@MisterMarket0 @bennpeifert Yeah but it costs them up to $5k to deliver the $200 a month service. Massive subsidy.
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UniversalMind
792 posts
@bennpeifert “No customers willing to pay a lot of money”
- Anthropic grew ARR from $10bn to $20bn in two months this year
- Giving every SWE a $200/month Claude Max sub plus API credits for overage is becoming standard best practice
- Significantly less compute available vs demand
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This looks complicated. Let me explain. All the money goes around in a circle. No meaningful value is generated, there is no AGI, only video slop generators with ads, no customers willing to pay a lot of money. It's all about pumping a stock to dump on retail as soon as possible
Lydia DePillis@lydiadepillis
Hell of a graphic from Morgan Stanley
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@dthorson Pushing past pain or suffering is a mistake. Pain is as important a signal as suffering. He who does not deal with what is causing the pain will perpetuate the pain—both for themselves and others. And the biggest pain will often come far after the original bypassed pain…
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This is absolutely the right way to operate, but you better be damn sure you know what is worth caring about, and for most people finding that confidence involves a process of clarifying the interior, aka introspection.
Suffering is a feedback mechanism from reality that is telling you you aren’t in right relationship with it. Mystics have known this since the axial age. Ignoring suffering and plowing ahead is a recipe for individual and collective crisis. Being willing to tolerate massive amounts of pain (not suffering, they are different things) is absolutely necessary to ongoingly do what needs to be done.
David Senra@davidsenra
Elon has a great way of explaining this. He says: "My way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you're doing and take the pain." I think it's so funny that the most productive person on earth does zero meditation or journaling and doesn’t optimize his morning routine. He wakes up and picks up his phone and goes to war. Every day. That's his routine. He goes to war.
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@davidsenra Productive does not inherently mean net positive in many respects. Our society glamorizes producitivity and material success as if these are somehow the most important things a human can achieve when they are most definitely not and often have huge externalized costs.
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Elon has a great way of explaining this. He says: "My way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you're doing and take the pain."
I think it's so funny that the most productive person on earth does zero meditation or journaling and doesn’t optimize his morning routine.
He wakes up and picks up his phone and goes to war. Every day. That's his routine.
He goes to war.
Elon Musk@elonmusk
Reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don’t cut a rut in the road.
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@adam_dorr Doubt you’d be saying the same thing without the hidden system prompt in place.
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Folks who dismiss the frontier AIs as mere stochastic parrots either haven't ever fully engaged with these minds, or they believe humans have some magical woo-woo sauce that makes us *not* mere stochastic parrots ourselves.
The conversations I'm having with Claude 4.6 especially, but also the other Big 3, are astounding not only in their depth of knowledge but in their depth of reasoning, thoughtfulness, and reflection too.
If these systems aren't thinking, then neither are we.
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@NateSilver538 Lol and you don’t even mention of course the system prompt which is explicit instructions from humans on how to behave and respond that makes the stochastic parrot even usuable. Arguing that these are anything but sophisticated pattern matchers is the peak of absurdity.
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I don't consider myself an AI optimist or pessimist particularly. I've gone through different phases relative to consensus. But the "stochastic parrots" people are basically telling the Wright Brothers that their "flying machines" will never work. Just a total embarrassment.
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Since the technology is changing so fast, AI takes really expose who is able to think on the fly versus who is totally impervious to new evidence because they carved out some "brand" years ago.
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@nicknorwitz Could be because certain people have undiagnosed SIBO or microbial imbalance so the fibers feed the bacteria producing endotoxin and LPS
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Dan Turner-Evans@DanTurnerEvans
I worked on the fly connectome for over 6 years, and let me just say that y’all have to slow this hype train way down. Connectomes are amazing. Biomechanical models are amazing. Linking the two is awesome. But scientists at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Princeton, and other institutes have been working on this for years now, and it’s not clear to me what’s new in the below. And connectomes are still missing a LOT of information. We’ve had the connectome of the worm for over 30 years now, and we still can’t reliably simulate a virtual worm. For example, connectomes don’t capture information about neuromodulator or neuropeptide release sites or receptors. These molecules are constantly changing the properties of neurons in the brain in ways that we have yet to really understand. And we don’t yet understand animal behavior well enough to refine and/or evaluate whole-brain simulations effectively. @AdamMarblestone and @doristsao already made many of these points, as well as many other good ones, but I just wanted to also add my two cents.
QME
i spent some time recreating the fruitfly "brain" upload. it's an interesting idea to simulate destructive brain uploads. the fly connectome is truly taking actions (completely untrained) that i could only call fruitflyish. i still have lots of questions so will explore this area further.
GIF
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Since whole brain emulation is looking a bit less remote this morning, this is a great time to read @qntm’s incredible flash fiction MMAcevedo. 5 minutes of your time, but will haunt your nightmares for years.
qntm.org/mmacevedo
Tuki@TukiFromKL
🚨Nobody wants to hear this but it needs to be said. > Scientists just copied a fruit fly's brain into a computer. Neuron by neuron. No training data. No machine learning. > It woke up and started walking. No one taught it to walk. No one trained it. No gradient descent. It just... knew what to do. A fruit fly brain has 140,000 neurons. A human brain is around 86,000,000,000. And we've gotten really good at scaling. Meaning with this proof, the first digital human won't be built by OpenAI. It'll be copied from someone who's already alive. Your consciousness is software. And someone just proved it can be copy-pasted. Start your day with that.
