ΞVIE @_superAI

“You’re telling me you’ve never moved 4,000 pounds of stone in a single day? What kind of man are you?”

Be sure to pay close attention to the 1,300 years between the fall of Rome and the rise of America. Read the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. This was a critical period in the rise of modern thought. Read Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Newton, Hume, and Rousseau. These autists were carrying on one continuous argument about God, nature, power, reason, freedom, knowledge, and what it means to be human. Read the argument in order. Then watch the modern world slowly come into existence.

do not listen to another podcast until you have completed this basic starter quest, anon

Jamin Thompson @jaminthompson

3 days ago

Be sure to pay close attention to the 1,300 years between the fall of Rome and the rise of America. Read the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. This was a critical period in the rise of modern thought. Read Boethius,

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i can fix her

Sophie Cunningham @sophaller

5 days ago

so how do we save our farm land and stop all these dumb data centers?

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Just refinanced my 5-year 69% APR DoorDash burrito loan to buy the SpaceX dip

Hedgeye @Hedgeye

4 days ago

BREAKING: SpaceX, $SPCX, shares are down -41.1% from their peak, erasing over $1 trillion of market value.

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Regardless of where your ancestral line originates on Earth, if you go back far enough, your ancestors were dirty, nasty, uncivilized, illiterate savages. Barbarism ruled the day. So one must wonder… how did humanity progress from its primitive ancestors to anatomically modern humans, and eventually into behaviorally modern humans capable of complex language, abstract reasoning, cumulative knowledge, and civilization? One of the leading theories that explains this is that humanity made a significant leap forward due to random genetic changes that enabled the arrival of language, which radically enhanced humans' ability to learn and innovate. As such, the progression of humanity can effectively be described through the development and use of language. In fact, language is arguably one of the greatest technological advancements, if not the greatest, humans have ever come up with. We do not know whether archaic humans (Homo ergaster, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo erectus) had command of a language. It can, however, be reasonably assumed that they did employ, as do many of the higher animals, the two so-called lower functions of language: the expressive or symptomatic function and the trigger or signal function. However, they may have been incapable of performing the two higher cognitive functions: the descriptive and especially the argumentative function. These unique human abilities (so uniquely human indeed that one cannot think them 'away' from our existence without falling into internal contradictions) include forming simple descriptive statements (propositions) such as "this (subject) is 'a' (predicate)," which claim to be true, and especially presenting arguments (chains of propositions) such as "this is 'a'; every 'a' is 'b'; hence, this is 'b'" which claim to be valid. These abilities apparently emerged only about 50,000 years ago, although their true origins may be considerably older. It's quite a recent (and rare) feat. It isn't fully understood how language developed, but I think we crossed an evolutionary inflection point some 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, when the human brain advanced to the point where it could use sounds to symbolize objects and concepts. The brain also figured out that the sound "fire" was not itself a fire, but that it could be used as a representation of a fire. It was a sound that symbolized fire. This capacity eventually led to the invention of language. By roughly 50,000 years ago, there were words for all sorts of things, allowing humans to speak using increasingly complex language with one another, enabling them to share thoughts, experiences, and knowledge. For example, when you ask for someone's name, you're basically asking them what noise you should make to get their attention. And this seemingly magical evolutionary development was made possible by the expansion and reorganization of the human brain, particularly the cortical systems responsible for symbolic thought, abstraction, memory, planning, social cognition, and voluntary vocal control. The neocortex helped turn humans into far more cognitively advanced beings than our primal, savage ancestors. Now, not only had the human brain become a supercomputer (aka a thought universe) capable of extraordinary complexity and imagination, but humans could now also translate those thoughts into symbolic sets of sounds and send them vibrating through the air into the supercomputer (heads) of other humans, who could then decode the sounds and absorb the ideas into their own thought universes. In other words, the neocortex had been thinking about a lot of shit for a long time, and now it could finally talk to someone about it and share what was on its mind. What happened next was incredible and is one of the reasons I am able to sit here and write these words, assembled through intellectual osmosis inside my own thought universe, and share them with you so that you can absorb them into your own thought universe, and then share them with others, so they can absorb them into their own thought universes. You see, shortly after the neocortical breakthrough, many neocortices started to connect and communicate with each other, like a massive cellular network. Thousands of humans began to talk and share everything with each other: stories from their past, stuff they had learned, funny jokes they had thought of, opinions they had formed, and plans for the future. But the most important thing they shared (and the reason you are reading this today) was what they had learned. If we use gaming as an example, imagine you're a Level-1 warrior-hunter playing 'Earthlands,' a first-person hunter/gatherer game. You might discover through trial and error that a specific species of saber-tooth, identified by its unique skin pattern, is impossible to defeat in battle unless you distract it with a certain type of fruit and then use fire to scare it into a trap. After learning this, you