Prosemite

@RnaudBertrand I am ashamed to be a boomer.

I feel like I'm eating crazy pills when I read the countless bad takes around how the Vatican would have virtually anointed Anthropic. When if you read the Pope's encyclical it's actually a COMPLETE repudiation of everything Anthropic - and U.S. AI generally - stands for. Read this part of the encyclical for instance (paragraph 110: #Artificial_intelligence" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">vatican.va/content/leo-xi…): "Finally, I would like to employ the expression 'to disarm,' which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life." In a nutshell what the Pope is saying is: 1) The "AI race" mentality itself is the disease: there is no "winning it responsibly", we need to stop seeing AI as a way "to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance" 2) Technical dominance and being the most powerful does not give you the right to set the rules 3) AI must be "freed from monopolistic control", opened to scrutiny, and "restored to the plurality of human cultures" Now compared and contrast it with what Anthropic is officially saying - namely Dario Amodei in his famous essay "Machines of Loving Grace" (darioamodei.com/essay/machines…): 1) Where the Pope says stop the AI race. Dario says win it: "A coalition of democracies [should seek] to gain a clear advantage on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment." 2) Where the Pope says technical power doesn't confer the right to govern. Dario says it does: "This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition's strategy." 3) Where the Pope says free AI from monopolistic control and restore it to the plurality of human cultures. Dario says concentrate it and use it to impose one model: "If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could optimistically lead to an 'eternal 1991.'" These aren't cherry-picked gotchas. This is the central thesis of Dario's essay. And Anthropic keeps repeating this over and over. On May 14, just days ago, Anthropic published a 5,000-word policy essay titled "2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership" (anthropic.com/research/2028-…) urging the US to "lock in a 12-24 month lead" over China by blocking chips, cutting off model access, and ensuring that "democracies, not authoritarian regimes" control AI. They warn that "a lead in frontier AI will enable a widening lead across the full national security technology stack" and urge America not to "squander our advantage." This is, almost word for word, everything the Pope is condemning in his encyclical. I'll grant Anthropic one thing: they have an excellent PR team. Turning what's an obvious repudiation into a perceived endorsement is pretty masterful. But it doesn't mean you have to fall for it...

@TheProjectUnity My schizophrenic brother conjures up non-existant people all the time.

Personally I do not believe there are literal human NPCs, I think everything is held within the overarching membrane of consciousness itself. People can be knuckle dragging, robotic drone-like morons, but they still have a soul. They're just deep in the illusion.

I know we all throw the term NPC around a lot these days. But do you think some people are actually NPCs? Meaning Non-Playable Character. Meaning they aren't really people but more like 'filler' for realities storylines. Do you think some people are literally just NPCs?

@goddek I think that's cherry-picked. Where is the US?

This is why Brazil will never be a first world country.

@TFTC21 Just another one of their PR stunts.

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models. What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text. "We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience." "We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease." These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours. And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve. Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large." The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

@RnaudBertrand Utilities are regulated, and the one and only thing you can trust Sam Altman to is seeing to it that OpenAI will never be regulated.

I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this but Altman is right here, that's the right way of seeing AI models: AI is a general purpose technology and models will end up being a utility like electricity. In fact I'm somewhat surprised he's admitting to this because it makes companies like OpenAI or Anthropic a lot less valuable: it means they'll become mere commodities, much like telecom companies or electricity providers are. The real value will lie in the application layer - what you actually DO with AI - as opposed to the models themselves. Much like the real valuable companies enabled by the internet weren't the telecom companies but businesses like Google, Amazon or Alibaba. I actually wrote a whole article explaining exactly this last month titled "There is no AI race": open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbert…

@wernerk_au @graninas I'm starting to think it's intentional on the part of the labs because it's a huge waste of tokens. Maybe it would cost more to get to actual obedience.

@graninas claude desktop - today, too many examples

Can't make AI agents do what I say. - Spec? Detailed. - Data structures? Defined in spec. - Algorithm? Presented in pseudocode. Result? - "The user is wrong, I'll change the algorithm" - Data structures - distorted - Tons of complexity This is unbearable.

@heynavtoor Without the rent seekers, we would not have VLC. So, show your gratitude.

