Do most people not realize they are now captured minds fully running the optimization algorithms of other people who care not a bit about them? It’s moved beyond propaganda into possession. We’ve summoned demons from the nether realm and allowed them to irrupt into our most sacred place and rampage with no control and no restraint.
What are we thinking? We aren’t; not any longer.
The modern left is extremely weird because they have suicidal empathy for what should be their sworn enemies, but extreme antipathy and hostility to those who should be their natural allies.
My hypothesis is that this is born of long-term internalized self-hatred, catalyzed by precarity and a feeling of ideological and cultural rootlessness. It’s a sickness peculiar to empires that have no frontiers left to the expand into, and whose people see no future beyond decline and decay.
Still, I hate those people as much as they hate themselves. One thing I do not possess is suicidal empathy; I wish to destroy my enemies. I can pity them after they are deceased.
the unstated mental model of the ai bubble conversation seems to be that once the bubble pops, we go back to the world as it once was, butlerian jihad by financial overextension. but the honest reporting is that everything, everything, is already and forever changed
— Jake Eaton (@jkeatn) November 29, 2025
As a wise friend once advised in a different context: there is no going back. If you know nothing else about how history and the evolution thereof functions you must know that any idea of return to the past is an invalid one and impossible due to the nature of humanity and reality itself. Retreating there cannot be done and attempting to do so is a fool’s errand that leads only to ruin.
Railroads didn’t disappear when that bubble popped. Neither did the internet in 2001. AI and all its implications, complications and dislocations will not either when the AI bubble deflates in 2027 or 2028. Quite the opposite — AI will get vastly cheaper as all those data centers are liquidated and it thus will be used far more.
There is no return. The past’s waves ripple outward forever and cannot be un-waved nor thoughts un-thought. Indeed, as an also very-wise cat once observed: what has been seen cannot be un-seen.
We’re all no longer human; we’re something else now. When someone had the first thought of the dichotomy of the nous and the numinous and attempted to reconcile and unify them, we transitioned to another state of being.
The ghost in the machine dissipated and we in turn then became more machine than human, more mechanism than moiety.
The quest for some constrained and denotative definition of “artificial general intelligence” is daft and pointless.
When does a 747 become a bird? When is a submarine a fish? When you ask an amorphous, unfocused question all your answers are disjunct from the set of possible paths to revealing the actual important questions, much less any answers.
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader what the important questions are. But suffice it to say that though I believe some form of human-level machine intelligence is possible, we’ll never succeed in making a submarine into a fish, and we’ll also never accomplish the feat of transforming silicon and transistors into a human. A person, perhaps. But not a human.
I’ve always been well off the beaten path politically. Though my views have changed some since then, on a forum I used to be a regular on back in the early 2000s the exact same dude around six months apart called me an “An unhinged loony leftist” and a “Prissy never-been-laid Republican conformist.” Because those sentiments were so apposite and opposite, I took a screenshot of the post but can’t find it anymore. Was probably on some CD-R that got corrupted before I had a real NAS.
There’s no tribe I am or ever will be a part of. I just can’t bend my thinking that way. I’ll always be at the edge, wrestling with the demons of complex thoughts and real-world exigencies. For me, it’s the only way to live.
Tattoos are the overblown exhibition of a coward who cannot define their being endogenously and must curse us all with their lack of internal self-representation. The failure of culture results in the preponderance of garish external displays of inner vacuity.
“Exist” is always too heavily loaded in these discussions. And it’s always a hoot when STEM-y people do philosophy. What a mess.
I don’t feel like writing a ton tonight, but as one of the commenters points out, math is just a model of the world. It and probability is “real” in the sense that it relates well to something phenomenologically experiential.
And as usual, no one in that discussion understands quantum mechanics at all or what it means, like the doof talking about Geiger counters. Completely wrong. We could know the entire history and state of every bit of everything in the universe and we still could not predict when a bit of uranium would alpha decay and trigger the counter.
And if you then base some other event on that alpha decay the Geiger counter registers, you’d have something operating that even knowing the entire prior history of the universe would not have been able to reveal to anyone would occur. In other words, all empirically successful quantum interpretations are probabilistic. And this is not (as it is with classical probability) due to lack of knowledge. That’s the moronic (and wrong) interpretation. The probabilistic nature of QM and reality is a fundamental aspect of the universe itself.
