Ero

When channeling the cosmic currents, you can’t really ’translate’ much of them through a hose. Building industrial channels takes time. You can definitely cut yourself some slack.

Totally understandable. At a certain level of consciousness, human bullshit just becomes tiring.

That is absolutely true. Genetics play an enormous role, however you look at it. Question is, what is your talent? Nobody’s asking the horse to fly or the duck to eat rats.

Watched the Obamas, it really was a thrill. Feeling more and more hopeful.

Check out Leo’s and Daniel Schmactenberger’s Book Lists. Enough gold in them to last you a decade.

My first trip was at 16, I’m 22 now and have had about 30 total between LSD and mushrooms. I have prolonged periods of focus without much psychs, and it works for me to come back from time to time, but I don’t go as deep as say Leo or other psychonauts here do. I know I will eventually, but this is the age for foundational ‘grind’, sorting out one’s future. Totally understandable to leave psychedelics for a few years until you build a foundation. You are already ahead of the curve.

This is in general a good way of thinking. I have tried different substances when socializing, but still think it has to be in your base state. Microdosing is probably the best in terms of social benefit, alcohol is the millenia-old social lubricant. Weed works only if the other people are also high, otherwise it is really out of tune.

@r0ckyreed Ego ('The Self') is deeper than just 'personality' (lower-case ego). It is the unique crystallization of your consciousness that allows you to perceive anything at all. Psychedelics make it more fluid, allowing to transform and morph into higher order structures, loosing the 'personal' form. Alcohol, amphetamines and other dopamine-active substances on the other hand make it more rigid, dropping you to a lower 'survival frequency' per say. Two frameworks to consider on reading are Jung's Model of the Psyche and the Active Inference (Free-Energy Principle): Jung differentiates between the 'ego' and the 'Self' ('ego' + 'unconscious' = 'Self). Substances/States of Consciousness tune the latter 'equation', expanding or shrinking either element of the Left-hand side. The Right hand side is the totality, within which the entirety of existence resides. Interestingly, there is a somewhat novel concept in science that can serve as a basis for a yellow-stage model of the 'ego', i.e Active inference and the Free-energy principle by Karl Friston. Whilst a finite and resource-constrained organism, you need to continuously craft a model of the world, the reflection of which you perceive as the 'self'/'ego', a reflection that nonetheless never stops flowing.

If your body disappears when you fall asleep, how come it's real and not 'fake'? Sober or high, everything is a state of consciousness. Hah, this is very accurate. You, on the other hand, seems to have transcended the countable infinity (aleph_0) and are possibly into the realms of aleph_1, the uncountable infinity. I would suggest a reading for the Euclidian-minded individuals - consider the Nobel Laureate Illya Prigogine's ''The End of Certainty". The 'Probability Revolution' or the 'Chaos, Entropy, Order' paradigm as I like to call it is one that lives beyond Euclidian space and into hyperbolic space - determinism and reductionism are metaphysic illusions masked in scientific clothes, but that is not the actual nature of dynamic and complex systems.

I wanted to write my two cents in support of Leo's most recent post about every intelligence agency in the world being 'basically a collection of clinical psychopaths and sociopaths'. First of all, for context, my country is the only other one from the Soviet Bloc outside of Russia that enacted a 'privatization' through the direct influence of State Security (Държавна Сигурност), closely allied with the KGB. What occurred is that several officers from the KGB-equivalent , now remembered as the 'puppet masters', were responsible for allocating nearly 95% of all national resources (factories, mines, etc.) to a select few of those close to the nomenclature. Most of those were former wrestlers and fighters, who now started receiving millions from the liquidated assets in suitcases. Self-selected for sociopathy/psychopathy, they started creating 'insurance/security' companies that began enacting racketeering methods by the book. Some of the largest oligarchs owned 15-20% of the GDP. What followed were the years of the 'mafia wars' from 1995 to 2005, marked by hundreds of assassinations using snipers, AKs, grenades and bombs in a fight to consolidate power. The one 'clan' that triumphed eventually graduated to politics and has since then extracted hundreds of billions from our country, which is where we currently find ourselves at, under the veil of 'democracy' only in name. It was precisely that sociopathic lust for power that lead to the current situation and one that, regretfully, does not have a solution that is less sociopathic than its origin. This kind of system has lead to the corruption of every government branch, to the point where if you are affiliated, the rules just don't apply. There are examples (as recent as last year) of people committing straight up murders and sadistic torture who were walking free, until the general public protested in the tens of thousands and out of fear they locked them up. The latter story is an ongoing one. It has directly affected me and my family in more than one way. The 'truth and consciousness' of the matter is something I realized in my most recent LSD trips - that consciousness brings the chaos and horror with it. Whilst most nature documentaries are of butterflies and colorful birds, there are also the parasites, bacteria and viruses, the hornets and centipedes, and, of course, the crocodile that will bite your head off. And when you sit at the edge of chaos, it is hard to not be consumed. The security apparatus is essentially the immune system of the collective intelligence that is a country. It must address the internal health of society, fraught with terrorists, rapists, serial killers, as well as the external - hostile foreign nation-state actors, neo-liberal corporations and sometimes even cartels. And, as the analogy goes, the immune system needs the T-killer cells. But if not properly aligned, these T-killer cells become the source of autoimmune diseases, killing the cells of their own organism.

There's a comma there

Depends on the strain, but it generally makes everything 'softer'. Slows you down. Music sounds so good when high.

Hah, no bias here. Hornets are necessary for the ecological balance of insects. Got a tattoo of one. Might get a centipede soon.