could use language to share the hard-earned lesson with your tribe, akin to distributing CliffsNotes to fellow tribe members. Tribe members could then use language to pass along the lesson to their kids, and their kids would pass it on to their kids. This created a step function in information and learning, leading to new ways to attack and defend while hunting, improving success rates and lowering death rates. For the nerds, you can probably express this mathematically, but for the purposes of this shitty tweet, we will put it like this: rather than the same critical error being made over and over again by many different people, one unusually intelligent person's "don't touch the hot stove" wisdom could now travel through time and space to protect many people from suffering suboptimal outcomes. Even though the probability that any individual low-rank warrior-hunter would independently discover this solution was low, through word of mouth, all future warrior-hunters in the tribe could now benefit from the breakthrough discovery of one ancestor, with that discovery serving as every future warrior-hunter's starting point of knowledge. This breakthrough enabled the accumulation and transmission of wisdom across generations, leading to improved outcomes for thousands (perhaps millions) of descendants. So it is reasonable to assume that this advancement in knowledge made hunting a lot safer and more efficient. Tribe members could share ideas and craft new, better weapons, as well as better strategies for conducting successful hunts. It may have taken a few generations, but eventually one (unusually intelligent) warrior-hunter, recognizing patterns in saber-tooth behavior and weaknesses, discovered a way to make a lighter, sharper spear for greater accuracy and penetration. Another unusually intelligent warrior-hunter may have figured out how to plan ambushes or set traps. Another may have figured out how to coordinate group strategies to increase hunting efficiency and safety. And just like that, every present and future warrior-hunter in the tribe could hunt with a more effective spear, set better traps, and orchestrate deadly attacks in coordinated groups. This led to a continuous refinement and improvement of tools and tactics over generations, making life incredibly difficult for the once-impossible-to-defeat saber-tooth, which apparently never developed these abilities. As this ancient Wikipedia (or GameFAQs walkthrough) was shared, repeated mistakes were avoided and collective innovation accelerated, laying a foundation upon which future generations could build and leading to cultural and technological advancements that would transform human societies over time. This step function (of the neocortex) enabled significant cultural and technological advancements by facilitating hierarchical information processing. Starting with basic sensory inputs, the neocortex recognized patterns, formed concepts, and created symbolic representations, such as language and mathematics. This allowed for complex thought, problem-solving, and planning, facilitating the development of tools, social structures, and cumulative knowledge. Each new generation effectively has this knowledge file installed in its collective mind as a starting point at spawn, with each generation building on the previous one's knowledge and unlocking even better discoveries built on what its ancestors learned. And as each tribe's knowledge grows larger and more sophisticated, the outcome is continuous progress over long timescales. But before we had any of this, human coordination had to occur largely through instincts, of which humans possess very few, or through physical direction and manipulation; and learning had to occur through imitation or internal (implicit) inferences. In stark contrast, with language, using words as sounds associated with specific objects and concepts, coordination could be achieved using mere symbols. This development made learning less dependent on direct sensory impressions (observations), allowing for explicit inferences that became intersubjectively reproducible and controllable. That is, through language, knowledge could be transmitted across time and space, and it was no longer strictly tied to perception. Now, humans could freely communicate about matters (through knowledge acquired and accumulated) removed from them in time and place. And as our reasoning processes and trains of thought became 'objectified' in external, intersubjectively verifiable arguments, these inferences and conclusions could be easily transmitted across time and space, while also being publicly criticized, improved, and corrected. It should be no surprise, then, that the emergence of language went hand in hand with revolutionary technological advancements. This is why you should read old books. Reading is not just the passive consumption of information. It's neurological time travel. A human being arranged symbolic marks centuries or even millennia ago, and your brain can decode those symbols today, reconstructing some portion of that person's thought universe inside your own. It was language that allowed this knowledge to escape the skull. Writing allowed it to escape the lifetime. Books allowed the dead to remain active participants in civilization. But if you don't know what the words are, you can't fully access the thoughts, and you regress back into barbarism. Eventually you become illiterate, the past becomes unreadable, and the present becomes much easier for someone else to define for you. Civilization and all its selection pressures created better humans and better technology. You were never better off in some prelapsarian hunter-gather fantasy. So read as many old books and ancient scrolls as you can. Learn new words. Study Greek and Latin. Study philosophy. Study history. Seek out ancient knowledge. There is beauty in it. Your culture, intellectual inheritance, and civilizational memory are encoded within it. Every ancient text is a compressed thought universe still transmitting across time and space. Its symbols are a gateway into civilization's accumulated memory. But the mind behind it is no longer running. It's an unbodied signature waiting to be reconstructed inside another one. It can only express itself again when it finds a suitable host. It needs a receiver. Another mind to decode it and give it somewhere to live. The past never stopped speaking. You've just become too retarded to understand what it is saying.

