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Free Will or Predictive Text? Rethinking Choice in the Age of Algorithms

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Mirror Neurons, Mirror Minds , Week 6 “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer “Freedom is not the absence of necessity but the ability to act according to one’s understanding of necessity.” — Spinoza Who’s Driving? You didn’t choose that movie. Netflix did. You didn’t write that sentence. Autocomplete did. And if you’re honest, you didn’t even pick this article , your algorithmic feed just thought it looked like something “you might enjoy.” So… who’s driving? It’s an unsettling question, especially for creatures who pride themselves on choice. We love our autonomy. We put it on T-shirts, we base entire political systems on it, and we defend it furiously when anyone , or anything , tries to take it away. But what if we’re not as free as we think? What if our preferences , the movies, the partners, the beliefs, the snacks , are less about choice and more about conditioning? What if we’r...

The Six Clues of the Fifth Dimension

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Reconciling UAP Physics with Higher-Dimensional Technology The Sky Is Not the Limit What if our skies are not a border, but a membrane? For more than a century, we’ve been looking up for answers. Radar dishes, telescopes, space probes, the whole lot of human ingenuity aimed at the firmament. Yet perhaps, to truly understand the Unidentified Aerial [or Anomalous ] Phenomena (UAPs) that dart, blink, and vanish across our sensors, we should be looking sideways , across the invisible planes of reality that might brush against our own. Let’s start with something concrete. The Pentagon’s so-called “Six Observables.” Luis Elizondo, who led the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), proposed these six measurable features common to UAP encounters: Instantaneous acceleration  — going from zero to supersonic faster than physics allows. Hypersonic velocity  — speeds above Mach 5 with no sonic boom or thermal bloom. Low observability  — radar ghosts...

Why Do We Discriminate? The Neuroscience of Othering

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  Mirror Neurons, Mirror Minds — Week 4 Copyright: Sanjay Basu This is written as a loose continuation of my week-2 article on profiling! “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”  — — Henri Bergson “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”  — — Steve Biko The First Label Before we learn to hate, we learn to label. Long before a child knows what “race” or “class” means, their brain is already sorting. Neuroscientists have shown that a toddler’s amygdala, that little almond of fear and vigilance, lights up differently when shown a familiar face versus a foreign one. Recognition is comfort. Strangeness is alert. It starts that early. By the time language enters the mix, the wiring is already there. Us versus Them. That primal binary becomes the blueprint for everything from schoolyard cliques to genocides. So, the question isn’t just why do we hate? It’s more uncomfortable. Why do we divide in the first place? Why d...

My AI lab in a box {or} how I foresee the AI Desktop Future

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu I am running llama.cpp on NVIDIA DGX Spark The NVIDIA DGX Spark just made desktop AI supercomputing accessible. This compact mini PC delivers 1 petaflop of AI performance with 128GB of unified memory . Enough to run models up to 200 billion parameters locally using llama.cpp. It’s bringing data center capabilities to my desk, and the implications are profound for anyone serious about local AI development. Why does this matter? Because for the first time, developers, researchers, and enterprises can fine-tune 70B parameter models and run inference on 200B parameter models entirely on their desks, without data center dependencies, API costs, or data leaving their infrastructure. The DGX Spark paired with llama.cpp’s optimized inference engine creates a sweet spot. Powerful enough for serious work, accessible enough for individuals, and private enough for sensitive applications. While memory bandwidth at 273 GB/s creates some trade-offs compared to discr...

Lessons History Teaches Those Who Listen

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Mirror Neurons, Mirror Minds — — Week 3 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  — — George Santayana “History is a vast early warning system.”  — — Norman Cousins Tragedy, Farce, and Clickbait History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as retargeted clickbait. That’s Karl Marx’s old line updated for our age of algorithmic déjà vu. A coup in some fragile democracy looks oddly like another one we scrolled past three years ago. The rise of a demagogue feels suspiciously familiar, like a sequel nobody asked for. Even our memes recycle ancient tropes, as if Plato’s cave has been rebranded as a TikTok filter. But what happens if we actually listen to history? Not skim it, not cherry-pick it, not weaponize it for political soundbites, but hear it. Hear its patterns. Hear its pain. Hear the parts we would rather forget. History, after all, doesn’t shout. It whispers. And in those whispers lie both our warnings and our salvation. The Ec...