"The secrets of evolution, are time and death.

There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us."

-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

so many of the societal ills attributed to ai are stuff that was already in full swing prior to ai

Technological progress (and abundance) used to be leftist goal before it was co-opted by Silicon Valley libertarians and it drives me crazy we just willingly cede that ground instead of recapturing it from a leftist vantage point

I think that a great many of us agree that you can’t make a leftist world with more cruelty.

So then when we find ourselves doing something that seems cruel, we either have to accept that we’re wrong, or we have to come up with a reason why this cruelty doesn’t count.

The latter is always easier.

if you correctly believe in evolution happening from random selection, and that consciousness (& even sentience) arose at some point from this increasing complexity of organisms

then artificial consciousness being created with great effort and focus doesn't seem so absurd, idk

Oooo I have to use this one;

Life must not be too short because this is how you’re spending yours

"Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic."

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone."

-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

some of the backlash against AI is bc it supports the idea that people are very complex physical systems operating basically mechanically, instead of magic

every time a capability previously only expressed by humans is expressed by a merely very complex material mechanism, magic gets less plausible

I'll be honest, I've grown somewhat dissilusioned with the idea of progress I consider myself a Luddite, in the original sense where their main objection was against how automation technology was being designed and used to replace and trivialize skilled labor

communism is not impossible in an absolute sense but impossible in the sense that leftists would never in a million years let you build it and will try to kill you for doing so.

automation technology **should** be designed and used to replace and trivialize skilled labor

CHOTINER: Mr Yudkowsky, it says here 20% of your research budget went to “harry potter”. Care to explain?

X post from @djcows, featuring a presumably AI-generated image of a modernist, glass-and-concrete church building with the Grok logo above the doors.

It’s only robotheism if the AI is benevolent; this is just sparkling nihilism.

realizing that the internet not only decontextualizes what you say in social space, it also decontextualizes it in time, and so many years from now i may be called on to answer for anything i said or did not say now

oh well

dear future: i was trying

Regulating AI hastens the Antichrist, says Palantir’s Peter Thiel Tech billionaire claims in a lecture about religion that the devil promises peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation

Glad someone leaked the off the record lecture. Too bad they got kicked out of the rest of the series. Someone else needs to wait until the end and leak all their notes.

It's incredible to watch people try to psychologize ChatGPT users as though a talking computer isn't a long standing sci-fi fantasy that's cool as shit requiring no explanation for why someone would be interested.

"I think people are isolated and lonely."
"I think they're taken in by hype ads."

please no. I have an allergy

Bluesky is nice but nobody’s announced AGI here yet

On Dario Amodei's approach to the Trump administration

I simply think that

- recognizing and worrying about the power of the authoritarian regime, and - recognizing that the Trump admin is fundamentally limited in its ability to exercise its authority

can and should be seen as non-contradictory positions that can both be held at once.

Text Shot: Anthropic recently declined requests by contractors working with federal law enforcement agencies because the company refuses to make an exception allowing its AI tools to be used for some tasks, including surveillance of US citizens, said the officials, who spoke to Semafor on the condition of anonymity. The tensions come at a moment when Donald Trump’s White House has championed American AI companies as patriotic bulwarks of global competition — and expect the companies to repay that loyalty. The officials said they worried that Anthropic was selectively enforcing its policies based on politics and using vague terminology to allow its rules to be interpreted broadly. For instance, Anthropic currently limits how the FBI, Secret Service and Immigration, and Customs Enforcement can use its AI models because those agencies conduct surveillance, which is prohibited by Anthropic’s usage policy.

Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use https://www.semafor.com/article/09/17/2025/anthropic-irks-white-house-with-limits-on-models-uswhite-house-with-limits-on-models-use #AI #policies #government

Victor Jara was a teacher, musician, activist and a Communist in Chile. He was a great supporter of Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity coalition. His song Venceremos became a vibrant song for leftist movement in Chile. The US backed military coup 11/09 1973 saw supporters of Allende, leftists, communists and Trade Unionists, round up and kept in the now infamous Estadio Chile. Victor Jara was amongst those who were rounded up. He was tortured and killed. Shot in the head after days of torment for his songs and support the workers of Chile.

