Ulisse Mini

My short and long-term memory are v good fwiw afaict. There is some mild fluctuation; when working memory gets temporarily very slightly worse (for 2-7 days), I’m about to have a meditative insight.

@___tilt @KanizsaBoundary

@MiniUlisse what is the fix?

this is a skill issue. i've tried to connect nick with people who know how to fix this (while keeping the benefits), but sadly haven't gotten through

@QiaochuYuan the completion of the rationalist project has not been done I think. even if you integrated all your trauma/conditioning, the positive form of rationality (forming correct beliefs on evidence) remains very unsolved

i've had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind for years that i "should" meditate more or be more western-buddhist and i think i am really just not temperamentally western-buddhist actually. there are plenty of people who i like and respect who have gone down this path and it seems to have been good for them but i've never been able to stay motivated with a meditation practice, i don't care about awakening as a goal at all, burbea or whoever has never moved my heart in any real way i think the nagging feeling for me comes from this implicit sales pitch that is like "if you meditate enough you will uncover the true structure of how minds work in a way that would be incomprehensible to you otherwise" i.e. western buddhism as a true completion of the rationalist project. and as an ex-rationalist i am tempted by this sales pitch! like i really do wanna know if i'm missing anything incredibly important about minds work, that is relevant to my interests. and it's epistemically horrifying to think that if i don't meditate enough i might die fundamentally confused about the nature of things but. western buddhism as a structure, overall, seems incredibly individualist to me in a way i don't like personally and that i also don't think is the right direction for solving the meaning crisis or whatever. in practice its entire discourse is focused on individual experience. i have always felt like the "for the benefit of all beings" meme is a cop-out that deprioritizes the specific beings you are already entangled in a web of mutual debt and duty and obligation with. there is this huge weird religious shadow i don't understand about ways in which western buddhism was created in competition with christianity while also being wishy-washy about whether it's a real religion or not to maintain a certain kind of respectability that i don't care about the most concrete thing is that western buddhism, compared to christianity, does not seem to prioritize creating structures to raise families in. i visited a few churches a few years back and this was by far my biggest takeaway; that a church is a place where you bring your whole family, you bring the kids and you bring grandma and grandpa. there was a church i visited in seattle where after the service there was a sort of afterparty (sorry i'm sure this has a real name), families relaxing, eating snacks, hanging out, catching up, gossiping, kids running around, then a pastor (?) did a lesson for the kids. incredibly wholesome, amazingly wholesome, left a big impression on me. nothing i've seen in the hippie / authentic relating / buddhist / meditation / psychedelic spaces has ever compared, really, and i doubt that's going to change because again, all of these spaces are situated in a discourse that prioritizes individual experience over everything else i have further doubts about the specific strain of rational-techno-buddhism that appears to quietly have gotten popular in parts of silicon valley and its function as a political tool but that is even more half-baked and i gotta chew on it more first

@nabla_theta @nickcammarata frustration != suffering - Joe Hudson is fairly advanced in all this and talks about coming into work frustrated people aren't moving faster. without resisting the frustration it can also feel amazing, without curtailing the human experience, if done right

@nickcammarata i sometimes say that one of the advantages of ADHD is it makes you extremely frustrated with doing unimportant things. from this angle, it would be terrible if i enjoyed doing everything

meditation will nuke your short term memory and you'll end up doing basic things twice in a row because you forgot you just did it, but you'll be so baseline happy doing anything that you won't mind doing things twice

I recently started noticing how it feels for trauma to pull me into the past. Sometimes I literally feel smaller, like a kid. Not a metaphor - an experience. I thought “trauma pulls you into the past” was just a pithy statement or theory. sometimes i'm just a 'ill kid lol

@_space_punk_ @mstreet221 😂

@mstreet221 What if I told you theres a choice that guarantees nobody dies so long as only 50% decide no one dies 50% off fire sale

@tszzl ahaha

apropos of nothing, the concept of a jury is a wonderful thing that I appreciate, where every day citizens impact on the lightcone can just get 10,000xed overnight it’s very lord of the rings

no I’m saying YOU have a system that touches superintelligence. and every man woman and child with $20 to their name

@tszzl going to need a new term, super-duper intelligence, to refer to the thing Einstein would be with a 10x larger brain while running 10x as fast. the thing that cracks the world in half is still a ways away (read: few years. maybe decade or two)

ultimately idk if my style is the best for getting results. but it feels the best for my soul, and seems to work great for me. when I deeply empathize with who I'm writing to, then I don't feel blocked by stranger danger/feeling like i'm being unreasonable/etc. which is great!

