Lutheran, Husband, Father, Gardener 👨🌾 Hobbit Nationalist 🌲 15% Doomer / 85% Optimist 🌳 USDA 6a / Köppen Dfa
Fort Wayne, IN
Joined May 2009
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Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
Or 10,000 years ago pigs stumbled upon what, to them, was equivalent to a superintelligent AI, and since have been used as food, often stuffed into cramped concrete stalls or metal pens, often unable to even turn around. A species as smart as dogs consigned to torture forever.
Man kann es auch anders sehen.
Vor 20.000 Jahren sind Hunde zufällig auf das gestoßen, was für sie einer superintelligenten KI entspricht.
Für Hunde ist die Singularität längst passiert. Sie leben in einer Welt, die sie nicht verstehen, umgeben von Wundern, die sie völlig normal finden.
Alle ihre Bedürfnisse werden von Wesen erfüllt, die ihr Vorstellungsvermögen übersteigen.
Heute gibt es etwa eine Milliarde Hunde auf der Erde. Die meisten sind ziemlich zufrieden.
Fast keiner muss arbeiten. Für sie ist es echt gut gelaufen.
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
I cannot let a steam engine analogy go by without bringing up John Wilkinson, perhaps the most underappreciated engineer of the Industrial Revolution.
Watt had figured out how to dramatically improve the steam engine, but he spent years struggling to actually manufacture one. The problem was embarrassingly simple: nobody could make a sufficiently round cylinder.
The casting and machining tolerances were atrocious. Watt complained that one 18-inch cylinder was out of round by as much as THREE-EIGHTHS OF AN INCH. Steam leaked past the piston. He tried packing the gaps with cork, oiled rags, paper, and apparently even old hats. Nothing worked particularly well.
Enter John Wilkinson, a British ironmaster whose immediate concern was manufacturing better cannons.
At the time, iron cannons were commonly cast around a core, introducing defects and misalignment that could make the barrels inaccurate or dangerously weak. Wilkinson developed a process for boring cannons from solid castings, and in 1774 patented a vastly improved boring machine.
The key innovation was almost comically mechanical: a massive, rigid boring bar, supported at both ends, that could cut a genuinely straight, circular hole instead of following the irregularities of the casting.
He adapted this technology to Watt's cylinders. By 1776, Matthew Boulton was boasting that Wilkinson had bored a FIFTY-INCH cylinder accurate to within the thickness of an old shilling.
Suddenly, the steam engine was a commercially viable machine.
And the story gets better. Wilkinson became one of Watt's first customers, buying an engine to drive the blast machinery at his own ironworks. The steam engine was now helping manufacture the iron that made more steam engines possible.
I find this whole episode absolutely extraordinary. The Industrial Revolution was, for a critical period, bottlenecked on the ability to make a sufficiently round hole.
We remember Watt, and rightly so. We remember the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent development of thermodynamics. But the man who made the machinery that made the whole thing possible is practically a footnote.
I think we consistently underestimate how much of scientific progress is actually downstream of advances in tooling, measurement, and manufacturing precision. It's not just that technology precedes theory. Sometimes the decisive breakthrough is that someone finally figures out how to build the thing the theorists have been talking about for twenty years.
Anyway, I think John Wilkinson deserves considerably more credit for modern civilization than he gets.
a few thoughts:
1. pretraining science is kind of like how people built quite good steam engines before they understood thermodynamics. “Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.”-(L.J. Henderson). if nick is right, which i am pretty sure he is, progress points in the direction of more interpretability, and pretraining was "slouching towards monosemanticity". my guess would be that major breakthroughs in interp also advance capabilities
2. nick is a good friend of mine, safe to say my origin story at openai wouldn't have happened if i hadn't met him, and it's fascinating watching him operate and seeing the early drafts evolve into this. he's the most profoundly happy guy I know- not driven by guilt, activism, or religious terror, but by fascination. he of course understands the stakes of understanding neural networks, but it doesn't seem like the core reason he does it: he just loves the neural nets. afaict he's posting this from some beautiful hideaway in tokyo. there's a lesson in there for all the +EV maxers. i feel very grateful to have met him
3. i do think it's crazy how few people across the world were staring at neural nets growing: most have moved to a different level of behaviorist analysis, thinking about reward functions and test scores and whatnot. it does not bode that well for the major model companies, oai included, that fundamental breakthroughs like this are coming from outside. we've become too much of a pressure cooker focusing on local incentives, studying narrow tracks under old paradigms, mostly doing engineering, rather than fundamental research, and implicitly hoping the next model will figure it out
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
Congress should only be in session one month a year, and it should be sequestered in some sort of luxury compound in Hawaii with a complete media blackout like the papal conclave until it’s over.
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
I don't know if you guys are fans of Orson Scott Card or not, but
Ukrainian-developed FPV drone simulator “Remote Reaper: FPV Drone” has officially left Early Access, with version 1.0 now available on Steam.
Developed in collaboration with military pilots, the simulator focuses on combat FPV drone operations and introduces several features in its full release, including armored vehicles with modeled vulnerable zones, electronic warfare effects that can disrupt video feeds and control signals during the final stage of an attack, and a customizable drone editor.
Version 1.0 also adds configurable weather conditions, custom mission editing, real-time flights with other pilots and a racing mode.
Players can use FPV hardware or a gamepad with realistic flight physics, or opt for simplified controls using a keyboard and mouse.
#RemoteReaper #FPV #FPVDrone #DroneSimulator
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
anyone employable is going to get more and more productive right up until they're no longer employable
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
I somehow had never seen TOMBSTONE before and now I want a listicle that’s like, “movies where one actor is acting in a better and/or different movie than the one they’re in”
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
WW2 caused an immense cultural loss:
Vienna - "410,000 volumes were destroyed".
Belarus - "83% of the libraries' collection were plundered, stolen or destroyed."
Poland - "Around 15 million volumes were lost"
Belgium - In Louvain, "900,000 volumes lost..300,000 were destroyed in WW1"
China - since 1936, "Four-fifths of the libraries were either destroyed or looted"
Czechoslovakia - "Total losses of books, manuscripts and incunabula estimated at 2,000,000 volumes."
France - Strasbourg's Library "300,000 out of 800,000 volumes were destroyed."
Germany - "About a third of books in German libraries were lost."
Italy - "About 2 million printed works and 39,000 manuscripts lost."
Japan - "Over 655,000 volumes in the Tokyo area were destroyed"
Netherlands - Zeeland's Library "160,000 volumes lost"
Serbia - "348,700 books were destroyed forever."
United Kingdom - "1,145,500 books destroyed in the ruins of the bombed libraries"
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
The only way not to have a hoarder house is to periodically regret throwing something away.
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
I had always suspected that the lunatic groyper accounts on here were being run by fully tenured Chinese communist Islamic jihadist professors of anthropology with Columbia PhDs posting from caves in rural Pennsylvania so it’s nice to be vindicated.
NEW: Haverford Professor Guangtian Ha
has been arrested and charged with cyberstalking a Jewish colleague.
Posing as a MAGA anon on X, he allegedly messaged another Haverford professor around 50 times between October 2025 and May 2026.
In addition to posting vile antisemitic messages (see below), he allegedly posted his colleague’s “home address, infant child's name, a photograph of the family's mailbox, countless antisemitic slurs and threats, and reference to real-time observation of their home.”
The target’s wife twice moved out of the home with their three children because they were so terrified.
Ha is a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
He has called complaints about antisemitism on campus “Zionist witch hunts.”
Originally from China, he is an associate professor of religion at Haverford who studies Islam in China.
He holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia. His dissertation is entitled, “Religion of the Father: Islam, Gender, and Politics of Ethnicity in Late Socialism.”
He won the 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion for his book, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China.
He is “charged with one count of cyberstalking pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §
2261A(2). The statutory maximum for cyberstalking is five years' imprisonment, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment.”
Here are some of the messages he posted (brace yourself):
“Jew, get the fuck out of my country”
“Jew pig, get the fuck out of Lower Merion”
“If jews are so special then they should also be placed in special camps and receive special treatments”
“LM jews are going to have it big time, jew. Remember this. You scums have had it too easy. Goyim are taking America back, blood-guzzling demons.”
“@[Victim 1] Eliminate the
jewish cockroaches. Exterminate the jewish state. [Victim 1], you will have nowhere to go. Your family has no future in the US. Give it another 10 years, and you shall see a true holocaust.”
“@[Victim 1] Fat jew, leave lower merion.”
“@[Victim 1] Jew, watch your [Victim I's minor son's true name]. There shall be a sign.”
After the victim took security precautions: “@[Victim 1] The goyim have woken up, jew. Run. Flee. Leave. Blurring your home on google map and installing a security camera next to your mailbox won't help.”
“[Victim 1], the jewish state will stop existing, whether you like it or not, which is why as an Israeli zio jew you want to recreate america in 'iSrAeL's' image. This won't work. You and your family have no future here. Homeless dogs jews will once again become, if you do survive.”
“That's right[Victim 1]The end of American jews is close. Let's start with the jews in Lower Merion. Watch out jewish nigga.”
“[is] that blood, [Victim 1]? We know jews are blood-sucking demons. Only the libtard niggas [...] will protect you. But soon we are going to make sure you have no place to hide, fat rat.”
“Nothing wrong to hate jews. We started to decline the moment we stopped hating, eradicating and expelling jews. Babylonians knew, the Romans knew, the Spaniards knew. American jews have been exposed. Fuck anti-Zionism. HH [i.e., “Heil Hitler”].”
Haverford College has placed Ha on administrative leave and barred him from campus. His information has been wiped from the college’s website.
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
America: $40 borger
Russia: literal plague
France: on fire
Samoa subplot:
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
Anyone surprised that Cameron would do a big romantic epic like Titanic did not understand The Terminator or The Abyss.
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
The no show on weddings—WEDDINGS—is between 20-30%. People have sent out engraved invitations months in advance and paid north of $100 for a meal. The selfishness of flaking on social engagements is indicative of “I owe nothing to anyone” mindset and is corrosive to society.
It would be difficult to be more gung ho about hosting and attending parties than I am, it’s sort of my whole personality, and the frequency of nobody showing up is mind boggling. I’ll print out flyers months in advance, invite my whole neighborhood over, Christmas party evite months early, my wife and I run the Young Adult Evenings at our church every other month. People tell us constantly how happy they are that somebody at the church has taken this on, that young families are getting together and that they have a place to bring their little kids. Then people don’t show. All. The. Time. At some point I’d have to guess that I’m just an unpleasant person to be around, but it happens as frequently when I don’t know the people involved (neighborhood block party) as when I do. It’s hard to talk about without just sounding bitter and petty but people committing to coming to something and then “having to take a rain check,” “something came up,” hours before is beyond ubiquitous. There is no shame about telling someone you’re coming to their party, allowing them to prepare food with you in mind, and then not showing up. Simply leaving the house, not even hosting, just exiting your home to go to someone else’s that’s been cleaned and food provided for you, has become a Herculean effort for so many people
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
incredible to me that people can live through the last decade or two & not come away with the ironclad lesson that you need to be suspicious of anyone trying to whip you into an outraged frenzy in any context
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
I'm not the step dad. I'm the dad who stepped on a toy. Ouch ouch ouch!
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
Calling your friend’s house used to mean occasionally having a two minute conversation with his mother, father or sister before you even got to him
You knew their voices. They knew who you were. His mom might ask how school was going
The cell phone quietly removed an entire layer of low grade relationships from American life
Bicoloured-Python-Rock-Snake 🦬🪐🌲 retweeted
This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities.
