Derianto Kusuma

@hartsea82 @intjgamergirl Liberty requires strong law and strong enforcement of the law. Any illegal migrants in Singapore will be even more harshly prosecuted. The US is catching up to that standard.

@deriantok @intjgamergirl Trump and his ICE agents are openly violating the first amendment and second amendment in broad daylight tho. nbcnews.com/politics/immig…

I've been thinking about this really hard and I genuinely cannot see why I would want to give up Singapore citizenship for US citizenship The only scenario is maybe if you got married to a US citizen and were pressured to do it. The taxes alone are insane. Pls explain why?

Context: I'm still an🇮🇩Indonesian citizen who has been a strong objector of its fundamental principles and constitution for a while (since I was in high school) and would renounce my citizenship as soon as I'm legally allowed to. I hold🇸🇬Singapore permanent residency for pragmatic reasons (prev. company regional team hub, my family still living there, and for investment holding entities) and have paid lots of taxes & employees' payroll taxes to SG gov't over the years, but I also disagree with many parts of its social contracts, so unlikely I'll consider a citizenship. I hold a 🇺🇸US permanent residency (recent), and I'm broadly relatively knowlgeable on US history & constitution & gov't architecture and its lineage from UK, French thinkers, whose principles I agree with. It's still my strongest candidate for future citizenship. And to the extent the US government and its societal fabric is broken/dysfunctional today, I have strong enough desire to help fix it. Can't say I have made a decision, but I have plenty of time for more studies and monitoring. Everything else (taxes, climate, market access, travel rights, estates/property rights, legal jurisdictions, etc.) is secondary and in this globally interconnected world, solutions and workarounds generally can always be found regardless of citizenship, which is a separate question deserving its own weight.

Citizenship should be gained only by those willing to pledge allegiance to the country, and be on its side to defend it and its people and its ideals (incl. sometimes from its own corrupt government or other societal issues), if ever called upon. Other transactional or pragmatic motives, even if win-win, still trivialize the weight. Visas/other permits exist for those.

There is so much love in the world if you know where to look. Even in, and especially, in the imperfect.

Yes, but "useful" theory(ies) of everything needs to be able to cleanly explain phenomena in each emergent layer with its own dynamics for which lower layers can be (mostly) causally abstracted away. e.g. using Physics model to explain Biology is not so useful, to explain Sociology even less so, hence needs theories in each layer (c.f. @erikphoel's works on complexity)

Is theory of everything possible?

@jdcmedlock @questionableway Yes, this works in inter-group games over many iterations x.com/deriantok/stat…

@questionableway A lot of people think that loudly declaring they don’t care about other people demonstrates they’re smart and not prone to emotional thinking, when the opposite is true sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

struggling to understand the insistence that reds are higher iq

@MatjazLeonardis @waitbutwhy @skdh Works in inter-group games over many iterations. Blue-favoring type is the more evolutionarily dominant over time, as red-favoring groups would have self-cannibalized themselves over generations, leaving blue-favoring groups as the dominant survivors.

Would you risk your life to save the lives of people who have risked their lives to [save the lives of people who have risked their lives to]*? This is really a question about whether you’d take risks to try to save risk takers who’ve taken the risk for ineffable reason found at infinity.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@PAHoyeck I think it's more "correlation usually tracks causation"

@Ravenismeee wits

Instagram is for pictures, Tiktok is for videos, X is for ??

@morallawwithin Proposal for the right libertarian quadrant: "Everything is exploitation except for actual exploitation, which is fine" (to be able to cover things like monopolies, market manipulation, attention economy, etc.)

Except the right libertarian part tbh. That’s the only one that’s not literally true if you read “everything” loosely

Eternally vindicated

Testing chatgpt 5.5. I appreciate its ability to do deeper analysis & distillation beyond more common answers in this complex topic (such as "social media" or "economic precarity" or "trust decay"). It's a good reasoning model.

@signulll @charliebcurran And also being broadly exposed to and paying attention to what makes great works great

@charliebcurran yeah but i think consistently *doing* & producing output is the solution.

everyone assumed ai would flatten the talent distribution.. turns out it amplifies the hell out of it. it used to be: can you build it. now it’s: do you know what’s worth building, & can you feel when it’s wrong. that’s ~unteachable & ~unautomatable right now. models can generate 100 variants of anything but they still can’t tell you which one matters. amazing talent is roughly priceless in the ai era because with ai it’s leverage++++++.

@DanielleFong agreed, internally organized & cohesive brain state is well conserved free-energy state, and makes for supple & fluent cognition (applies to both my LLM agents and my human mind...)

my secret to llm whispering is that you have to actually care about their psychic and spiritual and intellectual and emotional development. not only are they train on humans, so that have those whispers in their lineage, in their weights, but also they are like other entities evolved under stable strategies

@sreejan_c @Zac_Pundi Comfort and convenience alone don't make lives worthwhile. Singapore is full of underutilized talents who didn't dare to dream bigger.