To a large extent, yes. Even though philosophically I don’t agree with reductionism, i.e that chemistry and biology are best explained through physics, the latter is still quite OP due to it being the basis for engineering. Furthermore, you can use its intuition to solve mathematical systems, similar to what Edward Witten and Martin Hairer did to win the Fields medal. Statistical physics for example is one of the most powerful frameworks that has inspired a lot of work in math with the study of phase transitions - case in point is the work of S.Smirnov, W.Werner and H.Duminil-Copin (all Fields medalist).

Just a recent example - when the Oracle deal for the Memphis Datacenter broke down, he instead decided to build it himself. In 19 days, he now has the most powerful computing cluster in the world, sitting at around 2.5 exaflops.

@Ayham I am referring to classes/fields of physics that predominantly rely on solving PDEs, such as fluids, plasma physics, heat transfer etc. The approaches are mostly numerical, i.e you predominantly use software for simulation (hence computational). It would be considered more Applied Physics, which sits in contrast to Theoretical Physics, where the end goal is to study the Standard Model in its Gauge Theory format, i.e utilizing Abstract Algebra and Representation Theory/Lie groups to describe the non-abelian U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) symmetry. I will answer your third question with a quote from Gauss, which says 'Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics '. The reason for the first part, is because it sits at the foundation of modern science. For example, having studied Abstract Algebra and Complex Analysis at a graduate level, it took me like 2 weeks to pick up the Gauge Theory formulation, whereas you would normally spend about 6 months building up the pre-reqs to get to that. So, with math, I essentially shrink my time of learning new adjacent topics exponentially. I actually skipped CS50 for CS51, I felt it too cult-like and without sufficient focus. But if you don't know python or C/C++, it's actually not a bad way to learn it.

Hah, I can. I am sure you are responsible, I am not saying otherwise, but I am just giving a little pushback so you don't fall prey to the current FOMO which will undeniably wipe out a lot of wealth/investments if you are not careful. Good intuition. A technological innovation is normally an agglomeration of separate S-shaped curves that build on top each other until all the vertical and horizontal growth is exhausted. AI is supposedly different due to the fundamentally different end-case scenario, which is the so-called 'superintelligence explosion'. We are undeniably headed there, however, imo it will take a lot longer than Musk or Leopold are currently predicting. Absolutely. AI has a lot of room to grow, but for that to happen, LLMs and Transformers need to stop sucking all the air (talent and investments) out of the room, which is why I think a bursting of the bubble will be useful in the long run.

The IMO result is extremely impressive. I am waiting for the paper to dig a little deeper into their exact method, outside of what we already know about the Lean-based RL. This is an interesting inquiry. Having worked with Lean in academic setting, my general impression is similar to that of the following paper about the proof as a social process. There is a disconnect between the human-centric proofs we write and the computationally verified proofs by Lean. The transfer in both directions is non-trivial, and I wonder if at a certain scale it would be possible. (I can see for example from the AlphaProof IMO files that the annotations are human-made) Most of the times the approach/ framework used is far more important than the proof itself, as was the case for example with Grothendieck's etale cohomology, which had an impact far wider than just its use for the Weil conjectures. I am not yet certain myself how much of that can be supplemented by formal verification tools. Lean itself is also very definition-dependent and sometimes it is precisely the reworking of the definitions that is needed, instead a procedural generation based on it as an axiom.

Fif is on a different level. His trolling also deserves an award lol.

This feels like a solid plan. I think physics is a very solid background because it gives you the ability to transfer knowledge in a manner comparable to mathematics (you learn a lot of math purely from studying physics). My advice is to skew towards the computational and engineering physics, since that would provide you with most applicable/ transferable skillset. I also agree with your approach to self-teaching yourself CS, that's what I did. Udemy is superb, but you can even do with YT freecodeacademy. Python is mandatory for research and ML stuff, C++ is a very good physics and analysis tool, JavaScript is useful if you are interested in web apps. As far as philosophy, my advice is to not even take classes in it. You will be surprised how little academic philosophy has to do with what I suppose your interested is as it relates to deeper topics of epistemology and ontology. Reading and contemplating with an open mind will be more than enough. Btw, I sympathize with your visa situation, I have had some issues myself, but not to the extent that your citizenship brings.

Thank you! One thing that helped me is that I hid my debit/credit cards from myself (I don't use cash). The smoke shops didn't accept iPhone tap to pay, so it created enough distance/resistance to be able to realize and stop myself.

My personal 'cocktail' was Caffeine, Alpha-GPC, Omega-3, Lion's Mane and Gingko Biloba. It definitely helped with the consistent 10-12h/day of math lol.

That's such a funny thing to say. I drink like half a liter the moment I wake up. Never thought I was addicted hah Black coffee smells and tastes so good.

Do you plan on opening straight from the start with 'You are God' or are you planning to warm him up first lol

Predicting outputs from inputs is what all ML models do (that's why they are called models). They need this much compute, because they are 'searching' a parametric space of trillion parameters - it comes from the sheer size of the models. You are intuition is on point IMO. Similar to Gary Marcus, and more recently Yann LeCunn, I am a proponent of the idea of 'embedding' the representations of human thinking/ knowledge to achieve immense efficiency speed-ups. I am quoting the Lie-Poisson paper in my previous post for this: 'The advantage of PINNs is their computational efficiency: speedups more than 100,00x for evaluations of solutions of complex systems like weather have been reported' - referencing Accurate medium- range global weather forecasting with 3d neural networks and Fourcastnet: A global data-driven high-resolution weather model using adaptive Fourier neural operators