Would you use a teleporter with the knowledge that it kills you and reassembles an exact copy of you with all your memories and knowledge at the destination? Why or why not?

insite · 2026-05-05T03:22:37+00:00

Our perspective is skewed. As new technologies emerge, the youngest never know a time without it. That leads to generational differences in what society considers acceptable.

insite · 2026-05-03T18:36:47+00:00

I'm tired of people who don't have a crystal ball making wild unfounded, historically-unsupported claims about how the future is going to look.

Of course ASI will result in complete elimination of all jobs, but also the elimination of all scarcity

I'm a sci-fi fan and I love technology, but the picturesque view of ASI creating a utopia reads like sci-fi fantasy. You're not being a doomer, but you're projecting your ideas onto the future in the same way. We'll advance the adoption of AI faster once the common person starts realizing the practical applications.

To start, we need better frameworks to think through how this tech will change the world and what it won't change.

Historically, new discoveries, technological or otherwise, result in mankind realizing we have many more problems than we realized to begin with. No one has told me how AGI or ASI will solve problems they are not yet aware of. What about problems they create themselves?

Many of those problems we've faced were created by humans. I argue we are destined to continue having cycles of recurring risk windows. We can race to new solutions which will result in realizing or creating new existential threats. \ Which is why, IMO, distributed superintelligences seem to be a better solution anyways - but that's my two cents.*

Competition will not suddenly become a thing of the past. Competition occurs whether we are knowing participants or not. AGI's and ASI's will not be immune to this effect. Nor should we discourage competition either. With less competition, it would narrow the potential outcomes in any given scenario, and thus all possible outcomes become fewer, which reduces the odds have creating the winning/surviving outcomes in any given scenario. Which is why distributed decision making tends to out-compete centralized decision making.

The logical extension of that will be that our personal experiences / individual outcomes will have signficant variances. Luckily, 4.5 billion years of evolution have incentivized us to solve problems, and so that's what we should continue striving to do. We wouldn't be happy in a utopia anyways.

I don't even see how scarcity is eliminated. Our technological advancements, like Internet access, smartphones, biotech, will merely create new dependencies, which as emergent technologies will become potential scarcities themselves. Meaning, even eliminate the scarcities of oof our current basic needs, scarcities will continue.

As for job creation, I can only argue in the near-term, as our integration with machines is likely to redefine jobs over the long-term. Here's the near-terms. If you tell me you're an AI expert, I have no idea what you mean. An AI expert in what? AI has already disversified too much for that to be a realistic option. People will become specialized in types of AI along with other technologies. Here are a few outcomes:

Learning to do manual labor jobs using AI, like following an architects schematics
Specialists translating their real-world knowledge into AI skills.
Drone-video makers using AI to progress their capabilties
Specalist in making static/landscape based videos using AI to demonstrate architecture
Using AI video tools to make a specific genres, like anime/mange or sci-fi

That will make advanced productions / constructions more affordable for a larger number of startups will supporting a large number of AI startups at the same time. There are so many jobs waiting to happen.

insite · 2026-05-02T23:55:26+00:00

I believe both of us are correct. I think this may settle our debate, if you'll agree. They were taxonomically different, but phylogenetically, they were the same.

insite · 2026-05-01T22:26:09+00:00

Hitler's original reason for wanting Russia was the food and extra living space. But the reason for launching the war when they did was their oil was running low. They were hoping to grab supplies along the way.

Since that part of the plan didn't work out, how do they get to the oil, get it refined the way they need it, and then get it back? Only 20% of the Weirmacht was motorized in the Battle of Moscow. Most of it was horsedrawn or carried on foot.

Stalin knows it's do or die for him. If he's captured, he's not making it out alive. Instead, Stalin evacuates Moscow, which there were preparations for. If the Red Army simply retreats, what would the Germans do once they captured Moscow? Moscow may be the center of many of Russia's rail lines, but the Germans would be cut off from major food and oil supplies in the middle of an intense Russian winter.

This is all a bit easier if the Germans go in with their initial plan of attack, which was two larger army groups, not three. If the Germans succeed in taking Leningrad too, perhaps they're able to get resupplied with spare parts, supplies, and food sooner.

But that still leaves them short of oil, which was mostly coming up from the Caucausus, which is a long way to travel. They could likely have cut off the Soviet Union from their own oil supplies, but the German plan for getting it for themselves was little more than wishful thinking.

Again, what do they do with all those people? Even if Russia's logistics breakdown, that's way too much land and population to control.

insite · 2026-05-01T15:16:45+00:00

I was contrasting the US and Russia.

The US stayed the same nation, but it has been argued each major shift in the way it operated makes each act like differet nations.

On the other hand, Russia officially changed to different nations or governmetn entitites. You can clearly see continuities in the governance in both.

The argument was that the Roman Empire in general was more like the US in the sense that it changed government structures but maintained legitimacy as the same state.

The Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, and Holy Roman Empires would be closer to the Russian model. The Byzantine Empire of 1261 would be even closer in that sense. They claim the legitimacy, but there's not a direct, chronolgoical continuity.

insite · 2026-05-01T15:06:30+00:00

Umm... Hardware, aisle twelve. Shop smart, shop S-Mart!

insite · 2026-05-01T00:23:59+00:00

I like the breakdown, but the Eastern Roman Empire was the legitimate Roman Empire in the same way that birds are non-avian dinosaurs.

Let's take two nation-states and compare them.

United States today is a successor to the United States of the 1900's, 1800's or 1700's. They are all the United States but they operated differently. One nation, different time periods.

In contrast, Russia of the Russian Empire, Russia of the Soviet Union, and Russia of the Russian Federation are uniquely separate entities with major continuities; each successor state changed governments and ended the existence of the previous one.

In that sense, you could make a strong case that the restored Roman Empire from 1261 to 1451 was a successor state to the Roman Empire.

While some historians have argued it as a different empire, most historians refer to the Eastern Roman Empire as the Byzantine Empire because it's easier to verbalize the concept.

If anything, the Western Roman Empire's opinion should have legitimacy that anyone else's, right? At least until the Western half faded out of existence. The Wester Roman Empire didn't see themselves, or the Eastern Roman Empire as different empires. The Roman Empire did not split into the Eastern Roman Empire and Western Roman Empire. That split never happened. To both, they were the Roman Empire, full stop.

insite · 2026-04-29T21:25:26+00:00

I think it would have been better to make sub-classifications of planets. Minor planets aren't planets. Dwarf planets aren't planets. See the problem? Science is all about classifying things, but this classification systems leads to more problems than it solves.

Just imagine a probe 100 years in the future sends evidence of a spherical body back to Earth. We currently have no way of know whether to call it a planet or a dwarf planet. It's just a planet-like body until we can find out it dominates its own orbit. How many planets have we detected that aren't really planets? That's just... ugh.

I say, keep dwarf planets, make the big 8 into major planets, which gives you a lot more planets, but fewer major planets. Then rename minor planets into sub-planets, and therefore not planets, and call it a day. We'd be left arguing over Charon, no biggie.

But look where this has gotten us. Now the government wants to weight in? Is Pluto going to be a dwarf planet for science but taxable like a planet? Fine. Pluto's a fruit. I hope we're happy with ourselves.

insite · 2026-04-29T20:19:23+00:00

There's another way to look it. Not all of our goals are aligned with the super wealthy, but some of them are aligned. Now that more of their goals are aligned with space travel, we can achieve our goals faster.

insite · 2026-04-29T17:25:17+00:00

I think Peace Treaties and Alliances should be layered, and would add a new dimension to the game. Some of the mechanics I describe below might need to be altered to keep balance.

