June 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

[ot] [madness] healing psychosis with ai
by Karl 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

Text follows this introductory line. I believe I have this fully sorted out. Many problems can crop up on the path, and I believe I have a solution to any possible problems. The thought parts are hard to sustain, bring together, and retain, so there's only a bit here and there. Basically, the patient works with an AI as if they were part of a GAN. The AI learns to predict the behavior of the patient, and the patient learns to understand their own behavior. As the AI forms a model of the patient's psychosis, it maps things that trigger it or worsen it. The patient can then make informed decisions on how to act. They could pursue one or more of: - alteration of their brain to prevent the experiences - investigation into how the experiences developed and why they continue, in order to resolve them therapeutically - avoidance of the events that stimulate their experiences They could engage - personal cognitive training to learn to handle things - augmentation to warn them of or prevent the experiences This sounds both exotic and easy, but we have the research to do this today, and I am not aware of it being done. Research can take years to reach the doctor's office as things move through clinical trials. I've seen visualisations of AI models for image-recognition. I've also seen that AI models of human behavior are widespread among politics and sales. I'm sure visualising models of human behavior has already been done. I will probably be trying to work on this. But I expect public research to outpace me due to my issues. My eta would be a couple decades.

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Covid Crazies
by coderman 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

when thinking of usability of security features, i always wonder about diminished mental states - how do you handle authentication when the mind is unstable? (biometrics work, but they cannot be the whole piece. e.g. scanning a dead finger...) --- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-mental.html Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms Most had no history of mental illness and became psychotic weeks after contracting the virus. Cases are expected to remain rare but are being reported worldwide. Almost immediately, Dr. Hisam Goueli could tell that the patient who came to his psychiatric hospital on Long Island this summer was unusual. The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them. “It was like she was experiencing a movie, like ‘Kill Bill,’” Dr. Goueli, a psychiatrist, said. The patient described one of her children being run over by a truck and another decapitated. “It’s a horrifying thing that here’s this well-accomplished woman and she’s like ‘I love my kids, and I don’t know why I feel this way that I want to decapitate them,’” he said. The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children. At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking. - Thanks for reading The Times. [Subscribe to The Times](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=9L9L9) “But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’” Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus. In interviews and scientific articles, doctors described: A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window. A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed. Advertisement [Continue reading the main story](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-mental.htm… A 55-year-old woman in Britain had hallucinations of monkeys and a lion and became convinced a family member had been replaced by an impostor. Beyond individual reports, a British [study of neurological or psychiatric complications](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7316461/) in 153 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.” Another study identified [10 such patients in one hospital in Spain](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178120315092?…. And in Covid-related social media groups, medical professionals discuss seeing patients with similar symptoms in the Midwest, Great Plains and elsewhere. “My guess is any place that is seeing Covid is probably seeing this,” said Dr. Colin Smith at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, who helped treat the North Carolina woman. He and other doctors said their patients were too fragile to be asked whether they wanted to be interviewed for this article, but some, including the [North Carolina woman](https://casereports.bmj.com/content/13/8/e236940), agreed to have their cases described in scientific papers. Medical experts say they expect that such extreme psychiatric dysfunction will affect only a small proportion of patients. But the cases are considered examples of another way the Covid-19 disease process can affect mental health and brain function. In Her Words: Where women rule the headlines. Although the coronavirus was initially thought primarily to cause respiratory distress, there is now ample evidence of many other symptoms, including [neurological](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/health/Covid-patients-ment…, cognitive and psychological effects, that could emerge even in patients who didn’t develop serious lung, heart or circulatory problems. Such symptoms can be just as debilitating to a person’s ability to function and work, and it’s often unclear [how long they will last or how to treat them](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/health/covid-long-term-symptoms.ht…. Experts increasingly believe brain-related effects may be linked to the body’s immune system response to the coronavirus and possibly to vascular problems or surges of inflammation caused by the disease process. “Some of the neurotoxins that are reactions to immune activation can go to the brain, through the blood-brain barrier, and can induce this damage,” said Dr. Vilma Gabbay, a co-director of the Psychiatry Research Institute at Montefiore Einstein in the Bronx. Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses and other tests didn’t find any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated [two patients](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7414775/?fbclid=IwAR… with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who began carrying a knife, disrobing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in her food. Physically, most of these patients didn’t get very sick from Covid-19, reports indicate. The patients that Dr. Goueli treated experienced no respiratory problems, but they did have subtle neurological symptoms like hand tingling, vertigo, headaches or diminished smell. Then, two weeks to several months later, he said, they “develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary to all of the people around them.” Also striking is that most patients have been in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It’s very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age range,” Dr. Goueli said, since such symptoms more typically accompany schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older patients. And some patients — like the physical therapist who took herself to the hospital — understood something was wrong, while usually “people with psychosis don’t have an insight that they’ve lost touch with reality.” Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis needed weeks of hospitalization in which doctors tried different medications before finding one that helped. Dr. Robert Yolken, a neurovirology expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that although people might recover physically from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems, might be unable to shut down or might remain engaged because of “delayed clearance of a small amount of virus.” Persistent immune activation is also a leading explanation for [brain fog](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/health/covid-survivors.html)and memory problems bedeviling many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a schizophrenia expert at Johns Hopkins, said post-Covid cognitive and psychiatric effects might result from “something similar happening in the brain.” It may hinge on which brain region the immune response affects, Dr. Yolken said, adding, “some people have neurological symptoms, some people psychiatric and many people have a combination.” Experts don’t know whether genetic makeup or perhaps an undetected predisposition for psychiatric illness put some people at greater risk. Dr. Brian Kincaid, medical director of psychiatric emergency department services at Duke, said the North Carolina woman once had a skin reaction to another virus, which might suggest her immune system responds zealously to viral infections. Sporadic cases of post-infectious psychosis and mania have occurred with other viruses, including the 1918 flu and the coronaviruses SARS and MERS. “We think that it’s not unique to Covid,” said Dr. Jonathan Alpert, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who co-wrote the report on the Montefiore patients. He said studying these cases might help to increase doctors’ understanding of psychosis. The symptoms have ranged widely, some surprisingly severe for a first psychotic episode, experts said. Dr. Goueli said a 46-year-old pharmacy technician, whose family brought her in after she became fearful that evil spirits had invaded her home, “cried literally for four days” in the hospital. He said the 30-year-old construction worker, brought to the hospital by the police, became “extremely violent,” dismantling a hospital radiator and using its parts and his shoes to try to break out of a window. He also swung a chair at hospital staff. How long the psychosis lasted and patients’ response to treatment has varied. The woman in Britain — whose symptoms included paranoia about the color red and terror that nurses were devils who would harm her and a family member — took about 40 days to recover, according to [a case report](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477483/#:~:text=To%20…. The 49-year-old man treated at Montefiore was discharged after several weeks’ hospitalization, but “he was still struggling two months out” and required readmission, Dr. Gabbay said. The North Carolina woman, who was convinced that cellphones were tracking her and that her partner would steal her pandemic stimulus money, didn’t improve with the first medication, said Dr. Jonathan Komisar at Duke, who said doctors initially thought her symptoms reflected bipolar disorder. “When we began to realize that maybe this isn’t going to resolve immediately,” he said, she was given an antipsychotic, risperidone and discharged in a week. The physical therapist who planned to murder her children had more difficulty. “Every day, she was getting worse,” Dr. Goueli said. “We tried probably eight different medicines,” including antidepressants, antipsychotics and lithium. “She was so ill that we were considering electroconvulsive therapy for her because nothing was working.” About two weeks into her hospitalization, she couldn’t remember what her 2-year-old looked like. Calls with family were heartbreaking because “‘You could hear one in the background saying ‘When is Mom coming home?’” Dr. Goueli said. “That brought her a lot of shame because she was like, ‘I can’t be around my kids and here they are loving me.’” Ultimately, risperidone proved effective and after four weeks, she returned home to her family, “95 percent perfect,” he said. “We don’t know what the natural course of this is,” Dr. Goueli said. “Does this eventually go away? Do people get better? How long does that normally take? And are you then more prone to have other psychiatric issues as a result? There are just so many unanswered questions.”

