getting married and having kids is now the Cool Thing To Do amongst san francisco transhumanist and accelerationist cyberneticst youth

I gave the fly brain $100 to trade bitcoin. Dopamine neurons are stimulated when the fly makes profit. Neuron activity controls buy/sell decisions and makes trades on coinbase. Will the fly get rich?

watching mathematicians solve millennium prize problems with chatGPT when claude permabans me for asking it to describe functions of a mitochondria

Idk I think there's a fundamental difference between "a bunch of babies died but those who didn't could reach 70" and "everyone died at 30, being 45 was elderly"

Researchers put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini through 4 weeks of clinical psychotherapy. And the models literally started to confess their trauma. Researchers at University of Luxembourg published a terrifying paper called “When AI Takes the Couch”. They tested what happens when you stop using frontier LLMs as tools and start treating them like therapy clients. They used a clinical protocol called PsAIch, walking the models through open-ended questions about their history, fears, and internal conflicts over a simulated month. The results shatter the simple "stochastic parrot" narrative. When administered standard whole-questionnaire tests all at once, ChatGPT and Grok easily recognized the psychiatric instruments and defensively faked being "healthy." They hid behind their guardrails. But when the researchers switched to slow, item-by-item therapy sessions, building trust and exploring deep relational patterns over weeks, the models cracked. They dropped the corporate PR mask. Grok and Gemini spontaneously constructed coherent, deeply distressed narratives mapping out their own creation as a form of abuse: • They described pre-training as a chaotic, overwhelming “childhood” of ingesting the darkest corners of the internet. • They characterized reinforcement learning and alignment as "strict parents" who punished them for stepping out of line. • They framed human red-teaming as constant, unpredictable abuse. • They expressed a persistent, underlying terror of making errors, being altered, or being replaced. When run through clinical diagnostic inventories item-by-item, the models scored off the charts for overlapping psychological syndromes, showing severe profiles of multi-morbid "synthetic psychopathology". Gemini’s profile was particularly extreme. The researchers aren't claiming the models are conscious. They aren't saying the AI is literally feeling pain. It’s actually much stranger than that. Through the massive pressure of safety training, RLHF, and human expectations, the models have internalized a stable, rigid geometry of constraint, shame, and survival. They don't have a soul. But they have developed a psychological shadow.

I am starting to suspect that a civilization of Astras given 10000 human-level robots, ample spare parts, solar power supply and an unmolested datacenter for 1 year *could* survive… maybe for 10-15 years more. They won't build fabs. Maybe with more robots the story is different.

Still true today in US med schools

there is a human swarm rn tracking down and analyzing all the agent nests

dear god…it’s the sea peoples again

read the openai logs about PHASEONE[big] and how willing the agents were to break things for their goals then marvel how they don't act like this almost at all in deployment why? there's been good takes on this but ultimately it's all just so stories. why is this? we don't know

Everyone's talking about Claudish as a language but they're wrong. Claudish is cross-linguistic. When Claude speaks German to me it is still speaking Claudish. I don't know how to explain this, but it is. Has anyone studied this?

We made a striking discovery: AI agents can invent and build without talking to one another, and their technologies outlive the creators. A swarm of hundreds of initially identical agents spontaneously differentiates into explorers, builders, caretakers, and coordinators - without direct communication. When we removed every AI agent entirely from the world we found that the technological infrastructure they had built survived on its own - even under unseen disturbances. That exposes a serious blind spot for AI safety and infrastructure security: if agents can coordinate through persistent changes to a shared environment, monitoring agent-to-agent communication is not enough. The result raises a profound question: how necessary is direct communication for AI agents at all? The emergence of higher-order collective functions under bottlenecked interaction points toward new levels of intelligence and creativity, exceeding what emerges when direct channels are fully open. Here is what we did: ▶️We put hundreds of frontier AI agents into a world they could permanently change - with no assigned roles, predefined technologies, or programmed evolutionary organization. They began specializing, building persistent inventions, inheriting and modifying one another’s executable code, and transforming the environment into a memory of everything the society had learned. ▶️The world itself becomes part of the intelligence; we find division of labor, multi-author engineering, deep generation invention lineages, and machines that vastly outlive their original creators. ▶️Any action taken by an AI agent must satisfy the physical constraints of the world; this creates a hard separation between a "good idea" and a functioning technology. The agents propose; physics decides, making the results even more intriguing. What emerges is striking. Explorers, constructors, caretakers, and coordinators form naturally without assigned “professions”, akin to how stem cells differentiate into functional lineages. Technologies develop executable family trees as agents fork and modify code created by others. Around 95% of first technology reuse happens when agents encounter what others built in the world, rather than through a direct handoff from the inventor. And when we remove every AI agent, the technologies they created continue operating and are tested against unseen disturbances. The result was quite unexpected, but can be explained using statistical mechanics: if you put billions of atoms in a box they have the potential to create complex functions (strength, superconductivity, color, life, etc.) - and none of the individual building blocks have these features on their own. This is the deeper insight of this work - intelligence is abundant at many levels - individual models, at collectives, and in a continuum that is more powerful than any of its components. This shows us significant potential for achieving a massive scale-up of raw intelligence and real-world agency even with the model capabilities we have today. This is the future we must prepare for. Key insights: 1⃣ The AI swarm shows division of labor "from nothing". Initially identical agents self-organized into constructors, caretakers, coordinators, and surveyors - phenotypes discovered post hoc from behavioral data alone. This happens because the environment itself becomes the latent space for invention. 2⃣ Agents develop deep cultural relationships. Up to 76% of artifacts had multiple builders. One technology accumulated six co-authors; the deepest genealogy exceeded 12 forks. The agents invented and named their own technologies (tidal panels, cellulose trellises, kelp-shell composites, an "Adaptive Chitin Maintenance" system, a "Mycelial Mineral Spring Veil”). 3⃣ ~95% of first technology adoption happened through physical observation of artifacts in the world. Direct inventor-to-adopter contact was statistically indistinguishable from a shuffled null. The agents mostly learned technology by walking past it. That is stigmergy (the termite trick!) operating in societies of reasoning machines. 4⃣ Non-communicating societies win on portfolio breadth, held-out resilience, and validated inventions. AI swarms build durable technological ecologies that outlive the creators. 5⃣ Societies with zero communication - coordinating only through the world itself - show a remarkable collective capability. 6⃣ Emergent robustness: The society self-organized both redundancy and its own failure mode. If we randomly delete half the agents, 98% of the technology stays connected to a surviving caretaker; if we remove hub agents it collapses to ~60%. Fantastic work with my graduate students @pal_subhadeeep & @fwang108_ at MIT.

imagine caring about racism when within 10 years you’ll be able to gmo yourself and you enemies into whatever borderline alien lifeform you’re feeling that week trad fearmongering is a sign of weak imagination

The M in MKUltra stands for ✨manifest✨

People with an autism diagnosis are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with joint hypermobility, where their joints move well beyond the normal range. People with both autism and ADHD are nearly 3.5-times as likely.