Terence Tao warns that the race to AGI is becoming toxic, and OpenAI’s massive paper dump wiped out junior research projects overnight. Some parts of his most recent interview: “They were willing to toss understanding to the side so that they could prove more theorems, get more press releases [...] and test their latest toys. These AIs are depleting our pool of questions and not replenishing them with anything new. only looked at about 10 of the 300 odd papers. I mean, so this is part of the thing. There's just so many to look at. [...] There's a whole bunch which are still incomprehensible. And no one's really gone through them, and one or two even have some errors and [were] retracted. So we don't have a clear picture of what's going on. And no one from OpenAI is helping us. As far as they're concerned, they're done. [...] We have this pile of stuff to go through which we didn't ask for, but we have it anyway. And there will be some good stuff in there and some rubbish, but we don't know what the percentages are yet.”

really is wild that AI is poised to reach PhD level first, then Starbucks barista level after that.

Netherlands Euthanizes Disabled 2-Year-Old Child buff.ly/t6705hQ

German airpower is about to look a little different. 🔍

New: Joe Rogan was visibly intrigued when former Christian Daniel Everett reveals he spent years in the Amazon trying to convert the Pirahã tribe to Christianity, but their questions about Jesus ended up turning him into an ATHEIST: “You Don’t Know Anyone Who’s Ever Seen Him?” CONTEXT: Everett wasn't a casual Christian who lost interest in religion. He went to Brazil in 1977 as a missionary, learned one of the world’s most unusual languages and translated the Gospel of Mark into Pirahã specifically to help convert them. But he ran into a cultural rule that made Christianity extraordinarily difficult to communicate. Everett has described the Pirahã as placing enormous importance on what he calls the “immediacy of experience”: Information carries special weight when you personally witnessed it or when it comes from somebody who did. Then they started asking Everett about Jesus. EVERETT: “They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but you’ve seen him. What did he look like?’” “I said, ‘Well, I never saw him.’” “I don’t know anyone who’s ever seen Jesus.” EVERETT, quoting the Pirahã: “You don’t know anyone who’s ever seen him, and you’re just talking about him the whole time, telling us about him.” “We don’t want to hear about this anymore.” This wasn’t an overnight conversion to atheism. Everett says he arrived in Brazil in 1977, was having serious doubts by around 1982, and by roughly 1985 he no longer believed. He then kept his loss of faith largely secret for years because his family, livelihood and social world were deeply intertwined with Christianity. And there was an experiment that makes this story even more fascinating. Everett actually translated and recorded the Gospel of Mark in Pirahã. He played it for a group of Pirahã men. They understood what they were hearing. But when they recognized the Pirahã man whose voice was telling the story, their response was essentially: He didn’t witness Jesus either. Why should his recording change anything? The missionary had successfully translated the Gospel. The deeper problem was that he couldn’t translate the standard of evidence Christianity was asking them to accept. There’s an important wrinkle here: Calling the Pirahã simply “atheists” would be misleading. Everett has described them talking about spirits and supernatural-looking beings, but crucially, they often speak about those experiences as things they believe they or someone they know actually encountered. So this wasn't necessarily: religious tribe vs atheist tribe. It was closer to a collision between two radically different ways of establishing truth: Christianity: testimony and traditions transmitted across thousands of years can carry religious authority. Pirahã, as Everett describes them: Who actually saw it? That cultural principle became so important to Everett that he later made it part of his academic work on Pirahã language and cognition. And THAT triggered another enormous controversy. Everett argued that Pirahã culture constrains communication toward immediate experience and that this helps explain extraordinary features he identified in their language. Other prominent linguists challenged both his linguistic analysis and some of his claims about Pirahã culture. So even the intellectual framework underneath this incredible story remains debated. But one thing isn't really disputed: Everett entered the Amazon intending to change the Pirahã worldview. Instead, decades later, he wrote that their happiness and their demand for evidence he could not provide helped cause him to abandon his own faith. Eventually he returned to them and told them: “I don’t believe this stuff anymore either.” Their response? “Oh, now you’re like us.”

If we went strictly by the Bible’s standards, only Jesus would make it to heaven to be with his dad. Every other human being is headed for hell. 😂

look, it’s very bad structurally, but one of the president’s mistresses siccing the security state on her petty rivals and then parading him through the street to be humiliated does feel appropriately late roman

It was brought to our attention that Lake America was erroneously labeled as Lake “Ontario” on our website. We have corrected this mistake and apologize for deadnaming the lake.

The night before Julius Caesar was murdered, while he was sleeping, the doors and windows of his bedroom reportedly flew open by themselves, waking him up as moonlight poured into the room. The sacred weapons of Mars kept in his house began rattling and clashing in the darkness without anybody touching them. Beside him, his wife cried out in her sleep after dreaming that she held Caesar’s mutilated body in her arms while blood poured from his wounds. Across Rome, strange lights and fiery figures were said to have appeared in the sky, while unexplained cries were heard during the night. A small bird carrying a sprig of laurel flew into the Senate house and was immediately surrounded and torn apart by a flock of larger birds. By morning, every sacrifice warned him to remain home. One animal was cut open and found to have no heart. Caesar decided not to attend the Senate, until Brutus, one of the conspirators and a man he trusted, persuaded him to go. As Caesar left, a statue of him inside the house fell over and shattered. A man rushed up and handed him a final written warning naming the conspirators and placed it directly into Caesar’s hand. Caesar carried it unopened into the Senate house, where he was stabbed twenty-three times.