Drunk on wonder ❤️🔥 @conjectureinst fellow
this other Eden (🇬🇧)
Joined August 2012
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Tom Hyde retweeted
Science is not some hobby that serves the self actualization of people in a publicly sponsored job placement program. It is the systematic search for truth.
Tom Hyde retweeted
Force is the use of violence, or threat of violence, to arbitrarily prioritise one set of ideas over another.
..force predates humanity by millennia.
Indeed, the entire course of biological history can be understood as one great ideological struggle: selfish gene fighting selfish gene using poisons, venoms, talons and fangs to club one another into dank submission.
And long before, all of cosmic evolution—gravitation, collision, destruction—can be viewed in similar, forceful terms.
In people, the ideas are primarily memes (those encoded within one’s mind instead of one’s DNA); yet the use of force as a replication mechanism is no less common.
Persuasion, as we will later explore, is a remarkably modern discovery, both scarce and delicate.
Tyranny is by far the leading tenor of our most traditional progress.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_ 👇
Tom Hyde retweeted
really? what a narrow view! Anderson did in fact write sympathetically & convincingly about girls & women; even Hemingway has a story from an adolescent girl's perspective, "Up in Michigan," that is a knockout; not to mention D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy & (not least) Shakespeare.
if men can't write about women, women presumably can't write about men.
educated people can't write about lesser-educated people, Black writers can't write about brown people, people from Maine can't write about people from Vermont, no one can write about anyone except the sickly face in the mirror.
Tom Hyde retweeted
🇫🇷🚨 Après 23 ANS sans bras, cet homme reçoit la 1re GREFFE des 2 bras et des épaules au monde. Il peut enfin ENLACER ses proches !
En 1998, Felix, électricien islandais, est électrocuté sur une ligne à haute tension. Il perd ses 2 bras.
En 2021, à Lyon, des chirurgiens français lui greffent 2 bras et 2 épaules. En 2022, il enlace enfin sa fille et ses petits-enfants.
(AFP)
Libertarians are wrong about romance: it is *not* a form of trade.
tomhyde.substack.com/p/the-e…
Tom Hyde retweeted
Isaac Newton spent decades huffing mercury fumes in a Cambridge cellar, grinding lead into a worthless sludge while praying to the gods of alchemy. Now Marathon can use its reactor blanket to turn mercury-198 into stable gold by the ton. The alchemist will lose to the atom.
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
Tom Hyde retweeted
This peninsula is so ripe for total Manhattanisation.
Zero architectural merit to any of the buildings currently there. Double down on the big park and surround it with gleaming glorious skyscrapers.
Tom Hyde retweeted
Love, trade, force.
These really are the only ways we can know, be known, move, and be moved by other people in modern society.
All of interaction summarised in three words.
I want to explore these systems in greater detail to reveal their individual logics, and, in the process, justify their applications on varying social scales.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_
Seems oblique-verging-on-perverse to say but this plus Wikipedia only being like 50GB to download without images renders post-apocalyptic bunker stories—from the perspective of the people inside the bunker—barely apocalyptic.
All of human knowledge plus advanced semantic search and quasi-creative tutoring? Stored locally? That is better than basically every existing school by multiple orders of magnitude.
My mind is blown by how far ahead Apple is with local LLMs. The new Mac Studio M5 Ultra will have a 512 GB model for around 15-20k. You can chain 6 of them together using thunderbolt 5 and this have over 3 TB of ram and a massive amount of CPU and GPU cores. This means you can run a frontier model with over 2 trillion parameters locally for around 100kish. Nivida is around 500k for the same capability.
It is genuinely heartening from a risk science perspective. Making resilience technologies (those that facilitate the return to the original conditions or better) as cheap and abundant as possible effectively renders our existential risk from, say, nuclear warfare as zero.
Short of a relativistic asteroid or freak-onset stellar swelling I doubt that humans, as a species and civilisation, will ever go permanently extinct.