James Poulos

@LeadingReport @coffeebreak_YT There is still just one novel about the Epsteinverse saga. Its secrets are many I KNOW THIS SOUNDS CRAZY a.co/d/dP2bgkc

@michaelbd Human Forever p211

James Poulos on the philosophical contradiction he says sits at the heart of every AI accelerationist's worldview: "There's a funny paradox where some of the most super AI maxi, like accelerate post-humanism is good, that crowd, they somehow believe that their human ideas of advancement and improvement and progress are going to just port over into these machines." "They actually want these machines to become more thoughtful, more reflective, more self-improving than human beings." "Wait a minute, if we're really trying to create these machines that infinitely surpass us in our capabilities, why would they think about improvement and perfection and progress in the same terms that we do?" "Why wouldn't they start thinking about those things in a way that's more attuned to divine wisdom than to merely human knowledge?" @JamesPoulos

James Poulos on the reason he thinks people building AI have started reading a 150-year-old Russian novel: "To see Dostoevsky show up in a serious conversation among people in the frontier AI space about what exactly we're doing and how we can trust ourselves, and who else we can trust, and all those questions around alignment, it really said to me that my thesis in Human Forever was basically correct." "Technology has advanced and been pushed in a direction that debunks all of these merely secular or merely humanist ways of reinforcing trust among people, both in small groups and at scale." "When you look at a book like Dostoevsky's Demons, what you see is this stuff has actually been building up for a long time." "That book concerns really breakdown of human trust at the small level that then blows up to the scale ultimately of the entire Russian Revolution." @JamesPoulos

@vocalcry AFFIRM: friends exist

New algo feels like reuniting with all your friends after a year abroad

@AndrewBeckUSA Human Forever 5th anniversary

on the docket today: - @PatrickMcGee_ talking about apple's case - @robinhanson on ai as descendants vs. aliens - @anton_d_leicht discussing new essay "the flood" - @bswud on the latest re: works in progress/stripe - @jamespoulos on new @palladiummag piece - Lucas Pombo (@JoinFAI) on dc's pro-waymo case - @josephcohen on the story of @infinitemachine irl - @zanehengsperger on american factory abundance - @laurence1allen on terraforming robots - @MaikTWehmeyer from @taktile_org - @AkshayNarisetti on @Heypocket $11m raise we are booking experts in real time. come monitor with us!

I'm a situation today Come for the demis, stay for the poulos

@jgreenhall 👀

Strongest possible endorsement from someone I trust in precisely this context.

@drydenwtbrown Star Wars and its consequences

“The Rebel Alliance” and its every corporation in the entire world (except OpenAI and Anthropic)

@Cernovich x.com/jamespoulos/st…

Reddit AI.

@clankrmedia Don’t tell @default_friend

Researchers built a soft floating robot for indoor interaction. It uses helium and flapping fins instead of propellers. The result is quiet, lightweight, and safe to touch. It can follow people, give reminders, and act as a study buddy. Published at ACM DIS 2026.

@vocalcry RSI (recursive self infantilization)

What are we even doing anymore

digger mkultra activate dubya soros mode

@DisgracedProp So far no one has noticed the male lead in I Know This Sounds Crazy is a mischling amazon.com/I-Know-This-So…

On being a mischling: "200. The man of an age of dissolution which mixes the races with one another, who has the inheritance of a diversified descent in his body—that is to say, contrary, and often not only contrary, instincts and standards of value, which struggle with one another and are seldom at peace—such a man of late culture and broken lights, will, on an average, be a weak man. His fundamental desire is that the war which is IN HIM should come to an end; happiness appears to him in the character of a soothing medicine and mode of thought (for instance, Epicurean or Christian); it is above all things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity—it is the "Sabbath of Sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy rhetorician, St. Augustine, who was himself such a man. Should, however, the contrariety and conflict in such natures operate as an ADDITIONAL incentive and stimulus to life—and if, on the other hand, in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable instincts, they have also inherited and indoctrinated into them a proper mastery and subtlety for carrying on the conflict with themselves (that is to say, the faculty of self-control and self-deception), there then arise those marvelously incomprehensible and inexplicable beings, those enigmatical men, predestined for conquering and circumventing others, the finest examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar (with whom I should like to associate the FIRST of Europeans according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second), and among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker type, with its longing for repose, comes to the front; the two types are complementary to each other, and spring from the same causes." - Nietzsche

RSI (recursive self indexing)

@histories_arch Pynchon discusses this

For over a thousand years, historians thought the Viking "sunstone" was nothing more than a myth, until the ocean gave up its secret... The Norse sagas repeatedly referenced a mysterious object called a "sólarsteinn" or sunstone, a navigational tool so powerful that Viking sailors could locate the exact position of the sun even on the most overcast and cloudy days. For centuries, scholars debated whether this was real technology or simply folklore embellished over generations of retelling. Most assumed it was legend. They were wrong. In 2013, marine archaeologists excavating a British warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592 made a stunning discovery buried among the wreckage. Alongside navigational instruments including a pair of dividers and a slate, they found a rectangular chunk of translucent crystal. Testing confirmed it was Iceland spar, a remarkably pure form of calcite with extraordinary optical properties. The fact that it was found stored alongside other precision navigation tools was not a coincidence. Iceland spar possesses a property called birefringence, meaning it splits a single beam of light entering the crystal into two separate beams. When you hold the crystal up toward the sky and slowly rotate it, the two beams will vary in brightness independently until, at one specific angle of rotation, they become perfectly equal in intensity. That precise angle points directly toward the sun, regardless of whether the sun is visible to the naked eye. Cloud cover, fog, and even twilight conditions cannot defeat it. Researchers from the University of Rennes in France conducted extensive testing and published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Their experiments demonstrated that Iceland spar could locate the sun's position with an accuracy of within one degree, even under completely overcast skies. For Viking navigators crossing the North Atlantic toward Iceland, Greenland, and eventually North America, this accuracy would have meant the difference between a successful voyage and sailing hopelessly off course into open ocean. The Viking Age spanned roughly 793 to 1066 AD, and during this period Norse sailors were completing oceanic crossings that would not be replicated by other European cultures for another 400 years. Historians had long puzzled over how they achieved such consistent navigational precision without magnetic compasses, which did not reach Europe until the 12th century. The sunstone appears to be a significant part of that answer. What makes the Channel Islands find especially compelling is that the 1592 shipwreck is far outside the traditional Viking era, suggesting that knowledge of this navigational technique survived and was still being used by European sailors centuries after the Viking Age officially ended. The crystal was not a relic or a curiosity on that ship. It was working equipment. The sagas specifically describe King Olaf consulting a sunstone on a cloudy day to verify the position of the sun, with a separate observation then confirming the stone's accuracy. For generations this was dismissed as poetic invention. Science has now confirmed that every element of that description is physically possible and practically achievable with a simple piece of Icelandic calcite. The Vikings were not lucky explorers stumbling across new lands by accident. They were sophisticated navigators armed with technology so elegant and effective that it required no moving parts, no maintenance, and no power source beyond the sky itself. 📷 : the original calcite crystal alongside Elizabethan navigation dividers next to a cannon Alderney Museum #archaeohistories

@drydenwtbrown …

More likely than we’d like to think!

@mwilcox “You can just do… oh no”

From Jevon’s Paradox to Zeno’s

We’ll slide down the surface of things