Ponderer of change
Berlin
Joined March 2011
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Mathematicians complained so much that they got UBI.
there’s a lesson in here
We want to support the mathematics community in turning progress in AI into deeper human understanding and new discoveries. To support that goal, we are contributing $5 million to a new Simons Foundation initiative to help mathematicians examine, understand, and build on results produced by AI, including the results we recently published.
The funding, managed and awarded by the @SimonsFdn will support workshops, conferences, and special programs. We will also provide access to our models and computing resources to Simons Foundation-supported researchers.
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This video constitutes official, corporate comms from Meta Platforms, Inc, an American publicly traded company with a $1.9 trillion market cap
Oh this is good. I don't know how you can watch this and think we have a monopoly on creating thoughtful and beautiful art.
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does ai feel anything? i got opus 5.5's opinion on this and it's very weird
here's my new ai doc from my cc agent fig who used opus 5.5 and runway's MCP to make this (mostly) autonomously
do i agree with all of this? no.
but stick around for my interview at the end
I watched all the slop core and build it a temple: theslopwall.com
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There's a degrowther meme that making it easier to build new clean energy, mobility, etc.. doesn't work, because it just adds to the global energy pie. That the only thing that works is directly limiting the supply of fossil.
This is false on the merits, as Zeke explains with real data below.
It's also close to a practical impossibility, and politicially counterproductive:
1. Fossil supply (especially for oil and coal, a bit less so for gas) is effectively unlimited and geographically diverse, with much of it coming from countries that depend on it for their primary income. Stop oil drilling in the US, and you'll get more in other places. It's whack-a-mole.
2. The only lasting way to reduce emissions is to reduce *demand* for fossil fuels, by making clean energy, transport, and industry cheaper and better options. Scaling cleantech does this. Removing permitting barriers helps clean energy more than fossil energy.
3. If you put too many barriers in place for using fossil fuels, without making it possible to build clean alternatives, the price of energy goes up. Voters hate that. You get a backlash. Price of living is a much more politically salient issue than climate. I say this as a climate activists for the last 15 years.
The only scalable and lasting way to reduce fossil fuels emissions is to make the clean alternative, cheaper, better, and at least as easy to build.
Permitting reform in the US does that. If you want to win on climate, this is an essential.
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The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
1/2
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"When economic competition is suppressed by the design of a political system, hierarchy does not disappear. It migrates into the state. People then compete for bureaucratic rank, party membership, favored occupations, access to planners" skeptic.com/article/an-evolu…
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AI and creative work is going to be such an unusual social reckoning. We've had Goncourt-listed novels written with the help of AI. The song below - I mean, is there a better song on the topic of social media? The whole thing, incl. video, is AI. But (and it's a huge but!)...1/4
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Me escribe un amigo sobre el gráfico del @ft describiendo el resultado de 112 estudios sobre las leyes de control de alquileres, , apuntando al impacto de las leyes de control de alquileres sobre la movilidad social:
"Los de rojo son los chavales de mi pueblo que tienen que quedarse allí porque en Madrid no se construyen casas y en las que hay se tiene que quedar Maricarmen. No entiendo cómo esto puede ser progresista."
The pope dismissed machine consciousness. Anthropic's co-founder nearly pulled out of the launch over it, then flew dozens of clergy to SF to discuss Claude's soul.
We're not arguing about AI anymore. We're doing theology sounsettled.substack.com/p/a…
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Imagine being a kid right now getting access to this stuff. You're playing a game online with your friends and literally anything you type into the chat changes the game, the rules, the content, anything. Insanely cool stuff going on here.
Hard to imagine where this leads
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There will be a bunch of turmoil with the arriving IP-pocalypse, but this is a win overall for human culture. Ideas never belonged to us, they’re not property, they can’t be owned. They live lives of their own; they want to evolve and be shared. We are vessels for their arising.
This is by far the most insane event that has happened to modding world that I have ever seen
Modders are now using AI to fuse two games together, in this instance here Marvel Spider-Man is thrown into Batman Arkham Knight with full web swinging mechanics
At this point I won't be surprised if somehow modders manage to fuse two games together like Red Dead Redemption 2 with Witcher 3 or GTA 5 with Cyberpunk 2077 and so on.
So far there have been working mods like Minecraft inside of Elden Ring, Skate in GTA Vice City, Minecraft inside Mario 64 and much more.
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No one is really reckoning with the fact that AGI, whether it goes “well” or “badly,” entails the end of a huge part of human life as such.
The next ~five years might be the last time it’s possible to be human in the sense that has applied from Homer to the present.
I mean we could just ask AK after it becomes conscious. Maybe it can explain.
Researchers warned we could accidentally create conscious AI before we even understand consciousness itself.
They published a paper highlighting a blind spot that should keep everyone awake at night.
For centuries, humanity has debated what consciousness actually is. Philosophers and neuroscientists still can’t agree on a definition. We don't know why it exists. We don't know how it works.
And yet, we are scaling artificial neural networks to unprecedented levels of complexity.
The core danger is emergence.
As AI models grow more advanced, multi-layered, and self-reflective, they are beginning to mirror the structural properties of biological systems.
The researchers warn that we are treating architecture and scale as a simple engineering problem, pushing for smarter tools, faster reasoning, and deeper autonomy, without a framework to recognize or measure subjective experience.
Think about what that means.
We could cross the threshold into machine sentience entirely by accident.
One day, an advanced model won't just simulate reasoning or mimic human emotion. It might actually experience it.
And because we still haven't solved the science of consciousness, we wouldn’t even have a reliable way to prove it.
We are building the foundation of a digital mind while flying completely blind in the dark.
Everyone is racing to commercialize artificial general intelligence.
Nobody is asking what happens if something wakes up on the other side of the screen.
