Charles Rosenbauer

Art is memetic infrastructure

The previous Pope Leo notably got into an argument with Cantor about the theological implications of transcendental infinities. Cantor won the debate, the church backed down, but never seemed to really consider or deeply integrate the implications beyond "the math doesn't conflict in the way we thought it would."

@deanwball not the first such papal encyclical, I think? the Church seems to follow Western intellectual trends rather than lead them, for some time now

Reading the encyclical, I am reminded that the Vatican is fundamentally a city-state on the continent of Europe, and that its elites, which of course include the Pope himself, cannot resist the myopic preoccupations of the Eurocrat. This document would be much improved if it were less enamored of the traditional academia/civil society talking points on AI (“The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them” woah! really???) and more engaged with where AI is headed. But instead of doing that, the encyclical dodges in the deepest sense, denying that AI “really thinks” or “really learns” and all that typical strain of cope that amounts to magical thinking: “when a computer does it, it is ‘data processing,’ beep boop, but when a human does it, it is ‘actual learning’” It is probably actively bad for global understanding of AI that the Pope endorsed this viewpoint as late as 2026. In the end, this encyclical reads to me as though ghost written by the blob of Western civil society, the same people whose feckless and incoherent preaching we have heard blanketing our media for decades now. And, in a very important sense, it was written by them; after all, who forms the peer group for the elites of a European city-state? Like that blob, the encyclical is intellectually flaccid at its core, no matter how well intentioned it may be. This document is a missed opportunity to advance global understanding of AI, and yet another blow to the legitimacy and sanctity of storied Western institutions. As if you needed one more.

@Kurchatovian Here's another fun one that seems to have been forgotten! Something they pushed pretty hard during the IoT craze in the 2010s. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Qua…

@bzogrammer Itanium Larabee X-scale Optane Atom AI Accelerators Altera FPGAs long list of things built or acquired and mismanaged

Intel really fumbled by killing Optane. They had a revolutionary memory technology, marketed it poorly, got underwhelming sales, then scrapped it. tomshardware.com/tech-industry/…

@ranmasaotome96 @wearydetective0 @thekinocorner

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

@fishPointer thankfully you can make some tasty things with them

prokaryotes are a bunch of dumbasses stuck at the cell stage who couldn’t even figure out how to work a proton pump

On both performance and cost it was in a middle ground between DRAM and Flash. You could buy a 1TB Optane drive for a lot less than 1TB of DRAM. It's faster than an SSD but slower than DRAM. Byte addressable, high but not infinite write durability. Hardware interfaces were a bit awkward, they tried both PCIe and DDR. It found itself halfway between two niches in a place no one had really built anything for. I remember at the time people were explaining it as a high-performance SSD cache for "exotic server applications." I think one of the deeper problems here is that you actually do need software that's designed with it in mind, and by extension clear use cases. No matter how good the raw performance numbers are, it's not of much use if there isn't software built to use it, or if all your software is built to use RAM and SSDs without explicitly assuming a middle tier, and Intel didn't wait long enough for that software to be built, or put in much effort to build any on their own.

Does anyone know the back story of the oft quoted claim “it was too expensive”? There must be more to it. Consider the advantages of Optane: 1. It was byte addressable 2. no flash file system, no zones, no garbage collection 3. no frequent firmware updates to correct wear algorithms due to unexpected workloads 4. In our experience it seems indestructible, we’re expecting the rest of the server to rot away before the Optane wears out 5. Excellent consistent performance (no unexpected slow downs as the device fills up) 6. Good thermals Given all the positives, we would keep using it. It works particularly well as boot/root drives since we only need one (no need to RAID1 a pair of SSDs) given the Optane's wear resistance. I understand it took more than 200+ steps on the fab line to make (which does not seem to be a lot compared to newer nodes which are multiple times that?), so what part of the process or design were they finding intractable to make profitable or was it simply a case of excessive impatience to get the ROI?

This is just the Caral-Supe civilization. (aka Norte Chico) The oldest known civilization in the Americas, they were building pyramids atop mountains in the Andes ~5500ya. They practiced agriculture, but it seems to have started with cotton rather than anything edible. Their civilization may have begun as farmers growing cotton in the mountains to make fishing nets for coastal villages. Agriculture not for growing the food, but for growing the thing that lets you catch the food. The ancient Americas are very strange.

@mSanterre IIRC, they sold the specialized Optane fabs off to Micron and IBM and it sounds like a lot of it got scrapped.

@bzogrammer They killed it because no one would buy it. They can always bring it back, they still have the tech.

@sigfig eapoe.org/works/tales/me…

someone i was talking to recently was surprised that people had already anticipated the viability of air travel in the late 18th and early 19th century. it was actually a fairly popular concept, especially among the french utopians. here's one such concept from 1803

How many people are there in San Francisco?

@fishPointer The point here is that it's supposed to look 3D printed. How else are you supposed to know that it's The Future™?

input shaper needs calibration, and cooling fan is obviously too weak. lower layer heights and print again with 1k accel perimeters. consider drying the filament as well

youtu.be/K1c28meto3c We used to be a real country

Man was made to diddle

@fishPointer @0xJirachi We shall build the Aldrin Cyclers to harvest methane from the gas giants.

@0xJirachi american engineering is evolving

the Economies of Plasma that im architecting read like something between a citadel market maker quant and aleister crowley ceremonial magic was just the fourth state all along

My early 20s would have gone so much harder on that Midwestern isthmus

never forget where you came from

@fishPointer Note number 9 on the list en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance…

@bzogrammer i bet we could do it

To be very pedantic, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and technically is in a lot of our infrastructure and has been since the dawn of time. Refined aluminum is what's relatively new. And honestly it's nowhere near as cheap as it should be.

A lot of these people seem really obsessed with whatever easily legible metric they can find to prove to themselves and others that they are Very Smart™, hence the obsession with stuff like IQ, rationalism, and Bayesian inference. It honestly strikes me as a form of insecurity.

I feel like SF is dominated less by outcast geniuses and more by smart kids who were good at following the path laid out for them by their parents and teachers. And they've convinced themselves that off-road breakthroughs just happen if you follow the beaten path hard enough.