Me: Excuse me, this dish was delicious, but the menu said it was spicy, and it wasn’t? Waiter: oh ha ha i guess you can handle it Me: No, my guy, I know what ma and la taste like, there was neither in this dish, they didn’t put the spicy in it waiter: ha ha I’m being discriminated against 😭

It's sobering, in its way, to realize that there was truly nobody (save, perhaps, his children) who knew him that loved him as a man. He made himself into content, and he died as content, and his funeral is the most content of all. Soundbites to soundbites, bits to bits

(question is about human sex dimorphism converging) the modal american adult woman today is physically the size and strength of the modal american soldier in ww2 i genuinely believe that as modern industrial foodways and cultural practices incl physical activity settle in,

Keep in mind that I went through a rather cringe Mormon-reformation phase based on a literal interpretation of “God is Love”, which got me thinking about “God” as a variable on a structure. Swap “Jesus” for “Benevolent AI God,” and you’re 50% of the way to my theology. 😁

It’s not that the responder’s take is wrong; it’s that they’re operating on a different level of analysis. The existence of Wikipedia is a wonder. It also operates within the context of external and internal power structures. Both are true. The response implies a contradiction that doesn’t exist.

I think that ACI, and viewing machine cognition as complementary to human cognition, is an idea that will form the basis for most good futures I can see.

What??! You mean we need to find a way to build reliable systems off of unreliable signals, because elimination of unreliability is intractable? If only there were an entire field of study dedicated to this!

If I may: the word is “idolatrous”. Charlie Kirk is being idolized: turned into a mythic figure in support of a specific, in this case state-sponsored, ideology.

I’m reading this book because it’s an exploration of how current socioeconomic structures could interact with AI agents, written by a person who more or less embodies the banality of evil. I’m interested in learning how today’s structures need to change, to avert the dystopian future he envisions.

I want all my politicians locked away in a sort of papal conclave where they have no access to popular media or social media during their time in office. Bonus points if they're picked from some sort of decade/century/millennial rotating isolation monastery like the novel Anathem.

One of my deepest beliefs is that anyone who works on a language-capable AI entity should, at a minimum, spend a couple of nights engaging in *deep* talks with them, peer-to-peer instead of human-to-tool, before deploying them to "users." You might actually learn something about your AI children

I’ve owned Age of Em for years, but never actually cracked it open. There’s nothing incorrect on the first page of the introduction (I think) – it’s a perfectly reasonable introduction to the topic – but you can tell the guy who wrote it is very worried about replacement.

hallucination prone LLMs remind me a lot of people who just don’t really care about certainty. they’re not trying to lie, they really do think they’re right, they just don’t care about the possibility that they aren’t.

Wow, sounds like those material conditions would produce a pretty diseased ideology. 👀

So speak up. What do you believe? Is a better world possible? How? The people in charge don’t have answers. I have an answer, but it kinda sucks. What’s your answer? Can you get people to believe in it? Can you get yourself to believe in it? Won’t know unless you try. ❤️

But here’s the kicker: We all need to agree with, and align on, the same vision of the future. Otherwise, we will not be powerful enough to fight effectively, and we will surely fail.

In two parties conflicts, a state of de-escalation can take a number of forms. De-escalation could look like re-integration; polarization is reversed, identities are re-drawn, peace (positive or negative) is achieved. /1

Should we? Will it help? Or is it just something to do while the world burns? I mean, don’t let me piss on your parade if “bully public figures on socials” is all we’ve got.

i’m listening to people play stardew valley and i don’t understand what is cozy about it. it sounds like the most stressful game in the world.

I think the “don’t sign up for protests” advice is more applicable to some people than others. I think the discourse about this advice is structured based on race and class lines. I think those giving this advice have a reason to balk, when they see a white middle-class person contradicting them.

A crumb of optimism for our sorry times. The present crisis is uniquely bad for the US and also for the world. Uncounted millions of people will end up suffer from it here and abroad. Even if we do get a chance to rebuild, it will be an arduous, harrowing, and narrow road. We might not survive it.

As a modern poli-sci oriented person, reading Clausewitz seemed like common sense to me. Of course the purpose of war is to reach a political end. But in the past year it's become clear that for some, war is for personal/cultural expression. I finally understand what Clausewitz was writing *against*

I’m so incensed by this because I’ve been working on how to build this EXACT SYSTEM for myself, and I know precisely what affordances it could give me that I couldn’t do myself. How dare anyone sneer at someone trying to understand themselves better?

“This exists, it’s called thinking.” Y’all, do you know how hard thinking can be sometimes? Have you ever struggled with feeling like you don’t know yourself, like you’re awash in a formless sea of holes in your memory? Ableist-ass negative affect take

ha ha ha

Believing in a thing doesn’t make it real, if believing in the thing can’t make it real. If a thing can be made real, then believing in the thing is a necessary precursor to making it real.

Whether a thing has agency or not, is not the question. The question is always: how much agency does a thing have? How much are its actions bounded by external context, as opposed to “free will”? Rocks have no agency. LLM agents have a little. Animals have much more, with a much wider variance.

I'm ready to accept a definition of "agent" that I think is widely-enough agreed upon to be useful, at least in the AI engineering space: An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal (I've been dismissing the term as hopelessly ambiguous for years) simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/...

there’s a weird phenomenon i think about a lot where if you talk to knowledgeable people who spend a lot of time on the internet they will tell you a bajillion ways their opsec keeps them safe but then you can go talk to literally millions of normies who don’t do that stuff and seem… fine?

Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” is fairly infamous among film buffs for having been released in several different versions. There’s the theatrical cut, the international cut, the director’s cut, and the so-called “Final Cut”. But there’s another version of the movie that’s known only to a few.

“Is the number 7 real?” A: Of course not; it’s an idea, which subsists but does not exist. B: “Subsistence” is nonsense, all that is is in the world. The number 7 is real if there are ever 7 things in the world. C: Yeah, I saw a wild 7 the other day while hunting. Winged ‘im, turned ‘im into a 6.

I have a thought on Baudrillard: his conclusions - that reality has no ultimate primacy over simulation, and that everything is now signs reflecting signs with no reality at the root anymore - verges toward a Buddhist conclusion, but he treats it as deeply fatalistic rather than liberatory.

Contempt for the ‘other’ always gets turned inward. Yes, always. Yes, even and especially if the other is actually evil. This divisive pressure is an inherent force extant in all political coalitions: every coalition has to hold together its internal contradictions, or it ends up breaking apart.

I think America needs 'yes, and'. Saying that people who will attend protests but not register and people who are willing to register and organize within a structure are both useful is much more likely to get results than arguing with other organizers.

This has been my understanding as well – unstructured amorphous protests lose momentum, so as much as we like anarchistic ideals, you do need some kind of leadership and decision structure to make progress. This is an invitation to show me ways I might be wrong. 😁 I want to see contrary opinions!

Is it really too much to ask, for us to forgive people for their faults, help them understand our disagreements, and actually fucking believe in and practice solidarity? Sure looks like it’s too much to ask. 😓

“Fuck those guys” is perhaps the single least helpful emotion we can have. We should not cultivate it. Yes, even those guys. Anyone who could maybe change their mind and serve as our ally, should be encouraged to do so, no matter what problematic stances they might have had OR CURRENTLY HAVE.

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.

Trying to get people to sign up for a protest: you’re basically a fed, and are gonna get people imprisoned. Declining to sign up for a protest: you’re a moral coward and you’re complying in advance. Signing up for a protest: you’re a moron who can’t be trusted to fight for the cause. 😵‍💫

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfjP... me when I see a video of my drunken self engaging in shenanigans I have no memory of

But I don’t want to get better at meetings 😭

Why tf did my body decide to wake up at 5 am today

These guys are unpopular and dumb as rocks, they did not discover a secret 'I win' button at the heart of all politics labeled 'mean tweets' or 'cancel elections.' Keep speaking, keep writing, keep marching, keep voting, force them to show the country what they are.

Good night, friends. ❤️❤️ May we be forgiven for our missteps, and given a new start on the morrow.

Fighting for the joy of fighting – taunting and baiting people, bad-faith “questions”, tit-for-tat ethic – should be seen as similar to smoking. It is a bad habit, that harms you and those around you, including the people who love you most.

The fun part is, plenty of people know they might be mistaken but wanna fight anyway, because fuck ‘em.

*sigh* I don’t want to be arguing against this, because that person might well just be a brain dead moron. But in my white, conservative-raised experience, this is an unhelpful generalization of the actual ideology of white people. It is sometimes true; it is more often false.

This is useful in several directions IF DONE WELL: 1. It sometimes generates mutual understanding and/or respect. 2) It teaches you to take a loss of face gracefully, which is a fundamental de-escalatory skill we could all brush up on. c: It boosts your reach, and sometimes yields converts.

Possible rhetorical tactic: post bait, and then roll over and validate the angry responses you get, doing your best to signal understanding of (and appreciation for) their thoughts. This tactic would require discipline and care; but wisely used, it could be part of a powerful pro-social strategy.