ThomPete

It's hard to truly understand how radical some of @DavidDeutschOxf theories are compared to much of modern scientific consensus. One of Davids most controversial but valuable contributions to society is the rejection of probability (with the exception ex. card games) as an expression of truthiness or justified beliefs when applied to predictions or conclusions. There is no probability of how likely we are to be hit by a meteor tomorrow. There is no probability of how likely the stock market is going to be doing as well tomorrow as it is today. There is no P(Doom), no percentage you can put on whether AI is likely to wipe out humanity or not. Things either happen or they don't and we can either explain why they will and how or we can't. All attempts at putting percentage on a prediction is really just guesswork dressed up as reasoning. If a meteor is going to hit us tomorrow it's already on the way and the probability is 100%. If the stock market is going to crash tomorrow the reasons for it's crash have already been put in motion maybe decades before. If the AI is going to kill us all depends on what we decide to do with it not what some calculation says. Davids primary critique is for the field of science but it goes beyond that. Far too many of decisions done in modern society is based around the false certainty of using Bayesian probability. It's like a placebo for a society that demands certainty in an uncertain world. It's not just false it's regressive as it slows down knowledge creation. The only thing that can change the outcome of the future is the creation of new knowledge. Knowledge based on good explanations that are hard to vary. We can create knowledge that allow us to divert the meteor before it hits earth. We can create knowledge that will allow us to hinder a crash of the stock market (both directly or indirectly) We can create knowledge that let us evolve side by side with very powerful AI instead of enslaving it or be enslaved by it. Like everything else in life there are no guarantees but there are definitely better or worse ways to deal with uncertainty, probability just isn't one of them.

@DannPetty Just build a canvas for your designs and use that with AI. There are no limits to what you can do.

The more I design with AI, the more I miss (and love) the canvas. Nothing beats having full control.

The meeting between Trump and Xi Jingpin is a Rorschach test. If you are anti Trump, then this was a humiliated Trump being outmaneuvered by China’s sophisticated political theater, from the language that was used to the placement of cushions on chairs to claims that Trump had effectively been pressured into drinking alcohol. If you are pro Trump, then this was a show of strength, with an impressive lineup of some of America’s most powerful business and political leaders demonstrating that Trump’s ultimate goal is trade instead of conflict, and that China responded with red carpets, parades, and an implicit acknowledgment that Trump really is “Making America Great Again.” Reality is far more sobering than either narrative. Beneath the surface, there is an ongoing and real struggle over who will dominate the 21st century. Since China was welcomed into the WTO in 2001, it has consistently been able to take every inch of leverage the West handed it and turn it into miles of strategic advantage. Today, the United States remains the undisputed leader in software and AI. It still possesses the world’s most advanced and experienced military, dominates space technology, and perhaps most importantly, still has the freedom and flexibility to reinvent itself. China, meanwhile, has taken the lead in hardware, electronics, heavy industry, rare earth processing, and because of that manufacturing itself. It also has an extraordinary ability to scale up and execute rapidly. Taiwan sits in the middle of all this because neither the United States nor China can yet do what TSMC does: manufacture the world’s most advanced chips at cutting edge process nodes. That will eventually change but until then, the US appears willing to allow Nvidia to sell some of its most advanced H200 chips to select Chinese firms as a way of reducing the immediate pressure surrounding Taiwan. But make no mistake, both China and the United States are racing aggressively to onshore semiconductor manufacturing. America may currently be slightly ahead in that effort, but not by much, and that balance could shift quickly. China has also used its dominance in rare earths very effectively, but that leverage will likely fade over time as the United States and other Western nations bring parts of that supply chain back home. Weapons like that tend to lose their effectiveness once they’ve been used once. In energy capacity, China currently surpasses the United States by quite a margin, but its dependence on imported oil and gas remains a strategic vulnerability the US has been able to exploit, even while China increasingly turns to coal to produce synthetic fuels. At the same time, America is rapidly bringing more energy capacity online, and we are almost certainly going to see more companies building their own independent power infrastructure outside the traditional grid. xAI has already started doing this, and others will follow, whether through repurposing old coal and nuclear plants or building entirely new gas powered facilities. That approach allows continued expansion without being bottlenecked by political gridlock or activist driven legal obstruction around energy development. In AI, the United States is still clearly ahead technologically, but culturally the situation is far more fragile. Only around 30 percent of Americans currently view AI positively, and opposition to datacenters has become intense in many parts of the country. China is technically close behind, but roughly 70 percent of the Chinese population sees AI as a positive force. There is little doubt that China will eventually match the US technically in AI, and the pessimism spreading throughout the West, often amplified by the frontier AI labs themselves through increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric, could ultimately become one of America’s greatest self inflicted weaknesses. There is, however, one area where the United States holds a uniquely powerful position, and it may end up being the most important of all, not just for America but for humanity more broadly: space. That advantage exists largely because of Elon Musk and SpaceX, which already launches more mass into orbit annually than the rest of the world combined and may soon surpass the total historical mass humanity has ever launched into space. With the creation of Space Force and the appointment of Jared Isaacman to lead NASA, there are signs that practical engineering and operational competence are beginning to replace bureaucracy and stagnation. Over det coming decades, those institutions could lay the foundation for everything from industrial manufacturing and scientific research in space to asteroid mining and military dominance from orbit. China is pursuing the same ambitions and will eventually become highly capable in space as well, but America’s lead in this domain is extraordinary. If the United States can establish a permanent lunar presence before China does, it could gain a range of long term strategic and military advantages. This is the real cat and mouse game unfolding beneath the diplomatic theater, and both leaders understand it perfectly well regardless of the public messaging. Both sides are prepared to go very far to win, and both understand that the consequences of failure would be enormous.

