Sean Millerick

Whatever you think of AI, civilization is acting as though man is machine. You may think it is marketing. You may think it is a venture-capital fever dream. You may think it is demonic deception. You may think it is real and on the threshold of crossing into something that has never existed. The wager exists regardless of what you think. The wager is what civilization is doing, not what it believes. Trillions of dollars, energy grids, regulatory regimes, all premised on the bet that intelligence is computable and man is machine. The wager will shape what we become whether or not it clears. The question is what man is, while the wager is being staked. The question is older than the technology and survives whatever the technology turns out to be. Friendly Machine Gods is my book on that question. It stages the wager, follows both roads it opens, and ends at the threshold of an older human answer. seanmillerick.substack.com

@jamesgreenWY Pure gold

@realsedepicante Fun fact: content creation may survive the singularity.

I just love how Kennedy Hall is still using the SSPX to get attention. 😂😂😂 anyone can be a professional content creator, just act like everything you say is right.

@Fair_and_Biased Who told folks that they are entitled to live wherever they want? If you can't afford where you are, there are all sorts of very affordable places in some great neighborhoods. You can do it!

Why should they have to when it’s THEIR property? Saying that seniors should have to downsize because they’re being over-taxed on property they already own is very bleak.

"Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model." Sorry but this is retarded. That is not the business model at all. The AI companies aren't selling the data they used to train their models. Training their models didn't require the destruction of the data. For the most part those data are just as available as they always were. More or less anything you want to read is available for free, if you know where to look. There are 64 million books on Anna's archive, along with 95 million scientific papers. The problem is that you are not going to read 65 million books and 95 million scientific papers. An especially dedicated reader might read one book a week, on average. A real speedreader might get through a book a day. At that rate the speedreader would take about 200,000 years to read Anna's Archive. Which would be a painful experience, because 99.99% of books are shit. It hasn't been possible for humans to read everything that's ever been written for several centuries. There's just too much of it. And the problem is just getting worse. There's more stuff to read every year. Unlike a human, an LLM actually can read everything that's been written, in the sense that the corpus can be compressed into a single set of model weights. Better yet, that model can then be interrogated using natural language. It's a library containing all human knowledge, which you can talk to like a person, and which will formulate its answers to your queries based upon its entire knowledge base. The sheer scope of knowledge that's been produced already makes this technology invaluable, probably even essential. The business model isn't access to data, it's access to an interrogable model. To use the utility metaphor, they aren't claiming to have invented water; they're claiming to have built an aqueduct. OK, so, should the AI companies have paid copyright-holders for the data? This is the same copyright-trolling that's been used to artificially hobble the Internet since Napster was dismantled by the music labels for undermining their distribution and curation oligopoly. Remember Google Books? That was supposed to be a free Library of Alexandria, until the publishing houses shut it down because making the long tail of their out-of-print back catalogues freely available was going to cost them money somehow; result, Google Books is useless. Then there's the scientific publishing industry putting every single peer-reviewed paper behind a $30 paywall, despite not having paid for either the research or the peer-reviewing. Insofar as the data aren't easily available, it isn't the fault of the AI companies. It's due to artificial restrictions demanded by copyright-holders. The OP's 'burning down the library to open a subscription service' characterization isn't what the AI companies are doing, it's what the copyright corporations have already been doing for decades. AI companies aren't selling or providing copyrighted works. Their models are generally prevented from reproducing published works at all, precisely to prevent them from being used for wholesale copyright circumvention (which is retarded, because you can still find those works for free, but anyhow). Tracking down every single rights-holder for every single byte would be a Herculean task, and for a lot of it (e.g. Reddit posts) there's no one to pay (they already got paid in Reddit gold). Are the companies supposed to obtain positive consent from every individual redditor who ever got an updoot for every single post they scraped? Posts that were made on the open Internet, for anyone to read? When all they are essentially doing is performing a mathematical operation to compress that data into an unindexed model? That would simply be impossible, the same way it was impossible to legally fill a 100 GB iPod using $1 mp3s purchased from the iTunes music store (unless you were willing to spend $30,000 on mp3s, which no one was, and which Apple understood quite well). It would stop the development of this technology dead in its tracks. Which is the real point here.

@kennedyhall I mean, he does dumpster dive for milk.

One of the hallmarks of the anti-SSPX syndicate is melodrama.