So, is probability real? No, it’s a fucking model. Just like nearly anything else useful in science and math.
Nope. That’s the elementary school reading of Nietzsche.
Now to what ol’ Friedrich was actually getting at. He was saying that all knowledge and progress is from a perspective, and furthermore was observing that with the loss of binding religion that had pervaded all culture, we’d need to create new horizons and values, of many different kinds, all instantiated by and for humans rather than handed down from some higher power or metaphysical authority.
In other words, we must become the god we killed; Nietzsche was not saying all hope of a shared future or futures was lost, but that now we were wholly in charge of creating any of that.
As I’ve said before, the philosopher Baby Queen understands Nietzsche better than most people who read him, including Nils Gilman.
More and more people are realizing that the current weltanschauung has completely failed and that there is nothing to replace it. It’s those “New Minds” I write about here and talked about a lot on the old iteration of this blog. We need ’em, didn’t get ’em.
Absent a new sociocultural arrangement, we are in for a world of pain and probably WWIII. That cataclysm may be the only thing that gets us where we need to go, but what a price to pay. It makes me want to read the Terra Ignota series again.
the leftist compulsion to degrade national identity in democratic countries will be the undoing of their welfare state plank, because it turns out when you remove the nation people just default to narrower identities and don't care to pay for the outgroup's well-being
— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) August 22, 2025
Cohesive, coherent nations are probably the only structure we can support with current minds and sociocultural development that can provide something like general welfare benefits to the downtrodden.
Anything else is leftist fantasyland crap. They destroy themselves with worship of third-world immigration and clownish allegiance to Hamas and the like.
You better start believing in the technological singularity. You’re living in one.
(And have been since about 1850.)
People assert without evidence that human speech operates completely differently from how an AI generates words and phrases. But that is not at all clear, as we do not actually know how human speech functions at the level of word/meaning synthesis and expression.
Sure, humans are not operating on silicon in a datacenter, but I am not talking about the hardware substrate here.
It’s possible that AI could function completely differently, but it’s possible that it does not. We simply do not know. I suspect it’s more similar than most would want to believe, though.
Venus was beautiful in the sky this morning, incarnadine and beckoning.
Taking actions in the real world is so much better than in the virtual. Even if it is hard. Even if it is dangerous. Even if it might — almost certainly will the first time — fail.
For that reason, I will always have some respect for Elon Musk no matter what other evil he perpetrates because he built two companies that do extremely difficult things in the real world. Things that many, many people said absolutely could not be done1. Yes, he relied on government research and subsidies for some of it. But here’s the thing: so does everyone else. Liberals don’t tell you that part because it’s terribly inconvenient.
To go back to a point I’ve made elsewhere, many degrowther liberal types (and these days, nearly all liberals are de facto degrowthers) deeply loathe anyone who creates anything in the real word — a house, a car, a rocket, even kids’ toys. Because it “hurts the planet” and “contributes to climate change.”
This is not the future. It’s not even the present. It’s yet again another example of those too sequestered from the actual world to understand where wealth or even their own daily sustenance comes from.
There was a sci-fi author who speculated the reason for the great silence in the universe was because all advanced civilizations become wireheads (as we’re doing with smartphones), wither and then die. Seems pretty plausible to me. We are already far along that course.
That some path is to be avoided just because it’s dangerous and might not pan out is both cowardly and ignorant of history. The most worthwhile undertakings have always involved great risk. Many people in the past have died to bring you the life you enjoy now, while many others have suffered both before the advent of plenty and in the course of creating our civilization with all its boons.
We need to walk into the risk, go toward the Venusian light, embrace the glaring unknown, attempt the impossible and let the wild tides carry us beyond the horizon.
It is not a possible path. No, it is the only path.
So much more is possible than we allow to be. What we think is “impossible” is far more constrained by our limited beliefs and aspirations than by reality.
Remember, what was once “nerd fantasy” is now normie reality. It’s the story of the rise of humanity.