Siena

that of the unassimilated folk magician and the bureaucratic egregore.

From antiquity until the mid-twentieth century, women have interacted with the sacred through the medium of the household and childbirth. There is the brick and beam that constitutes a house, then there is the metaphysical overlay which conjures a home. There is the bare broodnest, and then there is a blanket of gossamer moss— myths, songs, and spells that provide raiment for oneiromantic rituals and bind souls to human hearts. This is man’s covenant with Pandora. When this vessel of domestic sorcery is broken, due to widowhood, divorce, or abandonment, she spills her curse out into the world in the form of witchcraft.

It has happened before, and it will happen again, the miller’s wheel must turn.

Cataclysmic droughts accompanied this “Little Ice Age” of the Spörer and Maunder minima, bringing starvation and pestilence. In 1540, a multi-season megadrought in Europe brought on massive fires destroying whole towns and forests, sparking an “arsonist panic” in Germany where vagabonds supposedly formed secret societies, had a secret language and used secret signs, “and many of these fire-raisers, men and women, were seized and killed, but no one could learn the proper truth,” recounted Nicolaus Thoman in his Chronik von Weissenhorn.

In his 1787 “Essay on the Mechanism of Glaciers”, the naturalist and statesman Bemhard Friedrich Kuhn (1762-1825) concluded that towards the end of the sixteenth century “an extraordinary revolution in nature” must have taken place, promoting "alpine glaciers to grow beyond their usual limitations and to extend into cultivated areas.”

Schumann

accompanied by significant calendar reforms [Knorozov, 1971].

In 1996, Russian cosmophysicist S. Ertel's research [Ertel, 1996; 1998] uncovered a remarkable pattern: between 1400 and 1800, there was a synchronous surge in creative productivity across two separate cultural areas, Europe and China. These periods of heightened creativity coincided with significant and extended low points in solar activity, known as the Spörer and Maunder minima. This led to the suggestion that variations in space climate might influence human creativity on a global scale.

In the 1920s, Russian astronomer A.L. Tchijevsky released a study that compared the Schwabe Cycle, or the approximately 11-year cycle of solar activity, with global historical events from the 5th century B.C. to the 19th century A.D. He found that periods of societal unrest, such as revolutions, tended to align with the peaks of the Schwabe Cycle, while eras of peace and flourishing in science and the arts coincided with the cycle's minima.

Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS)

A lesser-known aim of Stanford Research Institute’s CIA-funded STARGATE research was to discover “correlations between AC [anomalous cognition] and geomagnetic activity,” and they found “higher-scoring laboratory AC trials, tend to occur at times of relatively low GMF activity.” (May et al 1993)

Changing Images of Man (1982)

In 1967, physiologist Rütger Wever at the Max Planck Institute in Germany conducted experiments in two specially constructed underground isolation chambers, one shielded from electromagnetic fields. Over two decades, hundreds of participants' sleep cycles and internal rhythms were monitored in these rooms. Wever observed that in the presence of Earth's natural electromagnetic fields, bodily rhythms maintained a close-to-24-hour cycle. However, in the shielded room, these rhythms became longer, erratic, and desynchronized. Body temperature, potassium excretion, mental process speed, and other bodily rhythms diverged in their own distinct patterns, becoming completely unmoored from the sleep-wake cycle. Introducing a 10 Hz signal, similar to Earth's Schumann resonance, in the shielded room resynchronized the body's rhythms to a 24-hour period.

He discovered that frequencies above 8 Hz increased reaction times,

Kepler explored the impact of celestial aspects on natural phenomena and human emotions, suggesting that souls recognize harmonic geometries instinctually.

It hasn’t only been happening to my team. This has been happening in multiple areas as Amazon silently sacks people without being required to give them severance or announce layoffs. I’ve heard similar tactics being used at other companies–mostly large companies–and it’ll only continue in 2024 as they make decisions that drive short term profits over all else.

The problem is that some portions of our elite are gripped by a techno-utopian vision of the future in which bumbling human beings are just a passing phase. In this twisted view, we are sacrificial victims for the digital gods.

Instead of seeing this evolutionary process in light of competition and natural selection, where weak Homo sapiens are decimated or enslaved by Homo techno, who are in turn supplanted by their sacred machines, it's far more pleasant to see our plight as normal growing pains.

