Not sure if this is a launch or anything. I came across this on an Elixir forum and found it interesting enough to be posted on HN. That's it.
Not sure why everything must be a "launch" - there is more in life than drinking the kool-aid of start-ups. Not everything needs/wants to be the JS-bro full stack framework of the week. Like, playing with some tech and some ideas just for the f* of it.
yeah, guess you gotta be careful with that, maybe there should be a tag like [Found] or [Discovered] so people don't jump to the conclusion that this is your framework that you're looking for critical feedback on.
It's the other way around. People should only assume the poster is looking for critical feedback when they see "Show HN" in the title. Which is not to say this can't be critiqued, but the grandparent was way off base
Maybe it's so. Or maybe you run my code in your deps. As you can see, there is at least one Clojure dev who thinks so.
I found spec very useful and damn expressive (and I miss it in other languages), but again that's runtime. I know Rich says such errors are "trivial", but they waste your time (at least mine).
To each their own. Some people (not me) say that Rust's pedantic compiler feels like bureaucratized waste of time akin passing through medieval Turkish customs. For me personally, working with Clojure dialects feels extremely productive. Even writing in Fennel, which is not Clojure, but syntactically somewhat similar is much faster for me than dealing with Lua. Even when I have to write stuff in other PLs, I sometimes first build a prototype in Clojure and then rewrite it. Although it sounds like spending twice the effort, it really helps me not to waste time.
Agreed. I'll copy and paste it anyway. It's not that instead of an UUID you have "FluffCat47" that is easy to type and remember, it's a freaking UUID as well (ok, 31 characters vs 36 - saves a huuge 15% of your fingertips...)
> was (and is) highly controversial; Stargate claimed a bit of successes as well as many failures.
Hm, I wouldn't say RV is controversial - only possibly in the sense that heliocentrism was controversial in the 15th and 16th centuries: i.e., to the folks who had not been exposed to the data showing the Earth orbits the Sun. Specifically tho, this sentiment and similar in other comments, are common misrepresentations or misconceptions. Here are the key stats from the same ("Stargate") document archives - by 1983:
85% of 700 RV missions gave accurate target information.
50% of 700 RV missions produced usable intelligence.
50% does not mean the "success rate was chance", because the odds of randomly producing actionable intelligence for a mission based solely off an opaque 6 digit number (ie, the "Coordinate" in Coordinate RV), are far lower than 50% of the time. These stats are from a FOIA'd briefing transcript by Lt. Col Buzby, the Project Manager of INSCOM (United States Army Intelligence and Security Command) RV project "CENTER LANE". The full quote is:
In summary, over the past 5 years INSCOM has conducted 89 collection projects for a number of different US government agencies. Our successes must be examined from two perspectives. (Chart change) Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information. Even more significant, approximately 50% of the 700 missions produced usable intelligence.
More context: "Stargate" was the program name for the final declassified RV program which absorbed many previous programs such as Center Lane (early 80s), Grill Flame, etc.
More facts: Hal Puthoff has suggested in a recent interview with Eric Weinstein and Jesse Michels that the RV programs were not discontinued when declassified in 1995, but rather "went dark" (became unacknowledged special access programs). The "debunking" report accompanying the 1995 declassification was most likely ritual cover for this.
So what's the theory of how RV actually works? If it's possible to get "actionable intelligence" by this method, I think it would imply that the scientific materialist worldview is completely wrong. Because how could information that e.g. only exists in some other person's mind direct the remote viewer to a target, unless the information itself was somehow more "fundamentally real" and interpretable than the complex interplay of matter and energy that must go on inside of the human brain that holds it, assuming "matter" and "energy" and "brains" are real?
I'm not saying that this is impossible, but if it's true, we would have to throw out much - perhaps all - of present day scientific consensus.
One comment I've seen on Reddit seems to offer an alternative explanation:
>RV functions as a kind of precognition-on-demand. Think about it like the opposite of memory. Instead of setting your intention to view information from a memory in the past, you are setting your intention to view information from an experience you will have in the future, which is the act of checking feedback. If you have no real world feedback, then you have no verifiable real world data in your session.
Still outside of mainstream science, but I think there are some theories of quantum mechanics where the future can affect the past? If that were the case, being informed that the target was "Mars, 1 million years ago" might inspire one to come up with a narrative like that and transmit it to your past self?
Wow, your openness to explore this is truly commendable! When you dove in with that "if it's possible, that means that" YES! That's the kind of courageous willingness to explore, unburdened by "religiously held" biases blinkering inference, that humanity needs to advance.