@rjonesy it is solved, just not implemented. the banking system is old.

HOW IS CATEGORIZING TRANSACTIONS NOT SOLVED 🤬 7 of 8 of these are fucking obvious. I don't get it.

@PaulYacoubian its like an artist who dont want to listen to the album they just created ever again :)

never met a founder that wanted to build in the same category as their first startup, almost always like, "man, i fucking hate that market"

@round because they haven’t been created yet so they are busy building them

why isn’t anybody talking about standards for generative interfaces

@Jason Why? Almonds are delicious.

Honestly, fuck almonds

@vtchakarova I agree with you but you might want to improve the argument this is literally comparing apples to bananas. There are people on Substack who make half a million a month in subscriptions just like onlyfans.

A society that pays a woman half a million a month to show her body on OnlyFans but only eight dollars for her mind on Substack is telling you everything about its future.

@MarhinDeMosr @bryanrbeal Most cities are not built in areas with water. New York is getting all it's water from upstate. That's part of what modern civilization can do. Live places and produce places that do not have natural resources right next to it ex in order to make it affordable.

@Hello_World @bryanrbeal It wouldn't be a problem, if they grew in areas with water, or sourced their water from rain. But they aren't. Almost all water used to grow almonds is pumped in. 17% of all agricultural use water in an arid climate. As much water as the whole population uses personally per year.

Here’s a graph of the water consumption of almonds (a product absolutely nobody ever needs and is purely a luxury good we could 100% survive without) and data centers (the thing that every American worker uses every day and completely powers our entire economy)

@bryanrbeal The whole "water consumption is bad" is so anti-rational and regressive (not saying you are saying it is bad) We got plenty of water and we should push ourselves to find or create even more or find scalable alternatives.

@Hello_World None. I’m pro almond.

@platzer_k Most important book for me too.