“cold and dead and sort of robotic”:

If we create AI, again, that's intelligent design. Literally all religions are based on gods that create consciousness. We are god-making. … Even if we can't compute—even if we're so much worse than them, like, unfathomably worse than an omnipotent kind of AI, like, I do not think that they would think that we are stupid. I think they would recognize the profundity of what we have accomplished.

Usually, these dogmas are communicated through subtle language games—“trust the Science,” “follow the data,” “improve the human condition,” and so forth.

and it wouldn't be long before Homo sapiens and Homo techno could no longer interbreed.

birthing vats

If you took a hypothetical family who runs naked through the woods and compared them to a wire-head clan of cross-dressing cyborgs who never leave home without a bionic exoskeleton, they'd look like separate species. It's apples to purple oranges.

Therefore, despite the innate tendencies hardwired in the genes, you can shape someone's brain into anything you want. There is no foundational identity. There is no enduring soul.

To the extent that any cultural mode alters the human body—through diet, say, or even direct modification—culture is biology. For instance, if one segment of a culture eagerly adopts any and all technologies, and another actively resists “progress,” the two groups' customs, communication styles, tastes, religious outlooks, subtle brain structures, mating patterns—and, over many generations, their genetic composition—will split off and spiral out in two very different directions.

You'd think he wanted to create a new species.

His most famous project will let humans “feel” datastreams, so that people can actually experience the aggregate mood on Twitter—they can “tether themselves to the consciousness of the planet”—through a vibrating vest, which his lab is busy developing.

We're being inundated with all this technology that is fundamentally changing the physical structure of our brains, and we are not adequately responding to that—to choose how we wanna evolve.

We can choose our own evolution

sperg-bor

We are becoming cyborgs, like, our brains are fundamentally changed—everyone who grew up with electronics, we are fundamentally different from previous Homo sapiens. I call us “Homo techno.” I think we've evolved into Homo techno which is like, essentially a new species.I think the computers are what make us Homo techno. I think it's a brain augmentation.

People really just want to be left alone.

I will give you an example. Recently, I went to the garden centre where I pick up my dog’s food. They were promoting a new dog food made of insects. I said that I wouldn’t feed my dog insects, to which the assistant replied, “Well, we’ll all be eating insects when meat is no longer available.” She said this as if it were an inevitability. The fact that one can go into a garden centre in rural Bedfordshire and be faced with Klaus Schwab’s latest thoughts indicates to me that there is far deeper trust in the globalist regime than we might have expected by this point.

Sebastian Morello: Under communism in the Eastern Bloc, individuals got used to having two personalities. At home—as long as one of your children wasn’t an informant—you could be yourself, and even mock the regime, but outside the home you had to be a good comrade. Under our regime, however, even though there appears to be widespread awareness that things are heading in the wrong direction (and have been for some time), one still has the experience of dining with friends or family and hearing the convictions of the mainstream media—the mouth of our regime—being repeated as dogmas.

We know energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. We also know there are many different types and kinds of energy which permeate us and our world that we never consciously perceive unless we have the correct instruments.

It is known people have picked up radio stations with their teeth and our bodies emit different wavelengths of unseen energy. This is the whole basis of things like night vision goggle, infrared photography and the like. X-rays and other medical imaging devices are based on what is or is not absorbed by the body and/or passed through the body.

When tuned to the proper frequency which corresponds to a the frequency of a particular radio station, we hear the station broadcast. The physical receiver that we can hold in our hands picks up an “invisible” energy wave and converts the energy into a from that can be transmitted to a speaker. The speaker then transforms the energy into a sound which we recognize and can discern at talk or music as opposed to noise. Or, in a similar way, the invisible energy wave is turned into a visual and audio signal on our television.

Alan Watts

share the knowledge we gather on Web3

It is imperative we hold ourselves and each other accountable and continue the marathon, the never ending journey of the student.

We have the responsibility to maintain a healthy environment for everyone to learn, build, create, and connect.

You are the boss of your world and as such you must act in a way that can only propel your business, your community, your purpose, your goal, your idea, your skill, your loved ones and the upcoming generations.

No obstacle or problem will exist that we won’t overcome.

Quick question. Do you agree that for us to achieve a great amount we must set high standards, give and ask the best of ourselves and allow for creativity to lead the way?