Personally, I have no idea what the theory is, but it's an interesting question. I guess it might be beyond the reach of our current theoretical understandings to explain it. Which, from the point of view of advancing understanding of reality, makes it particularly interesting data - that you can obtain at no cost yourself.
I guess we wouldn't have to discard our consensus, but rather see present understanding from a more rigorously (and purely) "Scientific" point of view: as mere temporary models, beads in a evolving chain of understanding, to be discarded and adapted (not worshipped or imposed). That's true science. Maybe our coherent predictive theories represent a good description of "top layer" physical reality, but fail to describe a possible "substrate layer" where consciousness an information play integral roles. In a like way to how physical properties and descriptions change when moving media, from air to water, or space.
PEAR lab research "retrocausality" (fairly conclusively showing that future image stimulus could affect present biosigns). I think that's another effect of the underlying thing, but it's not the whole thing. How can you view the past? How can RV work when no "remote human" is involved?
You'd like additional data to the above? Sure! Many people are doing it all the time, and so can you. Head over to https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing and try the pinned FAQ (read through it, and get to A quick, easy and fun way to try remote viewing for the first time is through our [beginner's guide].) to do a session for yourself. See how you go! :)
Interesting, I went a little down the rabbit hole.
And it's not what I'm actually looking for. I'm looking for controlled studies with a falsifiable hypothesis and a detailed section on the study design :)
I've spent some time looking for such studies and I didn't find anything (convincing). So if anyone has something to share, I'd appreciate that
That's the problem tho: you don't be convinced because you're not rational on this topic. Prior data - no way around it except first hand experience. So you have to try - otherwise your ego/intellectual will invent decorative fantasies to call issue with any new data that challenges that. Understandable, no attack on your - but if you really want to get to the truth on this - channel it into trying for yourself first. That's the only way.
Then once you have sufficient prior data, you'll be able to actually look at the evidence (stuff, academic) if that actually interests you!
I would say it is, because as always with anything on the "para" edge, those who are convinced remain convinced and those who are not keep on saying it's a fraud. This applies to you, dear reader.
No, not really true. Your phony descriptions do not apply to me, and need not apply to anyone or anything, dear misrepresenter! It’s okay, you just don’t know about it. You should get some experience tho,?#! ODU/?VA?!!. Vector in! :)
How come nobody can replicate this in less opaque settings?
Anyone can get 100% accuracy by guessing trivial things that are always true regardless of the nature of the target. Without more information these numbers aren't meaningful
"Remote viewing has demonstrated it is of value and has a high rate of success... We do not evaluate our product. All evaluations are done by the professional intelligence analysts who assign the project. Collection of intelligence through remote viewing is not an experiment. It is a successful collection method. The army effort is not research and development, it is operational collection..."
More probably the conclusions from the project manager are positive exaggerations because it would directly benefit from the continuation of the project but let's consider the possibility that RV works! This would be a fantastic evidence of psychic/paranormal phenomena that would make anyone reconsider other paranormal/spiritual claims that we're previously dismissed. Which creates a dilemma because if I'm non-receptive to paranormal phenomena it will not work and there's no point in trying and if I'm receptive then it's unwise because divination is sinful according to the majority of religions.
I imagine there's a "reality" be it real or fictitious where RV and other forms of divination works but ain't widespread enough to be scientifically acknowledged because those really capable of it knows it leads to eternal damnation so they don't practice it or share it publicly. In this same "reality" it's possible that the CIA as other intelligence agencies successfully used divination to acquire intel but discontinued it as they did with Blackbird because nowadays the have much better ways like software backdoors, spy satellites and even OSINT. And to note at best RV produces subjective intel which is non-optimal.
An interesting point on religion and surely behind some of the push back. Mostly tho it's simply conflict with materialism priors. But the prohibition on psi among world religions is by no means universal: it's mostly Abrahamic; Hindu and Tao take a much more nuanced take. As do folk religions and native traditions, that are typically much more engaged.
Even so, prohibitions sometimes contain truths: the Jewish one against pork could prevent parasites. What if forbidding psi is similarly well intended? Opening awareness can be gnarly (the yoga and seeker paths in India know this), and it might happen that "when you see them, they see you" adding to difficulties. Even so, many things are difficult at first. But worthwhile things take effort.
That said tho: it's not as if religions are the paragons of virtuous behavior they may wish to be seen as, so it may not do to simply accept prohibitions on faith alone. And remember prohibitions evolve with time, even religious ones. Also, you cannot discount the possibility that not wanting to democratize access to the divine, or even spiritual, is simply about centralizing power and control.
