to Indonesias draconian blasphemy laws, a Christian-turned-Muslim cleric who was arrested last August for insulting Christianity, Muhammad Yahya Waloni, was sentenced to merely five months in prison in comparison. The inconsistent standard embedded in Indonesias legal system is self-evident.

Andreas Harsono, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch Indonesia, told ICC, The Indonesian government should promptly repeal the blasphemy law. Both Christian preacher Mohammad Kace and Muslim cleric Yahya Waloni need not to stay a single night in prison because of the toxic law.

The right to speak ones mind is essential and must be protected. This sort of treatment and punishment under Indonesian law is a shameful reality, said Timothy Carothers, ICCs Advocacy Manager for Southeast Asia. As long as Indonesia continues to enforce religious harmony through regulation and prosecution, it will continue to achieve the opposite.For interviews, please contact:press@persecution.org.

Since 1995, ICC has served the global persecuted church through a three-pronged approach of advocacy, awareness, and assistance. ICC exists to bandage the wounds of persecuted Christians andtobuild the church in the toughest parts of the world.

See the original post:

Christian YouTuber in Indonesia Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison - International Christian Concern

Originally posted here.By: NewsBTC

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Although trading bonuses cannot be withdrawn immediately, they can be used to initiate trades, pay fees, and cover losses.

Attempting to withdraw trading bonuses straight from your trading accounts will result in the loss of any remaining bonuses. Profits earned from trading the bonus, on the other hand, can be withdrawn.

Each email address is only eligible for one bonus claim. Your bonus will be calculated based on your score.

Please keep in mind that in order to receive your bonus, you must register your Phemex account using the email address you provided.

India, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, and Vietnam users are not eligible to participate in or get bonuses from the event.

KYC verification is required before a user may claim prizes.

Participants may only use one account to participate.

Every account that shares the same IP address or UID will be instantly removed from consideration.

The following activities will immediately disqualify you: Profits via market manipulation, self-dealing, or wash trades.

Only main-accounts are allowed, sub-accounts will not be counted.

These rules are subject to change at Phemexs sole discretion.

For more information on terms and conditions, visit the Phemex Universe Campaign Announcement.

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Win NFTs and Prizes: A Cosmic Guide to Phemex Universe - Geeks World Wide

Could you get by without using the internet for four and a half years? Thats exactly what singer and actress Selena Gomez has done in a bid to improve her mental health and she told Good Morning America that going offline had changed her life completely.

While she helps her team to produce the promotional pictures and videos regularly shared on her Twitter, Instagram and other social media feeds, the 29 year old isnt the one actually uploading the content to her millions of followers. I am happier, I am more present, I connect more with people, she said. It makes me feel normal.

Ms Gomez has spoken extensively about the relationship between her social media usage and her mental wellbeing, recalling feeling like an addict when she became Instagrams most followed user in 2016. At one point Instagram became my whole world, and it was really dangerous, she told InStyle magazine in January. Taking a break from social media was the best decision that Ive ever made for my mental health The unnecessary hate and comparisons went away once I put my phone down.

So, should we ordinary people follow in Ms Gomezs footsteps step away from the internet? Its one thing to ditch social media and Im sure we can all agree that creating and following a more considered, balanced approach to accessing apps and platforms is no bad thing.

Ditching the web at large, however, is a far more nuanced and complicated prospect. The increasing digitisation of our society means that everything from paying a gas bill and taxing your car to plotting a route to a friends house and even making a phone call are at the mercy of your internet connection. Actively opting out of using the internet becomes a matter of privilege.

Ms Gomez multi-millionaire status has allowed her to take the social out of social media, handing over the passwords to her accounts so she can continue to leverage her colossal fame while keeping the trolls at bay. The fact shes still the second most-followed woman on Instagram (behind cosmetics billionnaire Kylie Jenner) suggests its entirely possible to maintain a significant web profile to promote various projects by way of a dedicated team without being exposed to the cruel comments, hate mail and rape or death threats. While other A-listers Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson and Kate Winslet, among others, opt out of social media entirely, Ms Gomez has created a kind of halfway house that meets both her financial and health needs, but relies upon others to properly function.

It goes without saying that this is fundamentally different to how the rest of us without beauty deals and films to publicise use the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, but even the concept of a digital detox requires having a device and connectivity to choose to disconnect from.

