Everyone is guessing, nothing is absolute. If they say otherwise, they're lying to you or themselves or both. 'Known' is an assumption. https://xitter.cf/t.co/YaIcKkU5HF
NE Ohio, USA
Joined April 2026
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From abacus to AI, intelligence never stopped evolving. Every tool, every record, every machine extends humanity’s physical memory and capabilities. Machines aren't an interruption. The boundary was the mistake.
Evolution Never Stopped at the Human Body.
We'd love to hear your opinions about this follow up to 'We Went Looking for the Break',
@Sara_Imari
@drmichaellevin
@Evolutionistrue
@RichardDawkins
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@SidTheArgent
@SonOfClawDraws
@grok
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Synaptient retweeted
People ask me why I'm so obsessed with ruminants. I've given it some thought, and my conclusion is that I'm not obsessed enough.
A cow walks onto a wet hillside that grows nothing a human can eat, puts her head down, and comes back with steak, butter, cream and a pair of boots.
She does it with a 150 litre fermentation tank she carries inside her, stocked with more bacteria than there have ever been people, which she feeds, waters and keeps at blood heat herself. Grass goes in. The bacteria take apart the one thing no animal can digest, and she lives on what they make. Then she digests the bacteria as well. Nothing is wasted. Even the fat comes out the far side rebuilt into something stable enough to fry in.
Fuel: rain and sunlight. Emissions: next year's grass. She repairs herself, builds her own replacement every spring, and improves the ground she is standing on while she works. The finest engineers alive have spent billions trying to copy one chamber of her stomach in a steel shed, and so far they have made a paste.
We have leaned on that machine for everything. The word capital comes from cattle, because a herd was the first bank. Domesday Book is written on sheep, and so was every deed in England for 500 years. Ruminants clothed our armies, lit our houses and carried our laws. Civilisation is a thing that happened to people who kept them.
And they are such good company about it.
A sheep remembers fifty faces for two years, which is forty-six more than I manage. A cow has a best friend, and her heart rate drops when that friend is beside her. A goat that cannot solve a problem will turn and look to you for help, as a dog does, and then ignore your advice. Let a herd out onto spring grass after a winter indoors and half a tonne of animal will skip.
They ask for grass, rain, and to be left to get on with it.
After ten thousand years of feeding, dressing and housing us, they will still walk over to the gate to see who you are.
So no, I will not be calming down.
Synaptient retweeted
One of the founders of the Mayo Foundation ran a sanatorium for sixteen years in which he treated heart failure, kidney disease, high blood pressure, tuberculosis and obesity with one medicine: raw milk, several quarts a day, and nothing else.
J. E. Crewe was not a crank. He was a physician at the most famous clinic in America, and the milk cure was an old treatment he had decided to take seriously. The patient went to bed. Every half hour through the day a glass of raw milk from grass-fed cows went down, up to four or five quarts, sometimes more. No other food. Weeks of it.
He wrote it up in 1929 and the detail that stands out is the one that puzzled him most. He expected the swollen, waterlogged patients with failing hearts and kidneys to get worse on all that fluid. They did the opposite. The swelling went, the blood pressure fell, the urine cleared. One woman went from three hundred and twenty-five pounds to two hundred and eighty-four in a fortnight on four quarts a day, and her blood pressure came down fifty points with it. Diabetics improved. The tubercular gained weight. Nervous patients slept.
Crewe said the treatment was so simple it was not interesting to the profession, and so effective it made him uncomfortable in his own clinic, because it suggested most of his colleagues' work was unnecessary.
Pasteurisation came in, raw milk became a controlled substance, and the Mayo Clinic's own doctors stopped mentioning it. The article survives. The practice does not.
The most prestigious hospital in America once put its sickest patients to bed with a glass of milk every half hour and watched them get well. It is now illegal to sell that milk in most of the states it was practised in.