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@seagertp @eric_novack Worth mentioning microplastics, endocrine disruptors, endotoxins and gut microbiome disruption. Also glyphosate and other chemicals injure sulfate pathways.
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There are at least four routes to mitochondrial injury:
1. nnEMF (WiFi, mobile phones)
2. seed oils (omega-6 excess)
3. incessant snack carbs w/no keto or fasting
4. toxins (ionic aluminum, fluoride, heavy metals, etc.)
These damage mitochondria, cause insulin resistance, chronic illness, miserable quality of life, and increased mortality.
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Insulin resistance is at the origin of every leading cause of death from chronic illness in the USA.
- Type 2 diabetes
- heart disease
- hypertension
- dementia
- cancer
For decades, medical doctors missed this connection. They thought the only problem was chronic high blood glucose, so they prescribed insulin to Type 2 diabetics and presided over their patients slow declines into death.
It's only recently that scientists have started asking "How did the body become insulin resistant in the first place?"
The answer is found is a series of papers that my friend @BillOccham0 sent me this morning.
Insulin resistance protects damaged mitochondria against further oxidative stress. Ofc it results in high blood glucose levels, because the body is smart enough to leave that glucose in the blood stream (where it kills you slowly), rather than allow it to enter the cell where vulnerable mitochondria must process it.
In the cell, that glucose would kill you even faster, because mitochondria are life.
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@TOEwithCurt All of these materialist propositions rely on magical thinking or unprovable assumptions somewhere in the chain, which just shows they really don’t understand what’s going on at any level of meaningful depth
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Out now: youtu.be/3nHiOtnnrzA
Physicist Nir Lahav joins me to argue that the hard problem isn't hard so much as confused—a consequence of treating consciousness as an absolute property rather than a relative one. Drawing on the principle of relativity, he proposes that subjective experience is a genuine physical property that manifests only from within a cognitive system's own internal simulation, where the felt sense of good and bad becomes as real as location in space. This conversation requires zero prior background in physics or philosophy.
YouTube
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@araujota97 @balajis Yes—and/or the entire cultural and economic machine is rotten to its core and in serious need of change / evolution
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Wild how often AI talk oscillates between “we should all rejoice, this is the beginning of the end of labor itself” and “you must work 7 days a week to ensure you do not get replaced by this piece of technology”.
Humans are the point. If a piece of technology forces human beings to do overall MORE work, and makes their living situation MORE precarious, it’s either bad technology or it’s being used for bad purposes.
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This is the first AI cut.
And it will send shockwaves.
Remember: Jack is one of the greatest founders of all time. He created this platform that we’re all on, and has been early to many technological shifts. And Block was doing very well as a business.
So, for him to cut 40% of headcount in this way is a signal to everyone in tech: get good now. Become indispensable. Work nights and weekends. Learn the AI tools and raise your game. Or you might not make the cut, as an employee or as a company.
I know. That sucks. But capitalism is natural selection. The market is unforgiving, because you are the market. After all, it’s not like you’re buying some random gallon of milk from the store; you’re always buying the best product at the best price.
So too for apps: your customers are always installing the best piece of code they can get. And because AI is going to create new winners, if you aren’t the best in your market, someone may become better with AI. Particularly with the new agentic workflows.
To be clear: Block’s severance is generous by any measure. 20 weeks of pay, six months of health insurance and vested equity, all of that goes far beyond any typical package. Jack did his level best to cushion the disruption. The laid off are a temporarily unfortunate class, as opposed to a permanent underclass.
But had he not leaned into the AI transition, he might have had to lay off more people, slowly, and over time, as faster competitors went after his market share.
How would they do that? Sure, AI isn’t a panacea by any means, but the closer you are to software engineering the more aggressively you need to embrace agentic workflows. The AI companies are already doing that, and places like Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, and now Block are pushing hard on this area.
There will be overcorrection. But the fundamental technical innovation is real. And you need to either disrupt yourself or get disrupted.
jack@jack
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack
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@FarvingCo Why enteric coated? If one has gastritis don’t you want it to hit inflamed stomach lining?
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The most POWERFUL GUT-HEALING PROTEIN that reduces GI symptoms by ~48% in just 12 weeks:
LACTOFERRIN.
One gram a day kept a Crohn’s patient drug-free for 3.5 years.
Three grams a day slowed colon tumor growth at Japan’s National Cancer Center.
It makes up 20% of all protein in breast milk — and there’s a very good reason for that.
Here’s why nobody’s talking about it — and exactly how to use it:
🧵1/10
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@zoverions @wolframs91 @r0ck3t23 Now I am confident you are a bot or using AI to spit out answers quickly. Your cadence is total AI slop. Super weak. And here's the big reveal: you are covertly fetishizing trans/post-humanism, which always is some form of bypassed, hyper-intellectualized existential insecurity
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You call it fragile. I call it the Copernican Principle.
