The Future of Sovereign AI
We still don’t know just how important and disruptive artificial intelligence will be, but one thing seems clear: the power of AI should not remained cordoned off by centralized companies. Our panelists—Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed, Native Planet’s ~mopfel-winrux, Tlon’s Lukas Buhler, along with @mogmachine from Bittensor and David Capone from Harmless AI—are the perfect team to explore the possibilities unlocked by more sovereign, decentralized, and open AI.
[A bitcoiner, an ancap, a 3-D gun printer, an alt-righter, the founder of Hatreon and a convicted kiddle fucker walk into a bar. The barman picks up a baseball bat and says “get the fuck out of my bar, Cody.”]
Cancelling the Culture Industry
In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines. In this panel, author Sam Frank hosts MRB editor in chief Noah Kumin, romance writer Delicious Tacos, sex detective Magdalene Taylor and frog champion Lomez of Passage Press. Join them for a freewheeling discussion of saying whatever they want while evading the digital hall monitors.#
[not being able to live within five hundred feet of a school is a small price to pay for true freedom]
Securing Urbit
How do we make Urbit secure? And what does a secure Urbit look like? The great promise of Urbit has always been that it can provide a sovereign computing platform for the individual—a means by which to do everything you would want to do on a computer without giving up your data. For that dream to be fulfilled, Urbit should be as secure as your crypto hardware wallet—perhaps moreso. Moderated by Rikard Hjort, Urbit experts Logan Allen, and Joe Bryan discuss with Urbit fan and cybersecurity expert Ryan Lackey.
[as secure as a crypto hardware wallet, you say]
Rebooting the Arts
The culture war is over—Culture lost. Now it’s a race to build a new one. Media whisperer Ryan Lambert leads a conversation with Play Nice founder/impresario Hadrian Belove. trend forecaster Sean Monahan, and controversial art-doc collective Kirac. They discuss how to win the culture race, and create a new arts ecosystem out of the rubble.
[the answer is to get Peter Thiel to try to magic up Dimes Square out of nothing, isn’t it?]
How to Fund a New World
Cosimo de Medici persuaded Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, ‘Come, I will choke you with gold.’ Join UF Director of Markets Andrew Kim as he discusses how to get more gold onto Urbit with Jake Brukhman of Coinfund, Jae Yang of Tacen, @BacktheBunny from RabbitX and Evan Fisher of Portal VC.
[the answer’s still Thiel, isn’t it?]
In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines.
I literally lol’d. Beyond parody.
the answer is to get Peter Thiel to try to magic up Dimes Square out of nothing, isn’t it?
On a actually serious note: When I look back at the multiple years I spent on sneerclub and otherwise following the rationalists, I increasingly feel that I had been tilting at windmills. I had spent most of that time making fun of them instead of looking into their finances, and in doing so I had missed the big picture and simply hadn’t realized how integral Peter Thiel was in propping them up and building a network to support them.
Thiel funds or funded MIRI, EA groups, Curtis Yarvin, FTX and OpenAI.
split screen between “how to win the culture race” and “a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines”
Random musings but I feel like posting: I almost got sucked into the urbit hole. I thought it was such a cool idea and implementation, and all the fun names and technical purity was so attractive to me at age 18 (this was before the crypto circus and urbit barely did anything except talk to a terminal).
It took me a while to realize that there is, actually, zero reason to give nonsensical names to literally every aspect of software, and also pretty dumb to try to shoehorn everything through a tiny functional core (“Nock”) while slowly re-learning all the lessons of 50 years of compiler development. So why use it at all?
Using urbit over a normal Linux stack comes purely with downsides. Slow, buggy, obscurantist, and so on. This means whoever actually dedicates their precious time to developing this unconditionally buys into the ideology. I never thought an ideology could be so powerful that it could corrupt the minds of my people (software monkeys).
Urbit is a truly fascistHHnating phenomenon.
it feels like the obscurantism is a stolen magician’s trick? keep people too misdirected with all the weird shit and they might not notice the other parts that a lot of people might find themselves objecting to (if it were clearly laid out at first)
So his software has the same characteristics as his political writing
Cults love their neologisms.
our esteemed system owner @self recommends you stop worrying and learn to love NixOS, which Yarvin plagiarised wholesale
I’m a nixos fanatic, thank you very much! I even installed nixos on my (non-technical) SO’s computer. Was this a mistake? Yes. Do I care? no.