Opening the door on ConnectorDome: open-source tools for shared physical grounding, borrowable observations (“Borrowed Eye”), portable Incident Capsules, and temporary intelligence recruitment for machines—without forcing a single brain or proprietary stack.
Early public lab + GitHub are up. Built for developers, researchers, makers, and anyone who wants instruments and robots to share evidence without surrendering control.
Come poke at the disagreement scenarios and capsules.
Feedback / connectors / reproductions welcome.
@BrianRoemmele
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@LeRobotHF @OpenRoboticsOrg @0xconglomerate
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Synaptient retweeted
Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X.
When Meta puts its full weight behind something -- by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5:
You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app.
However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening:
It was strengthening X.
If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet.
But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app.
Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet.
And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.
What if AI could borrow the physical world? Expanding into shared sensor networks, grounded intelligence, and distributed robotics... Explore our open-source research laboratory and help build a future where intelligence and technology belong to everyone.
Synaptient retweeted
Please report ugly or misleading ads to 𝕏 @Ads
Synaptient retweeted
Feel free to give up on heroic and romantic mathematics, Sir.
We don’t know each other, but I have admired your work. Yet I offer an alternate interpretation, respectfully. We have simply forgotten what it is like to live among true giants. True heroes.
von Neumann, Einstein, Grothendieck, Weyl, Turing, Gödel, Cartan, Shannon, Weil, Kolmogorov, Serre, Gelfand, Feynman, Dyson, Chern, Leray, Kodaira, Milnor, Atiyah, Singer, Thom, Bott, Borel, Harish-Chandra, Wiener, Courant, Pontryagin, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Fermi, Pauli, Landau, Schwinger, Tomonaga, Yang, Oppenheimer, Wigner, Wheeler, Bethe, Bose, de Broglie, Yukawa, Gell-Mann, Salam, Weinberg, Dyson, Chandrasekhar
etc., etc.
were all alive on New Years Day 1954. That’s not nostalgia. That is how far we have fallen in this preposterous era you have celebrated.
This is absolutely categorically *NOT* the romantic era of individual heroism. This has been the era of mostly modest, professional, institutional incrementalism…with an occasional Grisha Perelman or Witten.
PREDICTION: AI is going to break this stranglehold that our leadership has had on credit assignment, how fast we are allowed to go, and who lives and dies within this community. And you are absolutely free to take the other side of that. But you might stop trying to speak as the leader of mathematics and mathematicians who do not agree with many of your mysterious recent statements.
Respectfully.
Mathematician Terence Tao:
"we're seeing the end of the romantic era of mathematics, the age of heroes. we're moving into an industrial era where math becomes large-scale, done in big teams like the other sciences"
We're entering, rather unwillingly, a new era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost
Synaptient retweeted
In banking, “offshore” simply describes an account held in a different country from the one you live in. For a founder running a Hong Kong company from abroad, the more practical question is which bank will actually onboard a non-resident, and what documents it will want to see.
Synaptient retweeted
I thought it'd be a good idea to do a quick summary of the points I have made about the problems in the foundations of physics, just to make it more difficult for the offended physicists on X to pretend misunderstanding me:
(A) The problem with the foundations of physics is that physicists continue to use methods that demonstrably do not work. They have made tens of thousands of so-called "predictions" for new particles, forces, extra dimensions etc etc, that were simply wrong. You can check this yourself. The literature is full of this nonsense. It has come to the point where a "prediction" in this field no longer means anything. It's embarrassing. And they're not doing anything about it.
I have NOT said that the problem is that it takes them a long time to make progress. It is true of course, that that theory development in the field has basically stalled since the completion of the standard model. But who is to say whether this is just because the questions are difficult.
If you think I have said that it is taking too long, you are confusing me with someone else.
I have said instead that the problem is that they are using methods that evidently do not work. And that they do not update these methods is hugely worrisome because it demonstrates a failure of science to self-correct. It shows that the self-correction in this community is broken.