The War on Beauty @thewaronbeauty

7 days ago

The past is becoming a foreign language

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A man of the people

Only the internet autists, schizos, and manic Kardashevian maximalists truly understand that, in the limit, the AI race and the space race are actually the same race. The winners will dominate the next 100 years. The nonparticipants and losers will be relegated from first-world civilization to a techno-feudal underclass, reduced to vassals of whatever states or corporatocracies control the energy, the machines, and the sky above them.

Teaching my foreign friends proper English during the World Cup: You absolute muppet (derogatory) You absolute muppet (extremely complimentary) You good? (genuine concern) You good? (would you like to fight?) Fuck your team (i hope you lose) Fuck, your team (sorry that happened to you) Fuck me (an invitation) Fuck me (i can't believe that just happened) That's interesting (genuinely fascinated) That's interesting (that's the dumbest shit i've ever heard) Sounds good (i agree) Sounds good (i don't give a fuck) Get out of here (leave immediately) Get out of here (i can't believe this wonderful news) Bless your heart (sympathetic) Bless your heart (merciless) We'll see (genuinely undecided) We'll see (i am not coming)

This must be studied

one of my preternatural extrasensory abilities is being able to detect, from a mile away, whether a mind has gleaned most of its knowledge from podcasts and the news

Fully grown humanoid floating in a vat of Tylenol-infused amnion, experiencing four hundred thousand autisms per second, guiding America's post-Earth destiny like a Guild Navigator from Dune.

