Joscha Bach

@lazilyoptimal @nanogenomic Cocaine makes you less loving, so it probably helps

@Plinz @nanogenomic can cocaine fill the void of heartbreak?

Working on it

@szpak Civilian collateral damage during urban warfare and bombing in densely populated areas is often 60%-80%, and half the population of Gaza are children. Ukraine is different (trench warfare, only adult combatants, no human shields, schools and hospitals not used as barracks etc.)

@Plinz Data (e.g. 0.3% child deaths in Ukraine vs 37.3% in Gaza), plus destroying schools, hospitals, civilians in Gaza, Lebanon & Iran indicates this is not "collateral" damage, but human (not AI) intended. Reframe: not war, but calculated societal destruction. x.com/alon_mizrahi/s…

Good news is that the Iran war slightly reduces the risk that humanity is going extinct due to AI

It seems unlikely that an Iranian opposition movement rises spontaneously to take power. The government has eliminated many of the people who could organize, and starting an opposition party is hard. For comparison, most Americans hate both parties, but there is no opposition

@szpak That's bs. Collateral damage happens in any war. The AI is likely sorting through data in similar way as humans, just more in a shorter amount of time.

@Plinz Given the apparently AI-assisted execution of the double-tap that killed 168 girls at the Shajareh Tayyebeh School, I'd say the tag-team of War & AI is greatly increasing the risk of extincting humanity. That includes the Drones & AI tag team which will target us individually.

@Bitnik9k Much of the funding is spent to enable homelessness and drug markets rather than to reduce them. SF is giving cash allowances, food, healthcare, drug paraphernalia, alcohol to homeless drug addicts. Btw you are only allowed to camp where you can buy drugs, not outside of the city

@Plinz How is it producing more homelessness?

The homeless industrial complex of SF is the best funded in the world (per capita), and consequently it is producing more homelessness. If social problems could be solved by spending more, SF would have solved them.

@kanzure @JosephJacks_

@Plinz @JosephJacks_ Studies have shown that potatoes can act as memresistors for physical reservoir computing

One human brain has 86 billion neurons containing > 10 quintillion α-tubulins doing ~10²⁵ ops/sec on 20 watts of power. Compared to the largest XPU superclusters, we have 6x more compute elements, 100x more ops/sec and require 500M× less power. Silicon has a long way to go.

@aricfedida @DrEliDavid By creating a European country in a middle eastern territory, it was inevitable that Israel shaped a Palestinian identity within those who were displaced

Country? WHAT Country?! 🤣 Mr. Bach, there has never been a country called "Palestine". Please educate yourself in basic history.

@blizzman488 @DrEliDavid x.com/ninapaley/stat…

@Plinz @DrEliDavid Palestinianism is a myth invented as a weapon with which to combat the Jewish state. The idea of Palestinian identity or nationhood never existed until the 60s when the Arabs realized they couldn’t win by force so propaganda was the next best move.

@FirasHermez Yes, we get risk of nuclear armageddon, but also risk of supply chain collapse (which would pause AI). In any case, p(doom) has always been and will always be 1, the question is not whether we die but how

@Plinz By raising the risk of extinction from other reasons 🙃?

@surveytheland Perhaps it's better to frame it not as a problem of good and evil but as evolution. The NGOs that survive are those that do not make themselves obsolete, which means that after a few years, the NGO ecosystem is dominated by orgs that increase the problem they are meant to solve

@Plinz As the person who coined "Homeless Industrial Complex", I always ask: "If I offered you $1B a year, with 25% increases each year, how long would it take you to solve homelessness?" 99.99% say one year. They problem is that they don't understand the depth of the evil in an NGO.

my clawdbot does not use .md files, but .phd files

@Dekeita There is a slightly increased probability of a global thermonuclear exchange before the AI takes over. There is also a possibility that China uses the overextension of the US and split in NATO to take Taiwan, which would effectively pause AI

@Plinz No it likely increases it. As energy prices drop a fair bit in the aftermath of incredible success for the US.

@JosephJacks_ I am sure it also varies by the kind of potato

The decorations on human brain alpha-tubulin, known as post-translational modifications, act like a biological GPS or instruction manual, and they are far more complex in the human brain than in a potato. In human neurons, these proteins are heavily modified with chemical tags like acetylation and polyglutamylation, which stabilize the long-distance "highways" needed to transport nutrients across long axons. These tags are so specific that they can even signal to motor proteins exactly where to drop off their cargo. In contrast, potato tubulin has a vastly simpler set of decorations; while it still uses some tags to manage cell division and structural growth, it lacks the high-density, diverse "tubulin code" required to maintain the sophisticated, lifelong stability of a human brain's neural network.

@on_godot @shivon I am using twitter so that the information I get is a paragraph length piece of text that I can consume in a few seconds and that is devoid of the overhead of having to take in someone's face; this format is a mismatch

@shivon @Plinz Now I’m back to: the smallest units must be like music but then what is a music note. While walking to my scooter, taking out my keys, imagining a whole note on a monstera leaf bopping circle and ellipse, with Charli XCX’s Beg For You melody plays.

When you think, what medium do you tend to think in? Would be very curious to hear how you’d describe the base unit(s) of your thoughts and how they feel to you. I assumed what happens in my head was similar to everyone else but have been surprised by how varied thought can be.

@JosephJacks_ Not all do, eg. RBMs have 2. But more importantly, ANNs are not meant to be a model of neurons (with exceptions, in the neuromorphic modeling space). A biological neuron is probably more akin to a little 3 layer network with a dozen noisy perceptron nodes.

All current artificial neural networks (SSMs, RNNs, Transformers, etc) assume that the Neuron (parameter space) has ONE degree of computational freedom. In reality, the actual Neuron in our brains has 10+ degrees of freedom.