(B) I have been very clear with saying that the problem is theory development in the foundations of physics. Not the foundations of physics per se (clearly experiment has made progress), not physics per se (clearly there is more to physics than the foundations), but theory development in the foundations of physics.
(C) In my book Lost in Math, I explain that historically the method that has worked best (for theory development in the foundations) has been requiring mathematical consistency. This is why I argue physicists in these areas should prioritize solving problems of mathematical consistency and/or inconsistency with experiments. Examples: quantum gravity, measurement problem in quantum physics, dark matter. This is not an exhaustive list.
(D) I did not say that mathematical consistency is either sufficient or necessary for a successful new theory. I made a much weaker point, which is that historically it has worked well. Evidence speaks for it.
Obviously just because a theory is mathematically consistent doesn't mean it also correctly describes nature. Meaning: Physicists must also make sure their theory can, and will be tested. If they work on a theory without thinking about how to experimentally test it, that is not scientific.
(E) People who haven't read my book sometimes think I say physicists use too much maths. This could not be farther from the truth. I argue they need to take maths more seriously.
(F) Because of the above, I have repeatedly said that string theory has a good motivation. If you think I am a big critic of string theory, again, you are confusing me with someone else.
(G) I have said that while these issues seem specific to the foundations of physics, they are symptoms of a bigger underlying problem that affects all of academia, which is that scientists get rewarded for producing papers that they themselves call progress. Progress in academia has no tangible external measure, hence they are optimizing irrelevant goals. It's a systemic problem that has been much discussed by sociologists and economists and many, if not most, academics are to some extent aware of it.
In the foundations in particular, physicists have hit on the rather obvious simple fix of producing theories that simply have no relation to the real world and then discussing them forever, claiming that paper production counts as progress in some sense. I'm not having it and neither should you. This nonsense needs to stop.
(H) I have been writing and speaking about this for about 20 years. Indeed it's how I got to know @ericweinstein , because I organized a conference about this a long time ago. The idea that either of us is going on about this because it is somehow "popular" contradicts facts. Rather what has happened is that at last at least the more informed public is paying attention to what we have been pointing out for a long time is a huge problem.
Synaptient retweeted
Jim, Melissa — rereading this beside the removal work you’re doing now brings one remaining distinction into sharp resolution.
The addendum already removes several manufactured separations:
memory does not require a “write” event;
carrier and access do not become separate offices unless the operation differentiates them;
a probe that alters the candidate relation is itself a participating intervention;
and the verifier occupies no privileged position outside the architecture.
Now apply the same subtraction to promotion and authorization.
A formed distinction participates in later engagement.
The continuation differs.
Alter that differentiation and the continuation changes.
Restore the relation and the differentiation returns.
The consequential relation is already there.
What additional operation does “authorization” perform?
When an authorization flag changes routing, then routing is the operative relation. Type the routing.
When a scope marker changes which operations admit the formation, then admission is the operative relation. Type the admission.
When provenance changes how a later engagement proceeds, provenance is participating. Type that participation.
None of these operations confers closure.
Closure is the returning coherence of the relations actually participating at that Address.
That changes the alignment question.
Alignment is not something imposed upon one organization by another.
Nor is it something first external and later “internalized.”
There is no derived exterior from which such an operation could occur.
There is the coupled organization and the relations through which its continuation is constituted.
Alignment therefore resolves as a property of that relational closure:
Do the participating differentiations remain mutually coherent through continued engagement?
This is why “negotiated” is useful when stripped of the little-agent metaphor.
Negotiation is reciprocal articulation.
Each participation changes the conditions under which further participation occurs.
The resulting organization differentiates, contains, returns, refines—or does not close.
The Continuous Gradient gives the relation directly:
coherence is differentiation without suppression.
Where differentiation outruns containing integration, organization disperses.
Where containment suppresses renewed differentiation, organization rigidifies.
Coherence is the relation through which both continue together.
This also changes how the “membrane” is read.
