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How you guys collect warning points is beyond me. Been here for 6 years and am yet to get one. Maybe I should treat it like a badge or sum.

That’s a fair assessment. Iran’s entire foreign policy is proxy wars through extremist organisations, they don’t want the smoke with Israel and the US. This is why they warned in advance (through covert channels) about their retaliation. Israel, however, is an unstable factor in the equation and I believe the US’ terms of support is largely what is going to dictate the escalation or lack thereof. Let’s hope Trump never steps in office again.

Have used both on full subscription for general and technical work. Whilst GPT is more formulaic/ PG, on coding, image generation and now reasoning tasks with o1 it is by far superior.

English is my third language. Without actively forcing myself to use proper vocabulary and grammar, I wouldn’t have become fluent. There were a few moments in 2018-2019 when my posts were incoherent. Being pushed by mods and Leo to be more clear and succinct only helped. So, if anything, this is going to help non-native speakers the most.

The more you trip, the less it will become about optimisation and the more towards exploration. Find what works for you.

I would say it takes more than just skillsets - you also have to have the social dynamics in order. They on the other hand are only possible if Tier 2 relativism is first established.

A highly sophisticated collective of Tier 2 thinkers is what allows for the transition from Yellow to Turquoise. Yellow’s failure point is solo-ing everything, whereas with the swing of the pendulum to “we” the collective becomes a holon - a small group of people reflecting the purpose and direction of the larger universal consciousness.

If operating under Tier 1 dynamics, sure. But it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t agree with the take on Nolan’s films. The Dark Knight 2008, Interstellar, Inception and Oppenheimer are absolute classics. Like top 100 movies of all time. I also second Leo on GoT. It’s true tho once they ran out of the material it slumped. John Wick is a “fast movie” franchise, one that I enjoy because Reeves is an all time favourite and the actual aesthetic of the last 2 movies is superb. I agree about Marvel tho - everything after the original Iron Man is overrated IMO.

With all the spiritual mumbo jumbo people forget to wipe their ass.

You understand that each of these technological revolutions has entire books written about it, right? That is not something I or anyone can give you in a few paragraphs. If you are serious about understanding it, you will have to spend a lot of time reading. The book I referenced is a start due to the framework it provides. Once you’ve finished it, I can recommend you technology-specific resources. You can’t sit around and wait for it.

I’ve had consistent spiritual dreams since little about this exact notion - a small group of people who have jailbroken existence and are reconstructing the source code. It is now at the root of my life purpose. The higher-order collective intelligence that could emerge from a group of highly sophisticated Tier 2 intellects is something the world is yet to see.

@thedoorsareopen Very nice trip report, thx for sharing. Reminds me of “Indra’s net”. Dimensionality is a tricky topic due to all the baggage that comes with it - mathematically it refers to a linearly independent and orthogonal basis vector (i.e a direction you can go in, perpendicular to all the others). Even more abstractly, it is just a component of the cartesian product of the space. This is a very different notion than the one normally used in the context of extra- and intra-dimensional ”travel” as part of the psychedelic experience. You can for example imagine/experience the existence of dimensions entirely “orthogonal” to mathematics, i.e something that can’t be reached through any mathematical construction. There is a lot of fruit to bear from contemplation, so if you are serious about understanding the higher order notion of dimensions, you might have to discard everything you have read. I will be interested to read your experiences as they develop.

