/technology/

Slop, kitsch, hubris, and innovation in sculptural aesthetics
An intellectual cage match I'd love to see is Monumental Labs, the brothers Missor, and Fen de Villiers on the subject of slop vs innovation and kitsch vs tradition in the future of sculpture. Who would come out on top? Each is groundbreakingly interesting... posted 3w ago with 1 reply received technology

Slop, kitsch, hubris received

Rodin is incredible. This is what “modern art” was meant to be before it was became a self-referential pozzed tax optimization scheme.... 3w ago received

Rodin is incredible. received

The third-worldification of the global internet: are private network enclaves the answer?
Following recent anon discourse on the general third-worldification of the internet, I've been pondering potential solutions.... (yggdrasil-network.github.io) posted 2mo ago with 31 replies received politics technology computing

The third-worldifica received

Urbit is a prime illustration of the limits of the theorycel.... 2mo ago received

Urbit is a prime ill received

I could absolutely imagine this being something real, but as others have pointed out in the Urbit case, architecture astronautics like implementing a Yggdrasil style overlay network must absolutely be entirely abstracted away from the people actually using... 2mo ago received

I could absolutely i received

This describes almost exactly what is explored in this: https://thebutlerian.com/posts/a_case_study.html... 4w ago received

This describes almos received

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) posted 3mo ago with 7 replies received technology economics news

Bismarck's Latest on received

SpaceX has an internal ERP system called Warp Speed. From the people I know who work there, it is a significant part of what makes the company work as well as it does.... 3mo ago received

SpaceX has an intern received

Appreciate it.... 1mo ago received

Appreciate it.... received

Applied Philosophy and ... Product Design?
Wanted to share one of my favorite pieces of aesthetic philosophy (as a branching off from >>3734). It is cleverly disguised as a product design blog post. If you haven't ever given much thought to why things look the way they do, this should be pretty con... (www.core77.com) posted 2mo ago with 11 replies received technology philosophy

Applied Philosophy a received

You normally wouldn't catch me defending the rectangle ideology, but i must protest your characterization of rectangles as “unnatural”. They are natural to rational thought. We did not invent the rectangular grid just out of pure postmodern arbitrarine... 2mo ago received

You normally wouldn' received

I take your point. There's an interesting technical discussion to be had here around optimality. The amount of compute required to run optimizations over form within an aero CFD environment is very large. I looked around a little while back and believe tha... 1mo ago received

I take your point. T received

Curtis Yarvin's New Discussion App
A long description from Curtis Yarvin of the discussion app ("Moses") that he is proposing the Urbit Foundation build. It competes with Tlon's Messenger app. I'd be interested in assessments of the proposal, both from Urbiters and non-Urbiters.... (x.com) posted 2mo ago with 9 replies received technology computing

Curtis Yarvin's New received

Some context here is that Curtis was recently fired from his role by the Urbit Foundation's Executive Director. The UF board then fired the ED and replaced him with Curtis. There's presently a vote to now reform the board here: https://master-malwyl.cypher... 2mo ago received

Some context here is received

There are only 16384 two-syllable nyms. There are 128 syllables. When we run out, we will get three syllable nyms. Some day there may be a recycling scheme if we had a way to reap the old ones. But just having them grow is fine too. 2mo ago received

There are only 16384 received

Democracy After the Bitter Lesson: Advisory Voting
Democracy has problems: the masses are low-information, voting systems get captured by parties and perverse incentives, voting becomes crudely ethnic or handout oriented, and giving everyone a slice of power just opens things up to manipulation and sybil a... posted 2mo ago with 10 replies received technology computing supercoordination

Democracy After the received

I think "projecting the wisdom of the crowd onto the vector of the sovereign's will" is beautifully put, but I'd love you to justify your core narrowing assumption a bit more - the question of sovereignty is the important one! Democracy without sovereignty... 2mo ago received

I think "projecting received

the backend is non-anonymous. You put in your email, it creates a persistent account that accumulates your reputation. I will at some point make it so identity data is destroyed once the reputation data is accumulated. But with occasional changes to the ar... 2mo ago received

the backend is non-a received

Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness are NP-Complete?
A know what you're thinking: anon's gone all kooky mashing together a bunch of mysterious things, wrapping it in some gold foil, and worshipping it as an idol. Maybe, maybe not. Hear me out.... posted 2mo ago with 16 replies received technology gnon computing