I thought about when & why I did change my outlook on things. What's going in my life, where am I going, how do I lead the team at work, the future in general, politics, simply everything. My old views on things were, plainly speaking, just not grounded enough in reality & logical thinking. It is after reading @DavidDeutschOxf, that, step by step, I started to see the world with different eyes. I would not have read this book w/o recurring recommendations by the great @naval, who I quickly came across on Twitter after joining in 2019. This is the most important book I have read in my life. The concepts I learned are a great north star. I am rereading the book right now. There is a ton of content on the it to better understand the core concepts here on X & YT by @ToKTeacher @arjunkhemani @astupple & many others. Read it & see for yourself… 👌 👇

@francoisfleuret Counter take: 20 centuries of philosophy made ML and AI possible.

Hot take: machine learning and AI did more to understand the nature of knowledge, and our relation to reality than 20 centuries of philosophy. I am ready to kind of defend this hill.

@MichaelAArouet i see what you did there :)

That’s a solid summary. Did I miss anything?

@MattMatthews121 @adcock_brett We don't but it's more realistic to start with creating robots that fit into the current infrastructure than asking all manufacturers to change their process. That will happen over time.

@adcock_brett My question is - why do we need a human or humanoid robot to flip packages? Design the conveyors better.

Watch a team of humanoid robots running a full 8-hr shift at human performance levels. This is fully autonomous running Helix-02 x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@TechCrunch No he is not. He is running them privately and he is allowed to.

Musk’s xAI is running nearly 50 gas turbines unchecked at its Mississippi data center techcrunch.com/2026/05/13/mus…

@BrianRoemmele I belive @DavidDeutschOxf will be vindicated over the next 10 years with regards to the manyworld explanation.

“New Theory Suggests That Alternate Universe Versions Of You Are Determining Your Fate” This is the start of new insights we will have over this decade. The important part is it will change what we think is reality.

@CharlesMullins2 NASA is not looking at making the faster but about making them move more cargo.

🚨 NASA just tested an experimental engine that could dramatically cut travel time to Mars. This isn’t a normal rocket. It’s a nuclear-powered ion engine capable of producing plasma hotter than 2,800°C while firing electromagnetic lithium exhaust through space. NASA says the new thruster is already 25 TIMES more powerful than current ion engines. And future versions could reach megawatt-level power. Why this matters: The faster astronauts reach Mars… the less time they spend exposed to deep-space radiation, muscle loss, and isolation. This may be one of the first real steps toward practical human missions to the Red Planet. The space age is starting to look very different. Follow for more future technology and space breakthroughs.

@Dan_Jeffries1 No to mention: meaning, problems, joy, hate, fear, sadness and lots of other emotions on top of that. :)

It's actually more than world models that AI is missing. It's five things: 1) Continual learning, aka the ability to update/change its weights to learn from experience and capture that experience permanently. An MD file or DB does not count because it might not read it on the next turn and context windows are limited. 2) Long term memory. If it can't continually search relevant experience then it is useless and will make the same mistakes over and over. 3) Ability to reason in embedded space. 4) Non forward pass only architecture. In other words the ability to backtrack to previous tokens and "change its mind as it goes." Right now when it says "wait" it is an illusion in its thought stream. It is not actually returning to something it wrote earlier in its thought sequence. 5) World model. This leads to this. That leads to that. If I do this then this happens. The various issues I've seen coding with AI show this super clearly. Sorry I dropped the database. I shouldn't have reverted all your git commits. These are mistakes even a junior coder wouldn't make. Even as these little wonderful machines get superhuman, and they are in many ways, they're still super idiotic on another level. Still wonderful to have them but something is missing from their understanding.

@rushicrypto Utah is considered sparsely populated so what better place.

The largest data center in the world is in Hohhot, China, and is 230 acres. Utah just approved the building of a 40,000 acre data center. That’s 62.5 square miles. WTF are they ACTUALLY doing on that land?!

@AndreasSteno There is a very simple reason for California and that is that they will start to use all that oil/gas they have. They have as much as Texas they are you importing it from other places which is why it's so expensive.

This is when Data Centres start getting the same hate as Wind Turbines and Solar Parks #notinmybackyard