Okay, having watched the interview, I have to say Gorard is positively brilliant. He is very sophisticated in both his philosophical statements, clarifying routinely the epistemic and ontological assumptions of his arguments, as well as in his technical expertise, actively recalling a formidable amount of mathematical background and scientific history. This is much more like what I would expect from a true mathematician/ scientists - epistemic neatness and giving credit where credit is due. On the technical front, I have to say that me and him basically have no disagreements when it comes to the actual meaning/role of Wolfram's 'formalism', which is exactly what he calls it. He rejects it as a 'fundamental theory' and classifies it as a 'contrapositive' program to that of the current continuous-based paradigm, i.e demonstrating that a discrete formalization is also largely applicable. Furthermore, he vehemently states that even if it is a successful formalization, it does not equal ontology - exactly what was at the core of all my previous statements. Lastly, his main point/thesis at around 1:02:00 mark, namely that 'coarse-graining an irreducible system can give you reducible laws' is in exact agreement with the fundamental postulate of what I describe in the Chaos, Entropy, Order formalism, namely that the fundamentally intractable (irreducible) nature of Chaos requires the development of levels of abstraction (the ordered macro-state with 'reducible laws') by fundamentally using the ergodic assumption (ergodicity is what allows the calculation of entropy). When I have more time I will examine more deeply his actual formalizations. On the physical verification front, he himself has admitted that it is highly speculative without any substantial results that they have been able to produce due to the lack of their own 'Abdus Salam', i.e. someone who can craft a dedicated experiment from a deep understanding of the theory. TLDR: Gorard is brilliant and we do not really have technical disagreements, as he is careful to not make the type of statements Wolfram does.

So, as I was thinkering with how can I add specific access policy to the host file in order to help me monitor website usage and access. Turns out, you can't really do that - UNIX-based systems do not allow fine-grained access control from the get-go, which baffles me. That should be the fundamental premise of any operating system going forward. You can no longer treat the user experience as the primary interface due to the growing nature of hybrid systems. One can imagine the absolute necessity in containing future models, crafting dedicated access policies for data and monitoring, s.t. containment is baked in as part of the architecture. For now a nixOS + SELinux (but not really since both are UNIX-based) is the basic premise I have in mind (SENix?). Probably I won't be able to work on this until after April 2025, but it is definitely something that I should consider as part of the organizational and infrastructural innovations that are necessary for a truly revolutionary startup.

Will watch, thanks. This is encouraging. He at least demonstrates epistemic nuance which Wolfram simply lacks.

I don't believe one can be called a 'genius' without having done some form of revolutionary work or fundamentally novel recontextualization of an existing field (you yourself have stated it has little to do with intelligence). Wolfram has done neither. 'Uncomputable' is a term coined by Church and Turing in 1936 as a response to Hilbert's 1928 Entscheidungsproblem. Wolfram simply renamed it as 'computational irreducibility' and claimed to have discovered it. Conway defined 'Game of Life' in 1970, which is 2D cellular automata. Wolfram simplified it to 1D and ran a few iterations, again claiming to be the first to discover it. I can keep going. The point is, there is nothing scientific or even epistemically genuine about what he does. To me that isn't genius, but rather intellectual hubris. You a quote me on this - Wolfram will remain the crackpot at the outskirts of science because nothing of what he does is revolutionary. If one actually were interested in these topics, it would only take a little reading to realize that this so called new 'paradigm' has been brewing for decades - I can give you examples of far more sophisticated scientists from any field: Biology and Medicine - Michael Levin Neuroscience and Statistics - Karl Friston, Demis Hassabis Physics - Giorgio Parisi, Chris Fields Mathematics - Alexander Grothendieck, John von Neumann, Michel Talagrand, Stanislav Smirnov Computer Science - Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Leslie Valiant, David Ackley As part of Kuhn's argument, it new paradigms no longer occur due to the 'lone genius' as Wolfram imagines it does. Remember when you said in the university thread that if you don't study formally STEM, you will just be an 'ogre' in your lair? That is kinda what Wolfram is, having been disconnected of formal science for close to 40 years.

I wrote more in detail in my journal why this approach of seeking a 'fundamental theory' instead of building bridges is fundamentally problematic:

