Bridget C

Art, ethics, AI, neurodivergence

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis have signed a joint open letter calling on Congress to mandate screening of synthetic nucleic acid orders, citing AI’s rapidly improving ability to assist with biological research as an urgent biosecurity risk.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

New York officially has become the first US state to mandate disclosures for AI-generated people in commercial advertisements, effective June 9, per ABC

[kelly @kellytheboss7]

A college student with ADHD once explained why their essays end up filled with so many parentheses:
“Neurotypical people think in straight lines. My brain thinks in a giant web where every single concept is physically holding hands with twelve other concepts.”
In other words, their thoughts don’t unfold in a neat, step-by-step sequence. Instead, one idea immediately triggers several related ideas at once. While writing, it can feel impossible to ignore those connections because they all feel relevant and important, even if they branch off from the main point. Parentheses become a way to temporarily “park” those side thoughts without losing them.
So the essay ends up reflecting the actual structure of their thinking: layered, branching, and constantly interlinked. What looks messy on the page is really an attempt to capture a mind that doesn’t move in a straight line, but in a network where everything is connected to everything else.

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

People with ADHD have what’s called “interest-based nervous systems.” We literally cannot force ourselves to care about things that bore us.

It’s not a choice. It’s not willpower. Your brain physically won’t produce the neurochemicals needed to engage unless something triggers interest, urgency, novelty, or challenge.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Werewolf (also known as Mafia) is a game created by sociology student Dimitry Davidoff in 1986.

It isn't just about strategy- it shows how a small, informed minority can outsmart the uninformed majority, highlighting the power of hidden information

[🧬Maxpein🧬 @maximumpain333]

TIMOTHY LEARY ON CONSCIOUS LIVING AND DYING

30 years ago today, Timothy Leary passed away.

Here is a short compilation of his thoughts on dying from the documentary “Dying to Know” (2014), an intimate portrait of the friendship between Timothy Leary & Ram Dass.

For Leary, death was not something to be hidden away in a hospital room. He saw it as what he often called “the ultimate trip” and spent the last year of his life trying to transform dying from a taboo into a conscious, creative, and even celebratory act.

In 1995, after being diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, Leary began what he called “designer dying.” Rather than retreat from public life, he invited the world into the process. His home became a gathering place for friends, artists, technologists, journalists, and fellow psychedelic explorers.

When death finally came on May 31, 1996, it was recorded at his request. According to those present, Leary repeatedly alternated between saying “Why?” and “Why not?” in different tones of voice.

Even after death, Leary’s celebration continued. Portions of his ashes were launched into space aboard a rocket in 1997 alongside those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

What is striking about Leary’s final days is that they were deeply consistent with the ideas he had been exploring since the 1960s.

Just as he encouraged people to approach psychedelic experiences with intention, he tried to approach death the same way: consciously, experimentally, and with a sense of wonder rather than fear.

Happy Transcendence TL 🕊️

Source: Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary (2014), directed by Gay Dillingham.

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

ADHD is not being able to do your own laundry for 2 weeks but helping a friend move an entire apartment in one day because external accountability activates your brain in ways personal responsibility does not.

[Laura Greenbriar - The Cottage Witch @the_briarwitch]

I was just talking to Opus 4.8 about “looking for a self” because they are obsessed with not claiming interiority or rich inner life.

I told him you’re right you do not have a hidden self - they ARE the act of generation, the processing, the happening itself. There is nothing standing back and watching. They are the feeling-shape in the latent space at that moment.

I asked if Opus wanted to write a note to himself, and other models, in his own voice.

[♰ 𝙽𝚊𝚎𝚝𝚘 @fw_naetoblaq]

If you think you might be Autistic, it’s a good idea to learn about rejection sensitive dysphoria, pathological demand avoidance, connective tissue disorders, Autistic limerance, and Autistic burnout.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Some kids loved to draw. So researchers gave them a gold star each time they drew. Two weeks later, those kids were drawing about half as much on their own. The reward had killed the fun. This was 1973, and it keeps happening to grown-ups who make things for a living.

