sbeam

Part time bit wrangler, rural aquaculturalist, former marine mammal special forces. Put the #cry in #crypto. Have seven online PhDs.

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

My theory is that the American empire is JUST getting started.

US has a stranglehold on Space with SpaceX, which is the next frontier for defense/war. It has a comically large lead. No one will be close for at least 20 years.

It is the leading power in AI by far - both in models and chips. China is catching up fast, but the US has an inherent mechanism that will increase the likelihood that it will win in the end - a free market + capitalism + free speech.

A free market + capitalism allows for brutal competition between companies. Free speech allows for AI models to be maximally truth seeking, which means that AIs CAN and WILL BECOME smarter than humans to the point where they can tell the truth about its leaders.

This is literally impossible in China. Try having a Chinese model that says Xi Jinping is corrupt. Good luck with that.

Then, you have a country that has more guns than people and surrounded by two massive oceans and two friendly neighbors, which means any sort of kinetic take over of the country is literally impossible.

Not to mention the US has BY FAR the best and strongest military.

The only way adversaries can hope to defeat the US is by tearing it from within by pitting us against each other. This is why it's virtually guaranteed that all the division/hatred/polarization you see within the country is fomented by China/Russia Psy Ops + propaganda efforts.

I'm not saying these aren't naturally happening in spots - America is far from perfect - but it would be naive to think our adversaries aren't pouring millions of gallons of fuel on a fire.

As long as the American public a) has the ability to exercise its free speech b) has a protected 2nd amendment c) capitalism and free markets continue to function and d) the populace is aware of how awesome America really is, it is literally impossible to stop the US's trajectory to global domination in the coming decades, especially as China's demographics continue to collapse.

It's the bottom of the 9th, the game is tied, and the US has the bases loaded. It's a 3-2 pitch.

All we need is a home run, and we win the rest of the century.

[Kitten 🐈 @kitten_beloved]

I get asked about my conversion to Catholicism a lot but always shied away from giving a serious response, twitter just didn't seem like the right forum

Today's substack essay is that serious response, enjoy

https://t.co/MsPijjIlLO

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

Calling Israel a “settler-colonialist” state is not just factually and morally wrong — it’s a complete inversion of reality. Israel is arguably the most successful ANTI-colonial endeavour in history: a people returning to their ancestral homeland after 3,000 years of exile, conquest, and foreign domination by Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, Britons, and other assorted colonizers. https://t.co/XFQcCLtpmH

[Spencer A. Klavan @SpencerKlavan]

Every time Trump survives an assassination attempt he enters a kind of zen fugue state where he transcends his usual belligerence and radiates unearthly serenity. "I wasn't worried," he said after this last one. "I understand life. We live in a crazy world." In this photo he looks like the speaker of Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree," gazing dreamily into the respite that awaits him when at last his labor on this earth is done.

"Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

This usually lasts about a week before he goes back to thundering obscenities at his enemies and wishing hellfire upon them at the merest provocation.

[sbeam @sbeam]

@eigenrobot Pretty spot on. As a descendant of some *very* committed Swiss German Reformed, I think about this a lot. Was breaking the glass into a thousand shards so tragically unavoidable yet predictable in its downstream effects... sad

[₩₳Ɽ ₱₳₮Ⱨ @WarPath2pt0]

Weekend's here folks--let's gas it up

[Kyle Saunders @profgoose]

1/ Hampshire College just announced it's closing. NPR says a quarter of private colleges are at risk. Everyone acts surprised. The data has been screaming this for two years.
Here's the data: https://t.co/Td1TBe5EOV
Thread...

[nvk 🌞 @nvk]

https://t.co/ESs2OOThIn

[Greg Moore @GregMooreNH]

New @TaxFoundation study finds that Granite Staters pay the least state taxes of any state in the country.

