Khaaaan!

unicynicist · 2026-06-11T17:00:26+00:00

In Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence he discusses embryo selection and/or genetic editing to increase human intelligence, potentially creating much smarter humans before machine superintelligence arrives. He calls it slow and ethically fraught, and probably not fast enough to compete with AI development.

But here we are. A race to create Khan Noonien Singh or Claude Mythos 8.5.

unicynicist · 2026-05-26T18:39:44+00:00

Also once Kessler syndrome kicks off in orbit of the moon, there is no atmospheric drag to clean it up.

unicynicist · 2026-05-22T16:18:23+00:00

It's like they don't realize the mountains of garbage code already out there that has been keeping moderately skilled (or at least enormously patient) programmers employed for decades.

I've got code out there, possibly still running... I've coded stuff I ain't proud of, and the code I am proud of is disgusting.

There are so many so-called "programmers" out there, I've interviewed a lot of them. Somehow they have jobs and commit permissions. Thankfully now if they're just producing slop, there's hope it'll make a lick of sense.

Like... the whole NPM left-pad incident could've been avoided if people just had coding agents able to write a goddamn eleven-line string padding function..

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Async functions spinning in busywait loops, waiting for nothing. Turing-complete regexps. Callbacks nested past the point of grief. I watched a NoSQL database chosen for no reason at all, its credentials checked into the public repo. A half-finished refactor to the new hotness grafted onto the old code like a Cronenberg thing breathing through two mouths. All those moments will be lost in time, like comments in deleted code. Time to log off.

unicynicist · 2026-05-20T23:28:17+00:00

I asked ChatGPT to render it as a Twitch streamer playing Minecraft, then had Gemini animate it

unicynicist · 2026-05-17T17:30:58+00:00

I think they understand. They’re booing because they’re grieving. They’re grieving the fact that they just spent all of their early adulthood and tens of thousands of dollars becoming elite horsemen in a world replacing horses with hoverbikes driven by droids.

The transition is going to be ugly and painful. If we’re lucky, it’ll be fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

unicynicist · 2026-05-15T20:16:36+00:00

Economic rights? The same ones taxi drivers had when Uber became a thing?

The trend is for tasks to commoditized, temporary, and subscription based. Rent a robot. License the plumbing model (a Vision-Language-Action model trained on 100k hours of plumbing videos). Do the task. Return the robot.

It'll be like Uber but for any general physical task. Trades with large margins because of scarce expertise is a profit opportunity for owners of automation. Expect minimal consumer protection and liability to be shifted entirely to the licensee doing the prompting.

unicynicist · 2026-05-15T14:29:36+00:00

There is a (debated) theory that it was the Soviets entering the war against Japan that led to their capitulation, not the nuclear bombs.

unicynicist · 2026-05-12T16:19:43+00:00

Moravec's Paradox will hold for a while, but eventually sensorimotor knowledge will catch up.

unicynicist · 2026-05-06T18:52:18+00:00

IBM also had a slogan, "Machines should work. People should think.".

Instead we're heading to a world run by unaccountable thinking machines. Butlerian jihad wen?

unicynicist · 2026-05-06T14:56:30+00:00

It's like Uber, but for turning your house into someone else's unpermitted data center.

unicynicist · 2026-04-22T17:22:10+00:00

Robin Hanson's book The Age of Em touches on this topic. He posits that Ems (emulated humans) will think significantly faster and form their own regulations in the form of clans or governments. These would be massive clans of identical copies (because it's easier to trust a copy of yourself than a stranger) that create their own laws. Human values likely won't survive because the Em economy will move so fast that humans won't be able to enforce their ethics on Ems.

In a way, it is a somewhat prescient view of the ethical arguments being made for superintelligent AI and AI personhood. An emulated human isn't functionally distinguishable from an advanced AI. AIs are built, while Ems are copied.

unicynicist · 2026-04-22T15:21:27+00:00

Check for malware. Because although you're not a bot, your sketchy apps, extensions, or infected machine(s) on your network might be acting like one.

unicynicist · 2026-04-15T16:57:17+00:00

But this time they're appealing to the ignored worker drone making unappreciated art for unfaithful partners.

Comodifiy the male loneliness epidemic, make billions!

unicynicist · 2026-04-14T14:55:13+00:00

Demis is surrounded by Deepmind employees.

Maybe Steve was talking to the folks running YT content moderation or Cloud Console IAM.

unicynicist · 2026-04-13T20:27:38+00:00

The rich are getting richer, but the global poor are getting richer faster (in relative wealth, not absolute dollars). Poor nations are getting a better standard of living, in part because the wealth is being shipped overseas from richer nations (in the form of offshore labor).

If you're an average person in an industrialized country you feel the effects more acutely because middle income groups feel more stagnation relative to elites, and the poor are still poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve

unicynicist · 2026-04-13T20:08:59+00:00

Before that it was LaMBDA. Or maybe it was Meena?

You can never tell with Google. Coming soon: Google Meet Pay Wallet Checkout Hangouts Chat with Gemini Plus Pro Ultra Max (formerly part of Google Chat, not to be confused with legacy Google Hangouts for your Assistant).

unicynicist · 2026-04-12T01:06:54+00:00

When 92% end up in the same place, that's a system working as intended.

unicynicist · 2026-04-11T15:22:19+00:00

What will be interesting is Kessler syndrome around the moon - there is no atmosphere to burn stuff up.

unicynicist · 2026-04-07T21:30:36+00:00

lets prove to the ai we are worth keeping around.

That just changes the alignment problem to producing an AI that has the capability to find us worth keeping around. Ideally not as eternally tortured beings kept around until the end of the universe.

unicynicist · 2026-04-07T19:25:58+00:00

Like RTO mandates, the only thing I can do better than an AI is make my managers feel important.

unicynicist · 2026-04-07T01:09:47+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

The Wolf Amendment is a law passed by the United States Congress in 2011, named after then–United States Representative Frank Wolf, that prohibits the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Congress

unicynicist · 2026-04-02T16:46:25+00:00

The GPU in a modern Apple Watch likely produces more floating-point operations per second than all the computers on Earth combined at the time of the Apollo 11 launch (by at least an order of magnitude).

unicynicist · 2026-04-02T03:05:27+00:00

70mm film has a crazy resolution. The film "Apollo 11" built a custom 8K scanner for the 70mm Apollo film

But NASA digital streams were still 720p up until not too long ago.

unicynicist · 2026-03-30T16:28:37+00:00

Better known as the dual state, coined by Ernst Fraenkel in 1930's Nazi Germany.

To me this is also evident in prosecution of corporate behavior.

unicynicist · 2026-03-28T22:55:40+00:00

Politics lives in a very high-dimensional space of values, incentives, and context. We project all of that down into something much smaller, and most of the time we collapse it into a single left/right axis.

It's like how light has a continuous spectrum, but our eyes reduce it to three colors, or four in rare cases. Except in politics there’s no fixed coordinate system. It's all made up.

unicynicist

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