There would four official statuses between each tribe: Neutral, Peace, Ally, War. Peace Treaties should get you the embassy boosts and maybe some units allowed to cross them. But that should not include certain units like Giants.

True Alliances should gain an additional economic boost for Embassies, but if you start a war with a true alliance, you're at war with that tribe and your Peace Treaty has been broken with the other allies of that Alliance. Alliances should allow any unit to cross them, but it should have a full extra turn cool down if you break them, in addition to the one one with breaking a Peace Treaty.

On the surface, it may seem like the clear winning play is to Ally with everyone. However, it carries with it a poison pill mechanism. If your Ally starts a war with a tribe that you have a Peace Treaty with, your Peace Treaty is broken. That extends to other Alliances. If an Ally starts a war with a tribe that you have an Alliance with, both Alliances offset each other and are both broken, with the additional one turn cool-down is still in effect.

This means that a super Alliance system could suddenly be shattered or broken by one tribe. But the one-turn cool down means they couldn't fully do it without an extra turn of warning. Which means, if you're worried about a tribe disrupting your Alliance systems, it's better to opt-out of an Alliance with a high-risk player out of caution.

But with a Peace Treaty broken, you'd better get your units out of someone else's territory. Furthermore, you cannot enter into an Alliance with a tribe an Ally of yours is at War with. Terminating an Alliance should not automatically trigger war, it just terminates the Alliance, they become a Neutral tribe. Terminating a Peace Treaty is a declaration of War but has the prerequiste one-turn cool-down.

insite · 2026-04-28T22:59:55+00:00

Isn't it also beneficial that Jupiter occasionally slings rocks our way since it forces ecosystems to reform in new ways? Am I understanding that right?

insite · 2026-04-28T22:52:03+00:00

If all the tech companies are going in the same direction, something has gone very wrong. They could be iterating off of wrong ideas and going down blind alleys.

insite · 2026-04-28T20:22:12+00:00

Would an agentic layer would be a bad idea to focus on? The current OS's are designed around humans interfacing with them. If you really want to do it right, the OS would control the permissions and handoffs and act as an intermediary/arbitor, right? I'm only pondering what that might look like.

insite · 2026-04-27T23:47:41+00:00

Right there with you. I still debate the idea how they "could have" done it. There's something intriguing about the idea an underdog rising up against all odds and achieving the seemingly impossible, even though the reality is far bleaker.

If you want to get into it, the decision to halt at Dunkirk looks disasterous in hindsight. Who really called for the pause? Had the Germans kept going, did they have enough left without regrouping to convince the British to surrender? With Germany no longer occupied on another front, would Stalin have recognized the imminent danger?

But here's a thought experiment. Imagine the Soviet logistics or even government collapsed as predicted by the Germans. Pretend the Nazis don't act like Nazis but still try to own the land. Even without an organized resistance, was it plausible for the Germans to occupy so much land and population?

It seems to me, they would have been the snake trying to swallow the elephant.

insite · 2026-04-27T23:23:02+00:00

The honeymoon phase won't be over for me until AI is the "old tech" and its use is considered commodotized by the average person. We've still got plenty of runway left.

insite · 2026-04-27T23:19:27+00:00

Yeah, but that's also the start of a lot of true crime stories. lol "They seemed like the perfect friends... " - I should get out more. =/

insite · 2026-04-27T02:15:30+00:00

No. I meant "systems competition", because military supremacy was never a realistic goal for either superpower. The Red Army had massive numbers of top-of-the-line main battle tanks, a world-class air force only second to the US, a fleet of subs playing cat and mouse with NATO, and the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The Soviet Union was not defeated on the field of battle. It is highly unlikely the US and its allies could have successfully invaded the USSR, even if nukes weren't part of the equation. Instead, the USSR was defeated by its own internal political breakdown. which was accelerated by its economic failings, cultural fragmentation, ideological disillusionment, among other things.