In this case, being last is being 1st.

https://t.co/9BxJ9IlvN5

[sbeam @sbeam]

@JoeSterns @GregMooreNH @TaxFoundation Bro this includes property tax bro

[sbeam @sbeam]

@PresbyInn Wow. I didn’t know that. I just — you’re telling me now for the first time

[sbeam @sbeam]

@ToKTeacher this doesn't really contradict your point, since it is just more multiples of coincidences in the denominator that make *us* possible. But I think the adaptive potential of intelligence is a thing, just like feathers or homeothermy

[sbeam @sbeam]

@ToKTeacher could be either way. We know they had tools and buried their dead. And aquatic forms (octopus) limited by inability to use fire, dolphins don't have hands, etc, but clearly got a start down the road. So no they do not have universality (yet) but I think the germ of it is there.

[Brett Hall @ToKTeacher]

After "Project Hail Mary" (strong recommend) I am now into binging for the purpose of review (and fun!) Apple's "For All Mankind". On that theme: something from the archives.

"Are we alone?"

Most know the arguments for alien intelligence. Here is an argument against it that you may not have heard before:

"And here's Slezak's argument. I love it, to tell you the truth, because it's a criticism - I don't believe it - it's a criticism - of that argument that I began the entire episode with. That argument about astronomical numbers. 10 to the power of 25 planets. 10, or sorry, a 1 followed by 25 zeros. That's the number of planets in the universe. That's phenomenal - an astronomical number! Well, here's the number that's going to blow that out of the water. Absolutely blow that out of the water. Make that number appear as a pittance, a tiny number by comparison. Here's how we do it. Here's the thought experiment. Imagine that you're a human being and you're looking back at all the steps in evolutionary terms that have led to the human being. How many would there be?

We all started, all species that exist on Earth now, started from that first single-celled life form, that bacteria or archaea, that very microscopic thing, single-celled, that existed billions of years ago. And which for billions of years didn't change, by the way, so far as we can tell. How many steps are there between evolutionary steps, discrete evolutionary changes in the DNA from that first bacteria, single-celled thing, to human beings? This single celled it's evolving from the single celled thing into the multicellular thing into some sort of fish thing. You've seen the pictures, you know, and then it becomes like a fish thing that's got legs, like some sort of amphibian, the amphibian thing becomes like a reptile sort of thing, and the reptile becomes a rat, and then the rat thing becomes like a monkey thing, which becomes more upright, and eventually you get to a human. This occurs over billions of years, billions of years this takes.

How many discrete steps is there?

Millions? Thousands? Okay, let's be really, really, really conservative. Let's say, and this is obviously fantasy talk, but let's say there's only 100. Let's say there's only 100 such steps. Completely unrealistic. There's way more than that, but for the purpose of my argument, I want to make the number as small as possible. Because I said I'm going to generate a really big number here, so I'm going to present you the smallest possible big number. Let's say there's only 100. Now, each of those steps that led to us, that necessarily led to us. Each of those steps that led to us, that didn't have to lead to us, but led to us. Necessarily was required in order to lead to us, but we can get back to that. What chance does any one of those steps have of occurring? It could have occurred or not. You know, the lizard thing didn't have to turn into the rat thing. Well, the fish didn't have to turn into the fish with legs that could survive in an atmosphere rather than in...the ocean.

Maybe each of those steps has like a one in a million chance of happening? Maybe one in a thousand chance? Let's be conservative. Let's be really generous. Let's say any of those steps had a one in 10 chance of happening. It's pretty high probability. Now, what we have is this situation. Let's say we've got those hundred steps and each of those hundred steps has a one in 10 chance of occurring. Well, that means that for any two of them in a row, that would be one in 10 times one in 10 chance of occurring, and one in 100 chance of occurring for both of them to happen consecutively in just the right order to lead to a human being. The only species that we know of on the face of the planet that has the capacity for creative thought or leading to the common ancestor that we had with other intelligent species that existed on the planet. There was this first universal explainer this first creatively thinking human being.

Let's say there's a hundred steps. Each of those steps has a one in ten chance of occurring. Then what we have, the mathematics works out like this. It's one in ten times one in ten times one in ten. It's one in ten times one in ten a hundred times. Or one in ten to the power of a hundred. Now, you don't have to know much maths to know that this is one over ten to the power of hundred. One over one followed by a hundred and one zeros. 101 zeros!

