PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔

Mostly interested in the world…

[鈴森はるか 『haruka suzumori』 🇯🇵 @harukaawake]

🇯🇵🇺🇸 Happy Independence Day to our friends in the United States!

This song is very popular here in Japan and many artists often cover it. I particularly love this one.

[David Maywald @DavidMaywald]

Why the ‘boy crisis’ is more than just a school problem, from The National at CBC News:
https://t.co/aP9pFJTCbp

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

Someone out there seems to know that an LLM is not an AGI, nor will better LLMs ever be AGIs.

[PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔 @PilRocket]

@dpfdpf If you let leaders wriggle out of institutional neutrality by saying things like “this is my personal view”, you don’ get any institutional neutrality.

[American Optimist @AmOptimistShow]

EPISODE 156: Coleman Hughes Takes on America's Most Contentious Debate 

@JTLonsdale sits down with @coldxman to discuss his new @uaustinorg course: "The Legacy of Slavery" 

(00:00) Episode intro

(01:40) Teaching the Legacy of Slavery

(06:20) Coleman's journey from Columbia to UATX

(08:30) Dr. King vs Derrick Bell

(11:20) Racial disparities by IQ and salary

(13:00) Thomas Sowell & the Real History of Slavery

(19:00) America's Founding Hypocrisy

(24:00) Will the Left cancel Dr. King?

(26:20) Understanding the 1619 Project

(30:25) Breakdown of the black family

(37:20) Is America wealthy because of slavery?

(43:50) Are you worried about woke AI?

(45:40) Three solutions for racial progress

[Big Brain AI @realBigBrainAI]

Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, explains how LLMs are quietly dismantling our deepest assumptions about consciousness:

He argues that large language models have done something philosophy and neuroscience couldn't:

"In terms of consciousness, I have to say, the idea that there's sort of something magic that goes beyond physics that leads to sort of conscious behavior, I kind of think that LLMs kind of put the final nail in that coffin."

His reasoning is that LLMs keep doing things people assumed they couldn't:

"There were all these things where it's like, oh, maybe it can't do this, but actually it does. And it's just an artificial neural net."

Wolfram then challenges a core assumption about conscious experience: the feeling that we are a single, continuous self moving through time.

"I think our notion of consciousness is a lot related to the fact that we believe in the single thread of experience that we have. It's not obvious that we should have a persistent thread of experience."

He points out that physics doesn't actually support this intuition:

"In our models of physics, we're made of different atoms of space at every successive moment of time. So the fact that we have this belief that we are somehow persistent, we have this thread of experience that extends through time, is not obvious."

Then Wolfram offers a striking origin story for consciousness itself.

@stephen_wolfram suggests it traces back to a simple evolutionary pressure: the moment animals first needed to move.

"I kind of realized that probably when animals first existed in the history of life on Earth, that's when we started needing brains. If you're a thing that doesn't have to move around, the different parts of you can be doing different kinds of things. If you're an animal, then one thing you have to do is decide, are you going to go left or are you going to go right?"

That single binary choice, he argues, may be the seed of everything we now call awareness:

"I kind of think it's a little disappointing to feel that this whole wanted thing that ends up being what we think of as consciousness might have originated in just that very simple need to decide if you are an animal that can move. You have to take all that sensory input and you have to make a definitive decision about do you go this way or that way."

The takeaway is unsettling but clarifying.

If LLMs can produce complex behavior from simple rules, then consciousness may not be a mystical add-on to physics.

It may just be what happens when a layered enough system has to make a decision.

[PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔 @PilRocket]

Hi Randy. I don’t know why more people aren’t realising that Elon doesn’t benefit from TSLA doing well in the lead up to the spaceX IPO. TSLA in the doldrums means more retail investors will sell to jump to the next big thing, namely SpaceX. IPOs are risky, so the smart money holds onto its TSLA stock knowing that the good news is likely to start flowing again post the SpaceX IPO.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

David Friedberg today on @Tesla:

"I think we're going to look back one day and have this laughing observation that Tesla started out as an electric car company, ended up becoming an autonomous car company, and the autonomous competency lead to the robotics revolution. Even if the socialist ban robotics on Earth, you could ship all those robots to the Moon and they could get to work and create an entirely new manufacturing frontier for our civilization, for humanity."

