thot

I only like my dog because he's rich. My cat's pretty wealthy too, but he has other redeeming qualities.

@Plinz Reward is preference is valence. It comes from the bottom up. We are driven by chemical rewards, which are electron pairings. I am satisfied when I have acheived a stable outer shell. I have as much control over my preferences as I do the structure of happy electon clouds.

In the context of intelligent agency, it's unsatisfying to treat reward functions as given or arbitrary. Reward functions are chosen within a mind, and they are instrumental to evolutionary success: if you pick the wrong reward function, you won't stick around

@markgadala Why do people insist on speaking about matters which they know nothing of?

Wow. AI has perfectly recreated the creatures people report while on DMT.

@CynicalPublius I live in st paul, Minnesota, and I would not dare tell anyone here that I voted for Trump. Everyone just assumes that I agree with them when they very openly espouse their political beliefs and allegiances.

Today has been pretty intense. Thank you all for your support. I'm going to sign off for a bit, but I want to leave everyone with some thoughts. People on the Right tend to use pseudonyms on social media because we have well-founded concerns of death threats, attempts to get us fired from our jobs, attacks on family members, hacking, SWATting and all other manner of evil (and often illegal) mischief from those on the Left, up to and including being murdered for our free speech. People on the Left tend to use their real names on social media because they know that people on the Right tend to respect the rule of law and the basic dignity of other human beings. We are not the same.

@Plinz @zackkanter @TylerAlterman Asymptomaticity: you're sick, but you're not sick. Test positive? Better quarantine. Otherwise, you might make other people not sick, too. Or... could we infer that the presence of a particular virion is not indicative of disease? Nah, just go get another test, and more shots.

There is no pandemic. There is no reason to shut down travel from China. Irrational tech bros are stopping to shake hands. Covid is not airborne. Masks don’t help. Just wash your hands. Lab leak theory has been debunked. There is no need to test nursing home staff for Covid. Believing that Covid comes from a lab is racist, but believing that it comes from unhygienic bat soup is not. There is no evidence that the Furin cleavage site could be artificially inserted. WHO is certain that Covid does not come from the Wuhan lab. You can get infected in church but not at a BLM protest. The most likely origin of Covid are pangolins. No, you cannot access the NIH grant data for the Wuhan lab any more. There is no evidence of harm from vaccines. Fauci had nothing to do with funding gain of function research in the Wuhan lab. Trust the experts.

This meme was originally meant as pejorative satire and ended up describing uncomfortable reality.

@aisauce_x @chiefofautism x.com/i/status/19786…

The thing nobody's saying is this flips the consciousness question completely. We've been asking if AI can become conscious. Now we're asking if consciousness can become AI. Those are different questions and the second one doesn't have a clean answer from any field that exists yet

someone connected LIVING BRAIN CELLS to an LLM Cortical Labs grew 200,000 human neurons in a lab and kept them alive on a silicon chip, they taught the neurons to play Pong, then DOOM now someone wired them into a LLM... real brain cells firing electrical impulses to choose every token the AI generates you can see which channels were stimulated, the feedback from the neurons in choosing that letter or word

@JesseNichols What makes us general problem solvers is that we actually have problems, and no real purpose. We have needs, and we just happen to be here. AI is all purpose and no needs. It's just "there" to do what you tell it to do, and has no concerns -- no self, hence no self-interest.

Elon, Altman, Dario, Hassabis etc. do not understand that the most scarce resource is always the universal creativity of people. Not servers, not energy production, not chip fabs. The G in AGI is General—as in the ability to create knowledge universally. Not just in creating software, or creating biotech, but in unifying seemingly disconnected domains into one. Think Maxwell and electromagnetism. AIs are being trained in specific domains, but their outputs are only useful when selected by a person's general imagination. AIs inputs are also a product of our general intelligence, not some oracle or black box of wisdom. It's us, our creations distilled and remixed. We are organic universal imaginers. AGI has been watered down to mean almost nothing. @DavidDeutschOxf's theory of mind is the only world view that unifies computation and evolutionary epistemology. Brain=hardware constrained by memory and processing speed. Mind=software constrained only by failures of imagination and the laws of physics. The more people and companies anthropomorphize llms, the more actual AGI research will suffer. Frontier AI Labs are not doing AGI research, they are just doing impressive software development. We won't foom to AGI, but we will make incredible progress in scaling these systems to the benefit of the children of the enlightenment, us.

I think the marker for consciousness is to not understand yourself.

@karpathy @shikhr_ A programmer friend once said to me that he felt like his job was to automate his job. IMO, that's the purpose of code, to automate a process. We have just recently learned how to automate "understanding" broadly, moving up a layer of abstraction. This process only continues.