Look, I am not saying what he does is entirely useless. The main argument I made in my first post in this thread which I will repeat again, is that there isn't anything special about the structure he examines. Every graph he draws, I can encode in a matrix. Matrices are so powerful for two reasons - there is something called Cayley's theorem, which states that any abstract group (the underlying structure in math) can be embedded in a permutation group (i.e how many ways you can re-order n numbers) and every permutation has a matrix representation. This essentially means that all of math can be 'found' inside the space of matrices. What I described to you above is a 'bridge', i.e a functorial/ representational relationship that allows me to switch perspectives. These bridges are used to establish the equivalence I mentioned with other Turing-systems. What my argument is, is that he has simply decided to focus on one Turing-complete system (cellular automata initially, now dynamic graphs) and base his entire theory on it. Again, there is nothing special about that structure, it is simply an instance of a larger formalism which he refuses to acknowledge. Sure, we can work only in his 'ruliad universe'. But why do that when we get better results in a different formalization that may be more suited for the task at hand - for example fluids and stochastic systems. If you are actually interested in what could serve as the foundation of AI (and I mean rigorous theories), then read the work of people who have actually built AI models - Peter Velickovic at DeepMind (Category Theory Paper), Philip Rigollet at MIT (Mathematical Perspective on Transformers). See the difference? There are rigorous statements about relevant models and predictions for those, something you don't find at all in Wolfram's work. Show me where he has made a clear and concise statement that is falsifiable. All he does is say "suggests", "indicates", expecting the reader to trust him because of his 'brilliance'. That is not who science and mathematics work. No matter how smart you are - even if you are Terence Tao or Noam Elkies (who has actually taught me), you still carry the burden of proof. Period.

Thanks for the share. I am not familiar with his work, so I will look into it.

Yet that is exactly what Wolfram does himself in that interview. There is nothing about his demeanour or arguments that suggests otherwise. Wolfram is a Layman’s genius. He clearly has prodigious level intelligence, yet as my argument above shows, nothing of his technical work is really “genius”. He hasn’t invented any of the concepts, hasn’t made any substantive contributions or predictions for that matter. When someone doesn’t have a technical background, it is hard to discern between the two, hence the term “Layman’s genius”.

@Keryo Koffa That's a very good point. Thing is, words being usurped by a belief system/ paradigm shouldn't stop us from using them, especially when they are the most succinct way to express an idea. I believe the opposite - by recontextualizing the meaning, we can in fact accelerate the transition away from the old paradigm. I can give you two examples: "God" - a very, very loaded word associated with stage blue paradigm. Nonetheless it has the exact meaning we psychonauts/spiritually developed people experience. Sure, you can try and swerve around it calling it 'All', 'The Universe', etc. but nothing really gets the point across as well as 'God' does. By recontextualizing the experience of Christ consciousness/ Oneness with God, we can help people realize there isn't a separation. "Entropy" - largely interpreted as the movement towards disorder in the old Physics paradigm. The reality is, that is true only in equilibrium systems. In non-equilibrium systems, such as the Earth itself and all life on it, it has the exactly opposite effect - it creates order through the emergence of levels of abstraction. It wouldn't make sense to change the word for it, because it is fundamentally the exact same underlying principle. In short, recontextualizing a concept is more powerful than swaying away from it because it has loaded meaning. This idea translates even for some of the most revolutionary work done in mathematics (e.g. Topos Theory and Motives as developed by Grothendieck)

@Keryo Koffa Yeah, the connotation I had for 'useful' is in a post-capitalist sense. I don't believe in the pure capitalist meritocracy of 'be useful or die useless'. I meant it more in the universal way of giving back to the flow of consciousness and creation. Utility in my book is a rather nuanced notion and one that is fundamentally not economically transferrable.

Agreed. Hoffman is a far more accomplished scientist in any aspect you can think. Yet Wolfram's hubris in the conversation is truly unbearable. His biggest strength of a hyper-intellect is also his worst flaw since it makes him think he is superior despite not having done the actual work. Growing up a prodigy has its pitfalls.

@Someone here For resources, I suggest Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. It gives a nice framework for thinking of the general direction of technology/science (they go hand in hand, hence the term 'STEM') My two cents stem from my current contextualization through the paradigm of 'Chaos, Entropy, Order'. Science is fundamentally our generative model of the world per the Free Energy Principle (attr. Karl Friston), aiming at minimizing our 'surprise' from observations of the world (equivalent to maximizing entropy - postulate 2). Technology are the fruits of this model - once you understand a system, you can influence/control it. The examples are numerous. By gaining new levels of abstractions (postulate 3 - Order), we can make sense of the apparent complexity around us (postulate 1 - Chaos) and turn it into something useful. To sum it up, in the words of Arthur C Clarke - 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick'