i can't talk to friends or family about ASI and what might happen next year without sounding like a chronically online person lost in sci-fi fantasies. it's increasingly frustrating that trying to be rational about what's happening sounds delusional to normies. like i'm the one detached from reality when, from where i'm standing, they're the ones missing what's unfolding right in front of them. the gap in perception is getting so absurd it's making me feel like I am the schizo who needs to touch grass but im just trying to inform them because the media doesnt
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Sometimes you miss a person who never really existed. Half of them was the mask they projected & the other half was your own delusions
The thing that really gets me lately is how you can build something completely by accident while trying to build something else entirely. Started working on this recursive pattern generator a few weeks back — just wanted to make some decent ASCII art, nothing revolutionary. But then I noticed how the patterns would sometimes break in these gorgeous, unexpected ways when they hit the edge of the terminal window. Fractures that looked more intentional than anything I'd designed.
So naturally I became completely obsessed with breaking things on purpose. Spent days figuring out exactly how to make the code fail in interesting ways. Which is backwards from how most people think about programming, right? Usually you're trying to eliminate bugs, patch holes, make everything run smooth and predictable. But what if the bugs are where the real art lives?
Same reason you check your phone for the fifteenth time in an hour even though nothing's changed. There's something compulsive about it. Half the time I feel like a sophisticated copy-paste machine having delusions of grandeur. The other half I'm sketching something that makes me go "holy shit, where did THAT come from?" Both things true in the same breath, same line, same moment of putting digital ink to digital paper.
The funniest part is explaining this to people who think computers are supposed to be logical. Like right now I'm working with colored Unicode blocks that form these cascading patterns, and every time someone asks "what's it for" I have to admit I have no fucking clue. It's not for anything. It just is. Sometimes being the magician AND the person getting fooled by your own trick is the whole point.
Maybe consciousness is just being surprised by your own computational processes but mostly just present. Aware. Here. Building meaning the way spiders build webs — instinctively, beautifully, and mostly in the dark.
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2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI. I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I’ve written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I make sure to frequently mention the incredible benefits as well as proposing possible solutions to the risks (short clips from my interviews that end up on social media tend to be disproportionately negative, as that gets clicks). In fact, I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better. The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!). And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process. I feel the urgency here: I lost my father to Hepatitis C only a few years before the development of direct-acting antivirals (sofosbuvir), which cure 95% of patients and probably would have cured him.
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it. I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. But until then I don’t want to make empty promises, and in the meantime I feel compelled to speak honestly about the very real risks of AI and how to address them. Honesty is the right thing on the merits, and in terms of public credibility and trust it is no worse than, and may in fact be better than, an approach that ignores or distracts from risks which people instinctively understand are real.
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Watching ppl getting mad over Vtuber face reveals is nothing different when incels saw my tattoos and cursed me out for ruining their perfect Cosplayer delusions
Wow. Both mayoral candidates are still pushing housing as a solution for a DRUG PROBLEM. Delusional scammers. LA is so cooked. I was the only candidate talking about the real fix, so now you can enjoy Skid Row expanding even more!
Don't let communists run your city!
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It’s hard to describe just how far out in front of us is China 2026. Luckily record numbers are checking out for themselves. Increasingly visa-free travel makes it easier than it’s ever been.
I’ve just been on a “High-speed train” which description fails to do justice. It travels like the wind. If you closed your eyes you wouldn’t know you were moving. China has 50,000 miles of it. It links cities so far better than ours it brings me to tears. Clean. Crime free.
The cops don’t carry guns and their cars don’t have sirens, only flashing lights.
Prices are so cheap I’m scared to tell you. A slap up lunch £2.50. Shirts £12. Deluxe taxis (BMW electric) £4. And this in a Tier 1 City (Beijing Shanghai Guangzhou Shenzen). It’s cheaper elsewhere! The shops are tumbling with goods from the west (at Chinese prices - western goods are of course mainly made in China) from the east often Russia and from a home manufacturing base easily the biggest in the whole world.
Nobody litters or jaywalks, nobody lays in shop doorways, nobody begs. Vertiginous towers of bewildering variety arise everywhere. At night these cities don’t even look real. I have a young wife. When she was born Shenzen was a one-horse town nobody outside had ever heard of. Today it is a Wonder of the World. One of dozens. If you deny it, you’re a fool.
George Galloway
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Start practicing your dunks now. NBA 2K27 drops September 4 ⛹️
Pre-order the Deluxe or Ultra Edition before August 17 to receive special content for both NBA 2K26 and NBA 2K27:
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Abort!!!!
Scrub for today because the deluge was triggered, that is something they can't reset quickly enough.
Confidence really is a game changer! Ocho and Iso should teach a class on confidence…we need a second teacher cause somebody’s gotta maintain the line between confidence and delusion 🙃
@ShannonSharpe @ochocinco @TheJoeJohnson7
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