I need to release
grandma-mode, a set of defaults for a remote deploy only NixOS desktop with an app store that installs user-local packages
speaking of
froztbyte@bambam ~ % nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m" - system: `"aarch64-darwin"` - host os: `Darwin 22.6.0, macOS 13.5` - multi-user?: `yes` - sandbox: `no` - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.18.1` - channels(root): `"nixpkgs"` - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixpkgs`and even after knowing about it for the better part of 6~7 years, it’s @self’s fault that I’m finally giving it a try
fuck yes, welcome to the
cultclub
oh cool, Kirac, those are the idiots who made the (hopefully still) unreleased michel houellebecq sex tape. what a nice congregation of weird frauds.
houellebecq sex tape
yup, and if you read french you can enjoy this very disturbing interview. it’s somehow worse and weirder than it sounds.
Mais c’est de plus en plus dur de lui procurer des femmes qui acceptent de coucher avec lui, on ne trouve pas de groupies et il n’aime pas payer des prostituées”.
lol holy shit michel
anyway i did my time thinking about Houellebecq in any capacity whatsoever
Qu’est-ce que fuck did I just read?
what, you’ve never helped your father figure’s wife find young women for him to fuck on camera so he’ll be less depressed?
I need eye and mind bleach, c’est très ironique tout ça quand même.
As somebody who is dutch, im sorry that we unleashed this monstrosity on the world. Our cultural project just suck and as soon as somebody finally figures out our many crimes they will turn the country into a used nuclear weapon storage facility. Gabber, reality tv, racist politicians with bad haircuts and now this, blame it all on the dutch.
oi gabber is wicked though
In my defence, I’m into BM, normal metal, various kinds of gothic music, and even have listened to Merzbow, so I clearly have no taste.
oh don’t worry, Australia did the same in the '80s with soap operas and gave the world Kylie Minogue.
@Soyweiser Don’t forget the speculative, state, and crony varieties of capitalism…
Fun fact, in the Netherlands, billionaires effectively pay less taxes than in the USA, and our prime minister is a racist (an actual ‘that action was racist according to the courts’ type, not a frothing at the mouth carves swastika in his face type. And that was before he was a PM, and people still voted for him). Neoliberalism baby!
Yet again I call to your attention The Basilisk Murders by Andrew Hickey, and especially the intro, which anticipates this conference schedule five years ahead.
had this tab open since yesterday, got to read it today
I am definitely going to be reading that book
edit: bought. also, $3.99 before logging in, $4.59 after? god I hate content cartels
Andrew puts his stuff on all the small ebook stores too, which don’t fuck people around
i helped beta read the book, Andrew actually had to tone it down because normal people couldn’t believe lesswrongers were that bad
yeah for this time the amount was too small to dig around. I should find out which stores I can generally access (and start preferencing them over bezosplace)
This was a very enjoyable read btw, thanks for the heads up about it @dgerard
(oh good mlem doesn’t offer completion, TIL)
Cosimo de Medici persuaded Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, ‘Come, I will choke you with gold.’
They are clearly ok with AI simulacra (simulacrap, perhaps) of everything interesting or meaningful, why do they even feel the need to court artists?
(of course, I know the answer. They are all just losers who don’t know how to do anything cool and they know it)
Poor people of Lisbon have to put up with 2 weeks of the great unweathered people of Ethereum and Urbit
The Atlantic Ocean is right there, though; perfect place to make them all get in the sea.
Look, humanity is trying to reduce oceanic pollution. Can’t we just bin and lid them? I’m sure we can get industrial containers in Lisbon…
Just noticed the fucken web summit is in Lisbon right after. Leave Lisbon alone!
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It’s the people of Portugal who are the real victims. Why do techbros love Lisbon so much? Cheap cost of living?
startup-amenable city. was ramping up 2018~2019 already, took a bit of a knock from 2020+, but seems to be continuing. and then that naturally attracts all who wish to take advantage of that (and others that wish to take advantage of those)
my condolences from Dublin. we gave you the web summit as well!
Cody Wilson jfc.
@dgerard “more sovereign, decentralized, and open AI” just reads like something that’s meant to “run on the blockchain” and given the processing capacity I think we’ll be able to sneak up on it and get it dressed in sovereign citizen style
You can’t make me read that shit, it’s been years and I still hate knowing what Urbit is.
