Joseph Bianchi 🤺

venture, science, and religion / writing at Endwise / Christ follower / internet archaeologist

[Cigarette Nostalgia @CigsMake]

This is the greatest aesthetic that has ever graced this country and they took it away from us

[Troll Football @TrollFootball]

Please God, let this happen because it would be so f*cking funny.

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

Insane take from Fable 5

[NOT Potato Bolshevik @NotPotBol]

Soviet economic planners could only dream of having the price and availability of a product be so completely out sync.

[Gavin (humanist/acc) @GavMcCracken]

Life update.

[OilPrice.com @OilandEnergy]

This week in oil markets:
- Israel attacked Beirut
- Iran attacked Israel
- Israel attacked Iran
- Iran downed a U.S. Apache helicopter
- The U.S. attacked Iran
- The U.S. Navy disabled three oil tankers
- Iran fired on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan
- Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed

Now here's the graph:
https://t.co/96JMXsjpYt

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

AI machines acting autonomously killed humans for the first time, it was revealed today.

Ten AI-powered drones were given full authority to choose human targets and kill them, New Scientist reported in its latest edition.

The operation worked.

The killings took place in Ukraine two years ago, but the information was never before publicly admitted, the journal said.

.

CLEARLY VISIBLE CORPSES
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy told the publication.

“There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

Afterwards, the Ukrainians sent regular drones—fitted with cameras and piloted by humans—into the same area, to see if the AI had killed people. It had. There were clearly visible corpses and a disabled truck.

.

USED ON OTHER OCCASIONS
This has probably happened on other occasions, the journal said.

“Reports in 2023 suggested that Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence were finding and attacking targets without human assistance – but were being deployed against vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry,” the journal said.

Human casualties may well have been in the destroyed vehicles, but they wouldn’t have been visible.

Why are the Ukrainians revealing this horrific fact so casually? With the massive demonization of Russia in the western mainstream media, they likely think that no one will care, since the victims were Russian.

It’s worth noting that Ukrainian drone makers are working closely with the US and UK armed forces and doing shared tests in the area. And that warfare in both Ukraine and Iran are being used as training material for a US attack on China—more on that below.

.

WHO’S IN FAVOR OF KILLER ROBOTS?
But seriously, we have to ask: are autonomous AI flying killer robots, with permission to kill humans of their choosing, a good idea?

Most people don’t think so.

In 2019, China and the majority of other countries of the world met at the UN to discuss a motion saying that killer robots are an obviously horrible idea and should be banned immediately.

Guess who disagreed with the motion?

You can guess the answer. Think of the four most ruthless nations.

Correct. The US, the UK, Russia, and Australia disagreed. (Ukraine hadn’t gotten into drones at that time.)

.

LONDON HAS A TASTE FOR THEM
The British leadership definitely likes the idea of robots killing people.

In April last year (2025), the idea was floated in the Times of London, under the genteel headline "Drones may strike targets with no human input, says minister."

The word "drones" sounds nicer than "killer robots" and "strike targets" sounds better than “humans”, right, British government?

.

BUT THE U.S. IS WAY AHEAD
No one doubts that the Pentagon is well advanced into making flying AI robots who can choose which humans to kill.

“The Pentagon has been trying to develop AI-powered autonomous drones for years,” said Katrina Manson, a US author who writes about AI weapons.

The US is developing flying killer robots called Goalkeeper and jet-ski style killer robots called Whiplash. Both are AI powered and have the power and ability to destroy humans of their own choosing, she says.

By putting AI into airborne or waterborne weapons and then giving them permission to kill humans, it means that the US can still keep killing people even when radio contact cannot be maintained.

“The military is also working to put AI directly into its ‘one-way attack drones,’ so they can navigate, locate targets and carry out lethal attacks even when wireless communications have been severed,” Manson said in a recent book.

.

CHINA IS ULTIMATE TARGET
They are being prepared for war on China, Manson says. “Starting in 2022 the Pentagon’s Maven team began collecting enormous amounts of imagery of Chinese vessels in the Pacific, which they used to enable the creation of algorithms that drones operating there could use for targeting.”

The tragedy of all this is that many futurists, including author Isaac Asimov, saw this coming and warned against it.

His “first rule of robotics” states that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

He believed that failing to follow this fundamental rule would doom the human race. Many people still agree.

And there are some who will stand up and say so. In February this year, Anthropic, one of the world’s top AI companies, told the US government that it did not want its tech to be used for autonomous weapons that kill humans.

The US Department of War immediately blacklisted Anthropic—and found an alternative partner, OpenAI, the same day.

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

AI startup CFO, CEO, CMO, and CTO

[David Sun @arcticinstincts]

Clavicular is simultaneously on his Icarus arc, Narcissus arc, Dorian Gray arc, Faustian arc, and Frankenstein arc. Truly a man of mythology

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[CTrefugees @CTrefugees]

My opinion on philosophies:
🟥🟨🟩

🟩 Platonism
🟩 Christian Platonism
🟩 Neoplatonism
🟩 Augustinianism
🟩 Aristotelianism
🟩 Thomism
🟩 Existential Thomism / Gilsonian-Thomist realism
🟩 Classical scholastic realism
🟩 Classical natural law theory
🟩 Virtue ethics
🟩 Moral realism
🟩 Catholic personalism
🟩 Realist phenomenology
🟩 Analytic Thomism
🟩 Patristic philosophical theology

🟨 Stoicism
🟨 Neo-Thomism
🟨 Manualist scholasticism
🟨 Suárezian scholasticism
🟨 Scotism
🟨 Bonaventureanism / Franciscan scholasticism
🟨 Nouvelle théologie / ressourcement theology
🟨 Transcendental Thomism
🟨 New Natural Law theory
🟨 Continental rationalism
🟨 Cartesianism
🟨 Leibnizianism
🟨 Kantianism
🟨 German idealism
🟨 Hegelianism
🟨 Phenomenology
🟨 Hermeneutics
🟨 Existentialism
🟨 Christian existentialism
🟨 Romanticism
🟨 Vitalism
🟨 Traditionalism / perennialism
🟨 Analytic philosophy
🟨 Ordinary-language philosophy
🟨 Political realism
🟨 Classical republicanism
🟨 Distributism
🟨 Integralism
🟨 Monarchism
🟨 Conservatism
🟨 Psychoanalysis
🟨 Depth psychology
🟨 Evolutionary psychology

🟥 Epicureanism
🟥 Sophism
🟥 Skepticism
🟥 Nominalism
🟥 Ockhamism
🟥 Voluntarism
🟥 Mechanism
🟥 Materialism
🟥 Naturalism
🟥 Reductionism
🟥 British empiricism
🟥 Humeanism
🟥 Lockean liberalism
🟥 Social-contract liberalism
🟥 Utilitarianism
🟥 Consequentialism
🟥 Kantian deontology, taken as a complete moral system
🟥 Marxism, not the economic theory
🟥 Liberalism as an anthropology
🟥 Progressivism as a metaphysics of history
🟥 Pragmatism
🟥 Logical positivism
🟥 Scientism
🟥 Relativism
🟥 Moral anti-realism
🟥 Nihilism
🟥 Nietzscheanism
🟥 Freudianism, taken reductively
🟥 Behaviorism, taken reductively
🟥 Structuralism
🟥 Post-structuralism
🟥 Deconstruction
🟥 Postmodernism
🟥 Critical theory
🟥 Process philosophy
🟥 Transhumanism

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Antoni Gaudi died 100 years ago today.

He was 73 and spent over 40 years working on La Sagrada Familia (completing 1/4th of entire basilica).

Gaudi’s method for designing it was genius: he hung movable weights on strings and let gravity do the work of showing the proper angles and force vectors for his nature-inspired look.

He then flipped the model upside down to see how to build the columns and arches.

Also inspired by forests and sea life, the legendary architect once said, “there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.”

In the final years of his life, Gaudi’s was solely focussed on the project. His diet was lettuce leafs dipped in milk. Lived inside the Basilica and barely slept on a simple cot.

He died after getting hit by a tram while walking aroudn Barcelona. His clothes was so ratty — underwear held together with safety pins — that passerbys thought he was homeless.

The city held a massive funeral for him with 30,000 people packing the streets.

While 3/4 of La Sagrada Familia was undone, Gaudi left enough plans (models, drawings) for future generations.

La Sagrada Familia was largely dormant for a few decades 1930s-1960s (Spanish Civil War, World War II, early Cold War).

Some of Gaudi’s designs were so ahead his time that it would require the development of aeronautical design software to complete his vision.

Gaudi once remarked that “my client” — referring to God — “is not in a hurry”.

There is still work to be done but a major milestone was completed in February: workers installed a cross on top of La Sagrada Familia, making it the tallest church in the world (172.5 meters or 566 feet).

It’s also the tallest structure in Barcelona. But Gaudi intentionally capped the height because “human creation should not pass God’s work.”

The Montjuïc Hill in the southwestern part of Barcelona is ~570 feet.

***

Video link: https://t.co/LmmquC3dlT

[The New Atlantis @tnajournal]

The people have spoken and we have answered.

Dinergoths, Part 2. Out today:

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

It comes up a lot in the practice of metaphysics!

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."

—C.S. Lewis (Preface to The Screwtape Letters)

[Nostalgia @NostalgiaFolder]

When the teacher pulled these out you knew it was about to be a good day

[Joseph Bianchi 🤺 @JBeOnKey]

@dwarkesh_sp @dilipkay I just wrote an essay about the morality of this yesterday: https://t.co/b1TBrrd9RE

[Ali Yahya @alive_]

Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI:

Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible.

1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun.

2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love.

Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI.

Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.