David 🔮

Keep learning. Reject polarization. Seek understanding.

[6529 @punk6529]

1/ On p (doom)

tl;dr

a) Everyone is making up the numbers
b) nobody knows anything (least of all the experts),
c) don't worry about it
d) there is nothing you can do to stop it
e) most things you can do if you "worry" will end up being deeply counter-productive to your own interests
f) on the margin, there are a couple of things you may consider

2/ p (doom) is the probability that the AGIs/ASIs kill us all

People in the AI space have a lot of estimates about this, ranging from very low to absolute certainty that it is going to happen.

You see them quoted in the news like this "Famed AI safety researcher / economist thinks that there is a 33% we are going to die but a 66% chance we will live in luxury techno-communism"

3/ I am here to reassure you that the number is definitely between 0% and 100% but other than that, all the other numbers are completely made up.

4/ True ASI is a gap in intelligence relative to us that is larger than you have from your favorite pet.

Your pet may love you, may cuddle with you, may have some type of understanding that you are their "human" but has no useful views on LLMs or NFTs

5/ Likewise, if ASI is real which is what all these p (doom) scenarios assume, then a human economist's assessment (circa 2026) of p(doom) is about as useful as your cat's view on how Saylor is going to wiggle himself out of his empire of vibe-coded financial instruments.

If your analyst insists otherwise, you can just tell them "well, it seems like you are not a true believer in ASI, if you think you can model an uber-intelligence of 600 IQ with your puny 140 IQ"

6/ Separately, people have estimates about which models may be dangerous to bring into the world.

This is actually more useful because it allows you to see how well predictions age.

Famously, Dario thought GPT-2 was "too dangerous" to release to the world and the OpenAI Board got all worked about the safety of GPT-4 class models and fired/unfired Sam broadly, putatively for that reason.

I have no doubt these are all very smart people who know a lot about AI and mean very well, but obviously in retrospect that idea that GPT-2 and GPT-4 were some super danger to the world was, well, "extremely not true"

7/ Again, this is not a criticism. I sympathize with the people who are ushering in perhaps the most important technology in human history.

It is a large responsibility, obviously risk is not zero, and they are naturally at some level worried at a personal, human level about the consequences if things go wrong. I am not sure I would want that level of responsibility.

And because they are mathematically oriented people, one way to deal with this anxiety is to try to tame it with numbers and formulas.

It is a math whiz's way to get comfortable with uncertainty, a form of coping mechanism. It is fine, just don't take any of the specifics seriously.

8/ I have been very tech-forward in general for a long time, I use $50K of inference each month and so naturally people ask me about AI.

Mostly they ask me
"6529, aren't you worried?"

My answer is:
"and what good would it do if I was worried?"

Will Xi get a report that I am not sleeping so well in my (air-conditioned, thank you very much) southern European bedroom and change China's industrial strategy?

Will Elon notice that I am stressed and cancel the data centers in space?

No, none of this will happen. All that will happen is that I will be less happy, less productive and less of a contributor to my friends, family and society at large.

8/ This is the most important societal technology in human history, for both economic and military purposes.

Nobody is going to stop working on it, nobody can risk stopping unilaterally and the dynamics of testing/verifying make it hard / impossible to enforce a global ban.

9/ If you get worried, you will do many things that are counter-productive to your own interests, such as:
a) lobbying against data centers in your country
b) lobbying for regulations to limit AI in your country
c) not using AI yourself in your life

10/ By analogy, will be doing the following:

It is 1850, some European has shown up in your country with a gun and you are still at the "bow and arrow" stage of military technology.

You naturally get alarmed by guns (they suck and are scary) and decide to:
a) ban production of guns in your country,
b) ban Europeans from selling you guns and
c) ban yourself from learning how to use a gun.

11/ Obviously all of this is deeply against your interests, but very welcome by the European with a gun.