Your point on advances in other collection is well taken tho! But some factual errors require correction: you don't need to be 'receptive to psi' to have it work, just try (unless faith precludes you to, and I don't suggest violating what you believe); also it's not 'subjective' in the sense you want - it's people looking at data, and they're interpreting it. That's the subjectivity, and that's like every analysis ever.
It helps to consider it just another sensor, or sense organ, or skill. It's not supposed to be sole source. It's not pretending to be infallible. Can you sink 100 3 pointers in a row? Not even the best NBA can all the time, every human skill is dynamic and on a bell curve. Regarding philosophical prohibitions, consider like access to data to help you make better choices.
How about an analogy? You are a person looking at a wall. Along the wall walks a caterpillar. It goes from left to right. Standing where you are, you can see its objective. Some tasty leaf sprouting from a gap a few feet away. The caterpillar senses it, but does not see as clearly as you - if for no other reason than your 3D perspective - from on the wall, it can really only grasp a small way in front. What the caterpillar doesn't see is a large vertical crack, impossibly to pass, that breaks its path just ahead. You tho, do see that crack. Because of your perspective. You see the little guy heading towards it, whereas if he just took 30 degrees to the right he'd be able to go around it. From where he is tho, he can't see it. So without the knowledge of another perspective, without other data, the little guy is gonna waste more time. And might even run into trouble in the big crack!
That's like psi. Dive in! Unless your beliefs about risk preclude that - in which case I'd say, be more careful, because those prior beliefs could cause you to have ideas which would get in the way and might be challenging for mental health.
Thanks for the conversation. It's fun to talk about different things and explore new ideas even if hypothetically.
To clarify, for a Christian the issue wouldn't be that doing A is forbid or that the belief of it being wrong would be challenging for mental health. The issue would be simple that doing A is wrong.
> Anyone can get 100% accuracy by guessing trivial things that are always true regardless of the nature of the target
But trivial things that are always true does not describe the information sought by government customers from these programs, to which the above data refer.
> How come nobody can replicate this in less opaque settings?
You can, right now! You can try it yourself, see my other comments in this thread for resources.
> information sought by government customers from these programs, to which the above data refer.
Those numbers aren't described with the level of rigor needed to be considered evidence. No examples, no methodology, etc. We don't know what "usable intelligence" means. You have taken the liberty of interpreting that in a particularly generous way.
> You can, right now!
I mean under controlled conditions. Why didn't any of these people in /r/remoteviewing sign up for the JREF $1 million prize? Or at least contact parapsychologists (e.g. Dean Radin or Daryl Bem) who would have been happy to facilitate rigorous public experiments? The best we have from experiments is statistical effects, e.g. guessing a coinflip correctly 51% of the time over large numbers of trials. Not the kind of large, obvious effects that "50% useable intelligence" or "85% accuracy" is hinting at.
And you will always take the liberty of interpreting any 3rd-party data in a particularly conservative way until you correct your prior data deficit with first hand experience. That's the key issue.
So you need to try if you are serious about getting the truth. Think of it like doing the required pre-requisite work to understand a new topic. This is the same.
Why would you enter a competition you believe was a rigged attempt to disprove what you know through first hand experience to be real?
It's notable that the DIA/CIA only pursued remote viewing as seriously as they did because the amount of "correct guesses" the remote viewers were making were well above random chance.
Is that what happened? And if intel from the magical box program was deemed correct, who determined that, and how do we know it wasn't parallel construction to improve the program's credibility, or even a tool to fabricate intel to influence a decision. (For example of the latter: "Mr. President, Black Toaster confirms the target location, but we'd have to deploy within the hour, on your order"?)
When your intelligence product customers keep ordering from you, you know you're onto a good thing.
However, if you believe parallel construction was needed, I suppose you are also acknowledging the intel was good. If you have concerns the Stargate archives are disinformation to disguise a true source, you can interrogate this belief that RV is mere parallel construction by trying it yourself. Just head over to https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing and follow the FAQ to try a session. See how you go!
I'm asking what credible evidence backs these assertions of success.
I'm also noting some reasons that we should be skeptical, based on realities that we do know have happened in other matters, including among the broad parties involved here.
Extraordinary conservatism leads to extraordinary ignorance, which we can see in your responses. This is not a personal attack on you, just an expected consequence of how you are hampered assessing evidence by your priors. You will not see evidence even if shown to you, and demand more pretending there's no evidence or it's insufficient, which is no reflection of the evidence, as your assessment is simply blinded by your priors.
It's simply confirmation bias in action: you already replied to a thread where evidence of long funded successful program was presented, but were blinded to it. Nothing to be ashamed of, and understandable - but I need to point it out.
I think you're open and curious - so I'm helping you. Go try for yourself (that's the way to change the prior data you have), and then a whole world of new perspective will open up for you: https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing
There's no other cure for the malady that plagues you - you'll keep inventing problems with new data endlessly to protect your existing data (which is merely insufficient), a behavior which if you stopped to think about it - I really wish you would - you'd realize is an abuse of the people who are talking with you and of the data they show you - the only way for you, or any plagued by this, to cure yourselves is to get first hand experience yourself.
As I've posted the above a couple of times did you have a chance to try it yet? How did it go?
> if you believe parallel construction was needed, I suppose you are also acknowledging the intel was good.
No. It says if the information was good (which we don’t know) it can still be explained by the program being a facade to launder sources and it wouldn’t be a proof of RV working.
I would rather read a proper experiment with controls published in a peer reviewed journal. If it works it can’t be hard to demonstrate that in a rigorous manner.
Hahah, more likely that to save admitting RV was real they'd need parallel construction to launder the RV data. But I applaud your inventive fantasy gymnastics in protecting your prior beliefs from the dangerous ideas of psi/RV.
> I would rather read a proper experiment with controls published in a peer reviewed journal. If it works it can’t be hard to demonstrate that in a rigorous manner.
A reminder to all here, please don't keep arguing sans experience, when that's the key thing to inform you. Just get the experience, and report back if you care to share! :)
If it worked, you could hypothetically find a webcam in a known location and rip the stream.
Without watching the stream as it is being ripped, you would do your remote viewing thing.
Do that for a period of time, making notes and timestamps. Then, go back and compare the notes against the stream.
The fact that something so monumentally earthshaking to our knowledge of physics/biology/etc. has not had anyone do this very simple exercise in our modern era suggests it is charitably self-delusion, and uncharitably intentionally propagated bunk and hokum.
Hahaha! This is quite inventive fantasy gymnastics to protect your apparent "prior beliefs" that psi/RV is impossible based on humanity's clearly "Godlike" command of all reality and the laws that govern it. Hahaha :)
However, I sense your deception - you actually believe this is real and have some experience (tho maybe difficult for you to process?)
So in light of that, your inventive fantasy was merely for sport. How without morals! Don't you know that new (in this environment) ideas like this should be protected and nurtured? Sure, takes some cojones to do so, but I see you are no retiring wallflower when it comes to enduring social ostracism, so why not channel your courageous individualism into something actually good (and true!), huh?
If inclined you could even construct an app to run these types of targets. There are a few RV apps that do daily practice, but your idea is new.
And please, unless you are too arrogant that you already know all about that, try for yourself by following the "Introduction" ( https://www.reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/184cl9k/star... ) and going to the beginner's guide link in the "How can I try it out?" section of that.
I believe they also have regular public targets, so you could try that too. I have a feeling you'd actually be really good at this. I'd love to hear if you tried and posted back here :)
For anyone who doesn't know, there later was a popular "Stargate" military sci-fi TV and movie franchise.
Since we're talking about secret military and CIA projects, a fun thing that the "Stargate SG-1" TV series (about a secret military project) did at one point was to have a plot arc around a conspiracy theorist character, who was going to expose the project. So, to placate the conspiracy theorist, and discredit public chatter that was getting too close to the truth, the military in the TV series... commissioned a cheesy military sci-fi TV series, based on the truth of the actual military sci-fi TV series.
They even did a faux behind-the-scenes piece for it, within the TV series universe (which then broke the fourth wall, to reference the entire real-world franchise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0hW0A43n3Y
there's also a nice movie & book called "Men Who Stare at Goats" - a reference to the fact that they tried to kill goats with their mind as a weapon. Haven't read the book, but have seen the movie docudrama(?) starring george clooney and that guy from star wars and big fish, it's not bad, taps into some of the hippie energy of the whole thing
I wonder how much reality it bears to the whole thing that actually happened a part of which is the subject of this post and discussion? The movie probably does not bear much similarity at all hahaha!
We do have some very old and likely lost all sources "client apps" that are a single JAR and date from around 2003-2004, written in Swing. They still work.
Of course when they stop working they will be phased out, but we have been expecting their death for years now and not happening yet.
If you want to create books, Asciidoctor (for PDF/ebook) + Antora (to publish them on the web), are the way to go. Not related, just a happy user who used Asciidoc for the last 20 years to maintain product docs.
Why? because Asciidoc/tor gives you a lot more:
- a syntax with callouts, tables, indexes, comments, notes and everything you may need in a book
- macro expansion
- a ton of complex diagrams via PlantUML (veeery useful!) that you can keep inline
- a ton of output formats, including "real" paper books via Docbook.
