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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 this is also not the first time this happened though more in the other direction. the same thing happened in the 70s, and it was the conservatives who stepped on the brakes and canceled a dozen research projects, some of which created things like... let me remember... ah yes, the internet

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.

and so you can only finetune and scale for a whole and thus fill out the local optimum completely, until it gets stale - and then you're at A until the next bombshell drops.

and so you just get jerked back and forth between these two things: stay here for a while, no we all go there now, well i'm not going, shit everybody is going, well guess i'm going too, but now we'll stay here for a while.

and i suppose you can try to find your own threshold on that curve - "when is the point that i switch allegiance?" - when i was young, that point was close to the foot of the S-curve. i was going to places before anyone else did.

i knew nothing and so i was fearless and full of curiosity, and also, my elders encouraged me. but now i'm in my 40s. i'm about approaching the middle of the S-curve. now i am part of the majority of people...

i am set in my ways, stubborn to change, and it takes a quiet kind of peer pressure for me to become restless and try to make my way, but i have to do it in my own way. i have particulars now! i have distinguished taste! i don't stay up until 6 am, i do not sleep under tables at conventions anymore.