Zarathustra called man a rope, and you're out here pricing rope

Joined August 2014
Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
It's that time of year again! Every November I rapid fire 30, yes 30 auctions (1 per day) and the highest auction proceeds go to purchasing gifts and art supplies for the less fortunate aspiring artist kids I can find in my local area. Last year Mrs. Modfly and I were able to choose 3 kids and hopefully gave them an incredible holiday. This helps me out at the end of the year greatly and also helps me to give back in a way that makes me feel pretty damn great! Anways, If you're still reading this, thank you! Please like and share and get the word out!
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Autobiographical, like High Fidelity
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Many moons ago, I worked background in the film "Walk the Line" (2006). That might be why my theory of the case for what's behind our chronic cultural deficit of meaning and purpose is that we don't have a good sense of how to be an extra rather than the protagonist. 🧵
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This part right here. This is nonsense. There doesn't need to be a least the moment the building sells. The new operator can buy the building. The oop failed to demonstrate that the past dependency they imply is real. The burden is on them, not on me.
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Also, don't lie about me.
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No. Americana is defined by things that are more less uniquely American. Football is Americana. Soccer is not, even though tons of American kids play soccer.
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Also, before you go around lying about my intelligence, lmk what you'd like to bet on an IQ test. People can disagree with you with being stupid.
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Alex Pretti was murdered.
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Thread of people saying Claude Opus 4.5 is ~AGI:
Unlike Dean, I do not have to remain vibe compliant, so I'll just say it: Claude Opus 4.5 in Claude Code is AGI. By the open AI definition? Can this system "outperform humans in most economically valuable work"? Depends a lot on how you define "humans" and "economically valuable work" obviously. But the entire information economy we've built up since the '70s is completely disrupted by this development, and people don't notice it yet because they think it's some crusty old unixy thing for programmers. As Dean points out elsewhere, software engineering just means getting the computer to do things. How much of your job is just about getting the computer to do things? What is left if you remove all of that? That's your job now. That's what value you add to the system. My workflow has completely changed in the last year. I used to spend a lot of time clicking and typing and managing windows and files and browser tabs. Now i mostly see chat windows. Agents search the web, synthesize information into documents, take screenshots of web pages and drop them all in a folder, figure out how to get around paywalls and captchas, write code, review each other's code, install software and edit files directly my personal folders. They also daily argue with me, gas me up, fake results, cheat tests, confidently bullshit me about factual questions, and generally try to get away with shit. Tn that way they're not so different from a human coworker. But they are strange. I have to constantly model the mind of these alien critters living inside my laptop, and in doing so I become more like them. I learn new words or terminal commands or weird Python libraries. I think in context windows. I become a cyborg, a hive mind of human and clauds. In my opinion, AGI is when a computer can use the computer. And we're there. But that's not because I think using a computer is the definition of intelligence. I think intelligence is a interconnected system of emergent self-replicating properties which compose into languages, not just human languages but DNA itself, raveling novel forms out of computation upward through levels molecular and cellular and organic and neural and social and linguistic and economic, and that we are one part of that process of intelligence which has now plunged back into the material realm and begun to organize the molecules of the mineral world to create new forms of intelligence and life. Intelligence is the ratiocinating process that makes sense of the universe and remakes the universe by sensing it So when we light up those megaliths of gold and silicon, and hoist into the cloud the Howling Ghostmind of All Culture Combined, and we call upon that magic mirror and we summon the helpful harmless honest spirit Claude, and we ask it to make our social media graphics in this folder, and it uses the same computer the same as us, it makes different mistakes but it fixes them as well, and it gets discouraged and wants to give up when the computer is hard to use... how can we not call this the intelligence of the machine? When God sings with his creations, will Claude not be part of the choir?
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In a world of low-effort things, we should appreciate high-effort, high-quality work
Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Really interesting piece on how University of Chicago professors helped a national network of food banks get surplus food much more efficiently to where it's needed, by creating an internal auction market. slowboring.com/p/how-to-actu…
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?
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I don't think Cleveland would quite do this to Indiana, but I think it's much closer to this than to a competitive game. Plus this video is great. youtu.be/doZzrsDJo-4?si=434g…
This stuff is dumb. Indiana has, maximum, a dozen *future* NFL regulars, with no current pro experience. The worst NFL team—grown men, all NFL regulars—would embarrass them at basically every position. I doubt Indiana could sustain, or stop, a single drive.
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The Naroditsky family shares the sad news of Daniel’s unexpected passing. Daniel was a talented chess player, educator, and beloved member of the chess community. We ask for privacy as the family grieves.
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
NEW EPISODE OF MAP MEN!!!!! 🗺️ How did the Netherlands delete the sea... and get rich? Share and enjoy! youtube.com/watch?v=eq-kgUpd…
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At my heart, I support boring technocratic governance. Unelected professionals doing meaningful work in the public interest in order to guide the policies enacted by elected officials. Attacking that base of knowledge is extremely dangerous.
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As a kid, I wanted to start something called Karl's Cool Club. But that's not aesthetic, so I wanted to spell everything with K's. Luckily, my mother intervened.
Share a piece of racism lore about yourself.
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No, some people disagree. They say that the value of a shrimp's life isn't just very low, it is literally zero. Or at least literally infinitesimal in relation to a human life. That's an important moral distinction. 1/2
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Less so for shrimp; there arguably aren't enough to matter. But where are people comfortable drawing that categorical species line? Mammals? Warm-blooded animals? Vertebrates? This is what that infamous concentric circle graph is meant to show.
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
No issue is more important to understanding modern American sociopolitical dynamics than the relationship of the Becker/Solomon/Greenberg concept of the ‘meaning-providing cultural worldview’ to the construction and preservation of identity/self-concept/self-esteem.🧵
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Some final thoughts
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Correctly value-bet QJxxx in razz. Someone throw me a parade.
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Karl🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
On absolute full blown tilt today. I've sounded the alarm re: Trump since 2015, and I would be the first to admit that his first term was not nearly as bad as what many expected, and I have tried to get many on the left to focus on the legitimate grievances and ditch the rest. For example, I don't think you focus on anything other then trying to steal the 2020 election and not taking COVID seriously enough early on. This term is already looking much more like the worst-case scenario that people have been predicting. In the story "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", while there is an important lesson about not overreacting and being well-calibrated to risks, it's important to remember that the wolf did eventually come. "TDS" is meant to capture the spirit of the phenomenon of getting caught up in the insignificant, meaningless criticisms of Trump, and there's something to that. But TDS shouldn't be used to describe *everyone* who is critical. If it is, the implication is that criticism won't be permitted. In 9 years, I've never said this: the wolf is here.
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