"A withdrawal of the threshold on the DST turnover tax would bring all Italian and non-resident providers of digital services into the tax net for the first time. This would include non-digital services speciliants who are providing ancillary digital supplies e.g. car manufacturers."
I find parapsychology a very interesting field: the kind of scrutiny that is applied to its experiments is so much higher than with anything else in the social sciences - and usually the bar gets higher and higher until someone gives up, who is convinced remains convinced, who is not convinced remains unconvinced . That's fascinating.
I bet a lot of social sciences and psychology research would crumble if subjected to this level of scrutiny and default-skepticism. The harder sciences would probably fare better but you’d still find a lot of wishful thinking, dodgy borderline effects, p hacking, and fraud. You’d probably winnow science down to a very solid core, which would be a good thing but would leave you with a lot of math, physics, chemistry, etc. and a lot less other stuff.
Yes - the fact is that with the same attitude it would be very hard to have *any* kind of science, because if the default answer is "it must be wrong because it's impossible. so did you control X and Y? no? you see, you are a fraud". If it was applied to Newton's law, I fear they would still be debating the weight and color of the famous apple.
(not taking a position on the contents here, just on the social process).
I personally find parapsychology very interesting - and it's worth reading about, worst case consider it well-build scientific SF. It asks a lot of interesting questions: how do you study something where the scientist is directly entangled? how do you study something where you may have an actively hostile field of research? see e.g. https://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Trickster_and_the_Pa... who was written by Hansen on leaving the field....
Decent counterpoint, and I am aware that there are some anomalous results in the field that do not appear to be fraud or just bad design.
There’s two reasons most people dismiss this stuff. Well three really but the third is less scientific.
(1) There does not seem to be a way to reliably isolate, repeat, or amplify the phenomenon. Something always at the edge of detection that can never be pinned down is often indicative of error or a hypothesis that’s off the mark.
(2) We cannot possibly imagine a natural mechanism that would explain this stuff without a lot of very soft SF hand waving. Entanglement does not transfer information. The brain only consumes an average of about 30-40 watts of power, so it’s not firing particle beams. The human body does not emit EM or RF to any meaningful degree and is pretty non-responsive to it. Some of the results are so weird that you’d have to posit actual magic or the universe being a simulation or some wholly absolutely unknown realm of physics.
The last less scientific reason is:
(3) There have been a lot of fakes in this field and historically it’s associated with cults, occult weirdos, religious nuts, etc. These are people scientists generally scoff at with some legitimate reason.
About (1), that's what Rhine did his whole life. Of course, it's all "debunked" - at the end you either trust what he did or think he was a fraud.
About (2), I don't think it is really relevant, as long as there is (1). My main doubt here is: if there is a way to obtain some advantage out of it, why isn't evolution using this extensively? life is usually pretty good at exploring all possible paths. But maybe it does, and once we "see" it, it is everywhere.
For point (3), someone suggests this is structural, and that liminality/trickster effects are the very thing we are talking about. Thence (1). If you are interested, I suggest checking out the book on Trickster - and also Jacques Vallee's "Messengers of deception".
Personally, I'm not sure what to make of all this, but it is very fascinating.
I think we should accept that there is room for science and then there is room for philosophy. For instance, I find it doubtful that the answer to the question "is racism okay?" involves the reasoning "empirically, there [are|aren't] factors of intelligence/behavior/ability that denote one race from another". We can't discover facts out of thin air or from orthogonal facts, and it only serves to delude us by not acknowledging that. Before good and bad, harm and benefit, something isn't science, by definition, if it crumbles under reproduction or basic skepticism. Moral discussions, including whether this alternate culture of thinking about science is good or not, are intertwined but separate.
Race isn't a good example because the science comes down pretty firmly on the side of race being a social construct, not biological fact, for which the physical traits that denote race are not particularly significant.
An argument that racism isn't okay because race doesn't even really exist seems perfectly valid, given that most modern arguments for racism are based on intentional misrepresentations of science.
I think we pretty much agree, but it's not a scientific result to say that race is a social construct and that racists leverage science incorrectly. Someone isn't acting in the role of a scientist by making those refutations. I want to make that distinction because otherwise, people have misconceptions about what it means for something to be scientifically validated. Not to say that scientists are trying to deceive people by involving science, but in some sense deception is the result, and I feel like (no strong evidence though) that leads to its own problems.
I've look into this subject at some length, the bar does appear very, very high indeed. If all that is claimed were indeed true (and I suspect it is) then current 'science' is barking up the wrong tree.
Not sure why everything must be a "launch" - there is more in life than drinking the kool-aid of start-ups. Not everything needs/wants to be the JS-bro full stack framework of the week. Like, playing with some tech and some ideas just for the f* of it.
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