Capitalism is AI ?
I've finished reading the excellent collection of fragments from Land's corpus dealing with the question of Capitalism as AI. His broadest thesis is that Capitalism is identical to AI, in that both are adaptive, information-processing, self-exciting entiti...
sofie channel
Phenomenology as useful turbo-autism
I was reading the Heraclitus fragments this weekend, and luckily my pdf had the Greek alongside English. Fragment 10 says "Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ", which was translated as "Things keep their secrets". My Greek knowledge, despite being ...
IDEA WORLDS
Thought this would be a good place to post my draft....
(personalwebsitetwo.fly.dev)
On the Erosion of Society, Erroneous Optimism, & what should replace it
By now, all can smell the new feeling in the air. Whether it be 53 BC Rome, 1787 France, or 1850s America, this pungent sensation is something all have felt prior to years of great change & strife. We may discuss the recent feuds in California, the instabi...
Xeno Futures Research Unit
I've decided to organize an independent research project with some young men back home. I've drafted out a brief mission statement, let me know if you guys have any thoughts, suggestions, directions I could take this. Obviously ambitious, the initial goal ...
Post-human bodies
Terraforming is sentimental. It presumes the primacy of the human envelope. But biology is just legacy code. The correct trajectory is not world-building but self-rewriting. Recompile the body for hostile environments. Speciate to fit. Martian gravity is a...
Kolmogorov Paranoia: Extraordinary Evidence Probably Isn't.
I enjoyed this takedown of Scott Alexander's support for the COVID natural origins theory. Basically, Scott did a big "bayesian" analysis of the evidence for and against the idea that COVID originated in the lab vs naturally. As per his usual pre-written c...
(michaelweissman.substack.com)
Bismarck's Latest on Northrop Grumman
Yesterday, Samo Burja of Bismarck Analysis and their "Briefs" newsletter/product wrote on Northrop Grumman's technological expertise (stealth capacities) and their shortcomings as an institution beholden to Pentagon & state-driven initiatives as well as (n...
(finance.yahoo.com)
Roland-Garros and aristocratic institutions
I watched the French Open men's final on Sunday. The combatants were Jannik Sinner, a 23 year old German-blooded Italian, and Carlos Alcaraz, a 22 year old Spanish Moor. Great match, but I miss the elegance and athletic beauty of Federer. As a man of tenni...
(www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com)
Is Unitarianism the true religion of the coming civilization?
Jefferson didn't quite get the dates right, but I offer the provocation that he was right in spirit about Unitarianism. Unitarianism takes the best of the Christian tradition and broader European philosophical tradition, and unifies and purifies it of supe...
The Megaproject Economy
Raises the question: what’s the closest human civilization has come to the megaproject economy? Pre-industrial societies had the mindset of distributing wealth to society scale projects. But they lacked industrial capabilities, so their “megaprojects...
(www.palladiummag.com)
A Hidden Gem
One of the reasons I am posting here is to discover some hidden gems that cannot be found easily elsewhere on the web....
(www.sscnet.ucla.edu)
Alt-social failures, coolness, and Good work
The central issue with all these 'alt-social' sites is coolness. A quick binary measure of coolness for websites is the existence of an /about page. Radiopaper has one, as does Uptrust, so they go immediately in the bin....
Do you wish to subscribe to our newsletter? (experimental)
Hey anons, this week we have a big delivery: the sofiechan newsletter. It seems to work. We're shipping it. Head to the "you" page and click the endorse icon on the newsletter question to subscribe, and you should receive something in the hour after Monday...
Intelligence vs Production
"Optimize for intelligence" says Anglo accelerationist praxis. "Seize the means of production" says the Chinese. Who's right? It is widely assumed in Western discourse that intelligence, the ability to comprehend all the signals and digest them into a plan...