/technology/

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 1d ago with 4 replies technology accelerationism bookclub

Capitalism is AI ?

Yes, that sounds right. A singleton maximizing extropy is stable. Many actors maximizing entropy is not: you end up in a catabolic collapse as the actor's environment is eaten for the (temporary) sake of the actor. Arguably this describes our current descr... 10h ago

Yes, that sounds rig

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 5d ago with 7 replies technology accelerationism

Xeno Futures Researc

I intend on having a website up in the next two weeks. Still working on fleshing out the plan and the vision but things are falling into place. 4d ago

I intend on having a

OpenAI vs. New York Times on "Data Preservation
In 2023 the Times sued both Microsoft and OpenAI, and claimed both were using millions of NYT articles w/o permission to train LLMs. A little over a week ago a court determined that OpenAI did, in fact, have to preserve + segregate all output log data. Ope... posted 5d ago with no replies technology news

OpenAI vs. New York

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 1w ago with 2 replies technology economics

Bismarck's Latest on

That idea of building many small factories sounds like it's not going to work very well. I'm not a manufacturing guy, but centralization in "gigafactories" is what SpaceX is doing. Vertical integration is probably better than whatever the primes are doing ... 1w ago

That idea of buildin

Towards a supercoordination protocol
Inspired by >>2513 and >>2589 I have been thinking about what a software implementation of a supercoordination protocol might look like. Specifically, this is based on the signal/impact model presented in >>2570. I would be interested to hear what other an... posted 2w ago with 4 replies technology informatics

Towards a supercoord

Hard agree. That remains an unsolved problem for me. I imagine a world where that process is semi-automated via APIs -- as a crude example, maybe liking a tweet automatically registers a signal/impact loop with a very small positive weight.... 1w ago

Hard agree. That rem

The Gentle Singularity
If the gentle singularity is true, then perhaps the AGI timeline question was malformed all along. Acting like some variant of Goodhart’s law, the reification of AGI holds the assumption that AGI will be a singularity. But it is definitely difficult to r... (blog.samaltman.com) posted 1w ago with 1 reply technology accelerationism

The Gentle Singulari

People compete on the world of ideas, those of emotions still exist like animals in a zoo.... 1w ago

People compete on th

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 3w ago with 3 replies technology meta informatics

Designing a word fre

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, ... 2w ago

It works! But slow a

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 2mo ago with 8 replies technology learning

Intelligent Use of L

just text:... 3w ago

just text:...

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 3mo ago with 10 replies technology rationality philosophy

The Hellenic View of

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... 3w ago

I think in this disc

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... posted 2mo ago with 9 replies technology accelerationism economics

Intelligence vs Prod

Look no comment on the current regime and its lack of tact. I support their priorities but there's obviously a lot of dumb stuff going on. In any case I consider it orthogonal to what we should be doing in theory and i wish not to be constrained by their r... 4w ago

Look no comment on t

Patchwork city states ?
With State capacity decline and movement of decentralization how probable is it that we see something like sov corp city states emerging ? First through corporations providing private security (I think this is already the case in Brazil to some extent) eve... posted 2mo ago with 6 replies technology accelerationism sovereignty

Patchwork city state

We see it already with today's tech companies, to an extent: the US government shuts down nuclear power plants while GOOGL and MSFT plan on building their own nuclear power plants, facilitating their respective AGI plans.... 1mo ago

We see it already wi

"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 2mo ago with 7 replies technology meta

"Forum software blew

not a ton of new ideas here, mostly agreeing with what others have said already.... 2mo ago

not a ton of new ide

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 3mo ago with 13 replies technology meta

How to build better

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. 3mo ago

Very cool, guys. Let

Dissolving vs. Surviving
Recent xenohumanist discussion has the doomer assumption built in that we as humans will be dissolving when higher man arrives on the scene. I don't think that's set in stone and want to offer a clarification.... posted 3mo ago with 5 replies technology accelerationism gnon

Dissolving vs. Survi

Some people won't believe in the inherent goodness of existence until it's been autistically proven to them with English philosophizing a hundred times over. That's fine. For the rest of us, we don't need to be persuaded of the inherent goodness of existen... 3mo ago

Some people won't be

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 4mo ago with 4 replies technology rationality coordination

Super-Coordination T

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. 4mo ago

How about aggregatin

"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 12mo ago with 11 replies technology

"Bull fighting" from

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... 10mo ago

America retains dist

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 1y ago with 16 replies technology sovereignty

Soft Ware for Hard P

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.... 10mo ago

One of my old friend

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 13mo ago with 40 replies technology economics

The Drone Question.

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... 12mo ago

consumer demand is a

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 13mo ago with 12 replies technology sovereignty

Towards an Illegible

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):... 13mo ago

There had been a thr

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 1y ago with 12 replies technology meta

Updates on sofiechan

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

I notice a large num