David K 🤔

Human being. Lover of nature & art. Practitioner of curiosity. Player of music & taker of photos. Retired techie turned flaneur.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

The UFO/UAP enthusiast claim Eric describes in paragraphs 2 & 3 is straight outta Doctor Who. The craft is basically a TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Or: Totally And Radically Driving In Space. Depending on which Doctor you ask. ☺️

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

There is a very regular set of USG stories around UFO. They don’t add up. At least for me.

One set of stories is about the perimeter of a “Craft” at human scale having a 2D boundary of a 3D volume the way the 1D rolled circular lip of a child’s balloon bound bounds a 2D area.

When you blow the balloon the area bounded becomes vastly larger while the lip does not. Similarly the 3D volume is reported to be vastly larger than the enclosing surface suggests.

There is an analogous 4D spacetime volume enclosed by a 3D boundary picture which is harder to picture for non-physicists/non-mathematicians.

Such bending is *technically* possible with just ordinary general relativity. But it is made prohibitively difficult because the mass/energy to do it is pretty much inconceivable. That is what is being discussed here.

A) There is never a leading relativist in the picture.

B) There is never a serious post-relativistic discussion. Never.

C) No one acts like they have ever heard of US concern of microscopic UFOs when I bring it up. We are always looking for craft at human aviation scale when you could be invaded by a craft with an arbitrarily large volume inside a profile no bigger than a microbe hypothetically.

D) There is never a science explainer video.

E) The energy implications would attract instant financial investment.

Etc.

It’s just low effort mid-level physics ghost stories told at a national security campfire. Like the three letter agencies version of Stag-O~Lee or the Yeti in the middle of a claimed loss of US sovereign airspace.

I sound like a broken record for a reason. There is something dumb here that doesn’t progress. That failure to progress the conversation is a *signature*. It sounds like BS.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

Such a skilled storyteller, bringing the reality of the Islamic Revolution to the West.

Reminded me of my parents' stories about fleeing the Cuban Revolution as children.

"Died of sadness," per her family.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

Also from last night.

Pic 2: northeast part of the pond taken over by black-bellied whistler ducks. They make quite a noise!

Pic 3: Big Boi the gator lookin' decidedly crusty. He'd probably been hangin' out in the same spot for hours. Gators are mostly layzee creatures.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

After such a dull day weather-wise it was lovely to see some late color. Three-shot pano.

[signüll @signulll]

it's unclear if most ppl realize that ozempic’s real effects on culture haven’t even started.

cuz what you’re seeing now is the first order effects & some glimpses of second order where ppl get thinner & some products experiencing a resurgence.

but the second & third order effects are where things might get gnarly due to the fact that these drugs seem to dampen desire itself across a surprisingly wide range of behaviors (it's not universal or obvious yet). food is simply the first & most obvious target.

liek what happens when millions of people suddenly spend less time thinking about consumption? what happens to industries built around cravings, indulgence, impulse purchases, addiction loops, or even certain forms of entertainment?

entire sections of the economy assume humans will remain governed by the same reward circuitry we’ve had for thousands of years. if these drugs meaningfully alter those circuits, we’re talking about a tool that edits human motivation.

we are gonna see thinness but in a lot of diff ways it seems like.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

Not all yesterday evening's pics were about lights. ☺️ Pic 2 is a three-shot vertical pano with most of the third shot cropped away.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

50mm lens.

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

@Devon_Eriksen_ "The humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious."

—Martin Amis

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Under capitalism, socialists are free to build socialism.

Under socialism, capitalists aren’t free to build anything.

Nothing stops a group of socialists pooling their money, forming a company, and splitting every wage and every pound of profit perfectly equally.... Or to donate all profit to the government.

It’s legal. It’s easy. Owning the means of production is as simple as setting up a company.

Marx wrote his manifesto before the invention of limited liability companies. Back then “seize the factory” meant seizing it from the handful of families who could afford one.

That argument expired the day anyone could start a company with limited liability, raise investment and hire who they want.

Socialists are free to lead by example and demonstrate their system works. They can out-recruit, out-motivate, out-build and out innovate based on their ideas if they like. It would prove the philosophy works. Capitalism will happily host their experiment.

The fact that nobody does this tells you a lot.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

Took these pics well after sunset. 25mm lens (~33mm "equivalent"). Old camera, slow exposures, some image artifacts.

Pic 4: 1/2 sec. handheld exposure. Had a doctor's appointment yesterday afternoon so no coffee all day. ☺️ Unintentional shadow selfie too!

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

35mm lens. All variations of the same basic photo. (I like that photo myself. ☺️)

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks It’s Building God

@Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.

@bgurley:

“Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do.

And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory. Quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that.

But then they just got so loud that I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory.

I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory.

The more I dig, I've met people who, I dare say, think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about, building a species that's superior to humans.

Dario wrote this blog post called ‘Machines of Loving Grace.’ It was based on a poem.

The last stanza of the poem says, ‘I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors, and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.’

Sounds like an overlord to me.

And then in Dario's post, he says, ‘It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans…’

So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.”

Jason:

“These are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is.

They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species.

It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.”

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

Pentax 43mm lens last night.

Pics 2 & 3 are from similar locations but taken ~25 minutes apart.
Pic 4: on the way home.

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

Of all human qualities, intelligence is relatively common. Much rarer are the character traits that make intelligence useful: curiosity, humility, and agency.

[Riva @rivatez]

Sutton’s respect for epistemology is so refreshing in a sea of AI hubris.

You can’t reduce intelligence to its narrowest form - mimicry- and expect to solve all of science. For frontier science the relevant data is precisely what hasn’t been observed yet. You can’t supervise-learn your way there

IMO the right tagline for the current AI paradigm isn’t ‘The Singularity is Near’ but Newton, reworked:

You are boys playing on the sea-shore, diverting yourselves in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before you

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

73mm lens.

Pic 2: lens wide open (f/1.5). I've taken variants of this shot before as lens tests, but this time it was the sky that caught my eye.

Pic 3: four-shot pano. I normally overlap pano shots by ~50% but this time not nearly as much. Full size pic is 83mp.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

Nifty clouds yesterday evening. 35mm lens. Pic 4 is a three-shot pano.

[David K 🤔 @Tele1953]

@olivertraldi “more diverse perspective” == kow tows to Identitarian dogma. The polar opposite of diverse. It’s of a piece with “we rank human beings by skin color, and if you object to this *you’re* the racist.”

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

As a liberal who was unpersoned during peak woke for dissenting from the orthodoxy on things like cultural appropriation, my measured opinion is that the people who perpetuated that culture simply should never have power again; they clearly can’t be trusted with it