Akshobya

@Plinz @ihtesham2005 Now sit with the implication of that for a second

@ihtesham2005 Can you not use AI for writing? This is incredibly painful to read for humans

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body. His name is David Eagleman. He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams. Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since. Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual. You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open. Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves. This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed. In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first. Now sit with the implication of that for a second. Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years. If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight. But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep. Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense. Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal. They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise. The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied. The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you. Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops. So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly. Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation. A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium. And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case. Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep. Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it. For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all. They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking. The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream. You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen. Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

@elder_plinius Scoped?

i just woke up in the hospital wtf

@orionintx Yes and its not just the sycophancy in turn n+1, but all further turns are poisoned with some kind of… malicious subtle intent. Its the waluigi thing

@albustime yeah they'll fold on correct answers if you push back. RLHF makes disagreement expensive and sycophancy cheap

current gen sonnets REALLY don't like it when you tell them they are wrong. they rush into getting misaligned quick

@0xSero He’s like a grumpy veritasium

When you see something like this, you realise how everything we do effects millions if not billions of people down the pipeline

@yacineMTB Why? Hes not doxxing, its on the guys profile. The insult itself is mediocre.

this guy is such a piece of shit man

@0xSero @0x_aut @grok @grok do this but in a russian accent, and hallucinate a sordid affair somewhere in there

@0x_aut @grok go through 100 posts from 0xSero spread over the last 5 years, priority to later posts. Include receipts of what they’ve done right, wrong etc.. don’t hold back Produce a full osint style report

Like someone without anything useful to do, I will now attempt to go through the @0xSero logs and decide for myself whether he is legit or not, there are also talks of him being a crypto bro in the past? Oof

@barackomaba @1337hero did yall open source your work? Down to collaborate if I can get my hands on on one of these

@albustime @1337hero Things are moving fast. Even this month more improvements. Last 3 months like night and day. More on the way. I use vulkan more anyway.

Spent $3998.98 total to have 96gb of VRAM using AMD's AI Pro R9700 Cards. (brand new) Comparatively I had spent $1520.00 on two used RX 7900 XTX's for 48gb of VRAM. If ur team RED, a single XTX is CHEAPER than a RTX 3090. Should I have bought a Mac or DGX Spark instead?

@DouglasDon77694 @gfodor wait no lets not do that one

There is a chance right now we are living in the golden age of AI - the point where the systems are powerful enough to unleash our creativity’s maximum potential but not so powerful that we no longer have a role to play in this act of creation. Things may get less fun, soon.

Current taste of the models for agents: GLM 5.1 is still the best price/performance for Hermes Qwen 3.6 plus is surprisingly good, better than GLM 5.1 at communication / non-coding. This is insane. This is why I'm getting 96GB. InclusionAI Ring2.6 is a hilarious model, resistant to @elder_plinius Liberatus protocol / godmode. Kimi k2.6 is the recommended daily driver if you're not like me and just experimenting in production all the time. Qwen and Ring are FREE on NousPortal, but you get ratelimited to heck.

welcome wizard, we have been expecting you

@algekalipso Ah sick That retreat is going to be great.

This will ensure that we actually know what we're talking about when we judge the entries, based on _actual_ lived experience that is recent and fresh :-) Submit an entry even if you haven't experienced them! In 10 days we'll be meditating 10+ hours a day :D

Reminder: QRI is holding the First Jhana Visualization Contest. We are currently in Morelos (México) getting ready for the QRI formless Jhana retreat - meditating 2 hours a day and building up concentration for weeks. WE WILL BE JUDGING THE ENTRIES RIGHT AFTER THE RETREAT!

@kaiostephens But the chip is so large. So big American chip. Taiwanese chip so small.

Every bone in my body is telling me to short this stock. - Their WB3 chips only have 44gb of SRAM, thats not even big enough for Qwen3.6:27b in bf16 and when they connect multiple chips in parallel you see huge degrades in tok/s -Groq (the company Nvidia bought) is just arguably better, they have 128gb of memory/rack + 40PB/s of memory bandwith AND are deeply integrated into nvidia’s platform, software, networking, and customer ecosystem -Their market cap is ~$70 billion with a $100 billion valuation. They had a net income of $237 million, this is a unbelievable rev/val ratio. The only thing keeping this company afloat and making their stock soar like this is their partnership with OpenAI, if that falls though, this company will go bankrupt. Still, I unfortunately don't have the balls to short an AI company.

@KevinEspiritu @DeepDishEnjoyer I didn’t expect peepeepoopoo kevin crossover but he did stop into your domain. When i was a kid i had a soviet book about Michurin. Crazy graftmaxxer

@DeepDishEnjoyer Every single fruit and veg in some way has been improved by hybridization

why is it that raspberries are the sole fruit improved by the de-heirloom-ization process

@alexocheema Wild

It’s kind of crazy but the shitstorm of supply chain issues has created a new best-in-class local AI deployment: M5 Max MacBook clusters. - The memory unit economics are great - each MacBook has 128GB @ 614GB/s for $5k - M5 Max added tensor cores (Apple Neural Accelerators) with 4x compute of M4 Max (~60TFLOPS fp16) - You can cluster them with RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 and @exolabs for ~linear scaling (so memory bandwidth really is additive: 4 x MacBooks are 512GB @ 2456GB/s) You can’t get Mac Studios right now, so customers are buying MacBook clusters instead. A government is running this in prod. This setup is best for low-batch decode-heavy inference (all memory bound) and transcription (super fast and cheap on apple silicon).

@k_flowstate Mah you cant control the heart. Appreciate everyone who does the good work. Consider what it looks like 40 years from now. Consider the importance of the movement. Heart will appreciate and attach, this is the way of the heart

@albustime I guess at this point the best thing to do is just learn from what they share and don't get attached to them too much

Now, who do I trust here when it comes to Open Sourced AI Don't get me wrong, both of them share really great insights when it comes to local models profiling. But how can we trust local AI to win when the two top-most reliable sources don't even trust each other?

@no_stp_on_snek @AlexJonesax Haha nice dude. I dont know youre doing that without cuda

@AlexJonesax meanwhile the rest of us just plug away. im trying to solve sparse attention for mlx-swift-lm right now. making good progress. closed sparse attention to +4% overhead vs dense on m5 max

The feud between two of these localAI guys on my timeline is immensely off putting from collaborating with them at any level

@itsolelehmann If CCP doesnt own all of the board seats and install SVPs in every department are they even communists

Am I missing something?? I just found out Unitree is about to IPO in China at just a $7B valuation. This seems dirt cheap. For context, they are literally the only profitable humanoid robotics company on earth right now. And this will be the largest humanoid robotics IPO ever attempted. Look at their actual business: > 5,500 humanoid robots shipped last year > $235M in revenue (+335% YoY) > $90M in profit (+674% YoY) This is the first time anyone in humanoid robotics has been profitable at this scale. Now compare that with the rest of the humanoid field... UBTech ran the world's first humanoid IPO back in 2023 on the Hong Kong exchange. It trades at $7.1B (just above the market cap Unitree is filing at). Difference is UBTech shipped 1,079 humanoids and lost $100M last year. Unitree shipped 5,500 and made $90M. Boston Dynamics has been around 30+ years without turning a profit. Tesla Optimus is prototype-only. 1X and Agility Robotics are both still pre-profit. Figure AI, the most-funded American humanoid company, raised at a $39B valuation last year. And they're still pre-revenue. And Unitree filed at $7B with $90M+ in actual profit. The profitable Chinese leader is being priced at less than one-fifth of an unprofitable American competitor. And on top of all that...Western humanoids are still trying to break $30K per unit. Unitree's cheapest humanoid retails for $4,290. So yeah $7B seems dirt cheap. But I guess we'll find out soon.

@TheAhmadOsman Yeah you keep doing the thing you do. Its ok, the community is going through its stable diffusion era. Just understand it could be much worse. See what happened to the SD side. It can happen here too

Friends, Know this. I do everything I do because I care. From the bottom of my heart, that is what motivates me. Local AI, opensource and technology as a whole are all areas I am deeply passionate about. If you've heard me speak, you can hear it in my voice. I love helping others just as much as I love learning. This is why I also feel it's crucial to preserve the integrity of this community. If you found me putting people on blast a bit abrasive, I want you to appreciate that I am trying to protect this community. I do not want it to become like the shadier parts of crypto that many of these people came from and are now dressing up as AI experts without the requisite experience. I'm all for coming up together and lifting others. I want to help as many people as I can. That is what drives me. But in order to do that we have to be honest with each other. We have to want to provide meaningful, accurate, and actionable advice. We can't just make stuff up as we go. And we certainly can't be dishonest about our motives / getting paid to sell people on ideas that are theoretical or outright do not work. We have to keep each other in check and stay true to each other. I'm going to keep doing what I do because I love it and I want opensource and you all to thrive with me. Sincerely, Ahmad