(via @theallinpod)

[Alan Smith @AlanJLSmith]

Have you watched The Manosphere with Louis Theroux on Netflix?

As the Dad of a 17 year old son, I think @jimmycarr is spot on.

What do you think?

[Melanie Phillips @MelanieLatest]

Thank you @elonmusk for recognising my work. I thought you might like to hear a little more about it.

[Sean Plunket @SeanPlunket]

Why on earth do politicians bother posting such disingenuous virtue signalling rubbish to prove their dei credentials?

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Monday debrief

Won a 7am HR meeting in 11 minutes

Failed a CAPTCHA four times to access my own money

Got retweeted by a senator

My wife said "you can't keep doing this"

Including the internet apparently

And it's only Monday

My wife is putting the kids to bed

The dog is staring at me

I'm on the couch reading DMs from strangers about their marriages

This is not where I thought my career would take me

And yet here I am

A CFO with identified adjectives and 40,000 stakeholders who need me more than my family does right now

Wednesday's department-wide meeting is on my mind

HR thinks they're going to fix the adjective situation

They don't know the controller changed his to "Tired"

Or that the analyst is on version 4 of his adjective application

I keep finding errors

I didn't start this

But I'm not stopping it either

Wednesday is going to be a problem

Plz fix. Thx.

Sent from my iPhone

[PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔 @PilRocket]

@TeslaBoomerMama @AlpacaAurelius It’s weird that they don’t acknowledge transportation automation when the autonomous cars are already on the roads???

[PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔 @PilRocket]

Yet another incentive for hyperscalers to get off world…

[Emad @EMostaque]

Current events are just a prelude.

If any AI lab gets close to AGI of course the government would take control of it.

You could even argue a government would be failing to do its job if it didn’t…

Thoughts?

[Winston Peters @winstonpeters]

The official New Zealand Parliament account has announced it will no longer be posting on X.

Why has such a significant and serious decision been made without consulting parliament?

This is how freedoms are lost - by unilateral decision making being made by moral virtue signalling - where someone seeks to do one thing but causes damage to other freedoms.

This platform is a mechanism for Parliament to communicate and update New Zealanders.

Neither the Clerk nor the Speakers Office are the moral compass for 123 MPs let alone 5.3 million New Zealanders.

[Heurisko @Heurisk0]

My wife was in a meeting yesterday, and out of 100 managers, there were 8 men. I told her the result of this will be an entire generation of embittered young men who will want to burn it all down. She sees it, and she knows it.

[PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔 @PilRocket]

Yes, the internet announces every happening a million times and many happenings that never happen. Yes, it’s an attention economy that captures and monetises our hopes and fears. Yes, it’s good, even essential, to regularly escape the endless urgent warnings and constant analysis. But none of this means that nothing happens or that the world would be better if we all abandoned the global for the local or if we all just stopped watching. This was a beautiful essay but it lacks balance.

[Liam Out Loud @liam_out_loud]

Identity Politics and Therapy Culture are the two of the main reasons society is going crazy.

They invert the collective mode of conduct.

Instead of judgement, intention, and values, people operate on emotions, impulses, and grievances.

[PilRocket 🤔🤔🤔 @PilRocket]

@ianbremmer @mehdirhasan But isn’t that the point @ianbremmer ? When you’re that unpopular, you shouldn’t get to stick around.

[Omid Djalili @omid9]

One thing the situation in Iran has made crystal clear is that whichever country, regime, group or political ideology, no matter how vile, disgusting or repressive, however many people are massacred or exterminated, as long as they are anti-West, specifically anti-US (and by extension anti-Israel), they will have the unquestioning support of the majority of the liberal left and the entertainment world.

The same “progressive left” who happily live in the west, profit from its relative freedoms, yet turn their activism on and off like a switch, or in some cases, even make a living out of it.

It is disappointing and exhausting.

But grateful to all those who have spoken out. Especially in the comedy community. It takes a lot of guts to do so when everyone around you is looking the other way.