Old Dude

@HashZappa @ashiiirg @EthicalSkeptic What are the chances that all the coal seams west side of Appalachia are boggy deposits from an event like this? Thanks for doing this work btw. It’s amazing

@ashiiirg @EthicalSkeptic I would disagree. The way they age things is disingenuous too. Everything peer-reviewed will support the gradualist model and if it does not, they either conveniently explain it away or ignore it entirely.

Max water heights during @EthicalSkeptic's ECDO State 1 > State 2 transition. As close as I could get given all the motion involved, anyway. One thing stands out vs. Ben Davidson's model. A 104° tilt is quite a bit more catastrophic than a 72° tilt. Absolute carnage is ECDO... 😳

@BasedMikeLee True. And far right authoritarian ideology is called tyranny.

What Democrats think fascism means: Republicans What fascism actually means: a far-left, authoritarian ideology focused on creating a highly centralized, dictatorial state that subordinates to the state all aspects of society—economy, culture, media, education, and private life

@Ryan1776_knows @randallwcarlson I wouldn’t want to live on mars. But God called earth his footstool. And said we would meet his son in the sky. Early prophets transported on/off of earth in “whirlwinds.” Future man will come and go between the heavens and an earth that will be made like the heavens.

@randallwcarlson Theory sounds good. Reality is that humans thrive done the natural world provided by the almighty God. Put a human on Mars. I personally think they will go nuts. No sounds of birds, plants, wind, etc. lost connection of our own planets natural frequencies.

Eight billion people on a single planet - but Randall reframes what that planet actually represents in the larger context. Earth is not simply where humanity happens to live. It is a seeding ground for the solar system - the origin point from which humanity can expand outward into a much larger world. That reframe changes the stakes of everything Randall has been discussing. The message about catastrophism, about cosmic threats, about the true history of civilization and its recurring resets, needs to go out relentlessly - because the enterprise it is pointing toward is not simply academic. It is civilizational. Randall is realistic about the reception. Not everyone will hear it. Not everyone needs to. He estimates that somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of people who encounter this framework will respond to it - not necessarily because they have intellectually processed every argument, but because something in them instinctively recognizes that it sounds right. That instinctive recognition is the starting point. From there the motivation to learn the specifics follows naturally - and Randall’s hope is that among those people, young people in particular will be inspired to pursue the disciplines that matter most to this enterprise. Science. Technology. Engineering. Mathematics. Astronomy. Catastrophism. The fields that will determine whether humanity is capable of becoming something larger than what it currently is.

@Math_files I got this wrong btw. ! Is actually a mathematical function . I’ve been out of school for too long. lol

@Math_files !=6

@aakashgupta Thank you for this insight.

For more AI takes: aibyaakash.com

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

@aiwithjainam AI

The people who will benefit the most from AI over the next few years are not necessarily engineers or developers, but the people who learn how to think with LLMs and use them as assistants for research, writing, and decision making. I created a starter playbook for mastering ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Comment "AI" and I’ll DM it to you.

@Reba1776 @bluemontauk Reminds me of Mitch Hedberg.

@bluemontauk I genuinely laughed out loud at this one! There was a comedian long ado that had this humor. Steve, gosh I can’t remember his last name. Anyway great post! 😆😆😆

Deep Thoughts 🧐