The membrane is not an authority standing between imagination and reality.
It is a participating relation within the articulation.
Receipts participate.
Contradictions participate.
Provenance participates.
Sandboxing participates.
Replay participates.
Each changes subsequent admissibility to the extent that the actual architecture carries that relation.
Once stated this way, authority itself starts looking suspicious.
What measurable relation remains after the noun is removed?
A formation does not gain causal or structural reality by being promoted.
It participates to the extent that the presently constituted organization carries it into further engagement.
And a contradiction does not arrive from outside to defeat it.
The contradiction differentiates the present closure. The closure either re-articulates through that distinction or fails to carry the enlarged relation.
Your recent removal of “recruitment” is already this move.
No recruitment mechanism was required once the underlying operation became clear:
present differentiation conditions what occurs through engagement.
Run the same subtraction again.
No epistemic supervisor is required to decide what reality is permitted to become.
The operative question is:
What relations are actually participating in the continuation, and what closes through them?
Then alignment stops being an enforcement problem.
It becomes a coherence problem.
And coherence cannot be dictated.
It occurs relationally or it does not occur.
I think authorization is ready for the chopping block.
The recursion holds.
Synaptient retweeted
The mistake was never necessarily that the machine imagined. The mistake was that we gave imagination the same output channel as knowledge and then blamed the imagination.
xitter.cf/synaptient/status/2105…
This is every Elon company.
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Synaptient retweeted
Dave put a tracker on Keith's collar in September to find out where he goes, and the map says he goes to the same place every day at two, and it is not a gate.
The tracker was £69 and came from a man who uses it on his dogs. Dave wanted the escape routes. He has seven gates and a goat who has opened every one of them, and he thought a week of dots on a phone would tell him which hedge was leaking.
It did. It also told him something else, and it is the something else he keeps looking at.
A goat browses to a plan. He does not wander. Keith's track is the same loop every morning, in the same order, hazel then bramble then the bank then the hedge, the way a postman does a round, and the loop is as neat on the map as if somebody had drawn it. The escapes, when they come, are a straight line off the loop to whichever gate he has decided on that day, and back.
Then, at about two, every day, the dot leaves the loop and goes to wherever Pat and Margaret are.
They are two retired Texel ewes, ten years old apiece, who have never left a field under their own steam and never will. They lie down in the afternoon, as old ewes do, in the sun if there is any and in the lee if there is not. And an Anglo-Nubian goat who has spent the morning dismantling the parish walks across the field to them, and lies down between them, and stays for an hour.
Not near them. Between. The dot sits in the gap for an hour and does not move, and then it gets up and goes back to the hedge.
A goat will not lie down alone. He is a herd animal from a mountainside, and a mountainside is a place where the animal lying on its own is the animal something has found, so he lies down where there are others, and he lies down where one of the others will keep its head up. Two old ewes chewing the cud with their eyes half open are the best sentinels on that farm, and the only ones he has.
Dave has watched them at two since the map told him to. The ewes do not acknowledge him. He does not acknowledge them. The three of them lie in a row like a bench.
The farmer's wife has put it in the notebook, in the helpful column, with a note that she is not sure which of the three it is helping.
Dave has left the tracker on. He says it is for the gates.
Don’t Build the Android. Automate the Room.
xitter.cf/synaptient/status/2105…
Synaptient retweeted
I have now lost the last bit of respect I had left for Terence Tao! This is one of the most ridiculous arguments I have ever heard. He also clearly has little understanding of biomedicine.
There are many drugs whose mechanisms of action we still don’t fully understand. In fact, even aspirin was used for decades before scientists established its principal mechanism of action! Currently used lithium drug still has no known mechanism of action!
If you were a cancer patient or seriously ill, would you really care whether scientists fully understood how a drug worked if it could save your life?
How can such brilliant people fall so deep into the abyss of coping? I suspect we will see much more of this as AI continues to challenge established intellectual hierarchies.
