seb

[seb @oneseabasket]

4 :(

[Fernando Borretti @zetalyrae]

The post-singularity world is so utopian you need invasive brain surgery to cope with the utopia.

[karthik @akbirthko]

this but for AI

[seb @oneseabasket]

Spot on. Trans/Posthumanism is a fundamentally misanthropic ideology.

We ought to forcefully reject the idea of Superintelligence.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Here’s a radical idea: Let’s not let Big Tech Oligarchs replace the human race.

[seb @oneseabasket]

@coryunbroken @PopCrave Big ass vacuums

[seb @oneseabasket]

every once in a blue moon x the everything app brings me metaphors that mark twain would be proud of

[mike @mikeswartz_]

@hassanrahim they're trying to cut open the bird to find the song

[Dan Huot @danhuot]

ha holy shit

[JP @jpbrammer]

ChatGPT saying "twin" and "NAHHH FR"

[seb @oneseabasket]

@needGod_net The AI slop is a real “know them by their fruits” moment here lol

[Vatican News @VaticanNews]

Pope Leo XIV’s surgery to remove a “small, localized nodule” from his lung was successful and he has returned to his room in the Gemelli Hospital, according to the Holy See Press Office.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.

- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.

So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

[seb @oneseabasket]

@peachtard This is a pastoral judgement (notice “inadmissible” not “sinful”).

The reasoning is that the death penalty was permitted because of the safety of the common good. Now that ways of containment and justice are present that can protect w/o the state killing, it’s now “inadmissible”

[seb @oneseabasket]

@_quodvultdeus You’re not understanding what the pope is declaring. It’s inadmissible now, not always has been immoral.

Death penalty was permitted for the public good and safety. We have other methods to ensure this now, therefore it is inadmissible to continue the practice.

[Catholic Sat @CatholicSat]

What a lot of people in the replies are missing is that the Church teaches that the death penalty is morally licit but in this day and age it is inadmissible, due to reasons the Pope lists.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption. #NoDeathPenalty

[one dozen bats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

the Catholic Church racking up PR wins by saying shit like “we shouldn’t bring back public executions” and “your Claude app isn’t sentient”

[Max Spero @max_spero_]

I believe it is corrosive to the soul to abuse technology that was made in the image of man

[seb @oneseabasket]

@TCzajka Continual Learning will happen, but the Pope is making a metaphysical claim.

Memory (in this context), lived experience, and recognition in this sense require the soul. That's what distinguishes humanity.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Intelligence must draw on memory. The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences. Everything that is good begins “with the Spirit” and thus possesses a breath, a dynamism and a sense of communion that, once experienced, are engraved upon the heart. https://t.co/Ij21tkb3qT

[Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) @MIT]

We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: https://t.co/ODkbdIsoHw