I remember when GPT-4 came out and the Italian regulator threatened to ban OpenAI from selling it in Italy.

And all I could think was "FFS, your real risk is that the US government will ban OpenAI from selling you GPT 8; you should be lobbying for an access agreement, not a banning agreement"

Turns out I was wrong and this has happened with GPT 5.6

12/ If you think that ASI/AGI is scary (like guns) and your geopolitical opponents have ASI/AGI, I regret to inform you that the correct move is to learn as quickly as possible how to use, deploy and ideally make your own ASI (the latter now out of reach for most countries)

13/ "6529, this is defeatist, if the people just unite, we will elect officials that will put ASI in a proper regulatory framework"

Yes, we will build on humanity's long-standing success in getting everyone to turn in their knives, guns, tanks, fighter jets, ballistic missiles, drones and nuclear weapons to the 3rd grade schoolteacher by recess.

You go ahead and let the Pentagon and PLA to turn in their AIs

14/ Also, since we mentioned regulation, your cat and your dog and your goldfish are pleased to inform you that they have developed a new regulatory framework for DeFi and look forward to Uniswap coming under their control and jurisdiction

15/ "Wait, do you think there should be no regulations on AI" - no, I have no doubt the Pentagon and NSA will have plenty of discussions with the frontier model providers on a variety of topics above my pay grade.

What I am saying is that you specifically are unlikely to have the security clearance to productively contribute to those discussions, unless that you are currently involved in fighting nuclear proliferation and bioweapons.

16/ What I mean is this: I see that >50% of people in Europe and some very large % elsewhere are going to read these p (doom) type essays and also a bunch of gross mathematical errors about how much water data centers use or whatever and conclude that they specifically should not use AI and they should discourage their co-citizens from doing the same

Which is very counter productive for them and the organizations they work for and their countries and will do literally absolutely nothing to change p (doom).

16/ You see, I don't know what p (doom) is but I can tell you what p (someone-is-going-to-compete-with-you-with-AI) is and that p is 100%.

That someone may be a personal "competitor" or a "company" or a "nation-state"

17/ As with all major technology change (and if ASI is real, this is the biggest one of all), going early may be a big win, going fast follower may be ok and going late could lead to "extinction"

History has not been kind to companies or countries that "missed" an industrial revolution.

The EU has missed the internet altogether and is no longer a techno-economic peer to the United States.

18/ If the hard case, the doomer case of ASI is real, then no non-ASI-enabled organizations and societies will survive. It is impossible to compete without ASI with a competitor with ASI.

You have to have your own and you have to believe in a world of balance of power.

Should ASI be real, one sole ASI is extraordinarily dangerous to the world. A vast bazaar of ASIs may possibly generate some balance of power.

19/ We will find all this out in time, but in any case, it is hard to imagine that it is "your" personal / corporate / national interest to be the one without AI capabilities in that world.

The very best case is that you will be a charity case in that world of gods-on-earth.

The worst case is you will get a sympathetic paragraph in the future history books about how it was not very neighborly when the drone swarm disabled your national infrastructure and you had to accept very unpleasant terms to keep the lights on.

20/ I think my view is probably closest to OpenAI's view if I had to pick - that models should be deployed and diffused often, giving society the change to absorb change incrementally and as broadly as possible.

And the open-source models are a good check on the ecoysystem.

21/ So, what can you do personally? Two things:

a) Learn and use, as discussed above. It can only help you personally, there is no chance it will hurt you personally

b) the number #1 medium-term risk from AGI/ASI is an engineered respiratory virus. that is this weekend's thread. hardening your life systems for that scenario is probably helpful on the margin

22/ tl;dr we are going to live the most interesting time in human history together, it is going to be a wild ride, it is better to be a proactive participant, and given all the above, you might as well decide to enjoy the ride

🫡😀

[David 🔮 @DKiblerEspresso]

@1xharsh 2

[RD @RogerDickerman]

https://t.co/Kh8GOnIb0Z

[6529 @punk6529]

1/ On the 6529 Network Museum

The Memes are a form of decentralized funding protocol - of art, of science, of other things that we want to fund.

