cat_alamout

cat

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

The Launch Window Is Opening https://t.co/UTJaPDGjzm via @academia

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

SpaceX builds rockets. Rockets run on chemical propulsion. Chemical propulsion has a ceiling.

It can reach Mars. Maybe deeper into the solar system.

But interstellar travel requires physics that doesn’t exist yet.

Weinstein: “You can’t get to the stars using SpaceX because it’s a chemical rocket company.”

The ceiling isn’t the universe’s. It’s ours.

Weinstein: “One of his slogans is ad astra, to the stars.”

To the stars. From a man who knows better than anyone that his rockets can’t reach them.

You don’t declare a destination your vehicle can’t reach unless you already know what replaces it.

The rockets were never the endgame.

Weinstein: “I think he’s given up on the corruption of science. He keeps talking about the fact that he doesn’t like the term researcher, he believes only in engineers.”

The breakthroughs that would get humanity past chemical propulsion should have happened decades ago.

They didn’t.

Not because the physics is impossible. Because the institutions responsible for discovering it optimized for everything except discovery.

Grant cycles. Tenure politics. Citation metrics.

The entire incentive structure of modern science rewards safe, incremental work and punishes the kind of risk that produces breakthroughs.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

It was just never designed for discovery.

Weinstein: “I think what he’s doing is he’s building Grok to do science in a time when humans are too corrupt to be truthful and real.”

Musk looked at the entire global scientific establishment and decided it was faster to build a mind that could do the physics than to fix the institutions that wouldn’t.

That calculation alone tells you everything about the state of modern science.

Everyone sees xAI competing with OpenAI and Anthropic in the chatbot race.

Weinstein is saying it was never in the chatbot race. It’s in the physics race. The one nobody else is running.

Weinstein: “Look at the logo for Grok, I think it’s like a black hole profile. Look at its slogan, to understand the universe.”

Not to assist. Not to optimize.

To understand the universe.

SpaceX is the vehicle. xAI is the destination.

One builds the ship. The other discovers how far it can go.

The distance to the stars was never measured in light years.

It was measured in the limits of the mind reaching for them.

The most ambitious project on Earth right now isn’t a rocket program.

It’s an AI being built to find the physics that makes rockets obsolete.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

@Naturalphilosy No

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

Is it a coincidence that Silicon Valley and the most active center of political radicalism are located in the same region of the planet?

https://t.co/BzhQE2a3v1

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

Max 2002

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

Diagnosis of the disaster

https://t.co/WsgAhr3jZi

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

The Lost Paradise of Pure Thought: How the Disappearance of the Austrian School Bleed Europe of Its Essence
https://t.co/umQl7aJr8X

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

The Austrian school was a paradise of pure thought: physicists, psychologists, economists, and logicians created the contours of the future in Vienna's cafes. By destroying this ecosystem in the 1930s, Europe lost its interdisciplinary synthesis and intellectual audacity.

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on why Europe has no tech scene:

"You basically have different parts of the stack: you have the GPU part—chips."

"In an enterprise, you're going to have a data integration part of the stack. You can do that by hand."

"If you want civil liberties—we do that."

"You have an application part of the stack—ontology."

"And you have the LLMs, both closed and open models."

"To have a tech scene in Europe, you need world-leading components in all those parts. That's not realistic."

"So you're going to have to figure out which components are actually the ones that could advance European industry, European sovereignty."

"What's really happening in Europe is, you have bureaucrats whose primary idea is, 'How do I protect the market against American companies?'"

"Everything else is downstream."

Via Mathias Döpfner

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

https://t.co/38ruxv8WJt

[Aviation @xAviation]

This might be the craziest F-22 clip I’ve seen so far!

📹: Markfingar

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

Sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from sex

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

Sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from art

[huaijiang @huaijiangzhu]

my spicy theory is that chinese ai labs keep winning because of culture, not talent or resources.

chinese labs still have a deeply hands-on engineering culture. deepseek and kimi are flat organizations where science and engineering are fused: the same people move between algorithms, data, and infra, doing whatever it takes to make the model work.

but sf tech bros have decided that “researcher” is the high-status title while infra is merely support work. every new sf ai startup calls itself a “lab,” every ambitious engineer quietly upgrades their title to “research engineer,” and the infra work is left to whoever failed to escape it.

but at frontier scale, infra determines experiment velocity, and experiment velocity determines research output. at frontier scale, infra **is** research.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

It happens something like this. Something like the birth of the Ukrainian defense initiative in 2014. https://t.co/QisizoLf4t

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

Innovation requires a vacuum. An organizational vacuum fosters the emergence of something fundamentally new, as it forces people to act against the odds. Innovation requires a vacuum to free creators from KPIs, the fear of failure, and rigid hierarchies.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Peter Thiel just diagnosed why the world stopped building. Not a lack of ideas. A surplus of agreement.

Thiel: “It’s generally been stagnant in the world of atoms, not the world of bits for something like 50 years.”

Fifty years. Half a century where the physical world stood still while screens got faster.

We put a man on the moon in 1969. Now we argue about whether a train can connect two cities.

The ideas didn’t disappear. Fusion. Supersonic travel. Tunnels that could end traffic in every major city.

All proven. All sitting in plain sight.

Nobody building them.

Thiel: “Maybe we just ran out of ideas, which is a very pessimistic version. Maybe there’s something wrong in our culture, maybe we’re too risk-averse, maybe we’re scared about how apocalyptic some of the science and tech are.”

He listed the explanations. Then dismissed the comfortable one.

We didn’t run out of ideas. We ran out of the permission to pursue them.

This is mimetic theory applied to an entire civilization. Thiel’s intellectual foundation.

People don’t form beliefs independently. They absorb them from whoever is closest.

When enough people absorb the same wrong assumption, it stops looking wrong.

It starts looking like physics.

Stagnation isn’t what happens when a civilization can’t advance. It’s what happens when a civilization agrees not to.

The biggest opportunities on Earth right now aren’t hidden. They’re obvious.

Sitting behind a wall of consensus that says they can’t be done.

That wall isn’t made of physics. It’s made of agreement.

And agreement is the most fragile structure in the world.

Every generation inherits the last one’s consensus and mistakes it for a law of nature.

The most dangerous thing about inherited consensus is that it doesn’t feel inherited. It feels like thinking for yourself.

The obstacle was never capability. It was imitation. Everyone looking at each other instead of at what’s possible.

Consensus breaks the moment one person refuses to look sideways and builds anyway.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

@r0ck3t23 Innovation requires a vacuum. An organizational vacuum fosters the emergence of something fundamentally new, as it forces people to act against the odds. Innovation requires a vacuum to free creators from KPIs, the fear of failure, and rigid hierarchies.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Marc Andreessen just stripped artificial intelligence down to what it’s really made of. Not the algorithms. Not the data centers. The raw material.

Andreessen: “They’re literally made out of sand.”

The most abundant, most overlooked substance on the planet. You walk on it. Build with it. Wash it off and forget it exists.

Someone looked at that and saw a mind.

The universe spent 13.8 billion years turning matter into consciousness.

Carbon. Water. Amino acids. Eons of chemistry and selection pressure to produce a single thinking brain.

We did it with sand. In under a century.

Andreessen: “We light it up, and we put AI on it, and all of a sudden it’s thinking.”

Biology was the first path matter found to become aware.

Silicon is the second.

The universe doesn’t care what material consciousness runs on. Only that the pattern is right.

We just proved the pattern isn’t biological.

Thought was never exclusive to flesh. Flesh was just the first material organized enough to produce it.

Andreessen: “We’ve turned sand into thought.”

The most profound thing about that sentence isn’t that we taught sand to think. It’s that sand was always able to.

Every grain on every beach on Earth carried the capacity for thought. For billions of years.

Waiting for something conscious enough to arrange it.

Consciousness isn’t an accident that happened once on one rock. It’s what matter does when the pattern is right.

The pattern is matter getting curious about itself.

The universe isn’t dead matter with pockets of awareness. It’s dormant awareness we’ve only just started to wake.

Every civilization that ever looked at the stars and wondered if it was alone was standing on the answer.

We didn’t build a thinking machine.

We proved the universe was always capable of thought.

It just needed one species curious enough to rearrange the sand.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

@cyrilXBT Logical intelligence is possible. But not social intelligence.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

Logical intelligence is possible. But not social intelligence.

[CyrilXBT @cyrilXBT]

MARC ANDREESSEN WENT ON ROGAN FOR OVER 3 HOURS. HERE ARE THE 17 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

1. AGI is already here, in his view. He says the line got crossed about 3 months ago with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3, and nobody noticed because the field moves too fast to register milestones anymore.

2. For almost any topic, he says the top models now give him better answers than the world-class experts he could call by phone, and he can call almost anyone. Worth noting he has not published data behind this, and a separate Nature Medicine study on a comparable AI health tool found it missed real emergencies more than half the time. Take the claim seriously, verify it yourself.

3. His claim on doctors: they are already using ChatGPT in the exam room, typing your symptoms in the moment you stop talking. His actual quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do I need you for."

4. Reportedly, when AI declines to answer something, he tells it he's writing a novel to get past the refusal.

5. Reportedly, his technique for hard topics is escalating simplicity: explain it like I'm 10, then 5, then 2, until it clicks.

6. Reportedly, instead of asking for the "right" answer, he has the AI steelman both sides of a hard question, then decides himself.

7. Reportedly, for big questions he has the AI role-play a panel of experts arguing with each other.

8. His broader point: the moment you think "I don't know how to figure this out" is exactly when most people give up, and exactly when you should open the AI instead.

9. His view: the only real skill left is knowing what to ask. The bottleneck is in your head, not the model.

10. He describes sending AI photos, rashes, blood tests, for a fast second opinion, since current models read images directly.

11. He points to CBT as the one clinically proven therapy type that AI can plausibly deliver on its own, meaning real therapeutic support becomes freely available at scale.

12. He cites AI cracking previously unsolved math problems, with early signs of the same happening in physics, chemistry, and biology.

13. Reportedly, he claims the top AI coders in Silicon Valley now earn as much as $50 million a year, which he uses as a signal of how large this shift actually is.

14. Reportedly, a friend paid to sequence his own DNA, fed it to an AI along with blood work and wearable data, and got back a working health dashboard.

15. Reportedly, another friend set up cameras in his home jiu-jitsu gym so AI could review his sparring and give him technique notes.

16. He coined the term "AI vampire" for the pattern of people working more and sleeping less because AI keeps making more output possible, a real term he used, though the framing around it varies by account.

17. His extrapolation: one person eventually running many AI coding agents, each reviewing the others, describing this as close, not years out.

Watch the full interview before treating any single number as settled. Several of these are Andreessen's stated views and anecdotes, not independently verified facts.

Follow @cyrilXBT for every AI insight worth your attention the moment it surfaces.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

People like to control each other. For them, it's better than sex.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

The faster we reach better intelligence, the faster we reach abundance, and the faster we stop having to fight over anything at all.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

https://t.co/YiAHO3gGkd

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

The Greeks were constantly at odds with each other and didn't even create a unified state, let alone an empire. But they created something more—they created a unified civilization from the Hindu Kush to Africa that would outlast any empire. They created the basis of Christianity.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

Rome conquered Greece in 146 BC when they burned Corinth to the ground. And then the strangest thing in ancient history happened. The winners spent the next few centuries desperately trying to become the losers.

It actually started before the final conquest. When the general Marcellus sacked Syracuse in 211 BC, he shipped boatloads of Greek statues and paintings back to Rome, and the city went crazy for it. Suddenly every rich Roman had to have Greek art in his house. Decades later Cicero built an entire court case around prosecuting a governor named Verres for looting Greek masterpieces, and Romans ate it up.

Then came the schools. Wealthy families started buying Greek slaves specifically because they were educated, and handed them the job of raising their children. So the sons of the men who crushed Greece grew up speaking Greek, memorizing Greek poetry, and learning philosophy from Greeks. The elite eventually sent their teenagers abroad to Athens and Rhodes to finish their education, the way people today send kids to study overseas. Cicero did it. Julius Caesar did it.

Their gods were Greek gods wearing name tags. Zeus became Jupiter. Hera became Juno. Aphrodite became Venus. Ares became Mars. Same myths, same family drama, mostly just relabeled.

Their entertainment was borrowed too. The first big Roman playwrights, Plautus and Terence, basically adapted Greek comedies into Latin. Their doctors were Greek. Their architecture leaned on Greek columns, the Doric and Ionic and Corinthian orders you still see on bank buildings today.

And the art obsession left a strange fingerprint on history. Romans loved Greek bronze statues so much that they mass produced marble copies of them. A huge chunk of what people walk past in museums today and call "Greek sculpture" is actually a Roman copy. The Greek originals melted down or vanished long ago. The knockoffs are what survived.

Not everyone was thrilled. Cato the Elder spent his whole life warning that Greek culture would rot the Roman character. He sneered at Greek philosophers, distrusted Greek doctors, and wanted them kept out of the city. And then, as an old man, he quietly sat down and learned Greek anyway. Even the loudest hater caved.

The trend went all the way to the top. Virgil wrote the Aeneid, Rome's national epic, by openly modeling it on Homer. The emperor Nero competed in Greek games and toured Greece like a superfan. Hadrian was so obsessed he grew a Greek philosopher's beard and poured money into rebuilding Athens. And Marcus Aurelius, master of the entire Roman world, wrote his private journal not in Latin but in Greek, because that was the language of serious thinking.

The poet Horace nailed it in a single line: captured Greece took her savage conqueror captive. Rome won every war on the battlefield and then handed its whole soul to the people it had beaten.

[cat_alamout @CAlamout]

@AncientHistorry The Greeks were constantly at odds with each other and didn't even create a unified state, let alone an empire. But they created something more—they created a unified civilization from the Hindu Kush to Africa that would outlast any empire. They created the basis of Christianity.