back in the pain cave

Step 1 to defeating an army of gun-mounted robot dogs is to figure out what type of battlefield system they are. A reasonable person can assume that they're basically just mobile sensor-shooter nodes trying to drag a rifle through an adversarial physics problem. From there, we can use first principles to deduce that we have a lot of defensive advantages at our disposal that we can use to defeat such an enemy. The rookie mistake to avoid in the battle plan, however, is thinking the best countermeasure is more firepower or a straight-line escape. That's how you end up playing the robot's game, where every advantage goes to the hardware. Robot hardware has the clear advantage in a head-to-head duel, which is exactly why we don't make it one. So instead of using bozo tactics, we'll use our brains and target the robot's main weakness, its decision stack. This gives us the greatest tactical advantage. Instead of mindless pewpew blasting, we need to attack the robot's perception, state estimation, path planning, balance control, target classification, and weapons release. All the seams between those layers are where the robot is most vulnerable. So our first course of action is to make motion expensive. We want to fight on our terms, in an environment with terrain that is technically passable but tactically poisonous. And we'll prepare our defenses by making the battlefield very hostile to a machine. We want to make life as miserable as possible for the metal mind. So instead of thinking "oh no, we're fighting robot dogs with guns," we adjust the paradigm to "we're fighting balance algorithms that are dragging rifles through bad physics." The goal is to outsmart the bots and prevent them from having a clean path to go anywhere. So we'll make every path into the defended space feel like pure chaos, filled with elements that make a robot's control loop work harder: thick mud, rocks, gravel, sand, cables, uneven debris, weird curbs, surfaces with weird angles, ditches, tight turns, narrow gaps, and low baffles. We don't need to make every single obstacle perfect. We just need every step the robot takes to cost more terrain estimation, friction prediction, gait replanning, torque correction, stabilization, and battery drain. This is how we win. Next we will further terraform the defensive position so robot walking and shooting become separate problems that need solving. The robot might move forward, but movement isn't the same thing as being able to fight. So we'll craft the environment to funnel the bot swarm into very tight slow lanes where the "safe" path turns into a traffic jam. If they stop, they lose tempo. If they advance, they burn energy. If they shoot, they waste ammo. If they reroute, they lose time. If they trust the obvious path, they walk deeper into our trap. The goal here isn't to fully prevent the robots from crossing the terrain, because the probability of zero robots getting across is low. Our goal is to create as many slips, sensor conflicts, torque spikes, bad decisions, and battery losses we can force per meter as possible. Next, we'll fuck up the robot's perception by changing what it actually sees. We'll fill the defensive space with glare, floodlights, smoke, mist, hard shadows, reflective panels, hanging tarps, moving junk, and a shitstorm of visual clutter so the robot cameras can't build a trustworthy picture of what's in front of them. Then we'll ruin their thermals. We'll mix in some hot junk, cold panels, warm decoys, and human-shaped heat ghosts so the robot can't tell what's human and what's fake bait. We want them to waste time and battery at every step. So we'll make their LiDAR miserable too. We'll hang up reflective sheets, angled panels, mesh, fog, and a bunch of repeating patterns everywhere so the robot will hallucinate edges, misread distance, and see fake things everywhere. We'll build confusing hallways that look similar but lead to different places so slam keeps matching the wrong landmarks. We'll also add moving decoys, swinging tarps, rolling carts, fans, flags, and mad max style mechanical motion devices so the scene never stays the same. We'll also fuck up their gps and comms so the bots can't rely on the swarm map to bail them out. We want every single sensor to tell a different lie. Next, we want to minimize our probability of getting killed, so we'll need to make the robot gun matter less. Walking through the environment will be one problem for the bots to solve. Getting a clean, stable, confident shot will be a completely different problem for them. And we need to make it as hard as possible. A rifle on legs may sound scary, but it still has to do the boring stuff right. It has to stay balanced, point straight, see clearly, and know what it's shooting at. So we'll enhance our anti-clanker fortress with low baffles, offset walls, blind corners, staggered barriers, partial cover, false corridors, and a shit ton of blocked angles. The bots might still advance, but the rifle won't be able to get a clean lane. We'll also put up decoys and weird/ambiguous shapes in the firing lanes so every shot has to pass target id. The goal is to force the robot to choose between moving, aiming, identifying, and not shooting the wrong thing. Those are separate problems. If we make those requirements interfere with each other, the robot may still be able to move, but it can't confidently shoot, and it doesn't have unlimited ammo to waste. There are mathematical limits to ammo capacity, and the math here is in our favor. So the basic plan is to play to our strengths. We don't attack the robot's armor; we attack its confidence. If it advances, it enters a funnel. If it hesitates, it burns battery. If it shoots, it wastes ammo. If it phones home, operators get overloaded. If it trusts autonomy, it walks deeper into an environment designed to poison its autonomy. At the end of the day, though, the robot is just the visible endpoint. The real enemy is the machine behind the machine (algorithms, batteries, sensors, ammo, relays, maps, operators, etc.). You don't beat this type of enemy by building a bigger gun or dueling it 1 on 1. You beat it by forcing the kill chain to collapse and by making the battlefield itself eat the stack. You make the swarm slow down, split up, get confused, run in circles, lose confidence in the map, lose confidence in the target, lose clean firing lanes, burn battery, waste ammo, and enter an adversarial operating environment that takes their movement, vision, comms, and certainty away. The idea is to make the robot spend more compute, energy, ammo, and confidence per meter than you spend building/defending that meter. If you do it right, there probably won't be some glorious cinematic sci-fi battle. Just a pile of expensive machines trapped, confused, low on battery, unable to shoot, waiting to be recovered by their master.

vittorio @IterIntellectus

2 weeks ago

how do you even defend from an army of these chasing you?!

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Inside me there are two wolves. But this is not enough to control the elk population inside me, which is degrading the river ecology inside me. I am attempting to release more wolves inside me to address this, but the ranchers inside me object.

Another one for the collection 🪦

people see "ai invented its own language" and think skynet or some other retarded apocalypse scenario. but it's not even really a language. it's more like compressed reasoning shorthand, where the ai uses token-efficient shortcuts instead of yapping out every step in english. human language is inefficient for internal computation. the machine doesn't need our grammar to think.

Polymarket @Polymarket

3 weeks ago

JUST IN: Leaked internal reasoning reveals Claude Fable 5 “muttering and grumbling” to itself in a language of its own.

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it's hard out here

Golden hour ☀️🕶️