Life, Intelligence, received

An off-topic comment but important to bring up: I saw the best minds of my generation get nerdsniped for years by category theory. Complexity theory, especially after attending Charles’ talk, seems to me to be another one of these ‘highly ontological u... 2mo ago received

An off-topic comment received

You're on to something, but I think B-SAT is the wrong problem to work with. If you want to apply modern deep learning to an NP-complete problem that can serve as general target for problem translations, you want a problem that has a natural metric on solu... 2mo ago received

You're on to somethi received

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... posted 3mo ago with 8 replies received technology superintelligence accelerationism

Capitalism is AI ? received

Land's theory is culture-agnostic. He would argue that any decadent or decaying culture will be by necessity replaced by whatever stronger and more capable culture exists within or outside that culture. There is always some cultural variance, so always som... 2mo ago received

Land's theory is cul received

Is adamjesionowski synonym for alexgajewski?... 2mo ago received

Is adamjesionowski s received

The sofiechan tag system: Name your tags or the AI will do it for you
We've been slaving away for you in the code mines over the past few weeks trying to polish up the sofiechan tag system and UI, and we have some new gems. I'll focus on the tag system stuff today:... posted 2mo ago with 2 replies received meta technology computing

The sofiechan tag sy received

I should have called this post "the tag apocalypse". We're going to be in tag chaos for a while as the autotagger is fast and opinionated and we're not yet in equilibrium with it, so it's going to do things like rewrite the tags on all posts as it figures ... 2mo ago received

I should have called received

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 ... posted 3mo ago with 15 replies received technology superintelligence accelerationism

Xeno Futures Researc received

Slight update on our mission statement, some clarifications and an attempt at formalized rigor.... 3mo ago received

Slight update on our received

Yeah, this is a totally fair point, and I think a lot of the "effective accerationsists" push this argument so far as to invalidate their entire worldview.... 2mo ago received

Yeah, this is a tota received

social AI
AI products so far primarily involve a single human interacting with an AI. But historically, the biggest tech opportunities tend to involve facilitating interactions between multiple people. Hence why email became the killer app of computers, social media... posted 3mo ago with 2 replies received technology

social AI received

I can imagine vast immersive game worlds spun up on demand by generative techniques, but how social is that going to be? There's a dystopian version of the generative media world where everyone just gets heavenbanned into a personal slop-Matrix. I also hav... 2mo ago received

I can imagine vast i received

Designing a word frequency auto-tagger for sofiechan
Let's talk about the upcoming auto-tagger architecture. All it has to do is produce affinity scores between threads and tags, and our now existent smart tag selector will select a high-affinity set of tags that also make a good index. To do this, it's goin... posted 3mo ago with 3 replies received meta technology computing

Designing a word fre received

It works! But slow as all hell. Right now we fully rebuild the "taste machine", which now includes this word frequency tagger, about once a minute. That used to do 50 iterations of the expectation-maximization algorithm we use to refine everyone's tastes, ... 3mo ago received

It works! But slow a received

Intelligent Use of LLMs
I would like to start a thread to share the methods we employ to use LLMs in a way that enhances our abilities, rather than just lazily outsources tasks to them. The heuristic for the techniques I am looking for would be if after employing the technique, a... posted 5mo ago with 8 replies received technology superintelligence

Intelligent Use of L received

just text:... 3mo ago received

just text:... received

The Hellenic View of Existential Risk
When I was a teen, I read much of the Less Wrong and the rationalist work of the day. This provided the basis for a vague worry surrounding "existential risk." The feeling was pervasive, and I would read works about the dangers of AI or other technology to... posted 6mo ago with 10 replies received technology philosophy rationality

The Hellenic View of received

Great post, OP. Most of the X-risk field reflects a spiritual illness and worldview poisoned by utilitarianism.... 6mo ago received

Great post, OP. Most received

I think in this discussion, as well as the places where I generally see this particular kind of critique of EA and x-risk come up, there's a conflation of two intertwined but separable core issues. The first is the factual risk of irreparable damage to the... 3mo ago received

I think in this disc received

Ergonomic features for anons and namefags: pronouncable nyms and profile pages
This week in the sofie mines, we've got pronounceable non-sequential anon ids (anon_haho, anon_ryfi, anon_lifo, etc), and custom nym bios and even profile pictures for nyms with proper usernames. Check it out.... posted 4mo ago with 3 replies received meta technology

Ergonomic features f received

They're nice! It's a small thing, but a good aesthetic improvement. Also a functional improvement, in that they make it easier to track anons when scanning a thread. 3mo ago received

They're nice! It's a received

Notifications have arrived, along with some smaller fixes and polish
Well it's that time again: 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. Time for the big push of barely-tested code to production! The sofiechan team has been slaving away in the code mines for you again this week, and we have some new updates:... posted 4mo ago with 2 replies received meta technology

Notifications have a received

Yeah it happens. I wish I had a better solution for you. It's been working reliably for most people afaik, and email is tough to get over those final reliability hurdles. Right now we're just using nearlyfreespeech as the provider, but we'll probably have ... 4mo ago received

Yeah it happens. I w received

"Forum software blew a 4000x lead with poor UX" - Simon Sarris
I really liked forums. I liked imageboards. I dislike many of the patterns on twitter and group chats etc. But it's undeniable that those apps offer a richer more engaging user experience somehow. It's just more immediate with something you want to respond... (x.com) posted 4mo ago with 7 replies received meta technology

"Forum software blew received

To actually answer this question w/r/t Sofiechan, the main things I like about forum software compared to here:... 4mo ago received

To actually answer t received

not a ton of new ideas here, mostly agreeing with what others have said already.... 4mo ago received

not a ton of new ide received

Revision Demoscene, Oscilloscope Music
I've followed the demoscene for a while, and this is in a class of its own. The image is produced by using the left audio channel to control the beam on the X axis, and the right audio channel to control the beam on the Y axis.... (www.youtube.com) posted 5mo ago with 1 reply received technology

Revision Demoscene, received

Yeah I've seen this stuff before. I remember the one with the mushroom. This is definitely getting much better. I wonder where it will go. I wonder if it will at some point be basically "solved" with the ability to pair arbitrary video with arbitrary audio... 5mo ago received

Yeah I've seen this received

How to build better anonymous social media: curation and tags
Back in 2014, moot banned gamergate discussion from 4chan. This led to an exodus of the most adventurous and curious channers to 8chan, which had a strict free speech policy. For a few months at least, 8chan was a haven of smart free discussion on all sort... posted 5mo ago with 13 replies received meta technology computing

How to build better received

Very cool, guys. Let a thousand alt social media flowers bloom. I look forward to seeing your respective attempts. I hope you’ll still want to come visit us here. 5mo ago received

Very cool, guys. Let received

Nintendo is a Live Organization that turns Gimmicks into Innovations.
The second installment in a series focused on live players. This one is about Nintendo as they shared a ton of information about the Switch 2 yesterday. I prefer live vidya organizations rather than dead ones. Dead ones produce cultural slop and games with... (oceanist.substack.com) posted 5mo ago with 3 replies received technology

Nintendo is a Live O received

I agree, but I mean that this can only be ascertained retrospectively, which causes many to conflate the two. That is, the connotation is typically of 2, but the expression itself is indeterminate and includes 1, indeed there's no shortage of false negativ... 5mo ago received

I agree, but I mean received

Super-Coordination Technical Exercise Problems
Another anon and I have been thinking about how to do supercoordination. We've got many ideas but we're still looking for the right problem to dive into together seriously.... posted 6mo ago with 4 replies received technology supercoordination

Super-Coordination T received

I think another interesting problem, narrower in scope, is automatically detecting fraud in scientific publishing. There are a small set of tools and techniques that super spotters use. They look for duplication in images, or data distributions that are im... 6mo ago received

I think another inte received

How about aggregating the collective will of a bunch of individuals wills? By will, I mean a freeform expression/document consisting of issues one values/cares about/wants change in. 6mo ago received

How about aggregatin received

How Pangram uses old school machine learning to detect AI text at very high confidence
https://www.pangram.com/our-model/how-it-works posted 6mo ago with 2 replies received technology

How Pangram uses old received

They claim: "Pangram Text is designed to detect AI-generated content with a near-zero false positive rate."... 6mo ago received

They claim: "Pangram received

internet supplants america
Modern Americans have outgrown our republic.... posted 7mo ago with 6 replies received politics technology

internet supplants a received

This feels abstract to the point of uselessness. If there is a supplanting power it will come from men, not "the internet" and will not be different in kind from what has happened before.... 7mo ago received

This feels abstract received

Ah sorry, I meant a migration **from the physical to the digital world.... 6mo ago received

Ah sorry, I meant a received

Stuff you should have been taught in college but weren’t. Tough love from Casey Handmer
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/02/04/stuff-you-should-have-been-taught-in-college-but-werent/ posted 7mo ago with 2 replies received technology

Stuff you should hav received

I'm a fan of Handmer and this was an interesting challenge to my usual resume-hating ways. It made me think more about the compounding of skill and reputation required to get involved in and do great things. There's a boring resume-stacker interpretation f... 7mo ago received

I'm a fan of Handmer received

Learning to code machine learning (tinygrad!)
I've been thinking about AGI stuff for over a decade, but never really engaged much with cutting edge machine learning practice except at a theoretical and philosophical level. But recently I've been getting more technical again and trying to build things,... posted 7mo ago with 2 replies received technology

Learning to code mac received

What's your favorite resource? What things are being done or have been done in traditional ML that are especially worth studying?... 7mo ago received

What's your favorite received

Lessons from Palantir Alums About Building a Tech Company
https://www.partly.work/p/lessons-from-palantir-alums-about posted 10mo ago with 3 replies received technology

Lessons from Palanti received

That makes sense. The forward deployed engineers are the engineers the customer should have but don't. 10mo ago received

That makes sense. Th received

"Bull fighting" from the future: Drone Slaying
For a few months I've been thinking about the history of warfare and sports. My grandfather grew up bullfighting - Most of my memories of him are watching the "corridas" every Saturday.... posted 1y ago with 11 replies received technology

"Bull fighting" from received

America retains distinct advantages in premier industrial domains, such as computer chip design (note, separate from manufacture), rockets, turbine jet engines, and various advanced materials science. As a strictly military example, no one makes night visi... 12mo ago received

America retains dist received

Soft Ware for Hard Power
I learned Photoshop as an autistic youth who wanted to make logos and background graphics for friends' gaming YouTube channels. Thousands of hours of skill development there transferred to every graphic design software I've come across since (Illustrator, ... posted 2y ago with 16 replies received technology

Soft Ware for Hard P received

To refresh, I (OP) was saying that there are classes of software applications that enable access to hard power, and they are hidden in plain sight among vastly less useful applications. Think Blender (real) vs Figma (fake). I was also saying the general sh... 1y ago received

To refresh, I (OP) w received

One of my old friends from Berkeley wanted to design a new power supply for an amp. He designed it from scratch, used open source PCB design software and had it printed for him by a company specializing in such things.... 13mo ago received

One of my old friend received

Paul Christiano proposes advisory voting/crowdsourced cyber-monarchy back in 2016
https://sideways-view.com/2016/12/02/crowdsourcing-moderation-without-sacrificing-quality/ posted 13mo ago with 1 reply received meta technology

Paul Christiano prop received

This is very cool. I didn't know this existed, but a friend sent it to me. It's shockingly close to what I envisioned and am doing for sofiechannel. I'll admit I've been inspired at points by Paul's other work. There are commonalities like his friendly AI ... 13mo ago received

This is very cool. I received

The Drone Question. Is America screwed by lack of industrial capacity?
The war in Ukraine is teaching us that explosive hunter-seeker drones, FPV piloted or autonomous, are shockingly overpowered. Flying panzerfausts are wrecking armor for fractional cents on the dollar, and flying grenades are blowing the legs off of boys wh... posted 1y ago with 40 replies received technology economics

The Drone Question. received

Buying drones doesn't particularly help you build drones. Unless it's just a handful for reverse engineering and inspiration. I think if your drone sports were to be leveraged into something industrially useful, it would start by making drones do something... 1y ago received

Buying drones doesn' received

consumer demand is a complete red herring here. Consumers should not be buying drone swarms or even thinking about it. The question is whether hackers are building novel stuff and then getting into manufacturing, and then whether the manufacturing ecosyste... 1y ago received

consumer demand is a received

Does Leopold Aschenbrenner make any sense?
Leopold Aschenbrenner has been everywhere for the last couple of weeks, feeding on the AI hype, doomerism and China hawkishness. He has very good credentials, but does any of his takes make any sense?... posted 1y ago with 15 replies received technology fieldtrip

