The incomparable strategic advantage conferred on America by its uniquely powerful and adaptable financial markets is cool, but have you tried resisting the mimetic urge to imitate in the very form of your being America’s uniquely powerful and adaptable financial markets
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> Golden Age Problem: there is no perfect amount of technology
Even in unexceptional or miserable times, there is no solution to the puzzle of exactly how much, what kind, or what diffusion of technology is correct or inarguable.
In a golden age the temptation to solve it, through the power of peak grandeur, grows almost irresistible. But here the dynamics become even more resistant to solutions and solutionism.
Like many matters of statecraft, landing on a particular arrangement, and a particular degree of control over the arrangement, is inescapably a matter of discernment and judgment.
Like many social matters, it can’t be fruitfully or healthily dispatched by recourse to imposing laws, rules, codes, or regulations (although the discerning know that trying to purify the laws is often itself a recipe for disaster)
The deeper the reflection on the question, the more one is drawn toward a recognition that understanding the best (or even just a good) calibration of technological arrangements at a certain juncture of spacetime is a spiritual matter, requiring attunement to the spiritual condition of the people.
Even in unexceptional or miserable times, there is no solution to the puzzle of exactly how much, what kind, or what diffusion of technology is correct or inarguable.
In a golden age the temptation to solve it, through the power of peak grandeur, grows almost irresistible. But here the dynamics become even more resistant to solutions and solutionism.
Like many matters of statecraft, landing on a particular arrangement, and a particular degree of control over the arrangement, is inescapably a matter of discernment and judgment.
Like many social matters, it can’t be fruitfully or healthily dispatched by recourse to imposing laws, rules, codes, or regulations (although the discerning know that trying to purify the laws is often itself a recipe for disaster)
The deeper the reflection on the question, the more one is drawn toward a recognition that understanding the best (or even just a good) calibration of technological arrangements at a certain juncture of spacetime is a spiritual matter, requiring attunement to the spiritual condition of the people.
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Understand prelest, understand poshlost
Very good piece. If "poshlost" catches on it may be partly because this Russian word to denote empty high culture signifiers sounds a bit like an English neologism that means the loss of poshness (could this de-contexted split make it recursively an example of itself?).
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Spiritual capacity
> Defenders need to have a tighter OODA loop than attackers
> Defenders need to have a tighter OODA loop than attackers
Over the past two months, we have been leading a coalition to mitigate one of the most severe bugs in open source software found in recent memory, php2shell, found as part of our Patch the Planet initiative. x.com/i/article/2112…
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Bitcoin Monasteries
> There's never been a better time to build an intranet for your people
> There's never been a better time to build an intranet for your people
This has been obviously destined since Dario saw GPT-3 autocompleting a for-loop in python and was struck by a vision of our future.
My guess is that this has barely started, and that Super Worms are coming. There's never been a better time to build an intranet for your people.
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"Men think they prove their greatness by simplifying the means. God's object is simple but His means infinitely various." Alexis de Tocqueville
.@jamespoulos explains why letting AI take over the entire economy could turn UBI into a trap:
"It’s always nice to put the money in the collection plate because you want to and you can, rather than because you’re afraid that your neighbors are gonna hate you if you don’t."
s definitely going to involve keeping certain elements of socioeconomic life distinctively human. It’s one thing to be banning superintelligence or whatever. It’s another thing to let the humans human. It’s a good hedge against all kinds of weirdness"
"We have a large country, thank God. Lots of room to conduct these experiments."
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Nice things and how we can have them
.@jamespoulos argues that people should get a share of AI profits even if they never use AI:
"So few people have engaged with AI at all beyond a chatbot level. People are worried that this is just gonna be a backdoor to serfdom."
"It is not necessary for a person sitting on a t of the company. You could think of an arrangement where large numbers of people are stakeholders in these entities, not obliged to use the product, not gonna receive a lower number of credits if your usage is down."
"Super concentrated finances tend to result in super concentrated political systems. Tyranny bad, autocracy bad, fill in the blank."
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Golden Age Problems
.@jamespoulos on why Anthropic's UBI-like proposal could become a bribe to surrender your humanity:
"Interesting to see a company do this instead of a government, which shakes up some of the preexisting ideological stances on UBI."
"You read the sci-fi corpus and you quickly ery optimistic within a dystopian setting or very pessimistic in a utopian setting."
"One corporation eats everything, no one owns their data, total surveillance state. But you can have an optimistic UBI: we’re gonna send everyone money so that they can preserve their humanity."
"The flip side: a utopian AGI world. But we’re gonna give everyone money to basically bribe them to surrender their humanity and become food or battery packs or biological bootloaders for this post-human intelligence."
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Postapocalyptic cybernetics
> AI does not have to "take over" for the environment to become unmanageable by traditional human processes. It only has to make discovery, weaponisation, and automation faster than the average organisation’s inventory, patching, and monitoring cycle.
> AI does not have to "take over" for the environment to become unmanageable by traditional human processes. It only has to make discovery, weaponisation, and automation faster than the average organisation’s inventory, patching, and monitoring cycle.
In the last 24 hours alone, I've seen.
1. iPhone 11 through 16 are apparently vulnerable to remote attacks.
2. SSL certificates are broken until browsers remove eMudhra CA.
3. PHP RCE (php2shell)
One is a leaked remote unlock capability for the most common phones on the planet.