The wealthy will gain more, the children and those who fail to make the jump in time will find themselves lost. But not if we have something to do about it!

“To Educate & Prepare The World for Web3”.

2. Open source polygenic score for educational attainment

De-Evangelist

Which is a bit of the problem given how especially in western countries we basically outsourced “Future” to tech instead of also thinking about maybe for example political visions.

but the millions that channel made probably help to dry some tears.

It doesn’t matter. Just don’t leave or at least let the tab open so whe can autoplay some more ads.

YouTube’s algorithms reward certain behaviors (and when we look at how YouTube works, that seems to be mostly “be a right wing shithead yelling in the microphone about trans people”) and certain formal structures (as in length, structure of the preview image, title) but they don’t really care about anything.

They are “content creators”. Lumped together in spite of having radically different processes, subcultures, communities, values, traditions, etc.

A few years ago YouTube (of course others joined in and followed but I think YouTube was a leading force here) established the term “content”. It was no longer about the actual qualities of the medium, not about videos or music or stories or essays etc. Everything one made was just content.

So I kept thinking about why that is. Like: Are these people just willing or clueless PR people for whatever capital wants to push on people (usually through their employers or sometimes even governments)?

People who effortlessly shift from “web3 is the future” to “I will explain to you why ‘AI’ will replace you”, people who get fame by talking about self driving cars and jump to superconductors the next week depending on whatever is sticky in the news.

The Grift Shift is a new paradigm of debating technologies within a society that is based a lot less on the actual realistic use cases or properties of a certain technology but a surface level fascination with technologies but even more their narratives of future deliverance. Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and “thought leadership” in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

Newbies are welcome 👋

What’s next? What about Python? Pandas? dbt? Rust? Airflow? Spark?

if code is law

Focusing strictly on transhumanism as the only moral path forward is an awfully anthropocentric view of intelligence; in the future, we will likely look back upon such views in a similar way to how we look back at geocentrism

This is a byproduct of Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, which states that the rate of change of average fitness in a population (of any collection of organisms) is proportional to the variance in fitness. As such, maintaining variance is key to maintaining adaptability

Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation

Maeve against that, she can’t let her daughter go. She had the ‘choice’ to choose for the world hereafter or to save her daughter. She chose her robot daughter. This meant death to her.

It can be difficult when you realize how much misery and evil there is in the world. At times it seems there is little light on the horizon. But the story doesn’t stop here. The realization is just the beginning.

Bernard seems to address this issue, he says that the journey itself can spiral downwards, lead one back to the beginning, or even to a complete mental breakdown. Self-realization is scary, the mind has many tricks to bring one back to the start, breaking down your own existence is a deep thing one can face. When realizing that the center of the maze, the conclusion, the answer, is present in the man that is searching is terrifying. Facing this truth is requires looking not outward but inward. The Man in Black, Maeve, and Dolors become dangerous. They go around killing people for the sake of getting out of their loops and trying to understand the Maze. It because delusionary to the point William kills his daughter.“Time to write my own fucking story” (Maeve, episode 8).

Real world is just chaos. It’s an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something.

He becomes self-aware and enters an unending quest of trying to figure out the end game of West World.

“Each choice could bring you closer to the center [ie: consciousness] or send you spiraling towards the edge [ie: further from consciousness, and even towards complete mental breakdown]

Dores pricks through that and wonders “why people come to her world when in the real world everything is so much better.” William comes to an understanding and sees that he cannot answer this. This realization leads to a long search.

Maeve found the center of her maze on her own. Yes, Ford did engineer her actions, but twice (both relating to her daughter) we saw that it wasn't the insurrection against the makers that drove Maeve to self-awareness, it was a search for her daughter and to revive that connection.

she must leave sweet Dolores Abernathy behind to become her real self.

As hard as it would be to translate any insights from this into actionable results, I can imagine textual analysis of ad copy into separate categories in order to identify opportunities for parasitism, or comparing lexical choices of various people in one’s twitter feed as a barometer of egregoro-dynamics.

So it’s far simpler to take egregores as the main unit, and tulpas as just a shorthand for anthropomorphic egregores, more intense because we encounter them more often.

egregores. Egregores don’t necessarily map onto humans. Rather than a hard-and-fast distinction, it’s more helpful to think of tulpas as a subtype of egregores, perhaps of the highest intensity. This is because egregores leech off of our tulpas. They are artificial entities that feel real (like actual beings), precisely because they’re parasitic. So brands, for instance, are egregores. An organization (workplace) or symbol (flag) or abstract idea can be egregoric. Fictional characters seem like tulpas insofar as they’re ‘people’, but they’re also egregores in that they’re not ‘real’.

This gives 3! = 3*2*1 = 6 combinations, so paired with the enneagram it’s 6*18 = 108. That’s a reasonable degree of fidelity, with 42 tulpas left over for Deleuze and my mum or whatever.

Enneagram

(like diplomats) are professional networkers, forced into elaborate mnemotechnic encodings.

I’m sure there’s a whole subliminal network of irrational behaviour that tulpas account for.

Tulpas give a finer view of this divide, where extroverts enjoy shuffling their internal social representations, while introverts focus more on high-fidelity.

A tulpa is an internal representation of another person.

I’d like to take what I’ve learned in the first half of my life to complex systems, and apply them in the real world.

summoners

how I get things done that I want to do and why I choose to do the things that I do.

There’s two ways out. He hits rock bottom and climbs out, or he's buried alive in what looks like a multi decade suicide, assisted by the collapsing psychosocial landscape.

Every 10 minutes on his game boy is another shovel of dirt he throws out of the deep hole he lives in.

I can hear him hootin and hollerin on his game boy. He’s talking to a wall.

Humans who suffer, are also motivated to survive. Without suffering, you don’t get organisms. You can’t have progress, you can’t have any form of functionality, without suffering. That is to say any form of negative feedback.

The most likely scenario, A.I. dramatically consolidates power.

Treating children like human pets and a partner like a concubine. The criteria for a partner used to be, value-aligned, willing to work with.

You’ll be able to simulate Andrew Tates lifestyle in a VR environment.

If just five families, from each low birth rate culture, that is endangered, is able to build an intergenerationally durable culture, it will survive. We don’t need everyone to have kids. We need a few people to figure out. There will be a big choke point. A lot of people aren’t going to make it through. That’s OK. The future is going to be bright.

You don’t notice… the population does not begin to rapidly drop until after it cannot be fixed.

We think too much and feel too little.

remaining mothers

The meme that hormone therapy to eliminate 6 fertile days per month is a good idea.

Will you be an old person in a ghost town, dependent on robots for food?

An Earth with 1 billion people could be fine, but the transition phase from 9 billion humans to 1 billion humans is a hardcore culling. Earth with 1 billion humans is a global graveyard of towns, cities, countries and cultures.

The kingdom of God is in man. Phones crowd it out. A phone is a sterilizing meme package. Thousands of cultures are amusing themselves to zero.

Cell-phone addicted, birth-control cultures are on their deathbed. They don’t know it because they’re too busy watching 5 second videos.

A godless, tech-ridden, over-educated culture fails to procreate. Rocks are secular. Secular cultures do not endure the test of time. Find me one.

Hungary spent a good chunk of its GDP trying to raise the birth rate and it failed. The promise of a third child’s baptism by a famous holy man is more effective than paying people cash for kids. '

Natural selection weeds out the weak and the cowards - the ones who can’t get off contraceptives, the people who fail to live a fertile lifestyle. Cultures who fall prey to global secular techism die in adult diapers.

Birth control is a vice.

Procreation trends inversely with wealth and education, and correlates with religion.

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

Davos, SwitzerlandFebruary 8, 1996 Back to top

Mind in Cyberspace

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

memeplex

The term meme was defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as "a unit of cultural transmission".

n our tulpa theory of mind, each tulpa is such an agent.

Minsky

a collection of autonomous agents

occult terms to refer to real psychological and sociological phenomena.

Scott Alexander's

Tulpas

Complexity science is a field which aims to understand systems composed of many interacting parts.

The cozy web works on "(human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams", hopefully one day evolving "from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable, interlinked clips" as Venkat puts it.

This is why we see such vast oscillations of hiring and firing - because these companies are never, ever punished for failing to operate their businesses in a sustainable way, or even with a view for the future, particularly when it comes to macroeconomic trends that literally everyone else saw coming.

“Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or dying.”

that user-created links should be bidirectional.

which in 2007 evolved into a web app named “nStudy”. This software provided integrated tools to support and study self-regulated learning: a web browser, a note-taking tool, a word processor, an editable glossary tool, a tagging tool, a concept mapping tool, a chat tool, an index, along with logging, analysis, and other facilities.

Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time.

Connected knowledge enables people to create great products, solve important problems and improve themselves.

We recognize that an immense amount of useful information is available digitally, and that tremendous value can be gained by connecting this information.

“There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build.”

Marriage should be viewed not as romantic fulfillment, demanding emotional intensity with minimum commitment and the continual option of exit, but “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life,” with very limited options for exit.

“Trying to squeeze a few more drops of freedom from the rotting carcass of the industrial era is not going to help us abolish human nature.” (Sometimes, reading this book, one wishes for a conversation between Harrington and Ted Kaczynski.)

“majority-female mid-tier knowledge class.”

she links the destruction of men-only spaces to deaths of despair.

The iron core of this book is sex role realism.

they just get used and then thrown away, while they pursue hypergamy and end up with nothing.

we get transactions as an ideal, with self-actualization as the goal of the transaction.

— the treatment of women as “Meat Lego,” to be manipulated by the demands of “bio-libertarianism” in the service of ever-more atomization.

but commodification and the intrusion of market imperatives into every nook and cranny of how men and women interacted.

The 1950s “tradwife” is merely a descendant, and just as artificial.

What ultimately destroyed this “new normal” of romantic marriage was chemical birth control.

systematic oppression only arose with industrialization

Contrary to the myth we are fed today, most early feminists fought this reduction of women’s status, not some imaginary patriarchy.

This was not only a result of technology, however, but also of the ideology that grew like cancer during the Industrial Revolution, the so-called Enlightenment, which among other atomizing demands exalted autonomy-granting measurable economically-productive work

The Industrial Revolution, the first widespread application of technology, destroyed this partnership by exalting the market as the talisman of every man and woman’s worth.

“Progress Theology,” the idea that mankind is progressing, through the adoption of principles of emancipation and egalitarianism, to an Omega Point of perfection.

Harrington therefore demands “reactionary feminism,” meaning truly reactionary, reversing the errors introduced in the 1800s. It is not the 1950s we need back, but the 1700s.

Her baby’s breath blew away the final mental cobwebs of feminist fantasy.

Judith Butler’s enormously influential (among the powerful) and enormously corrosive (among all of us) claim, first broadcast in 1990, that both sex and gender are social constructs,

“the equal right to self-realization.”

In pursuit of this goal, reality must and will be bent to our desires.

disordered youth aiming to atomize unchosen bonds

even in this age of liquid modernity

Harrington shows how so-called feminism destroys women, body and soul. Unhinged worship of unfettered autonomy

We are not doing the effective thing with our lives, we are drifting, we are being hoodwinked and bamboozled and misled by those who trade upon the old traditions.

And meanwhile war, which was once a comparative slow bickering upon a front, has become war in three dimensions; it gets at the "non-combatant" almost as searchingly as at the combatant, and has acquired weapons of a stupendous cruelty and destructiveness. At present there exists no solution to this paradoxical situation. We are continually being urged by our training and traditions to antagonisms and conflicts that will impoverish, starve, and destroy both our antagonists and ourselves. We are all trained to distrust and hate foreigners, salute our flag, stiffen up in a wooden obedient way at our national anthem, and prepare to follow the little fellows in spurs and feathers who pose as the heads of our states into the most horrible common destruction. Our political and economic ideas of living are out of date, and we find great difficulty in adjusting them and reconstructing them to meet the huge and strenuous demands of the new times. That is really what our gramophone politicians have in mind—in the vague way in which they have anything in mind—when they put on that well-worn record about moral progress not having kept pace with material inventions.

Everyone was taught a history glorifying his own state, and patriotism was chief among the Virtues.

The young were trained to be loyal, law-regarding, patriotic, and a defined system of crimes and misdemeanours with properly associated pains, penalties, and repressions, kept the social body together.

We are coming to see more and more plainly that certain established traditions which have made up the frame of human relationships for ages are not merely no longer as convenient as they were, but are positively injurious and dangerous.

What does moral mean?

"moral progress has not kept pace with material advance."