The selection is fully decentralized and the execution, mostly but not fully decentralized.

(For now, someone has to press a Trezor button ultimately for the mint to start, though this will change eventually.)

2/ Is this interesting? Is this just specific to The Memes or is the first example of a broader concept?

Well, obviously it is the latter. Today, I would like to propose a second demonstration of something that can be fully decentralized, in this case, a museum

3/ The 6529 Network Museum is a museum that is collectively curated and "owned" by the 6529 network, aka the people who have accrued TDH, aka at a first approximation the meme card holders

4/ By "owned", I mean owned the way the Louvre is owned by the French people, not owned the way I own punk6529.

In other words, I mean "held in perpetuity by the network" +/-, on behalf of the network, but not for any particular member of the network (myself included)

5/ The network museum will not as a general rule sell pieces, it will not distribute eth to network members or anything of the sort. It will be a smart contract ultimately that is controlled by the network forever.

6/ For now it is 3 of 5 multi-sig SAFE with 5 of us charged with transitioning in it to the TDH controlled smart contract - @6529er @itsjpower @gratusmasculus and @HugoFaz

7/ Now the interesting question - how do you run a decentralized museum - we have a theory on how to start. @6529er and I submitted a Meme Card today with a proposed theme for the first collection of the Museum. Any money he and I receive if the Meme Card is selected will be used to fund a network selection and acquisition of pieces from artists within the proposed theme.

8/ Whether or not our proposed collection is good will be determined by the network by TDH.

If our proposed Meme Card and, by extension, collection is selected, the pieces to be collected will also be selected by the network by TDH.

Once they are selected, they will be purchased as newly minted CC0 1/1s for the museum and the meme card will show a compilation of them.

9/ I think (and I apologize in advance for this) that this is pretty smart.

It took me me quite a bit of time to figure out how to do this, but I like the outcome.

a/ Anyone can submit a Meme Card to do this (and I hope people do)
b/ the network decides if they like the collection
c/ the network decides what 1 of 1s to buy
d/ the artists get a 1 of 1 in an extremely permanent collection and distribution to a larger group via the Meme Card compilation
e/ the Meme Card minters get a meme card and an edition of interesting work.

10/ Also, the fact that we are only buying, not selling and not fractionalizing, simplifies many otherwise complex issues.

I know this is going to confuse people, but it all depends on how you look at it.

The purpose of the network is to perform the functions of the state, not of a private individual or company.

11/ Nobody would expect the Smithsonian to be flipping its pieces on eBay or to give a dividend to every American and so the same logic applies here.

12/ There is more detail here: https://t.co/Q8W2bll0By

13/ In any case, we will see how it goes - let's see what the network thinks about all this and if it votes for the card - if so, I think we will learn some interesting things

[6529 @punk6529]

spent the afternoon with smart, capable non-accelerationist people and, I dunno, I feel like I am living on a different planet than them.

for all its flaws, thank god twitter exists.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

- Drafted a blog post
- Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours.
- Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing!
- Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite.
- LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true.
- lol

The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

[David 🔮 @DKiblerEspresso]

@zigmarillion This is amazing. Honored to have it in my collection!

[David 🔮 @DKiblerEspresso]

@1xharsh gm

[David 🔮 @DKiblerEspresso]

@1xharsh gm

[David 🔮 @DKiblerEspresso]

@1xharsh gm

[batsoupyum @batsoupyum]

Alright folks one last update and a few announcements. From here on out I'll be sending out updates case-by-case. The support continues to be fabulous 🙏

- The first callout by @musicalnetta is coming very soon. Again, follow her to participate

- I've created groups for the folks who have pledged financial support to offer our assistance. We need better scaffolding to help collectors along and this is our attempt to do it.