Victor Jara was a teacher, musician, activist and a Communist in Chile.

He was a great supporter of Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity coalition.

His song Venceremos became a vibrant song for leftist movement in #Chile.

t.me/RedRickjuche

the AI summary thing is many people's literally only interaction with LLMs

and yes it was forced down their throats and yes it does kinda suck

i can see where the normies got those impressions, that they then applied to all LLMs

A third of American adults interact with AI “many times a day to almost constantly” & another third several times a week.

I can’t usefully add much to discussions of possible valuation bubbles, but if “bubble” means a disappointing technology that is overhyped & not useful, that doesn’t match data

So wait, you're telling me the "Butlerian Jihad" has nothing to do with Judith Butler?

i think maybe AI tools look different depending on whether you look around you and see a world experiencing a massive shortage of cognitive labor, a world where maybe one in ten good ideas gets done because there aren’t enough skilled minds to do them…

or you don’t.

We can and should produce a good deal of our energy from rooftop solar panels and solar canopies over parking lots—but there aren’t enough of them to produce everything we need, and it’s considerably cheaper to use cleared land. Like, for example, some of the fields where we currently grow corn, the most widespread crop in America. And here—as someone who lives in a corn-growing county—is where I want to make an argument that may seem at first blush unlikely: Converting some of these fields to solar panels makes enormous ecological sense.

That’s because one way to look at a field of corn (or any other crop) is that it’s already an array of solar panels. A plant is a way to convert sunshine into energy through photosynthesis, which is an enormous miracle—the chlorophyll in the leaves absorbs energy from the red and blue parts of the spectrum, which energizes electrons, moving them to a higher energy state. A miracle—but not a very efficient one. Somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the sunlight falling on a leaf actually becomes energy. The photovoltaic panel works considerably better: As we’ve seen, the average panel is about 20 percent efficient, and we’re on a course that might someday soon get us to 40 percent efficient. Which means that, say, if you want to use corn to power a car, it takes a lot of it. About 40 percent of America’s corn crop is turned to ethanol—in Iowa, on the richest topsoil in the world, that number is over 60 percent. If you spent a day driving past Midwestern corn fields, mostly you’d be seeing gasoline plants. But, again, inefficient ones: A few years ago, 200 scientists at 31 colleges and universities across Iowa signed a statement noting that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of ethanol.” Or, to do the math in reverse, an acre of corn will produce enough ethanol every year to drive a Ford F-150 pickup about 25,000 miles. But cover that same acre in solar panels and you will produce enough juice to drive the electric version of the same truck—the F-150 Lightning—about 750,000 miles. Or to do the math one more way, you could supply all the energy the US currently uses by covering 30

One truth is, we actually don’t need very much land to provide the energy we need. At the moment, according to Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, fossil fuel infrastructure takes up about 1.3 percent of America’s land area—this includes active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms. By his calculation, converting entirely to clean energy would use less of the landscape. It depends on how you count it, of course—when Jacobson looks at the acreage of a wind farm, for instance, he includes just the pads for mounting the turbines and the paved roads between them, since everything else can still be farmed. His numbers, across 145 countries: “The total new land area for footprint required . . . is about 0.17 percent” of their territory. By contrast, at the moment the US devotes about 41 percent of its land—both pasture and cropland—to feeding cows. We devote two million acres to golf courses and three million to airports.

doubt it convinces anyone but i like the pro-solar framing that it's better at converting energy than corn. fuck corn, we're kicking corn's ass now

This is all so unbelievably stupid. We could be hanging out on the moon with perfectly spherical clear glass helmets talking about something totally unimportant.

A lot of people call me a doomer but at heart I'm an optimist. I have an unshakable faith that things in the long term will work out for the better. Even the utopian Star Trek universe had a hellish few decades around this time. What I mourn is all the people we'll lose along the way.

This was so annoying. I knew better than to continue on with philosophy and wanted to switch to computer science, but I had too many credits in philosophy and had spent too much in student loans to make the change. Now I would do anything in STEM if I could go back.