Pharma stocks have jumped 20% in a few days. That can’t mean anything good.

Twitter has become even more annoying than before by becoming “X, formerly known as Twitter” Social media sucks

“…in the last days of the Old Empire, humanity lost its drive. Terran civilization had spread across the stars, but grew stagnant. With few ambitions, most people allowed efficient machines to perform everyday tasks for them. Gradually, humans ceased to think, or dream …or truly live.” Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

Some people are setting the arbitrary goal that other people must, by 2030-2050 be completely “carbon neutral” whatever that means. I think by 2030 the world will be completely de-decarbonized and nobody will care about those “goals”

When I was a teenager we where the only people in the neighbourhood who owned a computer — actually the only people to ever use one. One of my neighbours was afraid of going in the room where we kept the computer — it might wake up and attack her with lasers! People are reacting to AI the same way today. And politicians and cronies are ready to capitalize on that.

The existential threat isn’t Artificial Intelligence It’s Natural Stupidity Ask ChatGPT to write something in reverse character order, or upside down and you’ll see how much “intelligence” that thing actually has. The problem isn’t that it can’t do that, that would be a huge improvement. It actually produces utter nonsense, like it had a stroke or something. It can’t abstract anything, only repeat patterns it has seen millions of times. Yet you can be sure there’ll be people who’ll try to force us to obey those things bc the AI is the “expert”

While I think it might be theoretically possible for extraterrestrial civilizations to send unmanned probes to Earth… The idea that the US govt would find them and keep it a secret while not a single private person has ever obtained one is just ludicrous. That doesn’t mean necessarily the whistleblowers are lying. “Intelligence” agencies have been known to be stupid enough to end up believing their own psyops and falling for a number of hoaxes — like all the psychic BS they spent lots of money investigating. You want to find someone ready to believe any nonsensical conspiracy theory — just go to a CIA building. Mk-ultra is a tale about how even a literally mad scientist can get the government to believe utter nonsense and give them money and license to commit all sorts of crimes. They’re not genius supervillains secretly controlling the world — they’re just government employees, and not necessarily the brightest ones. And definitely they aren’t the first to “make contact”. Sorry folks, it seems we’ll have to just deal with the fact that humans are in fact special after all. We’re alone in the universe. All the 8 billion of us.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (actually even before that) every major new technological development has been paraded as a threat and proof we need central planning or we’ll all die. - Factories - Electricity - Computers - Phones - The Internet - AI What else? It’s always the same discourse since the 19th century. And every time we learn that in fact the more complex a system and the least predictable— the more dangerous it is to try and centrally plan it, and the best to letting Yet people insist making the same stupid points again and again.

Long time I haven’t posted here. Really lost the excitement about Nostr. I don’t believe it’s good enough for actual censorship resistance in the long term. On the other hand it seems like everyone is happy with it and think it’s good enough. So there isn’t a lot of incentive for my research on better (or actual) censorship resistant global broadcast systems. That means work that people actually want and pay me money for gets priority and I don’t touch much the “pro bono” research. But I will eventually just compile everything I have so far and publish — even if I don’t have a proper working prototype. Realized there’s no rush. At this point it would take new major attacks against free speech platforms for people to get interested in alternative protocols — in particular the ones not optimized for sharing memes or sending micro payments. Meanwhile I work, eat lots of stake, and in general enjoy life before we all die in WW3.

If it wasn’t bizarre enough that media funded mostly by government are outraged at being labeled “government-funded media” (a simple statement of indisputable fact) Now Canadian politicians are accusing the opposition of getting help from “American billionaires” to attack CBC. For those who don’t know — Elon Musk is a Canadian citizen. His mother was Canadian and he acquires Canadian citizenship as a youth and lived in Canada before deciding to immigrate again to the US for business opportunities. Anyone who googled it would know. Trudeau famously once said “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” I guess that doesn’t apply to billionaires.

AI regulations are orders of magnitude more dangerous than AI. And it in fact magnifies the main risk of AI — people trusting and delegating decisions to it.

One of the things that pisses me most about taxes is all the talk about “paying the fair share”. You might argue that taxes are necessary — but there’s nothing fair about taking by force someone’s property and work for the benefit of others. The “fair share” of taxes for every single person on Earth is **exactly zero**. I can’t afford to own a home where I live, but if I had never paid any taxes I could be comfortably retired by now. That’s pretty typical of middle and upper classes in most of the world. How is that fair exactly? Anyone who finds legal ways to pay less in taxes is just behaving like a normal human being instead of a mindless zombie. Being a serf and paying taxes is just yet another sad thing we endure in this vale of tears. I try not to think too much about it. But pretending it’s a good thing is too much to ask.

Maybe the future will be a global war between zombies that just do whatever ChatGPT tells them too — and the few remaining actual humans. We have a good chance of winning bc the AI-zombies will be dumb af.

I hate paying taxes. I hate even more doing taxes. Paying someone else to do it for me doesn’t completely solve the problem as most of the effort is still mine. But I wouldn’t mind that much giving up 1/2 of my income if most of that money was to actually help other people, even if badly managed. Heck, I wouldn’t be too bothered if they just took 50% of my income to enrich themselves and then left me alone. What is truly infuriating is that they take my money and then use most of it to find new ways of harassing me and other people, dictate what we can or can’t do, patronize, humiliate, and gaslight us, and in general make our lives as miserable as possible. If you known some place in the world where I can just pay taxes and be left alone I would love to move there. A society governed by common thieves would be a great improvement over the status quo.