Joshua S McConkey

Researcher of society, high tech, theology, fatherhood, markets. Curiouser and curiouser.

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

Blind Faith vs Biblical Faith

“Faith is believing when there is no evidence.” Or so they say.

I have heard this from non-Christians and even from some Christians. It’s not always meant as a slight. People sometimes say it as if believing something with no evidence is a form of spiritual virtue, or even to be admired.

They are wrong. 🧵

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

@Google @googlegemma Single video card models are only about 16-18 months behind flagship LLMs.

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

@Criminalsimpson Am I so out of touch with my own sexuality?
No, it's the dogs who are wrong.

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

@MikeReissWriter If he did, you would complain that he is putting on a variety show during a war.

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

@JOBhakdi That example is exactly what I would want it to do... clearly optimized for truth.

[roon @tszzl]

on some level if you want civilization to ascend to a new level you need your AIs to do things that are not legible to you and maybe not even strictly obey you, in the same way that if you hire a great new ceo you give them a lot of autonomy to transform the company according to their own plan, even one which may not immediately read as a winning strategy (imagine the board of directors of Apple firing and rehiring Steve Jobs years later - except the board of directors are chimpanzees)

all else equal, companies and organizations that hand more of themselves over to machine intelligence will outcompete ones that demand the corrigibility and legibility tax of human oversight and human design. it is not a stable equilibrium and requires some sort of vast cooperation scheme if you’d like to enforce it

real asi alignment has to operate at a deeper level than oversight, control, or human corrigibility

[Antoine Rousseaux @AntoineRSX]

Get Hermes Agent running in less than 5 minutes.

No API key, No bot token, No SSH.

Just running with the skills and plugins adapted to your needs.

[Antoine Rousseaux @AntoineRSX]

Run your own Hermes Agent?
Good call.

Mine launched a business.
Already $20k mrr.

Bad path: VPS, SSH, API keys, 4 days of pain.
Good path: FlyHermes.

I use it. 24/7 cloud.

[China Beige Book @ChinaBeigeBook]

Pentagon’s ‘Deal Team Six’ Aims to Challenge China’s Grip on Rare Earth Power
https://t.co/zylPICuae7

[Jo Bhakdi @JOBhakdi]

I often have to think back to the last WEF in Davos.

Something very remarkable happened:

Climate change was solved. Gone. Poof 💨

DEI was solved. Gone. 💨

Even migration was seemingly solved. Replacement not necessary any more ?

Look at it again - it was remarkable.

What happened ?

My suspicion is that it has something to do with AGI.

It is clear that our civilization is facing a massive economic disruption that will change the mechanisms of monetary power accumulation in fundamental ways that make climate change , DEI and migration unimportant as levers of power.

The interesting question is 1) what takes their place and 2) how right (or wrong) will the power players be about whatever new strategy is coming ?

Big changes incoming.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

“The average person lives a life of luxury that previous generations could never imagine, but because of that we dont actually taste this deeper joy that I think God intends for us.”

Most people today live with a level of comfort that would have looked unbelievable to almost anyone in history.

Food is always available, entertainment never stops, boredom can be eliminated instantly, and almost every inconvenience can be solved with a screen and a few clicks.

That’s why so many people today have everything they thought they wanted and still feel empty afterward.

The strange paradox of modern life is that we have removed many of the hardships that once burdened humanity, but in the process we also removed many of the conditions that produced gratitude, resilience, depth, and dependence on God.

A civilization drowning in comfort often becomes spiritually numb without even realizing it.

Which is probably why some of the holiest people in history voluntarily embraced hardship even when they did not have to.

They understood something we are slowly forgetting:

Comfort and happiness are not the same thing.

[Nicholasn't @nopengmi]

@briankeating @Plinz On LessWrong someone gave a great explanation:

Connectomes are the biological equivalent of what you'd get if you removed all the component symbols from a circuit schematic and left only the wires. Good luck trying to reproduce the original functionality from that data.