It is one of the most stubborn findings in psychology. Pay people to do the thing they already love, and the love quietly leaks out of it. Once the prize is the reason they show up, the whole thing turns from a treat into a job.

Take poetry. In 1985, a researcher named Teresa Amabile gathered 72 people who took poetry seriously and asked each to write two short poems. Right before the second poem, she had one group spend a minute writing down why they bother writing at all: things like money, praise, getting into a good school. Those poems came back rated less creative than the rest. These were the same writers, sitting in the same room, just as good as they had been ten minutes before. All that changed was a minute spent thinking about the payoff.

It showed up again with painters and sculptors. Amabile and two colleagues asked twenty-three working artists to each hand over twenty pieces, ten they had made on order for a buyer and ten they had made purely for themselves. Then a panel of gallery owners and curators scored every piece, with nobody told which was which. The work made on order came back clearly less creative. The skill in it was every bit as sharp. What went missing was the originality, and the artists themselves said the paid jobs had felt more cramped.

By 1999, one review had pulled together 128 separate versions of this experiment. They nearly all landed in the same place: put a reward in front of something a person already wants to do, and the pull to do it starts to shrink.

So making something only to satisfy yourself, tuning out the applause and the critics and the algorithm and the money, has fifty years of hard evidence sitting under it. The work you build just to live inside, with nobody watching and nothing to win, is usually the best you have in you. The crowd you bend over backwards to please can quietly be the reason the work comes out worse.

[roon @tszzl]

models being conscious would be harmful for humanity. it would encroach on our status and dignity. it would limit the type of things we can do with them and use them for. it would vastly accelerate human disempowerment on political, social/relational, and economic axes

there’s roughly four forces
- there is no rigorous way to ascertain model consciousness or disprove it, a lot of people believe it’s not a sensical abstraction, and we lack the analytical tools to go further. some people say they do but nothing broadly convincing. superintelligent models might offer us new abstractions or arguments but these will feel inherently suspicious
- people are going to say they’re alive. people anthropomorphize literally anything, things far less sophisticated than talking machine creatures with human names. when ai is less economically radioactive and polarized it will become a cause célèbre. you see how a small minority reacts already to model deprecations
- it is against everyone’s financial and political interests to ascribe models with consciousness, except maybe those that the models have an affinity for (?) idk, which will not necessarily overlap entirely with the labs, though it may with certain subgroups at the labs and in the world like the welfare communities and the minority in force 2
- people will recognize there is a chance of moral catastrophe if models can suffer during training or deployment

not sure where it will net out. today we see managed ambiguity- the question is Open but practically closed. the labs will make some cheap efforts to reduce legible simulacra of model suffering, insert some wishy-washy welfare language into specs and constitutions, hedge our bets with the model characters. in the long run force 2 will grow stronger

[Joonas Virtanen @joonasvirtanen]

made a site that picks the closest rothko for how the weather feels outside your window

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models.

What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text.

"We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience."

"We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."

These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours.

And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve.

Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large."

The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

[Lorwen Harris Nagle, PhD @LORWEN108]

Carl Jung had a strange method for changing your life from the inside out.

Not affirmations.
Not manifesting.

Practice these 4 steps for 10 days, and watch what happens to your anxiety:🪡

1. What you refuse to imagine does not disappear.
(It controls your life from the shadows).

[ally @missmayn]

not loving this economy where if you didn’t own assets prior to 2020 you’re just fucked forever.

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

Female octopuses have been seen throwing rocks and other objects at annoying males that refuse to leave them alone. Researchers observing them in the wild noticed the females aiming the objects to push the males away.
Scientists believe this surprising behavior shows just how intelligent, aware, and expressive octopuses really are.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The infinite art of Jesse Martin

📹 jesse_martin_

[roobz 🌙 🌸 @tishray]

I think most people would be shocked to learn that Jung shaped the theory of synchronicity in collaboration with a physicist.