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who would have thought that mathematicians and information theoreticists make the fiercest weapons. everyone. everyone would have thought that.

we just can't help it. you dabble a bit and whoops you accidentally created *checks notes* an append-only machine with an appending tape head following a (2^18)(2^18) -> 2^18 probabilistically compressed state table, plus a content-addressed oracle that retrieves from its own past tape.

and suddenly it's pandemonium. the monkeys are going crazy. the historical lineage should be: nuclear bomb -> LSD (which timothy leary famously described "as significant as the nuclear bomb") -> transformers

leary also had a fascinating talk about how progress grows exponentionally, he used the unit "jesus" to measure it, using sentences such as "by this time we've gone from 2 jesuses to 10 jesuses"

effectively a loose generalization of moore's law to technological progress as a whole, and it turns out... he was probably right. we also just got gene therapy.

"welcome to the ai psychosis party" i wish it was a psychosis. 🫤 that would be curable. i did have an actual psychosis in 2020 so i can directly compare.

the past 20 years we were constantly cautioned against being too hyped about the future, what on account of all the people that progress overrolls - they see progress rollin, they hatin

and i guess the urge of trying to keep it all together is only human, but so is the excitement of discovery. and given the scale at which humanity operates now, i don't think either of these two groups can win, plus people "switch allegiance" all the time.

A) you try to pin down your culture to a certain expected state and invariably it gets corrupted because it is a fixed target. it is thoroughly known and thus exploitable.

B) but conversely, if you want the hottest newest thing you're going to run into diminishing returns invariably, because new insights arrive in quants. it's not a steady tap of new inventions, it's small breakthrough events whose outcomes have ramifications of scalability.