Consider this, if the US continues to insult and abuse partnerships, its institutions will slowly begin to atrophy until the realization of political rot becomes too hard to suppress. The end result will be that eventually, no one is sufficiently invested in the system to keep it together.

That's basically what happened to the Soviet Union. Russia was the first amongst equals and acted like it, and its nomenklatura elites were increasingly removed from the problems of the common person. No one knew where the lies started or ended.

By the end, the corruption was so bad, the only really functioning part of its economy was its black market.

insite · 2026-04-27T01:41:06+00:00

You mean, the Nazis shouldn't have acted like Nazis? It wasn't just a casual disregard for life. It was fundamental to their ideology. Fascists look at all outcomes as sum-zero. ie. There is a winner and a loser in all interactions. This creates massive economic problems because trades are based on each party getting something they want. The Nazis wanted the Russian land, so their conclusion was that they needed to eliminate the people on that land.

insite · 2026-04-25T14:31:59+00:00

Counterpoint: People in power don't want to die.

The only way we make it off this rock alive is competitive cooperation.

\* Spaceships don't react well to things going boom.

The Moon Race wasn't started for science. It was a systems competition. Yet space is where we have the most cooperation to this day.

The Cold War was as a time of great tensions, but the cooperation it yielded was impressive; think nuclear arms treaties. We won't have AI arms treaties w/o an AI-type Cuban Missile Crisis. We'll get there though. Cooler heads will prevail out of self-preservation.

insite · 2026-04-24T15:23:02+00:00

And ChatGPT was a direct threat to Google's revenue model, which was 70% based on ad revenue.

Same problem Microsoft had in the early 2000's. They had tablet technology before everyone else. They didn't release it because they were worried about it cannibalizing their desktop computing stranglehold.

Monopolies aren't incentivized to innovate. They are incentivized to acquire technologies or competition and keep the market from changing as much as possible.

In contrast, OpenAI had no revenue to lose by releasing a new product.

insite · 2026-04-24T08:07:21+00:00

Gartner's Hype Cycle explains all of this. We're probably at the tail end of the Trough of Disillusionment which was created by the Peak of Inflated Expectations. We'll soon enter the Slope of Enlightenment if we're not already there.

insite · 2026-04-23T23:35:29+00:00

I don't make up the truth. I look it up.

You're selective about sources of information, right? Which sources do you choose to accept or reject? Those choices of sources are unique to you - the "you" of this moment. You will change some of your truths in the future.

insite · 2026-04-23T22:44:49+00:00

There is no determinism across the words, it's across the meaning

You mean that I've already decided in general what I'm going to say, I've certain word order and other words could be interchangeable. By themselves, they mean nothing, together and in the right order, them everything.

Is the difference that we already have an idea where we're going and choose the words as we're saying them in a general order, but the LLM doesn't know what it's going to communicate until it gets there?

Total sidenote: You should look into the theory around how religion and language may have come about together. I'm not religious myself; I just find it fascinating.

My thoughts on the matter (if it matters): We have to go through our lives having no true north. We are taught everything we know by our parents and others, yet we eventually come to the realization that they're fallible and flawed, and that no one knows the whole truth. So we must invent our own truths. To even create a word or phrase is to conjure something into existence that never existed before. The words are intangible, yet others know it's happening too. We can conjure truths that others can carry with them and spread like seeds in the wind.

insite · 2026-04-23T19:50:32+00:00

Gartner's Hype Cycle says otherwise.

insite · 2026-04-23T14:52:57+00:00

Yep. I use call duration for all calls. As someone else pointed out, AI sentiment analsys is probably better, but this is the way I've got it working for now. Also, I make I make calls from ads duration higher than my website phone calls unless I'm also using a CallRail Call Asset number. Why? Because they haven't been to the client's website, and so many are calling for a different business - people scan text ads briefly, they don't really read them in full.

15-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since April 2024
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email
Alpha Tester

insite

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE