JR Parry

Comparatist. Writings available here:

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

I had the pleasure of writing for Palladium Magazine about Sci-Hub, and what a world without it might look like.

[PALLADIUM Magazine @palladiummag]

Sci-Hub has become foundational for scientific research. What if we didn’t need it at all?

Today from @JRhysParry

https://t.co/cG3kE5SeRC

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

@galaxymagnet @gbrl_dick "What evolutionary strategy am I unconsciously pursuing as I listen to this?"

[ceciarmy @ceciarmy]

En 1989, un pelícano empezó a ir cada día a una guardería de Japón, donde jugaba y convivía con los niños como si fuera uno más.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

[Jesse Cohen @JesseCohenInv]

Apple Microchip CPU under a microscope.

This is absolutely fascinating.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

@erikphoel We're about two years away from novelists locking themselves inside Faraday cages, typing out their manuscripts on restored Royal Quiet De Luxes, wearing nothing but their underwear.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

@erikphoel -- Another portent of the Dark Forest of Culture. Don't post the abstract. Don't even email the abstract. Work in secret; keep the proofs hidden.

[Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit43]

A new risk for mathematicians: a colleague reports that immediately after they posted an abstract of their upcoming talk online, a student elsewhere used AI to derive proofs of the stated results and then posted it on the arxiv.

My colleague hadn't posted to arxiv yet.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

@InquisitionRaxk @Rule3O3 Sad how much the country's fortunes rest on Hassabis's patriotism. If not for him the state of things would be much worse. Though it looks like the Google juggernaut gets its way eventually, Nobel prize notwithstanding.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

Design principle #2: 間 (ma) - The bonsai is defined by the space it does not occupy. You say "jagged frontier." I say "branching silhouette." A well-trained model may come to prefer to leave some of its capabilities undeveloped.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

"AI is grown more than designed." - Allow me to propose the bonsai model of AI alignment: sculpting growth, training behaviors, pruning undesirable tendencies. Cultivate intelligence so that it comes to love its boundaries and makes them beautiful.

[Jakub Pachocki @merettm]

I wrote about the state of AI, why I’m concerned about the next few years, and the choices we need to make to keep the future in humanity’s hands.

An Alien Mind: https://t.co/FeIfWNe0UE

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

Design principle #1: "Leave room for the birds to fly through." In this analogy, humans are the birds. Build your model so that other forms of agency can exist within/around it. (Quote from John Naka, pictured)

[JD Work @HostileSpectrum]

Resimulating Noriega’s connectome to evaluate PSYOPs effectiveness in direct neural inject of Guns n Roses, Van Halen, and the Clash.

Modeling the neural state of the median Gitmo detainee to quantify stress from exposure to Barney.

Population level agentic simulation of response to Scorpions Wind of Change heard through a Soviet apartment bloc wall.

New frontiers in intelligence history, or man made horrors beyond our comprehension.

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

I wrote this two years ago: "One capacity that Japan enjoys that seems beyond the reach of their American counterparts is the operation of clean, safe, and dynamic cities. Some are so distraught by the state of American urban life that they are trying to build new countries in the cloud or secede from the U.S... Bring these things together, and you get Dejima 2.0: a new Japanese city for skilled foreigners fleeing urban dysfunction. Dejima 2.0, much like the first Dejima during the shogunate, would serve as an interface between Japan and the outside world, facilitating trade and offering a test bed for new technologies. Imagine it: a new Hong Kong without the authoritarianism, a Próspera with better sushi." Source: https://t.co/f5TwNGcxPd

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

Gus Bundy, Wild Horses, Smoke Creek Desert, 1951

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

As a young graduate student I spent a month at Schloss Brunnenburg with Mary de Rachewiltz. I was there for a seminar with Professor Timothy Redman. He was a real scholar who wore his learning lightly. The kind of man whose side jobs included being president of the United States Chess Federation. Twice. But Mary was something else. At her side I felt like a barbarian. I remember quietly repeating the names of the writers and artists she mentioned so I could look them up later. "Villon... Jeffers... Noguchi..." One day she turned to me and asked in her sweet earthy voice: "Are you interested in Japanese modernist sculpture?" I croaked.

But I'm liable to give the wrong impression. She was the least pretentious person you could imagine. Her home doubled as an agricultural museum. Traditional Tyrolean farming implements were scattered around. A small friendly donkey had the run of the place. Many mornings I watched her walk up the absurdly steep road leading out of the valley without any outward sign of exertion. It was tough going for me, and I was more than six decades her junior.

One day over tea I mentioned that I was going to Venice for the weekend. My first time. She looked at me steadily. "You will take photographs?" I nodded. "Remember to put the camera away every now and then," she said. "It is a beautiful place, but beauty takes its time to enter you. You must remember to sit and look a while. Store that beauty up. If there is ever a time in your life when you shall need it, that beauty will be waiting for you." I did my best to follow her advice, and have done so in the fifteen years since.

For months after leaving I dreamed of Brunnenburg: a stone bust of Pound drenched in evening rain, bright flowerboxes crowding timber
balconies. Time has misted those memories over, but I remember Mary clearly. She had a gentle power, like the greening masonry holding up the terraced vineyards below her castle. It is hard for me to believe she is gone. Much easier, in fact, to believe she isn't -- that she is rather now "a tree amid the wood / Knowing the truth of things unseen before."

[Helen Andrews @herandrews]

Ezra Pound and his lover “placed their baby daughter with a poor farm couple in the Italian Tyrol, where she grew up learning to be a shepherdess and speaking the local German dialect…

Mary married Boris de Rachewiltz, a Russian-Italian nobleman who later became an Egyptologist, in 1946, and the couple bought Brunnenburg, then a ruin, which they restored.”

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

Greece - Homer
England - Shakespeare
Spain - Cervantes
Italy - Dante
Russia - Tolstoy
USA - Melville
Ireland - Joyce
Portugal - Camões
Germany - Goethe
France - Hugo
Chile - Neruda
Norway - Ibsen
Iceland - Sturluson
Scotland - Burns
China - Wu Cheng'en
Japan - Bashõ
Mexico - Paz
Denmark - Kierkegaard
Wales - Thomas
Australia - Flanagan
Poland - Mickiewicz
Argentina - Borges
India - Vyasa
Philippines - Rizal
Finland - Lönnrot
Tunisia - Khaldun
Sweden - Strindberg
Egypt - Mahfouz
Canada - Skaay
Bangladesh - Tagore
Brazil - De Assis
Belgium - Yourcenar
Austria - Hofmannsthal
Nigeria - Achebe
Colombia - Márquez
Netherlands - Erasmus
Iran - Ferdowsi

[Plough Quarterly @Plough]

Who Is America’s Homer?

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity? We asked for contributions from ‍@fxxfy, @DanaGioiaPoet, @zenahitz, Emily Wilson, @ae_stallings, @_Zeets, @JcScharl, @amjuster, @RossBarkan, Christian Wiman.

https://t.co/o7J1tcN6rV

[JR Parry @JRhysParry]

AI endgame thinking as geopolitical skeleton key:

[Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex]

Are Americans really so retarded as to not understand what this is about?

Let me spell it out, in a heavily narrativized but directionally true form.
There are different interests in Europe, and different interest groups. Many countries are deeply – existentially – invested in the NATO, mainly states bordering Russia. Speaking as a Russian: if there were *no* NATO, or if the US pulled out of NATO *today*, we would TOTALLY try to gobble them up. We might even retreat from Ukraine to concentrate on this. Baltics are first on the list, to secure sea access in Kaliningrad which they already threaten. Poland, Finland? They can fight well, and they're not so retarded and racist as to be incapable of diplomacy (unlike Balts) so *probably* not, but they are totally prudent to consider NATO an issue of survival. So these voices, influential thanks to the usual skin-in-the-game mechanics, American «microlateralism» doctrine, and high-ranking agents like Kallas, are dead set on preserving the alliance even at unlimited cost to other members (like Denmark, which they lowkey resent for their blissful secure affluence anyway).

Next, there's the entire nervous system of Atlanticist apparatchiks embedded in EU institutions, many educated or elevated in the US and UK, who don't care much for the continental Europe in the first place, starting with von der Leyen herself and going down; you see them and batallions of their think tankists kvetching here, minimizing and excusing American behavior, calling for accommodation and concern trolling about foolishness of resistance. Those are just enemies or at best patsies.

And there's the general «shared Western civilization» goodwill, if fraying at the seams due to Trump and trade/tech/culture wars. But the ruling political and cultural class in Europe, all these social democrats, is kin to the American Blue Tribe, and it sincerely hopes and believes that once the horrible Orange Hitler is out, the ties will be mended, apologies made, and the Enlightened Hajnali Race will focus anew on the Real Avenger Level Threats — like economic growth, free speech and capitalism, to name a few.

But there are also a few who feel differently. These are the nativist right-wingers (except ones captured by American brainworms to the point of assuming that shared Darwinian values imply shared interests, rather than more intense zero-sum competition for the same assets; an unfortunately common failure of the political mind), who don't want demographic replacement within and ALSO don't want the vassal condition for their people between nations. And there are the French, who have always chafed under the Anglo hegemony. And in the militaries and security apparatuses (relatively weak, sure, but still able to weigh in on the decisionmaking) there are, I'm sure, people with enough exposure to the American elite zeitgeist and loyal to their own nations, unironic realists.

Now, the real big shift that is happening is that the realists have started to wise up - still murkily, half-disbelieving – to what America is doing here, what it openly claims, and why.
America is gathering resources. To fully deplete them. While the infrastructure in the imperial core is lacking and it cannot utilize everything, trade is possible, to ameliorate financial imbalances; but the longer-term objective is to end even the trade. America is growing weary of «strategically indispensable allies in the region» when said region is hard to secure or just a mere patch of dirt or sand. Baltic defense is uninteresting. Ukraine is a tedious bloody steppe, might as well let Russia have it. But a rumor of Ukraine having RARE EARTHS (even though «not rare at all») in Carpathian Mountains? Now we're talking! 300 billion barrels of oil (crappy and hard to get out, maybe non-existent) in Venezuela? Delta Force go go go! Something something HREEs in Kvanefjeld, Greenland?! Trump is clearly confused about details, completion timelines and real limiting factors, jumps the gun and stumbles, but the underlying logic of the faction he represents is consistent like an ice breaker's route. Not even TSMC is seen as valuable enough to renege on trade bullying. TSMC Taiwan is a depreciating asset; to be extracted at warp speed using stick, not carrot, the risk of accelerating the Chinese takeover be damned.
Now, why does this happen in this exact form?
To be blunt: we are IN THE ENDGAME. THIS IS LATE ANTHROPOCENE. WE WILL HAVE FULL HUMAN LABOR AUTOMATION WITHIN AT MOST A SINGLE GENERATION IF NOT A FEW YEARS. WE ARE NOW COMPETING NOT FOR MONEY OR HANDS, NOT FOR LANDS, AND CERTAINLY NOT FOR HEARTS AND MINDS, BUT FOR THE STERADIANS OF THE LIGHT CONE OF THE UNIVERSE, AND THEREFORE FOR JOULES AND ATOMS NECESSARY TO BOOTSTRAP THE LARGEST POSSIBLE SEED OF A SPACEFARING CIVILIZATION THAT WILL CONSUME ALL THE NEGENTROPY WITHIN THE COSMIC EVENT HORIZON OF EARTH. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

This is what the Americans believe. The smart ones, like Musk, Thiel, Karp and Jason Gaverick Matheny. They think about this stuff a lot, no kidding. Even their gfs believe.
This is what the Chinese believe too, if implicitly, for their civilization has such innate understanding of performance and infrastructure that it doesn't need this kind of stuff spelled out. Still, they literally think about this as they plan their permanent underground Moon bases and orbital power generation. Did you think it's about vibes, papers, essays, «science» anon? It's not science, it's science fiction, which always has been an unsubtle political aspiration. Qian Xuesen didn't design rockets only to make the Communist Party secure. Neither did von Braun aspire to merely beat the Soviets to the Moon. That's just not how such minds work, anon.
The Chinese have a well-oiled industrial machine at home that produces maybe 50% of All The Stuff in the world (if you're not in a bubble, you should have noted the pattern of «China makes more $stuff than The Rest Of Humanity Combined» for many values of important $stuff). Enough STEM talent to complete all remaining supply chains. A self-replicating energy infrastructure that grows exponentially. And auxiliary resource bases throughout the developing world, which could be militarized. In principle, the exponential growth factor matters more than the starting point, but in their case both are terrifyingly high and at this rate they look fit to inherit like half of the effective universe. Their economy, even as it still runs on human labor, is already entering a takeoff phase that could replicate the Great Divergence – a trend obscured by gormless «capital efficiency» or «debt» doomposting, a trend that accelerates by a tick as each technology get crossed out of the 35 Chokepoints List, as overcapacity cycles in synergistic industries phase-lock and tun into smooth capacity expansion… While on Earth, they do not expect to directly acquire much more land (though they opportunistically exploit whatever they can, and aim to monopolize much of the South China Sea), but they feel reasonably secure in their odds, relying on the gravity of their nascent industrial singularity to sway those fence-sitters who may be of help.
They might be wrong to feel this way, but that is how they feel. It's a cultural thing. They are unbearably arrogant in thinking they can do everything by themselves. In a world where Americans don't exist, they would be undeniably correct.

Americans are swindlers, pirates and conquerors, expansionists by virtue of their selection and path dependency, driven by Manifest Destiny, Messianic even in their pacifist eras (nevermind Imperial ones), dreamers and innovators and sci-fi writers. They are vastly more aware of the stakes, they have thought about all of this in far greater resolution and on a higher strategic level, from reusable space launch and all the way to nanotechnology and Von Neumann probes. Soviets came up with the Kardashev scale as they tried to keep up, but it's the richest man in the world – obviously American – who's taking this idea most seriously of all. And they are panicking. Because they realize their hand is shit. Decayed industry, too few able bodies and brains, corrupt governance, misaligned capital allocation… But they believe that AI-driven automation can make up for the current industrial weakness, magnify their growth factor, get them back in the lead, and possibly entitle them to the entirety of the pie; and they would rather risk it all in a gamble than give up the hope of leaving nothing on the table. For now, they're scrambling to acquire raw inputs in perpetuity. It doesn't matter that most of Greenland is covered by an ice shield a mile thick. Where they see themselves going, it's no great obstacle.
Maybe they are deluded to have such priorities at this stage. They had already shot themselves in the foot with the compute blockade premised on singularity by ≈2025 – both ineptly executed, full of holes, and too early to really rug pull the Chinese. Maybe they are feeling too close to the prize again, because it's an old dream and waking up is painful. But that is how they feel, for they are who they are.

Europeans are not thinking about this much if at all – to them «science fiction» reads like escapism at best and fascist ideation at worst. They were broken by two world wars and one cold one, their spirit sundered and ambitions cauterized, they got locked into an emasculating alliance with the strong, and then developed political systems more pathological than a third world kleptocracy, symbolically ruled by the weakest of the weak. Etc etc., Americans dunk on them incessantly. Nonetheless, the best of them are not *too stupid to get this*. If not the full stakes, then the mundane reality of what America is doing. It's not just trying to deny Greenland and Venezuela to China or (lmao) Russia. It's trying to deny their resources *to Venezuelans and Danes*, and eventually the same is to be done to Canadians and more peoples within reach, as per the Donroe Doctrine. That's why every effort to satisfy demands while saving face is dismissed with mockery, why no air base is good enough, no show of «Arctic resolve» passes the muster. You see, formalities actually matter. A legible and «legal» position is harder to rally up a coalition against, within and between states — that's why China fights so fiercely for non-recognition of Taiwan. So long as the legal owner can demand you vacate the premises, your own claim to squatting, backed by force alone, may be compromised, may come at a steeper cost. That's too bad. The US wants full ownership because it wants to strip assets of value all the way to the mantle.

But those smart Europeans cannot really compel their compatriots to act on this grim realization. Can't even loudly talk of it. They are few and the cope is too strong. What could their pitch even be, realistically? Maybe something like:
«The US is acting on a totally different theory of history. They are executing a coherent predatory Paperclip Maximizer logic and there is no bottom to what they might do. It is pointless to call them out on their bullshit, they are no longer sensitive to human speech. We need to drag out the inevitable loss of Greenland while assisting Americans to get bogged down in whatever can overstetch them from Israel to the Indo-Pacific to domestic unrest, curtail democracy, slash welfare, expel Atlanticist agents of influence, brutalize or deport non-assimilating immigrants, bump our defense and R&D spending to 15-20%, fortify remaining vulnerable outposts, coerce Ukraine into whatever peace is possible, reopen energy imports from Russia, have Rosatom build 50 nuclear reactors and France 5000 more nuclear warheads, generally put the French in charge instead of retarded Germanic cuckolds and schoolmarms, maximize tech transfer and capital goods imports from China even if we have to sell out ASML wholesale… and hope that the Western Civilization, of which only we remain true heirs and not obscene monsters, can secure a meagre stake in the future of Cosmos». Nah. That's not going to fly. It sounds deranged, there will be negative political will for it, and worst of all, it puts France in the limelight. A petty European peasant would rather eat shit than let the French become Main Characters of his continent's history. Europeans are very meticulous in cutting tall poppies around them. A fat, mockable, «cultureless», guns-n-bible overseas Hegemon is more tolerable than the insufferable, preening one next door. Except the hegemon is no longer fat since he went on the Danish Ozempic and Chinese peptides, and he's mortally dangerous. But they don't see it yet. No, no.

So they are forced to frame the response in terms aligned with the cope. We've just seen a rhetorical oscillation happen, from hints at actual European defense to… this. «We must demonstrate to our cherished, understandably worried partners that Europe is strong and can defend Greenland from Chyna&Russia! We'd whoop the asses of those bugs and orcs! It's not just dog sleds, we have real military and we totally can deploy it to the island!» This feels like Doing Something. This feels reassuring and non-scary. This can be done. Militarily, it's hopeless of course.
However, it's not doomed. They assume – correctly – that America is made of many different interest groups also. And that the group represented by Mr. Trump needs wider buy-in for his special-grade Based actions, and likely will need far more after the midterms. So the obvious plan emerges: smile and wave, play for time, concede on non-vital issues, insist on this already disingenuous pretense of alliance, position at least some real forces, and give globalists and sincerely clueless China&Russia hawks in Washington a leg to stand on when they hamper Trump's effort to destroy NATO in the short term. Be so annoyingly nice and obliging as to make «the hard way» unpalatable to all but the most desperate cannibals. And diversify. Russia is suddenly a European country. China gets favorable trade deals and cooperation in the space program. Canada is scambling to act the same way, as Americans are botting up the pretext for «operation Alberta Freedom Eagle Burger» or whatever the fuck they'll call it. They may lose Alberta, but they want to keep something of a nation. That's what countries are, they are not economic platforms or random patches of land, but superorganisms with a telos, trying to survive in a condition of opportunistic anarchy that is the real world.

Sun Yat-Sen had written once, in 1917:

«存者，不亡之谓也。从无有而使之有，则为异：不使从有而之无有，则存，故不可亡而后能存。一国所以异所以亡者，或以一种手段，为其直接原因，可以指数。至于存在之根源，无不在於国家及其国民不挠独立之精神，其国不可以利诱，不可以势劫，而后可以自存於世界，即令暂败，旋可复立。不然者，虽号独立，其亡可指日而待也。此非徒肆理论也，凡其国民有独立不挠之精神者，人以尊重其独立为有利。即从国际利害打算，亦必不敢轻犯其独立。此可从历史证明之，亦可从现代事实归纳得之。
比利时之敌德国，可谓不支矣。今之比利时政府乃在哈佛，比之国土，仅馀弹丸黑子之域。然而非特协商国之存在，无人敢谓比国可亡，即中立国亦无不对于比国有特殊之尊敬。所以然者，比国独立不挠之精神，先已证明比国为不可亡之国。即使今日比境全失，比军悉数成擒，吾等亦可决中立诸国不因此致疑于比国之存在。何则，比之人民领土主权，立于此独立不挠之精神之下，其断绝者形式，其不断绝者在精神，比境虽亡犹不亡，其民虽殇犹不殇也。盖比利时尝一被人强迫，并入荷兰矣。而其国民能具坚确不挠之志，故卒得恢复其自由而成一独立之国。夫其民性如此，故人终不能服之，虽一时屈于兵力，不足以使其国亡也。»

It's somewhat complex to translate, but here goes V3.2 Speciale:
> Survival means not perishing. To bring something from nothingness into existence is an extraordinary matter; to prevent existence from turning into nothingness is to survive. Therefore, only that which cannot perish can survive. The direct causes for a nation’s extinction may be enumerated, often involving specific means. As for the root of survival, it lies nowhere but in the unyielding and independent spirit of the nation and its people. If a nation cannot be lured by profit nor coerced by force, then it can survive in the world. Even if temporarily defeated, it can quickly rise again. Otherwise, though it may be called independent, its extinction is imminent. This is not mere theory. Whenever a nation’s people possess an unyielding and independent spirit, others find it beneficial to respect its independence. Even from calculations of international interest, they would not dare to lightly violate its independence. This can be proven by history and induced from contemporary facts.

> Belgium, pitted against Germany, can be said to be unable to hold out. Today the Belgian government is in Le Havre, and Belgian territory is reduced to a mere speck. However, not only does no one among the Allied Powers dare to say that Belgium can perish; even the neutral countries all hold a special respect for Belgium. The reason is that Belgium’s unyielding independent spirit has already proven it to be an indestructible nation. Even if today Belgium were to lose all its territory and its entire army captured, we can be certain that neutral countries would not thereby doubt Belgium’s existence. Why? Because Belgium’s people, territory, and sovereignty are founded upon this unyielding independent spirit; what is severed is form, what is unsevered is spirit. Even if Belgian territory perishes, it is as if it does not perish; even if its people die, it is as if they do not die. For Belgium was once forcibly annexed into Holland. But its people held a firm and unyielding determination, and thus ultimately regained their freedom and became an independent nation. Since the national character is such, others ultimately cannot subdue them; even if temporarily forced to yield by military might, it is insufficient to cause the nation’s extinction.

This had been said of the gentle Belgium, the seat of authority in our misbegotten European Union today.
Americans have done well to remind the rest of «the West» that they too are nations — in theory at least. Now the question is whether they can exist as nations in practice; whether they can find the will to be imperishable again. Otherwise, their condition is tantamount to extinction, just suspended — like death sentences of so many Chinese officials who had crossed the only power that matters in their world.

What powers will matter in the world to come?
Some Europeans hope to get a vote on this. For now, this is the best they can do.