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Wccftech: Starlink’s 649 Mbps Download Speed Is Eye-Popping & Blisteringly Fast!
by jim bell 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

Wccftech: Starlink’s 649 Mbps Download Speed Is Eye-Popping & Blisteringly Fast!. https://wccftech.com/starlinks-649-mbps-download-speed-is-eye-popping-blist…

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Vietnam's new social media code of conduct
by Douglas Lucas 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

Reuters 18 June 2021 By Phuong Nguyen, James Pearson. Dateline Hanoi/Reuters. === Vietnam introduced national guidelines on social media behaviour on Friday which encourage people to post positive content about the Southeast Asian country and require state employees to report “conflicting information” to their superiors. The code prohibits posts which violate the law and “affect the interests of the state” and applies to state organisations, social media companies, and all their users in Vietnam. “Social media users are encouraged to promote the beauty of Vietnam’s scenery, people and culture, and spread good stories about good people,” reads the code, which was contained in a decision from the information ministry and dated June 17. It was not clear to what extent the decision was legally binding, or how it would be enforced. Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party tolerates little criticism, retains tight control over media and has in recent years presided over an intensified crackdown on dissidents and activists, some of whom are serving lengthy jail terms for posts on Facebook and Google’s YouTube. In November last year, Reuters exclusively reported that Vietnamese authorities had threatened to shut down Facebook if the social media giant did not bow to government pressure to censor more local political content on the platform. Vietnam is a major market for Facebook, which serves about 60 million users in the country and generates revenue of nearly $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the numbers. The new code requires social media providers in Vietnam to “deal with users in accordance with Vietnamese law” when requested by authorities to remove content from their platforms. It encourages social media users to create accounts using their real identities, share information from official sources, and avoid posting content which violates the law, contains bad language, or advertises illegal services. In January, Vietnamese social media users used fake weather reports and football scores as a creative means to discuss Communist Party leadership wrangling after an official ban on speculation ahead of a Party congress. Reporting by Phuong Nguyen and James Pearson; Editing by Ed Davies === Music video, just under 4 minutes ,for R.E.M.'s satirical song "Shiny Happy People": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYOKMUTTDdA

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WIRED: GPS III’s Long Journey Is Picking Up Speed
by jim bell 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

WIRED: GPS III’s Long Journey Is Picking Up Speed. https://www.wired.com/story/gps-iiis-long-journey-is-picking-up-speed

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Cryptocurrency: Price Discovery Alive and Well
by grarpamp 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

https://mises.org/wire/why-wild-swings-crypto-prices-are-not-really-problem Price Discovery Is Alive And Well In Crypto “If the market continues to see wild swings based on Elon Musk tweets, it’s going to be a big setback for this asset class,” Matt Maley, chief market strategist for Miller Tabak + Co. told Bloomberg. “The fact that it sees such wild swings to the tweets from one person takes away the legitimacy of the asset class.” Reminds a bit of a financial planner who told me bitcoin is “manipulated” and followed up with the ultimate smear “unregulated.” Yikes. Then the Chinese government made all sorts of threats concerning the mining and holding of crypto's top brand. A wag on Twitter responded with words to the effect that when the Chinese banned Google in 2010 it didn’t seem to slow down the company. Weston Nakamura in an interview with Real Vision’s Jack Farley made the trenchant point, “This is what markets look like when you don't have global central banks artificially suppressing volatility, intervention of central banks buying every dip, putting a safety net under every single slight tremor or taper tantrum or whatever it may be, this is what happens.” Making money isn’t easy. Whether it be working 9 to 5 or trading markets. The Fed seeks to smooth every bump so everyone will stay calm and carry on, buying stocks. Perhaps a viewer or two of his recent 60 Minutes interview caught Powell’s off-hand comment that the central bank has bailed out money market funds twice in recent months. Money market funds? Most people believe that is cash. There was no mention of the Plunge Protection Team or other secret committees to ensure the safety and soundness of securities markets. Just keep plugging your savings into those 401(k)s, folks, and let the experts handle it. Cyrptoland is a little different. “This is a 70 vol asset, 80 vol, or whatever it is. What that means is that—forget what the volatility is, this is what freely trading markets look like. We haven't seen what freely traded markets look like for, I don't know, a decade or so,” Nakamura told Farley. “There's no Chairman Powell that needs to come out and announce something for you to put your capital to work. Free markets will do that. That was on display today. 70 vol assets don't exist except for here and this is what 70 vol assets behaves like. If there is a value proposition behind it, you will see investors take advantage of it.” Farley, somewhat of a financial history buff, chimed in, “Weston, who would say hey, we had this Wild West before the Federal Reserve, what we had was banking panics, we had deflation, we had banks issuing their own currency. One thinks of this whole, Dave Portnoy launching Safemoon, someone launching CumRocket, someone else launching—all these coins new every day, perhaps it would remind you of the Wild West of banking before the Federal Reserve.” That’s right, there used to be gold in them there banks. Unfortunately, not enough to cover all the paper notes these banks would issue. However, there wasn’t runaway asset inflation either. Having all of these different bank notes floating around might have been confusing. However, the market created note clearinghouses, what Murray Rothbard describes in A History of Money and Banking in the United States before the Twentieth Century as “A Free-Market ‘Central Bank.’” The Suffolk Bank and the Bank of New York, provided, as Rothbard wrote describing the former, “an island of monetary stability in an America contending with monetary chaos.” Professor David Howden writes in his chapter “A Pre-history of the Federal Reserve” (included in The Fed at One Hundred), of the New York clearinghouse created in 1853 “as a solution to a complex settlement process among New York City Banks.” He cites monetary scholar Richard Timberlake, who saw the Federal Reserve as no more than “an evolutionary development of the clearinghouse associations.” Today’s not-so-free-market central bank has two stated mandates, price stability and full employment, as well as a third that Mr. Nakamura calls out, “where asset prices can never go down for a certain cohort of investors.” If there is such a mandate, Nakamura says, just say so and then we’ll know “there really is no real market anymore when you have an unlimited non-economic actor in the market distorting prices, and furthermore, that other investors perceive them to be there, whether or not they're there. That is not a functioning market at all.” Meanwhile, when crypto collectively hit the ditch, “[w]hat you saw today was functioning markets, even not functioning platforms, but functioning markets,” Nakamura said. He explains, “Bitcoin is not a US asset, just like oil is not a US asset, just like gold is not a US asset. Now, those are denominated in USD.” Sure, Americans think in US dollars, but “it's BTC/fiat, and it's not an American asset. People need to get that in their head. If you actually look at BTC/JPY (Japanese yen), the levels make a hell of a lot more sense.” Investors are simply looking for ways to escape the US dollar and “What this crypto space does is it allows for 1 trillion or 2 trillion of that excess froth to be diverted away from stocks and from real estate and all that and to go into this very benign asset,” Nakamura told Farley. There will be a day when the Fed, the Treasury and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) will stick their long regulatory snouts into crypto. It may not mean the digital party is over, but the markets will lose the price discovery elasticity that currently works so well. However crypto adoption could nullify such intrusion attempts...

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SciTechDaily: Impenetrable Encryption for Data Communication: Researchers Take Quantum Key Distribution Out of the Lab
by jim bell 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

SciTechDaily: Impenetrable Encryption for Data Communication: Researchers Take Quantum Key Distribution Out of the Lab. https://scitechdaily.com/impenetrable-encryption-for-data-communication-res…

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[ot][wrong][joke][spam] Classified Research
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

Learning is classified research. We will have to close down the schools to protect the security of the nation.

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[wrong][spam] Cracking PGP
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

PGP is a puzzle like any other. Let's break it open and destroy everyone's encryption! To perform this task, I will be using an i386 from 1989. The code will be written in qbasic and executed in ms-dos.

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[ot][wrong][spam] Classified Research
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

The English alphabet is classified research. By reading and writing things on digital devices, or allowing other people to do so, you are endangering the security of the nation.

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