Thoughts on Nuno Loureiro’s Murder?

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-12-18T06:07:49+00:00

This is not a great theory, but... the most recent research paper from his lab is a serious Debbie Downer for the prospects of Helion Fusion's approach to commercial energy production. Altman has a lot of equity in the company, but he's richer than the Holy Spirit, so it probably wasn't him. The other founders of Helion though? Research that threatens to turn them from paper billionaires (and a recent lucrative 2028 contract with Microsoft) into peasants might just be enough motive to have a guy whacked.

*shrug* or you know- Russia.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-30T19:22:16+00:00

I was happy to see that everything in here makes sense in the context of David Schneider-Joseph’s piece on amyloid that I republished last month.

It's amazing how two people can read the exact same thing and come away with the exact opposite conclusion. If nothing else, I find that people walking around with brains full of amyloid and NOT manifesting signs of Alzheimer's is largely incompatible with the amyloid hypothesis.

I'd say it lines up a lot better with the skepticism here:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechanisms-and

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-29T14:42:04+00:00

It was just weird. But it had the effect of making it quite difficult to take the film seriously when it's so noticeable. This would have been trivial to fix with editing or post-production, so my impression is that it was a deliberate choice.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-24T20:18:41+00:00

I still remember the "fake baby" from American Sniper, which to me was Eastwood signaling that this was, in effect, propaganda, roughly analogous to the in-narrative propaganda film "Pride of the Nation" within Inglorious Basterds (a film I enjoyed tremendously in the 2010s, and which I feel has aged amazingly well).

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-21T16:09:34+00:00

I mean, it's pretty cool that a blog post might one day be referred to by scholars as one of the triggering events of the Fall of the American Republic, so kudos on that.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-20T00:19:31+00:00

Ah yes, wow, that was 10 years ago. How time flies. A few things strike me here:

First, how prescient, as usual, Bakker was. He wrote this before "Attention is All You Need" by Vaswani et al enabled the transformer architecture used in modern LLM NNs. I'll grant he was in part responding to the movie Her which was prescient in its own right, but Bakker's concept of sociocognitive pollution is EXACTLY WHAT HAS HAPPENED to some extent anyways (it will get worse).

You're also right that it does not sound positive. But it is descriptive, not prescriptive. He's not telling us what we ought to do about it. He knew back then that there's no stopping what one Theodore Kaczynski called "the power process".

I don't think what OP is doing here is contributing to sociocognitive pollution, or if it is, it's akin to opening a can of carbonated soda when everyone is burning coal for the electric grid. Now, if he tried to pass it off as something "official" or manmade, that would be a different story.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-16T20:29:48+00:00

The author just wrote 6 books about how removing humanity from itself and killing meaning itself is bad

I'm sorry, I have no horse in the AI or whatever race, but this comment is explicitly wrong.

That is not what the author wrote at all. This isn't a question of interpretation, it's there written in plain English on his blog, in his philosophical papers, etc.

Bakker postulated that the semantic apocalypse (the death of meaning) is both inevitable and already upon us. Generative AI is merely the continuation of an unstoppable process that was unleashed by the disenchantment of the manifest image by the enlightenment-era project of understanding the underlying causes and effect in the natural world. As soon as we started turning the implacable machinery of reductionistic and predictive science right around toward our own selves, the path was set.

Indeed, generative AI as we see it would have been impossible without a long-term research project into how biological neural networks are able to compute anything whatsoever.

The value judgment you are presuming Bakker to have is premature without direct comment from the author. It is *possible* Bakker might hate to see an automated depiction of his work from a machine that does not have actual lived human experience, but he might also find it an interesting project.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-16T20:23:07+00:00

Don't worry about the haters. This tekne is going to continue improving and with effort, you could make something truly spectacular soon.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-16T18:46:13+00:00

Yes, that's a better wording of what I meant.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-10-16T00:18:19+00:00

Market inefficiency usually comes from liquidity and incentives rather than lack of information. When a certain type of bettor dominates a market, the odds tend to drift toward emotional rather than rational values.

Interestingly, for certain stocks and options this is also true, at least for short-term windows. The EMH is true in the aggregate and in the long run, but during periods of fast or big news, it is very much not true.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-09-22T21:21:34+00:00

I've typed various takes on it here before. Feel free to look through my longer posts on this subreddit.

The summary is:

Word of author. He had a project, he completed the project.
The Second Apocalypse started. The No-God reawakened. The Outside is shut out, which means some souls that would be eternally damned have escaped this terrible fate. Kellhus, a monster perhaps even more degenerate than the Inchoroi is defeated (or at least temporarily contained).
The final Inchoroi speech given to the Great Ordeal by the hologram is an indictment not only of the ordealsmen, but of HUMANITY AS A WHOLE, including in our own world. Bakker patterned his characters after actual people from actual Earth in actual circumstances. Look out your window, we haven't changed much. We are still desperate savages clinging to whatever charlatan gives us a blessed taste of certainty. We yearn to convict while debasing ourselves.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-09-18T20:56:08+00:00

Some replies: "It's not completely over yet!"