Do not install VLC. Once you install it, you can never go back. You will never pay 99 cents for a codec again. You will never buy QuickTime Pro again. You will never renew RealPlayer Plus again. You will never pay for Blu-ray decoder software again. You will never see the words "this file format is not supported" again. You will become the family tech support person. Forever. Your dad will call you at 11 PM because he downloaded a .mkv from somewhere and Windows refuses to open it. Your answer will always be the same. "Install VLC." And then the orange traffic cone will eat his problem in 4 seconds and he will call you a genius. You did not do that. A French student named Jean-Baptiste Kempf did, in 1996, as a school project at École Centrale Paris. His roommate brought a traffic cone home from the street that year. They made it the logo. 6 billion downloads later, the cone is still undefeated. Repo: github.com/videolan/vlc. 18,463 stars. GPL-2.0. Pushed today. Here is the wildest part: The warning is real. Just not for you. Apple sold QuickTime Pro for $29.99. VLC killed it. Apple shut it down in 2016. Microsoft sold Windows Media Center for $9.99. VLC killed it. Microsoft shut it down with Windows 10. RealNetworks charged $39.99 a year for RealPlayer Plus. VLC killed it. Sony built Blu-ray to need a $79.99 licensed decoder. VLC ships with libdvdcss and a French court ruling that protects it. The codec mafia spent 30 years building a tollbooth on every video file on Earth. A guy whose GitHub location is literally "Coneland" walked through every tollbooth with a cone on his head and never paid a cent. He was offered millions of dollars to sell it. He said no. So yes. Do not install VLC. The codec industry has not recovered from the last 6 billion people who did. 100% Opensource. 100% Free. 100% Yours. The biggest media companies on Earth spent three decades trying to charge you to play your own files. One French student and a cone he found on the street made all of it pointless.

@Simon_Ingari What? Please describe exactly what kind of privacy you're trying to conjure up. Do you think that looking at a house shouldn't be allowed?

how is Google Maps allowed to have aerial photos of all our homes without ever asking permission?

@Govindtwtt No. I check every outcome.

Are you checking every line of code written by AI?

@Rakeshhkumaar Reagan marks the beginning of the current leg of the decline.

Reagan blamed inflation on government spending for ordinary people while corporations kept receiving subsidies, tax cuts, and bailouts because admitting that corporations raise prices to protect profits would expose how capitalism actually works.

@lr_jordan Any AI that tells me what to focus on, without my asking, is instantly in the past.

Claude's memory is extremely annoying One day you're exploring a random idea out of curiosity, then a week later the AI is telling you not to do something because you need to focus on the random idea you already forgot about like wtf?

@vancemurphy @PramilaJayapal Immigration

@PramilaJayapal Point to one program or subsidy that the government runs efficiently and effectively. Just one will do

Private insurance has no place in health care. They don't need to exist, period.

@SolidEvidence Who says it's voluntary?

One of the things that has surprised me from wastewater surveillance is just how much cocaine Americans are still consuming. It's everywhere, and there is a lot of it. No real decrease with all of the increased border security either. Who knew?

@Tyler_A_Harper It's not going to be that black-and-white.

Yep this has been clear for some time.

@hashjenni Maybe they are all dead.

Epstein Island wasn't running itself. There were maids, custodians, chefs, gardeners, dock workers. Where are they today? Why are they not telling us what they saw?

@txbeergoddess The goal is total global domination for the few and slavery for the rest.

I don’t even understand how this is remotely possible since AI has been proven over and over again to hallucinate, plagiarize, make shit up, lie and gaslight. Like, what is it actually doing?

@OrevaZSN To spell it out, the goal is global domination for the few and slavery for the rest.

I really want to know what these billionaires' end game is. They take away jobs, replace everything with AI, inflation goes up, healthcare costs increase, and no one can afford rent or food. How are they going to make money if no one can afford their products?

@TheProjectUnity My BS detector kept firing on this one.

Atlantean imagery is EVERYWHERE. One of the most mysterious sites in Egypt is the Temple dedicated to Hathor in Dendara. I went there several years ago, this is footage from that exploration. This is where you will find the famous 'Lightbulb' images and much more.

@unusual_whales "Two out of three ain't bad." as the song goes.

Jeff Bezos: "If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, packages would take 6 weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it."

@HalSinger Equating the stock market to the economy is the laziest thing ever.

Gentle reminder that the wealthiest 10% of American households own approximately 87% to 93% of all U.S. stock market wealth. Hence the booming stock market juxtaposed against plummeting consumer confidence. Riddle solved.