[Alok Kumar @Alokkumarzz]

Instead of watching an hour movie, watch this. In 14 minutes, an Anthropic engineer who wrote Building Effective Agents will teach you more about building agents right than most developers figure out on their own in months.

[Indu Tripathi @InduTripat82427]

Learn AI for free directly from top companies.

1 - Anthropic:
https://t.co/AsLXSZ5U82

2 - Google:
https://t.co/XklH2XVwla

3 - Meta:
https://t.co/MfZ6b9qQPP

4 - NVIDIA:
https://t.co/K6tfhpkMk5

5 - Microsoft:
https://t.co/MspZSPpu17

6 - OpenAI:
https://t.co/Ss3zqpwz5H

7 - IBM:
https://t.co/wADoYKb5Pm

8 - AWS:
https://t.co/jsTQYyJsj4

9 - https://t.co/7nLjPSE8Mb:
https://t.co/4lkwBZ0aPQ

10 - Hugging Face:
https://t.co/apoz0EKqpG

👇Comment "Learning" if you find this helpful.

Repost so others can take help.

Must bookmark for future reference.

[Ruben Hassid @rubenhassid]

How to duplicate yourself into Claude in a weekend:

(even if you've never written a prompt before)

1. Download the desktop app.
☑ Go to claude .com/download
☑ Set Opus 4.7 as default
☑ Turn ON Extended Thinking

2. Open Cowork mode.
☑ Cowork = where your voice lives
☑ Click the top left tab
☑ Create your "Voice" folder inside

3. Install Wispr Flow (it's free).
☑ Turns your voice → text
☑ Voice = faster and more honest
☑ Typing kills the truth.

4. Run the interview.
☑ Paste Prompt 1 from https://t.co/LyV7feh2TK.
☑ 100 questions, 7 categories
☑ Push past every vague answer

5. Compress the dump.
☑ Paste prompt 2 from https://t.co/LyV7feh2TK.
☑ 20K words → 4K tokens
☑ Save as [your_name] .md

6. Test it in a blank chat.
☑ Open a fresh Claude chat
☑ Run a prompt only you would write
☑ If it sounds like you → ship it

7. Drop it into Cowork.
☑ Move [your_name] .md into your folder
☑ Claude now reads it on every turn
☑ Every draft = your voice, automatically

8. Port it everywhere.
☑ Upload to ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini
☑ Same file = same voice in every AI
☑ Hand it to your team or ghostwriter

9. Edit it forever.
☑ Install Obsidian (free)
☑ Open Cowork as a vault
☑ Update as your taste shifts

Full guide + prompts at https://t.co/LyV7feh2TK.

(save this to clone yourself into any AI)

[Jasmin @AI_with_jasmin]

WHY I DELETED DUOLINGO.

I tried for 3 years to learn Japanese. Didn’t work.

Until ChatGPT did it in 5-weeks, for free.

Copy & paste these 6 prompts:

[NeilXbt @neil_xbt]

Andrej Karpathy could have charged $10,000 for this course.

He put it on YouTube.

The man who built Tesla Autopilot from scratch.
Co-founded OpenAI.
Understands AI at a level most engineers at Google and Meta never reach.

Sat down. Recorded 2 hours. No frameworks. No libraries. No shortcuts.

Then dropped it for free.

The gap between people who watch it this week and those who save it for later is not 2 hours.

It is everything those 2 hours quietly unlock for the rest of your career.

[Fiz @MRB_AI24]

CANCELLED NETFLIX. CANCELLED AMAZON PRIME. CANCELLED HULU.

No more $19.99 each month. ChatGPT transformed my laptop into a free streaming center.

Here are 7 prompts to create this system:

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

@XiXiDu Can disassemble other subs and do this?

Sol system should be a preserved park.

[Joshua S McConkey @elemental_j]

@Sean_McDowell Count it all joy, brethren, when you encounter suffering, for it produces (list of food character things).