The UKs digital divide has worsened over the past two years of Covid restrictions, with poorer families significantly less likely to have working broadband connections in their homes. Around 1.1m households, equating to five per cent of the population, are struggling to afford broadband, according to a recent report from Ofcom. Meanwhile, telecoms giants plans to move all 29m UK homes to a new digital phone system that works over the internet have been sullied by tales of pensioners left without phone lines. Digital exclusion is a major threat to wider societal equality in the UK, so witnessing companies like Facebook championing the metaverse as the next great frontier when schoolchildren are struggling to complete their homework feels particularly grating.

Consequently, its worth bearing in mind that while deleting all social accounts will undoubtedly make some, including Ms Gomez, feel infinitely better when it comes to prioritising their mental health and wellbeing, many other people benefit from the strong sense of community that sharing and entertainment platforms (or wider internet access generally) can simultaneously engender.

Internet access will continue to grow in importance as we edge further towards web 3.0, and greater resources and initiatives are needed both to help those in the UK feeling underprepared and to connect the families without the connectivity they desperately need to learn, work and live. Its crucial that people who feel that social media is having a detrimental effect on their mental health are allowed to switch off and for those living in digital exclusion to be able to switch on in the first place.

Rhiannon Williams is a technology journalist

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Selena Gomez has switched off from the internet. If only we all had that privilege - iNews

Being the second-most populous country in the world, India always had the need for credit. But with the complex lending process and the unwillingness of financial institutions to lend money to low/absent credit scores, people were left with no choice but to borrow from friends or families.

Since there was a lot of white space created, the new-age lending platforms were born to serve the demand of millennials who were mostly salaried and self-employed, between 25-45 years of age. They had many aspirations, and with the pandemic hitting the country, they also started facing many medical and financial emergencies.

The new-age lending platforms simplified and boosted lending in India and provided micro-loans to the vast underserved middle/lower-income segments. They were getting good reviews because they were 100% digital, had a rapid online process, instant disbursal, and reduced ticket values (as low as Rs. 1000).

If managed properly, these small-ticket loans increased the purchasing power of people. Lets say a consumer wants to buy a laptop worth Rs. 50,000, but he only has Rs 40,000 with him now. Now he has two options to settle for a laptop with a lower configuration or buy later whenever he saves the required sum. But with short-term personal loans coming into the picture, he can borrow Rs. 10,000 through a digital lending platform instantly and buy his favourite laptop. All that is needed is selecting the loan amount and tenure, uploading the required documents, and getting the money instantly in his bank account.

So, why were they gaining popularity, and what advantages did they give to customers?

Builds credit history

For new borrowers, it came as a huge relief. Apart from supporting their day-to-day needs, these loans build a credit history, which later helped them become eligible for high-value, long-term loans they may require in the future.

100% Digital

Applying for a loan was never digital before. Instead, a lot of time and energy is wasted on paperwork. With todays technology, new-age lending platforms give loans in an entirely digital format. All you need is a smartphone and internet connectivity.

Quick online process

Remember how people used to plan ahead of time if they wanted to buy something? From the time the loan papers are filed until the time the loan is disbursed, it can take days or even weeks. Because of the paperwork, most of us despise the loan procedure.

But the digital lending platforms only take a few minutes. You just need to download the app and register> upload the documents> choose the loan option and apply, and the funds will be transferred to your account.

Instant Disbursal

With digital lending apps, there is minimal buffer time between you applying for a loan and its disbursal, making borrowing just a tap away. The basic set-up takes a few minutes for registration & uploading the necessary documents for authentication. You can choose from the available options that suit your requirements, apply easily, and receive the funds in your bank account. The instant disbursal feature spiked the demand even higher due to medical emergencies in the Covid times.

Instant repeat loans

The ease of borrowing and repaying money through online platforms certainly saves energy and time. But, the smaller amount will automatically have a smaller repayment tenure that attracts the buyers for re-borrowing. Once you repay the borrowed amount, you can again borrow a smallticket loan instantly and easily since you have already submitted all the required details and documents.

Better management of loans

If we look from the lenders glasses, the digital disbursal has also aided them in better tracking and management of loans. Companies were able to verify prospects through AI and social media mining. They were also able to minimise costs and risks using data analytics and geo-tagging.

Final verdict:

Considering the above-stated points, the new-age lending platforms made it very easy for people seeking loans anytime and anywhere. More and more players are entering the market and trying to grab the pie with differentiated features, speed, user experience, data encryption, and serve customization as per borrower requirements.

Important:One thing to keep in mind while taking out loans through digital lending apps is whether or not RBI-registered NBFCs are processing the loans. This will save you from the trap of shell companies operating in an unregulated manner.

With the use of cash being minimised and masses going cashless with digital payment methods, online lending and borrowing space would be interesting to observe.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Why are small-ticket loans gaining popularity in todays environment? Here are the reasons - Times of India