I say this is an "offer" because, at least for me, I genuinely like when people ask me stuff like this! It feels good even if I decline. I usually encourage people who do this :-)

if you can't view your ask as an offer, where you can imagine the other person being glad they received it (even if they're not interested!) then it's a bad ask! this isn't as restrictive as you might think. i'll give a few examples of crazy asks below, written like this 🧵

asking for stuff doesn't feel like grifting if you genuinely only want them to say yes if it'll benefit them as well as you. ditto for applying to programs/fellowships/etc. it's basically a rich guy who wants to improve the world or make returns, you provide them evidence for how good you'd be at what they want, as best you can, then you go back to getting better. many kinds of interpersonal agency can feel icky, like grifting, so ppl avoid it. but if you refuse to be inauthentic, to lie, to have nothing unwholesome in your heart, then it's easy! when everyone feels like, on some level, a friend who you haven't met yet, then it all flows so much more naturally and better. never having gone to school myself (homeschooled, whole life) this kind of orientation comes more naturally to me I think. imagine never having a stupid test, adults that wouldn't listen to you/take you seriously, and oppressive institutions. I deeply feel like everyone can be reasoned with. that said, i still have to work to monitor my orientation! it's easy for me to fall into a grift-y mindset momentarily, there's so of that in the world, it's natural to mirror occasionally. nothing wrong with that! but, for me, it feels better for my soul to be authentic and wholesome. and, thankfully, it's also very effective! authenticity really stands out in an application, when everyone else is trying to convince you, and one person stops to be real and simply connect. as people. hope this helps someone! :-)

@noisyb0y1 seems fake. I've had someone doing this for a few months and there's less alpha than you'd think

14-year-old American found a roofing company on Google Maps with 4.9 stars and no website, copied their reviews and pasted them into ChatGPT 5.5. 2 minutes later - a complete brief. Pasted it into webuil io and just waited while the system built a full website with all pages, reviews and a booking button. Called the owner and showed him the live preview. He said yes immediately because he'd been meaning to fix this for years and never had the time. Invoice for $1,000. 47 minutes of work from the first search to a closed deal. Then he built a machine. Outscraper pulls 200 businesses from Google Maps in 10 minutes, ChatGPT 5.5 writes a personalized email for each one with their real business data - 500 emails a day, 3% respond. Month one - $4,000, month six - $15,000-20,000. Five million businesses on Google Maps are still waiting for that call.

@blader some of us (me) have never been to school to drop out :-)

update (sadly i did not invest because i am retarded):

:-)

We’ve raised 75m in new funding from Sequoia and Spark Capital—partnering with @sonyatweetybird, @MikowaiA, and @YasminRazavi, all of whom are deeply supportive of our long-term mission. We’ve also brought on angels & advisors including @karpathy, @tszzl, and @_milankovac_. ----- Our early results with FDM-1 moved computer use from a data-constrained regime to a compute-constrained one; this latest round of funding unlocks several orders of magnitude of compute scaling for that work. With the FDM model series we have a path to scale agentic capabilities through video pretraining, and we expect to achieve superhuman performance on general computer tasks in the same way that current language models have superhuman performance on coding tasks. We’re also now able to invest in the blue-sky research necessary to our long term mission of building aligned general learners. To realize the civilizationally transformative impacts of AI, models must generalize far out of their training distributions, actively exploring and building skills in new environments. This capability represents a substantial shift from the current paradigm of model training. We believe that current alignment techniques are insufficient to predictably and safely steer a model with human-level learning capabilities, and so we’re doing work to study small versions of this problem in controlled environments to develop a science of alignment for general learners. We’re a team of 6 people in San Francisco. We’re hiring world-class researchers and engineers to help us achieve our mission. If that’s you, please get in touch.