sean thomas knox
8.2K posts
@thomasknox
Thriller writer, travel writer, vacillator
Dwarkesh Patel says give any human 0.0001% of what an LLM has read and they'd produce thousands of new ideas. But the LLM produces none. "Give me one new idea, one fundamental new idea that's been generated." Naval continues: "Every poem ever written by an LLM is garbage. I think even their fiction writing is terrible." "They're very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what's important. They don't have an opinion or a point of view." "They are a fundamental breakthrough in computing. It is a different way to program a computer. Rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code, you just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program." "But are they AGI? Not yet. And I don't see a direct path from here to there." P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab a free copy here: besuperhuman.gumroad.com/l/mentalmodels — Naval Ravikant ( @naval ), co-founder of AngelList, on Chris Williamson's ( @ChrisWillx ) Modern Wisdom
Bought 2 hand axes. 1 is Neanderthal, made ~40,000BP (in Dordogne). The other is likely Homo heidelbergensis, found in Kent. It’s ~400,000 years old. I’ve been discussing them with Claude AI, and I’ve just realised I’m discussing the very first human tools with the very last
The most interesting thing about this endless encyclical bilge on AI, is that it sounds like it was written by ChatGPT on a bad day. It is the papal equivalent of that Commonwealth Prize short story
The most interesting thing about this endless encyclical bilge on AI, is that it sounds like it was written by ChatGPT on a bad day. It is the papal equivalent of that Commonwealth Prize short story
In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas vatican.va/content/leo-xi…
Rome 🇮🇹: A Syrian immigrant thief gets caught red-handed. When the Carabinieri arrive, he tries to escape, then suddenly turns and stabs an officer in the chest with a screwdriver. His colleague intervenes and shoots, killing the attacker. Anywhere else in the world, this would be ruled self-defense and the officer would be praised. Not in Italy. In Italy, the justice system sentenced the Officer to 3 years in prison and ordered him to pay compensation to the criminal’s family: €15,000 for each child and €5,000 for each sibling. It’s a nauseating disgrace.
If you go on a weight loss drug such as a GLP-1 or similar just to shed a few pounds, you will likely become psychologically dependent upon these drugs for life. If you stop and regain the weight, which almost all do, you will find it extremely difficult to lose the weight again without the drugs. You then will be forever dependent on these drugs, something you may not have considered, The folks that “hop on a cycle of Reta” to get lean for the summer are going to be stuck on these drugs for life, or at least the vast majority will. Just watch it play out!
While Romanian families shivered in unheated apartments and waited hours for meager bread rations, Nicolae Ceaușescu built himself a 1,100-room palace that consumed $3 billion of his nation's wealth. The Casa Poporului stands today as a monument to the inevitable outcome when central planners face zero market constraints on their appetites. Ceaușescu's palace contains 12 stories above ground, spreads across 365,000 square meters, and required 20,000 workers laboring in shifts around the clock. He demolished entire historic neighborhoods of Bucharest to clear space for his architectural ego trip. Meanwhile, his citizens endured bread queues, rolling blackouts, and heating restrictions so severe that hospitals couldn't maintain proper temperatures. The dictator diverted the nation's resources toward marble, crystal chandeliers, and gold leaf while his people literally froze. Without market prices to signal genuine demand or profit-and-loss mechanisms to punish waste, political authorities inevitably channel resources toward projects that serve their personal preferences rather than human needs. Ceaușescu faced no competitors, no angry shareholders, no bankruptcy risk. He simply commanded the nation's productive capacity to serve his grandiose vision. The palace required 3,500 tons of crystal, 480 chandeliers, 1,409 ceiling lights, and 700,000 tons of steel and bronze. Every ton of material that went into those ornate rooms represented food, medicine, fuel, or housing that never reached Romanian families. The arithmetic is brutal but simple: centralized control means resources flow toward political vanity projects rather than genuine human priorities. The building still stands, largely empty, costing millions annually just to maintain its unused splendor.
