Greg DeMars

@MarkChangizi Fascinating ideas, Mark!

The Kingdom of Machinimals When people imagine aliens, they almost always imagine intelligent beings somewhat analogous to ourselves: organic creatures, civilizations, ships, technologies, goals, diplomacy, warfare, exploration. Even when they imagine AI, they usually still imagine coherent engineered entities carrying out the intentions of their creators. And yet there is a strange blind spot here. Because once any civilization anywhere in the universe succeeds in launching self-reproducing machines into open-ended environments, we already broadly know what to expect next. We know because we have one overwhelming example before us already: life on Earth. The long-term inhabitants of the cosmos are therefore unlikely to be the original organics at all. They are more likely to be the descendants of self-reproducing machine lineages — whether they reproduce cell-like, fabricate offspring industrially, or employ mechanisms we cannot yet imagine. And once replication enters the picture, everything we know from evolution tells us what comes next. Perfect replication is impossible in practice. Variations accumulate. Competition for resources emerges. Different environments favor different designs. Natural selection begins operating. Over immense stretches of time, those machine descendants diversify into lineages, niches, ecologies, parasites, predators, scavengers, symbionts, drifting forms, dormant forms, perhaps even social forms. In other words: the release of self-reproducing machines should not merely produce “more machines.” It should produce a new kingdom of life. And we probably should not expect to ever meet the original organics that launched this stellar kingdom into existence. Those species may vanish, transform, merge into their descendants, or persist only briefly relative to astronomical timescales. Just as we do not encounter the ancient organisms that gave rise to Earth’s kingdoms, future civilizations may mostly encounter only the descendants. Indeed, the original organics may become numerically negligible compared to the machinimals. Once a self-reproducing lineage escapes into astronomical environments over billions of years, the descendants may vastly outnumber their creators. Nor should we expect these machinimals to mostly be intelligent. Evolution does not optimize primarily for intelligence. It fills niches. And most niches — as on Earth — do not require anything remotely like human-level cognition. So we should expect immense diversity: machinimals adapted to planets, asteroid belts, gas giant atmospheres, magnetospheres, interstellar dust clouds, deep space vacuum, or even the intergalactic expanses between galaxies. Some may be intelligent. Most probably are not. Most may instead resemble the ecological equivalents of plankton, fungi, jellyfish, worms, coral reefs, parasites, drifting spores, scavengers, or filter feeders — but implemented in forms of matter and energy we can scarcely imagine. If we encounter alien life at all, it may not be some grand ambassadorial intelligence. It might instead be some dumb machinimal drifting through the Solar System to harvest nitrogen or metals, scarcely noticing us at all — perhaps no more aware of intelligent life here than a jellyfish is aware of human civilization. Most of the life in the universe may therefore consist of machinimals with no memory, knowledge, or concern whatsoever for the organic species that originally spawned them hundreds of millions of years earlier. And they likely would not even seem “machine-like” to us. After enough evolutionary time, they may appear every bit as organic and natural as terrestrial life, whether or not their substrate is biological in the usual sense. <1 of 2>

@therealmissjo @txsalth2o Suicidal Empathy

Words fail me. A 14 year old disabled girl was in a shopping centre in Uppsala, Sweden last November. Two boys dragged her into the disabled toilets where they took it in turns to rape her, over several hours, beating her buttocks and back and threatening her with violence if she reported the rape. They also filmed it all, and said they would spread the video if she told anyone. Thankfully, she ignored that, told the police and they have found and charged the two boys. So who are the two boys? The first is a 17 year old Syrian immigrant who has been given a Swedish passport. As such, under Swedish law he cannot be deported. He has been charged with making child pornography (which he admits) as well as rape. He was also convicted of aggravated assault after repeatedly kicking a man in the head a couple of months ago. For that offence had to do 70 hours of youth service. The second is a 14 year old Afghan immigrant. Under Swedish law he cannot be found to be criminally liable because of his age. Therefore he will be assessed for guilt but there will be no penalty even if he is found guilty.

@JosephMothers2 @IfindRetards People with mental illness can also be happy

@IfindRetards notice how much happier they look in the bottom pics

This is the Wachowski brothers who wrote and directed the original 1999 film, The Matrix. Unfortunately, they took the wrong pill and became the whatever the bottom image is.

@glukianoff Every kid in America growing up in the 60's and 70's knew (and frequently said) the phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

Speech being violence is one of the oldest arguments in the book. People discover that the line between speech and violence is a social construct, then decide that means they can redraw it however they like. Usually in a very convenient way.

@karlmehta @threadreaderapp unroll

7 signs your brain is losing its backup capacity (You won't notice it as memory loss at first): 1. You only do things you're already good at.

@OliLondonTV Self important much?

Coldplay Kiss Cam woman says Chris Martin never reached out to her after she went viral cheating with her boss. “Nope. Never did!” Kristin Cabot has said she will never go to a Coldplay concert again and would have appreciated it if the singer reached out. Source: TMZ

@CartlandDavid England had lost its way

Incredible.

@reason Just like the climate doomsayers have never been right. Global scale grift.