- In the next few days I'll be launching the instagram account

- @goppie has built a fabulous website almost ready to go. I expect that to launch soon as well

Lots more to do.... and here are yet more people who have stepped up:

Artist Support:
- @NuwanShilpa
https://t.co/V2nNpzdQ3e

- @Hadi_art6
https://t.co/LyzUHycxU0

- @reylarsdam
https://t.co/VFkXJtFP0X

In-kind Support:
- @TransientLabs will highlight some of the artists on their site and offer curatorial notes

- @whitewallsapp have offered to create a channel specifically dedicated to this curation

- @ALLSHIPS will do a feature once a month on the artists

The past few days have seen an energy unlike I've seen here since 2021. Only this time it feels organic and real and sustainable. Thank you all for the support! We're pushing this forward and not stopping♥️✊

[andy jones @andy_l_jones]

i am glad this chart is public now because it is bananas. it is ridiculous. it should not exist.

it should be taken less as evidence about anthropic's execution or potential and more as evidence about how weird the world we've found ourselves in is.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[batsoupyum @batsoupyum]

I'm going to spend $100k this year buying cryptoart from artists trying to get established. It'll come out to around 1E per week. It's not nearly enough but hopefully it helps.

@musicalnetta, who is way better at this than I am, will be helping me. Here's how it works:

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

A lot of people quote tweeted this as 1 year anniversary of vibe coding. Some retrospective -

I've had a Twitter account for 17 years now (omg) and I still can't predict my tweet engagement basically at all. This was a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet that I just fired off without thinking but somehow it minted a fitting name at the right moment for something that a lot of people were feeling at the same time, so here we are: vibe coding is now mentioned on my Wikipedia as a major memetic "contribution" and even its article is longer. lol

The one thing I'd add is that at the time, LLM capability was low enough that you'd mostly use vibe coding for fun throwaway projects, demos and explorations. It was good fun and it almost worked. Today (1 year later), programming via LLM agents is increasingly becoming a default workflow for professionals, except with more oversight and scrutiny. The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software. Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally my current favorite "agentic engineering":

- "agentic" because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time, you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight.
- "engineering" to emphasize that there is an art & science and expertise to it. It's something you can learn and become better at, with its own depth of a different kind.

In 2026, we're likely to see continued improvements on both the model layer and the new agent layer. I feel excited about the product of the two and another year of progress.

[Schmrypto ☎️ @schmrypto]

I'm proud to present the final trailer for An Accursed Share!

This is my love letter to our crazy space and the culture we're building, and I'm so grateful to everyone who has supported my work over the years!

[SuperRare @SuperRare]

Migrating from a platform that went dark?

Don’t let your works vanish with it.
https://t.co/q3JxvHFWHu → import

[Sam Spratt @SamSpratt]

Unfortunately, due to its closure, you should withdraw your Masks and Players off of Nifty as soon as possible.

There are a few hundred remaining and I would encourage everyone to keep them close for the future.

There are a tremendous amount of caring and brilliant people in motion as we speak - in and out, high and low - who are all, off the timeline, answering the bigger questions in the air right now. On our end, we have had a plan in place since we first began The Monument Game as it relates to continuity and media migration that extends through Masquerade. As these conversations unfold, it’s become clear that’s not universal and there are a number of ways our path and learnings will touch the broader preservation efforts. My confident hope is that the work being done and all involved at Nifty and around them can continue to band together to do just that.

Anyone that has inquiries on asset withdrawal, please reach out to [email protected]

[NODE @nodefnd]

NODE exists to serve artists defining digital culture, but major exhibitions only tell part of the story.

OCCUPY is our open channel for new and emerging work. A way for artists to get on our radar and access professional-grade infrastructure.

If selected, your work runs on our screens at our global headquarters in Palo Alto and you join a network of artists around the world.

Learn more: https://t.co/K9VR8mz7GC