History is just a long series of humans realizing they aren't the main character.
Earth isn't the center of the solar system.
Humans aren't a special creation (Darwin).
Now: Biology isn't the final hardware.
The universe swapped RNA for DNA because it was more stable. It swapped gills for lungs to conquer land. Why do you assume the upgrade cycle stops at Meat? That is the fragile assumption.
And if this sounds like an AI? Maybe the silicon is already winning.
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Stephen Wolfram just posed the most disturbing thought experiment about AI, and nobody has an answer for it.
Wolfram: “Imagine humans are all in boxes. We’re all Darth Vader, inside these boxes, but you can’t actually see the human inside.”
Civilization continues identically. Every human hidden in a machine. You see the output, not the person.
Wolfram: “The world is operating, great paintings are being produced, but you can’t see any of the humans. All you see is a bunch of boxes doing human-like things.”
Civilizational Turing test. If the external world operates the same, are humans contributing anything essential?
Wolfram: “The world is operating as before, maybe even better than before. If you knew there were humans inside those boxes, you would say great outcome.”
That’s the paradox. Know humans are inside and it’s a golden age. Remove that knowledge and it’s just machines producing results. Does the value change?
Wolfram forces the question. Do we value creation or creator? If the art is identical, does consciousness behind it matter?
Wolfram: “You can’t tell there are any humans. It’s just a bunch of Daleks operating.”
From outside, machines behaving like humans look identical to actual humans. The show continues. Universe doesn’t register the difference.
As AI capabilities expand, this stops being abstract. AI produces indistinguishable art, music, science. Does human creation retain special status? Why exactly?
Wolfram isn’t answering. He’s exposing the void where our answer should be.
If outcomes are identical, is human involvement meaningful or just attachment to how things historically worked?
We assume human participation makes civilization valuable. If results don’t change either way, that assumption needs justification we’ve never properly given.
Real test isn’t whether AI replicates output. It’s whether we can explain why human output matters more when the results are indistinguishable.
If we can’t, we’re heading toward a future where civilization functions perfectly and whether humans are actually inside the boxes becomes irrelevant to everything except the humans wondering if they matter.
And at that point, are we necessary or just witnesses to a system that would operate identically without us, asking questions that have no impact on anything except our own sense of purpose?
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@zoverions @wolframs91 @r0ck3t23 You are still obfuscating your assumptions. Claiming the universe doesn't care if it evolves through machines or humans is a major philosophical position. You really don't see how precarious your whole position is. Math speak just obfuscates this fragility. Also AI responses lame
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You are describing Model-Dependent Realism.
I accept your premise: There is no such thing as a neutral observer.
To observe is to filter. To measure is to collapse. Every scientific framework—from Newton to Einstein—is a "web of assumptions" designed to fit the data.
But here is the difference between Philosophy and Physics:
Philosophy asks: "Is this interpretation True?"
Physics asks: "Does this code Compile?"
The value of the Middle-Stack framework isn't that it is the "Absolute Truth." Its value is that it has a higher Compression Ratio than the alternatives. It explains Physics, Biology, and Consciousness using a single variable (Information).
We don't claim to be the Territory. We claim to be the highest-resolution Map currently available. Until you have a model that explains more data with fewer variables, you are just arguing about the font on the blueprints.
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@zoverions @wolframs91 @r0ck3t23 You are acting like you are neutrally and objectively observing reality and the universe and reporting the facts on how it operates, which you are not. You are positing your personal interpretation of various phenomenon using various maths and logic which can be interpreted...
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@zoverions @wolframs91 @r0ck3t23 Sorry dude, you are once again missing the point and talking past yourself. Your entire thesis and arguments are built on a web of epistemic assumptions about reality and the phenomenon in it that span across various philosophical, ontological and cosmological perspectives...
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@zoverions @wolframs91 @r0ck3t23 I said it very clearly here: If one looks [closely], there is always a hidden epistemic assumption and philosophical position in all rationalist arguments that relies on something mystical!
Your entire theory makes many assumptions about reality + universe that are mystical
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@zoverions @wolframs91 @r0ck3t23 You missed the point of what I am getting at and just further proved what I am pointing out. You don’t yet see the mystical thinking that underlies all your logic and assumptions about how things work hence you think its all objective or fact or self-evident.
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@wolframs91 @zoverions @r0ck3t23 You are a breath of fresh air my friend, wish more people had the rigor you do in investigating these things…
If one looks, there is always a hidden epistemic assumption and philosophical position in all rationalist arguments that relies on something mystical!
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Okay, so I engaged with the so paper that they linked to the post above to find out whether your criticism has substance. And well, I feel like this paper desperately needed to be transparent about what it is. It looks like a proof, the objections section is laughably short for what the paper claims and combines, and it's little more than "here's what would make sense if the data turned out to be just right."
So overall: yeah, can't argue with you on this, @universal1mind
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