FredipusRex

@ramez I’m an environmentalist too (longtime supporter of the Nature Conservancy)z The mainstream environmental movement is unfortunately full of degrowther mindset and anti-capitalism

@FredipusRex I'm an environmentalist. I dislike such broad characterizations. I think you meant some enviros.

Texas is the clean energy capital of the United States. And a chunk of that is because of their easy permitting, relatively ample transmission, and highly deregulated electricity market. Abundance thinking in energy works.

@Austen If I was even 10 years younger I’d jump at this

If you’re an engineer who wants to master AI, we want to * Fly you to Austin * Cover your housing * Cover your food * Have someone do your laundry * Train you to use AI * Get you a $200k+ job with our hiring partners And it’s completely free, no matter what

@sandeepnailwal “I co-founded a company literally called Sentient… so believe me when I say this.” I’ve seen some stretching of appeals to authority on this platform, but this might take the prize.

LLM based AI is NOT conscious. I co-founded a company literally called Sentient, we're building reasoning systems for AGI, so believe me when I say this. I keep seeing smart people, people I genuinely respect, come out and say that AI has crossed into some kind of awareness. That it feels things, that we should worry about it going rogue. And i think this whole conversation tells us way more about ourselves than it does about AI. These models are wild, i won't pretend otherwise. But feeling human and actually having inner experience are completely different things and we're confusing the two because our brains literally can't help it. We evolved to see minds everywhere and now that wiring is misfiring on language models. I grew up in a philosophical tradition that has thought about consciousness longer than almost any other, and this is the part that really frustrates me about the current conversation. The entire framing of "does AI have consciousness?" assumes consciousness is something you build up to by adding more layers of complexity. In Vedantic philosophy it's the opposite. You don't build toward consciousness. Consciousness is already there, more fundamental than matter or energy. Everything else, including computation, is downstream of it. When someone tells me AI is "waking up" because it generated a paragraph that felt real, what they're telling me is how thin our understanding of consciousness has gotten. We've reduced a question humans have wrestled with for thousands of years to "did the output sound like it had feelings?" It's math that has gotten really good at predicting what a conscious being would say and do next. Calling that consciousness cheapens something that Vedantic, Buddhist, Greek and Sufi thinkers spent millennia actually sitting with. We didn't build something that thinks. We built a mirror and right now a lot of very smart people are mistaking the reflection for something looking back.

@JessePeltan Because the Communist Han are widely known for their respect for and deference to traditional cultures

We should revive traditional clothing. So many cultures have really cool traditions and manufacturing techniques shaped by local materials and climate. Everything has become so homogenized now that many people don’t even know how their ancestors dressed.

@besttrousers Depends on if the price of everything begins to trend toward $0.

It's sort of funny that UBI has ended up conceived as an AI policy response. A person who loses their job is not going to be very happy that they are getting $12k/year.

@RobertSecundus Children of Dune

why would anyone wonder where to start? Book 1?? obviously??? DUNE. Dune, the first novel in the Dune series, is where you start Dune. The question people actually have is where you should STOP.

@landon20s Buffalo Joe’s

Best wings 🍗🪽 in Chicago (no particular order) - crisp - birds nest - del seoul - Nancy’s - big sauce - broken barrel - output lounge - house of wings - Aberdeen tap - woodies

@elonmusk Mixed. Very good at search and Grokipedia style research, so-so at coding, it has a very samey-samey writing and conversational style

What are your initial impressions of Grok 4.20? Major upgrades are still landing every week.

@chibbqk1ng As if Pizza and Oven Grinder is anything other than a stunt

Pepperoni?! Chicago is a sausage town. Italian sausage is an actual thing we do better than anywhere else and as far as I know the Chicago area is the only place where sausage is more commonly ordered than pepperoni. This is what happens when JP Morgan decides to do food media.

@its_hipolita Why you shaming her mud mask beauty routine?

If you haven't read Dune: Messiah, you might be wondering why Princess Irulan/Florence Pugh looks like this. I've read it so I'll briefly explain: I have no fucking idea what's going on here.

@SandyofCthulhu George resurrected Jon Snow and Catelyn Stark (as Lady Stoneheart) and Beric Dondarrion was resurrected so many times his soul felt thin

Gandalf's resurrection was one of the very few times that a resurrection worked in fiction. It worked in Narnia because it was a reflection of Christ's. I hated it when they resurrected Superman after his death, because I knew for a fact they wouldn't let him die so it was a stupid and moronic attempt to play on our emotions from the get-go. Let's not talk about Palpatine's.

@Grady_Booch @StarTrek Frak that felgercarb

One of the things that surprises me about the distant future as envisioned by science fiction series such as @StarTrek is the distinct absence of new swear words.

@nazzobetweeting That’s just the truth

fahrenheit is better than celsius

@EWErickson That’s basically “are you over 45?”

All 20 for me.

@AndyMasley A needed first step along the Golden Path

Yeah I apologize for thinking Paul Atreides was cool. I know the whole book is about how messianic leaders are bad. When he nuked a mountain and rode a worm through, I should've been shaking my head the whole time saying "Not cool, not cool at all"

@JeremiahDJohns Paul Ehrlich was the story of the day yesterday for all the right reasons (near universal condemnation) and there’s Kevin Hassett thinking “hold my beer”

"Consumers getting hurt, that's the last of our concerns" - bold midterms message from the Trump administration.

@JeremiahDJohns @AlexanderMcCoy4 I don’t think neoliberal means what he thinks it means if he thinks the typical left of DSA Democratic staffer is a neolib

@AlexanderMcCoy4 god I wish the staffer class was neoliberal instead of so far left they're practically falling into the pacific ocean

If you work in Democratic politics, this dynamic is ever-present. The elite staffer/activist/journalist class that drives discourse is both more neoliberal than the median voter, and also driven by its own obsessions: deficit reduction, bipartisanship, global primacy, and pursuing policy goals via byzantine tax credits. Gotta work hard to stay focused on normie opinion.

@senatorshoshana *She

It's true if not for social media I would be hanging out with 8 year olds and eating candy

@ATabarrok @jaredpolis Basically giant squabs

@jaredpolis I hear they are delicious!

Dodo birds might be coming back soon! 🐦 theguardian.com/us-news/2026/m…