@usr_bin_roygbiv I mean, Arch/Hyprland is essentially an llm native system, except it does require you to think.

when are people gonna learn everything in unix is a text file already

@EricRSammons I wrote a book on the very real questions brought up by the AI issue, the audiobook is free on YouTube. youtube.com/playlist?list=…

For decades AI experts played in their own sandbox, with insane beliefs like machines can be conscious, and no one challenged them because most people assumed no one could be that dumb. Now the pope calls out their insane beliefs as insane to the world and they’re spiraling.

@pontificatormax Vatican alignment with Anthropic may wind up being worse than the China deal.

What an endorsement!

@EricRSammons As a civilization we are actually testing whether that premise is false or not.

The fundamental false premise of many AI leaders is that they believe man is just a machine, and therefore they assume a machine can be made into a man.

@0xIlyy Terminal and mono space is for the ascended man only, sorry it doesn't work for you....

Fuck your terminal. I don’t want to be typing little magic words in your a black rectangle. Give me a clean UI with good shortcuts, please.

@StephenKokx @frankwrighter Why are all Brits 4'9" and under? Is it the lack of space? Or is it the curry?

.@frankwrighter is the grim reaper of modern liberalism. ☠️

@jamesgreenWY @catholicpat Pentecost homily was written by gpt5.5 . Granted, it was an improvement over the regular rambled/mumble. But the structure of the paragraphs and anaphora where such that all I could think about was how the priest prompted the model.

@catholicpat x.com/jamesgreenWY/s…

[every Catholic slop-poster tomorrow]

@DSDOConnor I would be cautious about basing arguments on technical capabilities/limitations. There is a solid case for a ceiling within development, but non-falsifiable claims erode the seriousness of arguments. The argument around silicon vs carbon is more of a wager at this point.

Headlines today, on the eve of the release of Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (on AI). Yes, we are in prophetically unprecedented times. But always remember. The danger is not merely the aspirations of these tech gurus. They will indeed wreak much havoc, but their forthcoming "machine god" will forever remain infinitely beneath a 7-year-old's intellectual prowess. The real danger is the deception which lies at the heart of their conquest; namely, the blasphemous lie that they could ever make what only God can (an intelligent being). That lie will drive them to construct the New Tower of Babel; The Image of the Beast. And the people's belief in this same lie of "AGI" is what will prompt them to de-facto worship it—this so-called "superintelligent AI system" which will be nothing other than a heap of logic gates posessed by the Devil. Cf. That Hideous Strength, Chapter 8. So many voices today, including even many "red pilled" Christian commentators, are only succumbing to and promoting the very diabolical ploys they think they are warning against as they fret about the supposed imminence of superintelligent "godlike" AI. They have become the Devil's useful idiots. I'm eager to read the Pope's encyclical tomorrow. Judging just by its title, Magnificent Humanity, it appears it will above all emphasize that key truth to keep in mind for avoiding the Great Deception that is coming, namely: Only Man Bears His Image.

@CathFamPodcast Got any of those marshmallows left?

We all see that the "house" is burning. Some of us understand we have to be outside the house or we will die. Some of us think that we have to stay in the house and put out the flames with squirt guns. Some of us sell marshmallows and shake hands with the arsonist.

@stkms0011223344 @RabbiPupy @wilding_gyres I honestly thought it was a hotdog until I saw your comment.

@SeanMillerick_ @RabbiPupy @wilding_gyres What?? It looks delicious. I love pickles.

This isn’t a restaurant, you’re eating in someone’s rape shack. That’s a folding table from 1987 and the walls look like unpainted plywood

@excelsusX @mabrumley Because printing is free?

@mabrumley You’re selling an encyclical? lol. The grift never ends. Everything is about money. Everything.

Pope Leo XIV provides a compelling Christian response to the rise of digital technocracy, showing how faith, reason, and Catholic social teaching can guide us through rapid technological change and ethical use of AI. Preorder a deluxe hardcover edition at ignatius.com.

@thsottiaux I just call it 5.5, those who need to know understand, and those who don't understand don't need to know.

How do you refer to it

@stkms0011223344 @RabbiPupy @wilding_gyres That's a weird looking pickle.

@RabbiPupy @wilding_gyres Yeah but two sliders and a pickle for $1 ain't bad

@realsedepicante @FredSimonTLM I am deeply conflicted about the video. I want to hate it. But, he seems like he is probably a really good dude. Or terrible. Doesn't seem like a middle ground situation.

@FredSimonTLM This might be the greatest thing ever