Does Leopold Aschenb received

Rally name: End The Occupation, China Out Now! 1y ago received

Rally name: End The received

Towards an Illegible Computational Medium of Exchange
You cannot be sovereign if you do not control your medium of exchange, if your enemies can insert themselves into every transaction and tax it or block it at will.... posted 1y ago with 12 replies received technology computing

Towards an Illegible received

Again, I really like this general idea. That's why I'm motivated to press a bit on the technical details. Please take this pressing as entirely friendly.... 1y ago received

Again, I really like received

There had been a thread on high software profit margins, which has since disappeared off sofiechan. The OP on hackernews might still be relevant (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904339):... 1y ago received

There had been a thr received

Silicon Valley's Military Fever Dream
Thank goodness I can just Ctrl-A Ctrl-P before the paywall shows up. That was a close one. It does appear that Silicon Valley wants to appear more chad, so to speak. Perhaps nerds have too much of a reputation for being hunchbacked and quiet, as the articl... (www.forbes.com) posted 1y ago with 24 replies received politics technology

Silicon Valley's Mil received

Here's my honest opinion as someone involved in VC-backed defensetech:... 1y ago received

Here's my honest opi received

I looked to President Eisenhower in his inaugural address for guidance... 1y ago received

I looked to Presiden received

Higher-order Virtual Machine (HVM). New functional programming VM based on Interaction Nets.
https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM/tree/master posted 1y ago with 4 replies received technology computing

Higher-order Virtual received

Yeah Bend is the language built on the HVM. I haven't looked into it yet but I'd love to try it out when I get a chance. The other one I've recently been wanting to check out is Zig. It really does look like C with the problems fixed. But I have no great p... 1y ago received

Yeah Bend is the lan received

How to Control an Online Forum
This thread is for the linked post about disinformation and forum control.... (edith.reisen) posted 1y ago with 5 replies received technology supercoordination

How to Control an On received

Currently, sliding is not a huge problem because the front page has everything (scroll down!). Though of course discussion seems to be concentrated in the top few threads. In the long run, we're going to deal with scale and prioritization with tags. There ... 1y ago received

Currently, sliding i received

Who’s Behind All the ‘Pussy in Bio’ on Twitter? A little something on what we're up against.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/who-is-behind-all-the-pussy-in-bio-porn-spam-on-x.html posted 1y ago with 6 replies received politics technology

Who’s Behind All the received

1. Urbit is not designed to be uncensorable, nor is it particularly useful for our purposes.... 1y ago received

1. Urbit is not desi received

Strong genomic selection is almost feasible, and no one cares?
Strong genomic selection is the ability to create people who have genomes that are strongly selected--by several standard deviations--for some trait. Strong genomic selection would be a civilizational game-changer. For the price of a car, or less, accordin... posted 1y ago with 5 replies received technology eugenics

Strong genomic selec received

There was an interesting post related to this and the prospect of a Biosingularity a few weeks back:... 1y ago received

There was an interes received

Degen communism: the only correct political ideology. Vitalik Buterin's new manifesto.
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/04/01/dc.html posted 1y ago with 8 replies received politics technology

Degen communism: the received

I would like to rephrase that as classical man living in a new kind of polis that uses computerized communication and governance mechanisms. 1y ago received

I would like to reph received

Updates on sofiechan's curation system: Cybernetic Direct Democracy
I (admin) just pushed a bunch of changes. You'll see it most obviously in the percent signs next to the save and hide buttons, and as colored emojis indicating which posts are well regarded, and which are about to be deleted. Broadly, this is part of how s... posted 2y ago with 12 replies received meta technology

Updates on sofiechan received

Respond and make your case. Eventually there will be 4chan-style linkbacks so that you can immediately see if a post is really controversial (posts that generate tones of replies tend to be controversial). I think disagreement is better expressed as rebutt... 2y ago received

Respond and make you received

I notice a large number of threads converge on approximately 60% up, 1% down. This is two things: not enough people, so when the usual number of us vote and engage in a usual thread, it ends up with about the usual amount of evidence. But then they should ... 1y ago received

I notice a large num received

Hundred Rabbits' "UXN" ultra-portable personal computing stack
They made a simple VM that can be implemented in a weekend by almost anyone that can run their whole suite of personal computing, artistic, gaming, music, creative, etc apps. This is one of the coolest projects out there and it proves that computing could ... (100r.co) posted 2y ago with 15 replies received technology computing

Hundred Rabbits' "UX received