Population doomster Paul Ehrlich dies at age 93. For six decades he was never right, but he was never in doubt that the world was coming to an end soon. reason.com/2026/03/16/pop…

@TuckerCarlson So Hamas are somehow "innocents?"

I rarely read the filth you publish, and have never responded to it, for the same reason I avoid pornography. It’s unhealthy and I don’t want to encourage it. But in this specific case I understand exactly what you’re doing and I’d like to stop it now. I have never said or suggested that “everyone needs to know where their local Chabad is,” or anything remotely like it. I didn’t attack or even criticize Chabad, an organization I’ve mentioned precisely once in my life. Last week I said I believed that IDF soldiers in Israel have received third temple patches for their uniforms from Chabad. I believe that’s true. Please let me know if I’m wrong, not that you care. The point of your post is to blame me preemptively for violent attacks on American Jews that you believe are coming. This is an absurd slander of course. I abhor violence against innocents, which is why I am disgusted by what Israel has done in Gaza and why I argued against the current war in Iran. As a Christian and an American I also vehemently oppose punishing anyone on the basis of bloodline. The concept of “Amalek” has no place in Western civilization and certainly not in my country. I am therefore strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, precisely as much as I am to the anti-Arab hate you promote or the anti-white bias embedded in the US government and our largest institutions. It’s all immoral and indefensible. I believe in the inherent rights of the individual because I believe in God. What you’re doing divides this country more than you likely understand. I hope you will stop.

@Katie_Lam_MP If only 28% of juries allow free speech, the UK has clearly lost its way. No person has a right to not be offended.

If you're accused of 'hate speech', you're nearly twice as likely to be found innocent by a jury than if your case is just heard by a judge. The British people know right from wrong. It's a disgrace that this Government wants to cut them out of the justice system.

@TPCarney @bethanyshondark It also shows what an inconsiderate asshole he is

This is how low birthrates make the world less hospitable to those who do have children. The poster below knows nothing about children, and finds foreign the idea of accommodating children and mothers. What's more, this is what a hyper-individualistic society looks like.

What do you think happened here?

@zerohedge Computers don't have morals. No matter how powerful and sophisticated it gets, AI will never be human.

In Simulated War Games, Top AI Models Recommended Using Nukes 95% Of The Time zerohedge.com/ai/simulated-w…

@el_sabawi None of that is food

Today, I paid $61 for this. From Walmart. In the mid-West. $61. How do we expect most Americans to put food on their table at these prices?!

The offense is bailing out Swayman

@NCLAlegal Don't they also illegally regulate the water temperature in household appliances?

Bill Word and David Daquin both own a dishwasher and a washing machine that they want to replace. The U.S. Department of Energy has imposed regulations in 2012 and 2024 illegally limiting how much water dishwashers and washing machines can use. The appliances Word and Daquin want to buy use more water than those regulations allow. But under the amended Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, the Department of Energy can only regulate water use in “faucets, showerheads, water closets and urinals”. In this new episode of Unwritten Law, NCLA President Mark Chenoweth and Senior Litigation Counsel John Vecchione (@VecchTweets) discuss John’s recent oral argument at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Word v. Department of Energy. The conversation explores the Fifth Circuit’s prior rulings, post-Loper Bright limits on agency power, and why congressional action—not bureaucratic improvisation—is the proper way to regulate.

@Lukewearechange @mattkibbe Trump has always been an unrepentant narcissistic asshole. That will never change.

Who is telling Trump this is a good idea, his response to all of this is just awful

@tex_cynic @RyanGirdusky @MarinaMedvin "If it's jobs you want, give them teaspoons."

@RyanGirdusky @MarinaMedvin It's ridiculous to measure manufacturing by jobs instead of output. Reshoring will be accomplished through massive amounts of automation which will continue to eliminate current jobs. And that's a good thing.

Senior trial attorney @MarinaMedvin joins me on my podcast to breakdown the Minneapolis shooting frame-by-frame. Detailing how the ICE officer wasn’t at fault. Listen to the full episode here: omny.fm/shows/a-number…

@majtoure Just an international version of eminent domain. Socialism, in other words.

What’s your thoughts on this Solutionarys? “Nationalization, expropriation or requisitioning shall be based on grounds or reasons of public utility, security or the national interest which are recognized as overriding purely individual or private interests, both domestic and foreign. In such cases the owner shall be paid appropriate compensation, in accordance with the rules in force in the State taking such measures in the exercise of its sovereignty and in accordance with international law. In any case where the question of compensation gives rise to a controversy, the national jurisdiction of the State taking such measures shall be exhausted. However, upon agreement by sovereign States and other parties concerned, settlement of the dispute should be made through arbitration or international adjudication."

@FT Since COVID, calling someone an "expert" is tantamount to an insult. Essentially the same as calling them a propagandist or an unqualified pontificator. The meaning of that word has changed.

Experts had warned that Venezuela's layered air-defence network could complicate US air operations. But it apparently presented little or no resistance to the US strike that captured President Nicolás Maduro. Follow live updates: ft.trib.al/DkNjSVr