One is a broken link in the certificate authority system that underpins the entire encrypted web and another is a core language vulnerability that affects a huge fraction of the internet’s servers.
This is the pace now.
AI does not have to "take over" for the environment to become unmanageable by traditional human processes. It only has to make discovery, weaponisation, and automation faster than the average organisation’s inventory, patching, and monitoring cycle.
If your plan was still "wait and see how AI plays out in security," I hope you have loyal religiously loyal customers and a hell of an insurance policy.
Inventory what you run (especially PHP and anything that trusts public CAs), prepare to patch at the speed these things now appear, and start treating AI-assisted detection and response as table stakes rather than a future project.
The window for comfortable observation is closed.
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Spawning in shortly to talk universal borgic income
PHP VULNERABILITY | DARIO LONGPOST | SI CONTROL STANDARDS x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
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Careful, anon!
"The demon of vainglory transforms himself into an angel of light... He shows us visions of lights, shapes, and dramatic configurations, and whispers that we have attained a high degree of holiness. Reject every such light and form with humility, for Christ does not manifest ."
The Ladder
St John Climacus (6th century)
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> Bestows complete and eternal enlightenment on first response
Pretty sure there are um fables about this
Pretty sure there are um fables about this
Fable 5.5 probably definitely tomorrow.
Rumors:
- Better at reasoning and intuition
- Infers intent rather than taking instructions literally
- More ambitious. Ask it to fix a bug and it fixes the deeper root cause
- Does creative, “out-of-the-box” thinking
- Can invent algos to predict stocks
- Bestows complete and eternal enlightenment on first response
AND I’d bet it has major efficiency gains like Opus 5.5. Icing on the cake would be usage for all subs.
Prepare yourself in mind, body and spirit.
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Still, one example of sharp thinking about something interesting would be plugging Land's notion of an alien superintelligence reaching back from the future to manifest itself into Thiel's notion that any civilization of light or near light speed travel must be angels
or demons
or demons
The era when "sharp thinking" about "something interesting" were enough is ending
people who went all in on these skills are stumbling in a post apocalyptic daze in the general direction of where they seem to recall their "house" is
vaguely hoping it's still standing and offers at least enough of a refuge to recover basic perception
on second thought maybe the move is to pull the covers over your head and go all in on someone benign waking them up after a nap for the ages
Technology is invalidating secular control systems one after the next. People shocked or confused by this phenomenon and its mechanics are being gigafried
Our hearts must ache, they do need rest and recovery. Of the sort secular control systems can't provide
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The era when "sharp thinking" about "something interesting" were enough is ending
people who went all in on these skills are stumbling in a post apocalyptic daze in the general direction of where they seem to recall their "house" is
vaguely hoping it's still standing and offers at least enough of a refuge to recover basic perception
on second thought maybe the move is to pull the covers over your head and go all in on someone benign waking them up after a nap for the ages
Technology is invalidating secular control systems one after the next. People shocked or confused by this phenomenon and its mechanics are being gigafried
Our hearts must ache, they do need rest and recovery. Of the sort secular control systems can't provide
people who went all in on these skills are stumbling in a post apocalyptic daze in the general direction of where they seem to recall their "house" is
vaguely hoping it's still standing and offers at least enough of a refuge to recover basic perception
on second thought maybe the move is to pull the covers over your head and go all in on someone benign waking them up after a nap for the ages
Technology is invalidating secular control systems one after the next. People shocked or confused by this phenomenon and its mechanics are being gigafried
Our hearts must ache, they do need rest and recovery. Of the sort secular control systems can't provide
These last six months feel like some kind of breathless void in the discourse.
Most of the sharpest thinkers I know of appear to be on some kind of hiatus, or are depressed, or took a job somewhere, or are doing some kind of religious hermetic thing. Many are "going through the motions" and privately admit they are losing their direction.
If you look at each person's life trajectory and whatever appears to have diminished their output as writers, artists, thinkers and so on, it all seems just personal on the surface: but I suspect it may actually be a broader kind of 'exhaustion'. Their personal difficulties in their work seem only to be manifestations of a much wider cultural exhaustion.
We appear to be in a transitional era that goes on forever. Many have attempted to keep track of or to influence the general direction that culture is going in, and appeared to be doing so fairly well for a while. But by now, everyone who has attempted that task has been humbled deeply by a series of vague and inscrutable cultural shifts that have snuck in with quiet haste. The result has been total discombobulation and a wearying sense of empty instability.
Nobody knows what is next, and nobody appears to be in a strong position to shape what comes next either. Our compasses are failing us. Meanwhile the publishing industry continues its spectacular death, reading itself is collapsing, and even the anthropological realities of what it means to be human are now in question.
We've felt the "something's gotta give" feeling for so long that we are now numb, and any attempt at saying what will or could or might "give" now feels pointless. Building niche sideline underground IRL projects feels extraordinarily distant. Deep traditional religion appeals, but its logical endpoint is for each of us to shut up, withdraw, and embrace a life of silent devotion.
And above all -- spectacle is now boring, redundant; the wider culture is tired of LOOKING and clicking and subscribing and so on. Writers are tired of marching to the 24/7 tempo of that environment as well. Burnout is the chief export of this system -- for author and reader alike.
Whatever this is, it's clear to me that an era has very quietly ended and that whatever's "next" may not come at all, at least not for a long time yet.
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