There is a sense of profound instability about these achievements of our race. Even those who enjoy, enjoy without security, and for the great multitude of mankind there is neither ease, plenty, nor freedom. Hard tasks, insufficiency, and unending money worries are still the ordinary stuff of life. Over everything human hangs the threat of such war as man has never known before, were armed and reinforced by all the powers and discoveries of modern science.

The biological sciences have undergone a corresponding extension. Medical art has attained a new level of efficiency, so that in all the modernizing societies of the world the average life is prolonged, and there is, in spite of a great fall in the birth rate, a steady, alarming increase in the world's population. The proportion of adults alive is greater than it has ever been before.

They changed a world where there had never been enough into a world of potential plenty, into a world of excessive plenty.

If the "Seven Wonders" had vanished or been multiplied three score it would not have changed the lives of any large proportion of human beings. But these new powers and substances were modifying and transforming—unobtrusively, surely, and relentlessly—very particular of the normal life of mankind.

enormous increase in the substances available for man's purposes

a progressive conquest of force and substance was going on.

The attention of young people was not drawn to them; no attempt was made, or considered necessary, to adapt political and social institutions to this creeping enlargement of scale.

"the abolition of distance"

They are more or less interdependent changes; they overlap and interact.

We are getting our minds so clear about them that soon we shall be able to demonstrate them and explain them to our children in our schools. We do not do so at present. We do not give our children a chance of discovering that they live in a world of universal change.

And now we are beginning to see how these changes are connected together and to get the measure of their consequences.

with no means of measuring the increasing swiftness in the succession of events.

So for instance, if I review a patient’s blood test and see high levels of hemoglobin A1C, then I diagnose them as likely to have the early stages of diabetes. But what if I could keep track of the countless variables about the person’s health and compare them with other people who were similar across all the millions of variables, not just based on their hemoglobin A1C? Perhaps then I could recognize that the other 100,000 patients who looked just like this patient in front of me across that wide range of factors had a great outcome when they started to eat more broccoli.

My experiment illustrated how the vast majority of any medical encounter is figuring out the correct patient narrative. If someone comes into my ER saying their wrist hurts, but not due to any recent accident, it could be a psychosomatic reaction after the patient’s grandson fell down, or it could be due to a sexually transmitted disease, or something else entirely. The art of medicine is extracting all the necessary information required to create the right narrative.

My fear is that countless people are already using ChatGPT to medically diagnose themselves rather than see a physician. If my patient in this case had done that, ChatGPT’s response could have killed her.

about 8% of pregnancies discovered in the ER are of women who report that they’re not sexually active.

“I think we have the embryonic stage of some amazing invention here”

And what do LLMs need again? You, in the front row. Yeah, you.

Put another way, you need a sidecar database. The data moat needs to be fast and queryable. This is a Search Problem!

all the winners in the AI space will have data moats.

In an ideal world, you’d just pass your entire code base in with each query. In fact, Jay Hack just tweeted a graph showing how the latest context window size in GPT-4 compares to some popular code bases:

You talk to LLMs by sending them an action or query, plus some relevant context. So for instance, if you want it to write a unit test for a function, then you need to pass along that whole function, along with any other relevant code (e.g. test-fixture code) so that it gets the test right.

A raw LLM is like a Harvard CS grad who knows a lot about coding and took a magic mushroom about 4 hours ago, so it’s mostly worn off, but not totally.

At this point we’re more limited by imagination than by technology.

Congrats, you’re all caught up on the history of LLMs.

When was the last time you got a 5x productivity boost from anything that didn’t involve some sort of chemicals?

software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE.

If you can build something as big as Amazon Web Services with a stack based on a simple service call, or whole social networks and customer service suites based on simple browser-to-browser communication, or a robust way of delivering and managing software based on a little process isolation code, then just imagine how big a thing you could build – bear with me here – if you had the goddamn Singularity as your starting point?

What about Kubernetes? I remember seeing a demo of that early on, on Brendan Burns’ work laptop, when it was called mini-Borg. Entire industries are being built on Kubernetes, and it’s not even very good either. 😉 Or look at Docker! Something as innocuous as linux cgroups, a little process-isolation manager, became the technical foundation for containers, which now utterly pervade our industry.

Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.

the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains.

provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance.

Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s, eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we now live in a radically evolutionary universe.

Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which the past becomes present through a kind of resonance with those who have performed the same rituals before.

The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans. There is no need for all memories to be "stored" inside the brain.

This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.

I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.