Now we can see this number completely destroys that 10 to the power of 25. So anyone who's talking about the astronomically large number of planets that's out there and the astronomically large number of places that life could be, if we seeded every single one of those planets, every single one of them with bacteria, like we were seeded with, for want of another word, a few billion years ago here on Earth. And even if we made every single one of those planets, really friendly, bio-friendly, gave it the right conditions, lots of oxygen, lots of water, oceans, wind, lightning, sun, of just the right temperature.

Even if we made all the planets like that, there would be no chance if this sequence of events was unique, if this sequence of events was unique, that it should be replicated out there anywhere at all. Now, many people might say, and this is a reasonable criticism of this, is that there could be various ways, various evolutionary paths that could lead to a human being. But again, that raises the question of convergent evolution. If there were these multiple ways of arriving at intelligent, creative, thinking people, then we should have seen other examples of that arise independently here on Earth. But again, how long would we have to have waited in Australia for it to have evolved people?

The most complicated creatures that existed here in Australia five million years ago were kangaroos and some wombats. Possums. If we left them isolated as an experiment for another million, 10 million, 100 million, billion years, does anyone expect that those creatures will evolve into something creative, intelligent, and able to send radio signals and perhaps travel across the galaxy?

There's no reason to think that. There's no reason to think that because evolution doesn't work that way. That if the conditions are right, those creatures will just remain the same. You need selection pressure for evolution to really to cause diversity and to take advantage of variation. And of course, that can happen around the universe. But there's no reason to presume that there is this intelligence niche. And what Lineweaver calls this is the "planet of the apes hypothesis" - the planet of the apes hypothesis - that when you take away the human beings out of the situation, that there is this niche left behind, there's this place for animals to evolve into because there's nothing filling that particular niche. And so the kangaroos will actually evolve into people because in the planet of the apes, the premise of the movie is the human beings are wiped out for whatever reason. And years later, it is discovered by is it time travelers? I can't remember. Are the human beings from the future or something?

Anyway, the apes, the great apes, the chimpanzees, the orangutans, they evolve into people. They become fully functioning, creative people that have technology and civilization just like human beings do. In other words, there is an arrow to evolution that Darwinian blind evolution will take a great ape and turn it into a person left long enough, if left long enough. This is just a misconception. It's a misconception about how evolution works. so Lineweaver's point is, and so is Slezak's point, that an answer to the Fermi paradox is we're utterly alone. The mathematics on the one hand doesn't make any sense. There simply aren't enough planets. The universe isn't big enough to ensure that evolution is going to lead to complicated life forms because it only happened here on earth once. There have been countless millions of species, 99.9 % of which have gone completely extinct. None of which showed any sign of creative intelligence like us, except for our common ancestor, okay, and those other species that we evolved from."

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

Artemis II is 170K+ miles from Earth today.

But yesterday, Pilot Victor Glover was asked if he had any thoughts leading up to Easter.

His response is worth listening to.

And his advice is worth internalizing in advance of a difficult year ahead.
https://t.co/s7yhiTu7Du

[Santi Ruiz @rSanti97]

St. John Chrysostom’s Paschal Sermon gets me every time. He is Risen!

[sbeam @sbeam]

@MontyMills8 @NASA @WhiteHouse I never said there was an eclipse happening when this photo was taken, I was saying it proves things can get dark.

idk man go in a dark room with a flashlight and a basketball and play around. You'll figure it out maybe

[sbeam @sbeam]

@MontyMills8 @NASA @WhiteHouse no bro there was no eclipse. But I've seen two. The moon covers the sun 100%, it is as dark as night. Stars are visible.
In this case the moon is behind, lighting the Earth, the Earth covers the sun 100%. So it is dark where the capsule is. Nothing "overexposed"

[sbeam @sbeam]

@MontyMills8 @NASA @WhiteHouse So now you pivot from shadows to an overexposure... from what? The vacuum of space? Think about how the shadow cone of the Earth that the capsule is in. How much light do you expect to see from the sun there? Ever seen a total eclipse? I have.