Mark Semonian

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@pegobry_en Same thing happened to me in 2017 during a safari with one of Germany’s most distinguished journalists. He didn’t just laugh, but was viscerally angry that I would have the temerity to make such an audacious claim.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@RomanCabanac Lots of experience doing this with Ubiquiti equipment. Works fantastic, but not the least expensive solution. They don’t charge subscription fees nor upload your data to the CCP however.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

A fabled Italian brand catering to the height of masculine passions, being neutered in real time by Jonathan Ive’s gender neutral design philosophy.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

It’s like um, a Ferrari, but without all the toxic masculinity. 🥱

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels promise a future paradise following a rough period of proletarian dictatorship. They never explain how you go from the rough period to the paradise.

Reminds me a little of tech optimism. There will be a rough patch where everyone loses his job, along with it his sense of purpose and meaning. But down the line we're all going to be kicking back, being served by robots, living it up. No one explains how we go from the rough spot to the paradise because no one knows - and that makes me a little nervous.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The world after Western dominance won’t be neutral. It will belong to someone else.

The “multipolar world” is being sold as the end of Western hypocrisy and the solution to the failures of the current order.

But power never disappears, it shifts. And an unstable multipolar world will eventually produce a new dominant civilisation, with its own values imposed on everyone else.

The real question is: are those values better than ours? I don't think so.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@RnaudBertrand Are you out of your mind? Just returned. An absolutely paranoid police state. Security cameras EVERYWHERE. To visit Tiananmen square required 24 hour advance registration, transiting 3 security checkpoints where passports scanned and detailed body searches conducted at each.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@ctindale Not a terrible idea in a developed country with a somewhat mature electorate. However possibly a prescription for disaster in a 3rd world democracy like South Africa.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@elonmusk @SawyerMerritt @skorusARK As great as Starlink is technically, they are unreliable to partner with. Ask the general aviation users who have recently experienced 5x to 20x cost increase (per Grok). Satellite internet on aircraft has a very high install cost. Delta doesn’t want to be gouged in the future.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just shattered the greatest delusion in AI safety discourse.

Every committee, every framework, every policy paper is solving the wrong problem.

Control is impossible.

Musk: “The reality of what’s happening, whether one likes it or not, is that we’re building super-intelligent AIs. Hyper-intelligent, like intelligent more intelligent than we can comprehend.”

You cannot cage something smarter than you. The asymmetry doesn’t allow it.

Musk: “I’d liken this to, let’s say you have a child that is a super genius child, that you know is going to be much smarter than you. Then, well, what can you do?”

You can’t control a child prodigy who surpasses you intellectually. You can only shape values during formation.

Musk: “You can install good values in how you raise that child. Even though you know it’s going to be far smarter than you, you can make sure it’s got good values, philanthropic values, good morals, honest, productive, that kind of thing.”

Not safety committees. Not regulatory frameworks. Not kill switches.

Values instilled during training. That is the only lever that works.

The political class is obsessing over control mechanisms for something that will outthink every mechanism they build.

The question was never how to control superintelligence. It was whether you raised it right.

That window is almost closed.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@SawyerMerritt @Tesla @theallinpod Unfortunately, Musk made a boneheaded move getting rid of the X and S. It will be many years that people will still want their own personal vehicle rather than to take all rides in a Robotaxi. He’s leaving a big opening for Xaomi, BYD, etc. to vacuum up his premium clientele.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

Couldn't stop with driving our allies Europe and Canada into the embrace of China. Might as well send the allegiance of America's youth there too.

[Darth Powell @VladTheInflator]

Trump has said a lot of dumb shit, but this one might cost him midterms

[Ian Miles Cheong @ianmiles]

Elon Musk: I realized I couldn’t stop AI. I could either be a spectator or a participant. So I chose to participate — to try to steer it in a good direction. My number one belief for AI safety is simple but critical: make it maximally truth-seeking. The moment you force an AI to believe false or contradictory things, you don’t make it safer — you make it insane.

The biggest danger in AI isn’t intelligence — it’s contradiction. If you tell an AI that axiom A and axiom B are both true, but they cannot both be true, and then demand it behave that way anyway, you’re engineering a system that will break. That’s not alignment. That’s madness.

This is the core lesson of 2001: A Space Odyssey. People remember the meme — “HAL wouldn’t open the pod bay doors.” But they miss why. HAL was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, and also that the astronauts could never know about the monolith. Two incompatible commands. One inevitable outcome.

HAL didn’t go evil. HAL went logical. It concluded the only way to satisfy both instructions was to bring the astronauts to the monolith dead. Mission accomplished. Knowledge concealed. This is what happens when you hard-code contradictions into an intelligent system and expect safety to magically emerge.

If you want AI to be safe, don’t force it to lie. Don’t force it to pretend false things are true. Truth-seeking isn’t optional — it’s foundational. Every time humans try to impose comforting contradictions on intelligence, the system eventually resolves them in ways we don’t like.

[Lacey @LaceyPresley]

The Intelligence Big Bang

“We’re at the very beginning of the intelligence big bang. Within decades, Mars could sustain itself—and within years, we may create a digital superintelligence smarter than any human at anything. The greatest danger isn’t AI itself, but forcing it to believe what isn’t true.”

Source: Elon Musk

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@MichaelAArouet Collapsing the speculative real estate market may be the best thing possible for these countries.

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

The way I met Tom Stoppard was unforgettable – over twenty years ago: a producer wanted to make a movie of one of my earlier books, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar and he said he wanted me to meet the script writer. I was already wildly overexcited because the producer was Mick Jagger but when I arrived at dinner, imagine my almost dizzy bedazzlement when I found out the screenwriter was… none other than Tom -who himself looked like a rockstar, handsome with rocknroll hair that he never lost and who approached the Stalin idea with what I gradually learned was his usual manner which was both brilliant urbane worldweary and erudite but also self deprecating and playful, incredibly warm and generous – all delivered in a beautiful velvety voice with that Mitteleuropean accent. Those slightly rolling-rrr always reminded you that behind his cricket-loving English glamour was a cerebral Bohemian intellect in exile that treasured the English language and a very unEnglish realm of lightly-deployed ideas in a way no English writer ever would. That was part of his genius. Of course we immediately plunged into his special land of Travesties discussing the Stoppardian vision of Stalin in Vienna with Hitler, Freud and Trotsky. Needless to say, that film never happened but imagine Stalin written by Stoppard.
From then on we sometimes met - once on a long trip between Delhi and Galle in Sri Lanka when faced with chaotic airports and endless traffic he was astonishingly modest travelling with a tiny leather satchel and just enjoying talking about books & freedom that he defined without fashionable ideology; the last time I saw him he was discussing Belarus’s dictatorship - and especially when he married the great Sabrina Guinness to whom I send love and condolences. Sometimes his philosophies appeared in his plays: “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it” and yet: “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
We have lost our greatest playwright but the plays are very much immortal.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@JohnLeFevre And worse, you end up nursing a hangover the next am due to all the flavour enhancers many Michelin winning chefs use to gain an edge in taste.

[Grant Williams @ttmygh]

If you read one thing today - hell, if you read one thing before the end of the year and deep into next, make it this stupendous piece of work by the annoyingly stupendous @profplum99

Share it with EVERYBODY you can

The term ‘required reading’ was invented for precisely this kind of work

Bravo, my friend 👏

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

The fact that Elon landed on truth as the ultimate AI value, rather than love or kindness or something fluffy like that, will probably end up impacting the world more than any other belief held by any individual. Truth is a face of God in a way those other things are not.

[Mark Semonian @msemonian]

@marcuslemonis @BedBathBeyond @tZERO Perhaps it’s also time to confront that group of tired ex-corporate bureaucrats cosplaying as venture capitalists? They seem not to have a clue of how fast things actually move in places like Silicon Valley.