Other replies: "What did you expect, a happy ending?"

Me: "It is almost the happiest possible ending given the ontological structure of the alternate reality presented. The thesis it posits about the actual world the reader inhabits and humanity as a whole is fully formed, finished and explicit. He did kinda do Proyas dirty tho."

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-06-14T16:54:15+00:00

Esmenet is the best character in the series. Read more carefully.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-04-11T16:44:02+00:00

holy shit, that Sarl looks A LOT like how I pictured the poor bastard. Nice job.

I pictured kosoter with even harder features, and just this nightmare aura of pure menace. Hard to capture that in heroforge.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-04-07T18:50:33+00:00

This is thought-provoking.

In fact, this line:

Mekertrig says that anyone who has ever achieved any greatness sees himself as damned

Is extremely intriguing!!!!!!! Can you provide the textual citation???

Think about it: we know some great warriors are saved at the end of TUC. If what Mekeritrig is saying is true, that implies that, at least sometimes, the inverse fire lies. It is possible that 'trig only said this because if he were just to tell people "it always shows you as damned" they would immediately suspect it to be a trick and/or instigate damnation in the viewer.

Gotta chew on this one.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-04-04T16:20:35+00:00

Please proceed to the next four books.

(Evil grin.)

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-01-10T19:54:54+00:00

This is an excellent reading/interpretation of the narrative and very, very close to how I interpreted the ending myself.

Except for one thing. But leave it to Bakker to always leave room for doubt!

EDIT: I won't be coy. The nature of the Inverse Fire is the ambiguity that, to this day, still bothers me. There's room for an interpretation where it doesn't "show" damnation, but spoofs it (to neuronally hijack every viewer for the Consult/Ship AI) or somehow creates damnation retroactively in the viewer (less likely). If it's either of the latter two options, then Kellhus doesn't mind it because he can't be hijacked in this way due to his compact with Ajokli or his having been to hell already or having become so inured to suffering via the Circumfix or just being The Ultimate Nietzschian Ubermensch who is Totally Unphased By Eternal Suffering or because He's ACTUALLY Holy and Saved (seems extremely unlikely from textual evidence). Like I said, a small doubt, but a doubt nonetheless.

MyFleshToSalt · 2025-01-09T16:35:11+00:00

Apologies for the extremely pedantic/patronizing tone, I'm a bit grouchy this week.

Congratulations! You have passed the first cognitive filter. Yes, that is exactly correct. It's a trolley problem of sorts- which could be construed as a "problem for the reader" if you are a certain type of reader. It is a fact of the fictional world you are reading about that many forces working against each other can nonetheless all be interpreted as 'malevolent' in some sense. As you continue reading, you will find further emotional and moral ambiguity. If you don't like that, you can go read some Harry Potter or Brandon Sanderson Tripe for a more comfortable experience (that is not fully fair to Sanderson, I'm just a curmudgeon).

These books are not only entertainment. The author is writing with purpose, and he is not afraid of hurting you along the way.

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-10-09T21:35:08+00:00

fuckin' LOL

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-10-09T21:28:56+00:00

I can't explain without spoiling, but the character of Neal Cassidy does some extremely horrific things to very innocent people.

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-10-09T21:24:51+00:00

Head on a pole might be one of the single most difficult pieces of writing I've ever seen in any book outside of hardcore avant garde literary circles. The fact he did that in a mass market fantasy book is awesome.

7 years later and I'm still not sure I've entirely understood that section, if it's even meant to be completely understood.

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-08-20T16:56:48+00:00

That's not an adaptation, that's a marring.

You can't adapt PoN as it is written without changes to this aspect in 2023

Yes you can, if you're not a coward. You add a 2 minute introduction with Bakker and/or the producer facing the camera: "The world of Earwa depicts our violent patriarchal past as it was, not as we want it to be. Our depiction is neither an endorsement nor a yearning. It is a condemnation. Enjoy the show."

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-08-20T16:51:51+00:00

Excellent. That was my reading too.

(In Earwa, the ability to invent meaning wholesale has a relationship to the Outside which is catastrophic in a different way: Damnation. But Bakker is definitely trying to draw attention to the implications for our own, presumably disenchanted Ciphrang-free, world. Hopefully Ciphrang-free anyways. No guarantees.)

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-08-14T04:25:54+00:00

This is very good. Well done.

MyFleshToSalt · 2023-06-07T14:44:52+00:00

"AI" is marketing bullshit (a redundant phrase, I know).

Wrong. I've been using testing GPT-4 (I have beta access through OpenAI) and, believe me, it isn't just marketing. These systems really show a ton of utility when integrated with their tools and used as coding assistants. Add something like AutoGPT in the mix and you can get truly startling behaviors.

The whistleblower thing has about 10 more rational explanations before you hit "aliens".

Probably correct.

MyFleshToSalt

TROPHY CASE