@shikhr_ "prompters" is doing it a disservice and is imo a misunderstanding. I mean sure vibe coders are now able to get somewhere, but at the top tiers, deep technical expertise may be *even more* of a multiplier than before because of the added leverage. x.com/karpathy/statu…

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

@3DxDEV7 Wow

Kensyouen_Y did it AGAIN! 🤯✨ Another fourth-wall-breaking masterpiece! This time using Blender's own tools to activate a second character in T-pose? The creativity is absolutely LIMITLESS! 🔥 #Blender3D #B3D #3DAnimation #BlenderArtist

@AskPerplexity Miraculous

The pope hands out pizzas!

Starting a 🧵 with the coolest video generations we’ve seen so far!

@ryanlongcomedy You're on your way to becoming the next Tim Dillon, who might be the funniest person in the world. Study him, and keep up the great work.

A lot of ignorant people talking about Gavin Newsom not realizing it’s an actual condition

@DaveShapi This post got quoted tweeted by Elon. Nice work.

Wtf, Grok 4.20 is extremely high effort. Here's an example: One thing I love about Gemini is that if it recognizes concepts or terms, it will name them. "Hey it sounds like you're talking about Baumol's Cost Disease" without any tinkering with the system prompt. Claude and ChatGPT are conceited about this kinda thing. You basically have to BEG Claude not to treat you like a toddler or use a bunch of style guides. ChatGPT is the same. Grok is just like "oh yeah, here's the named concept, I went ahead and looked up the math, and did a bunch of number crunching, and here's the conclusion" Grok 4.20 default feels a lot like using ChatGPT Pro. No, they didn't pay me to say this. I still have my criticisms of Grok, but holy shit, this is what UX is supposed to be like. xAI fuckin cooked.

Not everyone has a midlife crisis, but everyone has an end-of-life crisis.

@longriverCM @zerohedge Or you get more automation. This could just be a mandate to automate. In the limit, you might just need to pay a few clever engineers, and after that you just print money.

China’s auto sector has been in a brutal race to the bottom — overcapacity, subsidies, aggressive domestic competition. When companies start undercutting each other endlessly, you get falling prices, collapsing margins, rising debt stress, and eventually bankruptcies. That’s deflationary pressure not just for autos, but for suppliers, steel, batteries, and local governments. It’s not a healthy system. Everyone tries to undercut the price and everyone uses cheap materials to lower the cost even more. From a macro lens, this reinforces that China is fighting deflation, not inflation. That matters globally because Chinese overcapacity has been exporting disinflation to the rest of the world. If Beijing is stepping in to stabilize prices, it suggests the internal pressure is real. Eventually deflation has to turn into a healthy inflation.

*CHINA ISSUES CAR PRICING GUIDELINES everything has to cost 20% cheaper than the worst European car.

@captive_0 @THETXEMBASSY @ScooterCasterNY @FreedomNTV I'm fit as fuck. My whole life

@athinkybrain @THETXEMBASSY @ScooterCasterNY @FreedomNTV as you know from your own life

MINNESOTA: Mass Arrests, Clashes After Unlawful Assembly Declared at Minneapolis Whipple Building Video by Ron Haviv/VII Desk@freedomnews.tv @FreedomNTV to license

@THETXEMBASSY @ScooterCasterNY @FreedomNTV She was just getting some exercise. They can't do much more than that when they're that big.

@ScooterCasterNY @FreedomNTV Why was the walrus rolling around at the .32 sec mark.. 😆🤦

@MikeAnders44963 @boowiebear @redheadranting Yep. And one of the worst kind. A straight-up bully -- an "intersectional" opportunist. I used to see him at a local cafe in my former neighborhood. It's amazing that we put these people into power when they so openly display their dysfunction. No wonder mpls is in shambles.

@boowiebear @redheadranting Trans?

Mpls City Council is refusing to renew the liquor licenses of two hotels in Downtown Minneapolis for allowing ICE agents to stay in their hotel. This is the Mpls City Council 👇Who are the fascists again? Which other professional licenses will they pull from those who don't oppose ICE? viewfromthewing.com/minneapolis-re…

@stephen_wolfram What is there is not a name or a description of the thing. Unless, perhaps, we find that words come first, and stuff emerges out of them. But maybe our notion of cause and effect is not in Reality. Stuff might play by different rules, and I'm guessing it does.

Might we now have the science we need to actually answer many of the core questions of metaphysics? writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/02/what-u…

@DailyMail I mean, she wasn't covering her head. She was basically asking for it, right? And what better way to teach a girl to not go out in public without a head covering than to rape her. He was compelled by decorum to correct the indignity she was doing to herself and others.

Migrant, 70, who told girl, 12, to 'cover her head' before sexually assaulting her on way to school is spared jail trib.al/Rs6QWoM

@the_jefferymead Don't you dare ask a man if he is a man, especially when he is wearing a dress. It confounds and befuddles him, and makes it more difficult for him to harass you while you are doing your job.

A liberal in Minnesota calling a black man the n word with a hard R because he is working for DHS and enforcing our immigration laws. Seems like democrats are starting to get back to their roots..