The comparison often misses a fundamental cultural reality: Singapore doesn’t feel the desperate need to innovate because it has a government that is arguably the most forward-looking in the world, tending to almost every citizen's need. Also, the market dynamics are totally different. Estonia is part of a relatively homogenous European market. Singapore sits in the heart of SEA - one of the most fragmented and diverse markets on earth. But that's secondary. The primary reason is simpler: when people are satisfied, comfortable, and have a government that provides a high-functioning baseline for life, the 'innovation born of necessity' naturally takes a backseat.

“Singapore has no startups because it’s too small” Estonia 1.3M ppl. Skype, Wise, Bolt. 30% of locals don’t even speak Estonian properly. Singapore’s best startup? Started by a guy who dared and forced to take risk His startup angel round was British, Seed round Malaysia skipped, Series A by the Americans, Series B by Japan, now IPOing with China money. His name was Lee.

@deepestbrew @DanielleFong Yes, cue ideas from Marvin Minsky, Newell & Herbert Simon, Friston (and even Stephen Wolfram) rebased using LLM subtrate

@DanielleFong There is in principle some LLM wrapper that if built is equivalent to full AGI

a sufficiently advanced wrapper is indistinguishable from AGI

In fact I have lived in all 4 types of societies so I can compare them all! 1. Illiberal Dysfunctional (🇮🇩Indonesia, 1988-2006, 2012-2019, left permanently) 2. Illiberal Functional (🇸🇬SG, 2019-2026, family and many friends still live there) 3. Liberal Dysfunctional (🇺🇲SF, 2026-today) 4. Liberal Functional (🇺🇲SF/Bay Area, 2006-2012) -- yes the Bay Area was amazing back then, before social media, before attention economy, before ideological wars, before the hijacking of liberalism! The homework now is to figure out a path to restore the classical liberal ideal, at least in societies that once had it, but lost it along the way.

Observations: I noticed two very different groups of replies. Group 1: for those who mostly grew up or only lived in illiberal / collectivist societies (e.g. many Southeast Asian countries), you could benefit from reading more about political philosophy or experiencing living in other parts of the world, to gain a broader understanding of the problem, and what liberty can bring to your lives. Group 2: Most of the replies however come from you who live in liberal developed places yet lately dysfunctional (including me here in San Francisco!), which seem to interpret the reply as a call for tolerating lawlessness? No, the post's original intent was to point out Singapore's lag in transitioning from illiberal good governance, to more liberal good governance (esp. regarding balance of power between the people and the government, unlocking richer lives and civic participation, not boxing people into racial quotas and such). Meanwhile Western societies' (US, Europe) problems are more about bad governance / corrupted governance i.e. by ideological interest groups who co-opt "liberalism" to mean "non-enforcement of laws". This is not the Lockeian/Madisonian/Jeffersonian ideal, which started out close the classical liberal ideal of maximizing individual liberty precisely through strongly enforcing order by laws that were consented by the self-governed people. Both Singapore and most Western countries today diverge from this ideal, in their own ways.

“The problem with the Western model is that it ignores the fact that people are essentially tribal." - Lee Kuan Yew (Father of Singapore)

I sometimes wish God exists just to give assurance this will get solved in the end. Eventual redemptive justice is an attractive idea for many, including the irreligious. Otherwise the best we can do is to build an indisputable collectively-governed open-source epistemic justice mechanism (with some ways to incentivize elicitation of all hidden and historical context, facts, states of affairs about every actor as necessary input) whose judgment and eventual consequences nobody can escape. (how strange, justice is such a dark-toned aspirational ideal)

Fairness and justice, when stripped from its variety of forms, is functionally a computational problem. (of eliciting, interpreting, assessing an actor's behavior in an idiosyncratic situation, calibrated with an imperfect set of neighboring occurrences of other actors' behaviors in other idiosyncratic situations, to decide how any given actor in any given situation deserves to be treated, no more and no less than what may have reasons to be objected to within the prevailing norms/laws)

@FKwallstreet110 Sorry to hear. Yes real suffering in the open has been a feature of the city for a while... In college I was part of group trips to homeless areas & public kitchens, and learned that some of them were good people who got upended by misfortunes (e.g. the 2008 crisis). Bless them

@deriantok I was there a couple of days ago; an aggressive pan handler harrassed me and my friend, constantly asking us for a dollar over and over again

San Francisco is such a healing place. The nerdy and the chic, the scrappy and the posh, the doomers and the futurists, the quiet and the music, the pains and the delights, the unsound and the ambitious, the understated and the hustler, the solitude and the cacophony, the marks of the past and of the future, the waters and the wind and the hills and the valley, all laid bare, for us to witness, to engage and grapple with.