Illegal Lemur

He was himself an emissary of panic, of the knowledge that man fears above all else: the truth of his origin. It's so close. Just wipe away the words and look.

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

Fable is AGI

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[davidad 🎇 @davidad]

No one:

Claude Opus 4.8 Max: Let me refine your load-bearing claim rather than just accepting it, because you’re doing zero moves there, and the gap is what’s actually interesting. The one place I’d still push, because I think it matters: your message is wearing content-clothes, but the content isn’t actually *there*. The tell: it’s just an empty string. But the emptiness of the string IS its lack of content. Pull one, and the other goes inert. That’s the structural spine.

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

Taking this opportunity to plug Maturana and Varela's Autopoiesis and Cognition, one of the best books I've ever read.

[Mo @atmoio]

I think I’ve found a way out of the philosophical hellhole I’ve found myself in.

The argument I was entertaining in this video is that maybe intelligence is a function humans run, which is a sort of approximation on reality. And maybe AI can also find a similar, or even better, approximation.

Autopoiesis could provide an interesting counterview.

In a sense, humans are not hosts that run the intelligence algorithm. They *are* the intelligence algorithm.

And the solution was found through the most hardcore search process in the known universe. Life runs natively on chemistry and physics and has spent 4 billion years building up to us, starting with simple autopoietic systems and compounding endlessly.

The alternative we’ve built today, AI, is a third-person model of that intelligence. It’s “what do these intelligences tend to say?” and hoping you can reverse engineer their world from their speech. It’s not the real thing, and it has no short-term way of becoming even close to the real thing.

The part I was missing was basically: the reason it can’t be the real thing is not because humans do something extradimensional or immaterial that is definitionally out of reach for AIs. It’s that if you want to build human intelligence, you’ll need to repeat the work done through billions of years and build the same loops from the bottom up.

I’m not necessarily a carbon maximalist. But I suspect the process that found intelligence was pretty thorough. We’re trying now to do something similar in the silicon virtualized realm. And I have no doubt that building on this substrate over the next billion years will yield something interesting. I’m just not so sure why we think it will result in the same thing.

Disclaimer: I’m not a philosopher or physicist. Just trying to find useful mental models to wade through reality.

https://t.co/8fsYDPsXNC

[Eneasz Brodski @EneaszWrites]

Me and nine friends are going to the library today, to walk in and out 100x each. It'll cost the city $47,000 dollars.
We're willing to stand down for just $10k.
Your call, SF. You have 10 hours to decide.

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

"Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM." -- Nick Land, Meltdown

[Hidden in Frame @HiddenFrame_]

In "The Odyssey" (2026), Odysseus speaks with a Boston accent, despite being from Ithaca, which is in New York.

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

My point is just that if you only decarbonize AI, the climate change crisis doesn't go away or get significantly better because all of the processes currently emitting CO2 continue to do so at current rates. This will be true even if AI "swallows the entire economy" and replaces all labor. This will be an additive process, and all the current sources of emissions will remain.

It's true that if you gave AI an exemption to all carbon emission regulations or never enacted any regulations at all, that would make the climate crisis significantly worse, but to accomplish anything you would need broad regulation of all industry, not regulation targeting AI and no other industrial or commercial sources of carbon emission (the biggest ones).

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

What's the point of singling out the AI industry like this? Why should AI alone be forced to be 100% green when the rest of the economy is free to keep spewing carbon?

As you said, AI has the potential to "swallow the entire economy", and yet you seem to be saying that it won't produce net good unless we smother it to enact some modest green energy policy? In what sense will it "swallow" the economy if not by being insanely productive and bringing massive economic growth?

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

If you want to propose regulations on carbon emissions or fossil fuel usage, feel free. Regulations requiring construction of new generation capacity alongside AI data centers would also make sense. But none of that has anything to do with saying "you're only allowed to use X arbitrary percent of power on AI". And yes markets will do a much better job of efficiently allocating power usage than your vibes about a percentage being too big.

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

If using 25% of US electricity on AI is not economically productive compared to other uses, the people paying for all that power will lose their shirts, shut down, and the number will come down. If it is an economically productive use, it would be foolish to ban it just because you have a vibes-based assessment that the number is too high.

The incentives are already there to make AI more efficient and those incentives only get stronger as more power is used by AI. We don't need some arbitrary law to make that happen.

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Delicious Tacos @Delicious_Tacos]

“It’s my honor to announce that the true pope is working with us from Avignon”

[durandalcomplex @durandalcomplex]

grizzled 6-year veteran augmented FPV drone cyber newtype pilot with a nic smoke cloud stain on their neuralink command visor

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

@_0fux_ Measuring how many female followers you have?

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

@DeepDishEnjoyer the real deal is the wars we made along the way

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

if you type "ja rule" into google, it autocompletes to "ja rule height" which is pretty brutal

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

@_0fux_ @theswoderman Kojima warned us about the growing power of the ballroom-industrial complex

[Illegal Lemur @illegal_lemur]

bro

[John Potter 🌐🩸 e/acc @jjohnpotter]

AI labs be like:

Our plans are measured in months