Technology is the only thing that has ever eliminated poverty.

I'm so happy to share that my debut book, LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT, comes out August 6th, 2024 from Riverhead Books! Read more about it here: bit.ly/3QN0Nop

Funniest weird rumor of the day: Sunak read Fredric Jameson’s defense of universal conscripted service.

Fantastically unlikely but somehow I want it to be true.

Jenny Zhang Two people anywhere on the planet touching an internet router are both touching the same physical object, made out of a gigantic knit of optical fiber with routers at the tip of each strand!

Stop viewing Greenpeace as a noble NGO fighting injustice. It’s a multinational enterprise no different to DuPont trading in deadly PFOA in service of profit.

Greenpeace just trades in fear, uncertainty & doubt—no less deadly—in service of donations.

theguardian.com/environment/ar…

Tech Philosopher Benjamin Bratton on how intelligent life transforms the planet. Benjamin Bratton

All 6 episodes of “A Brief History of the Future” are now streaming for free on PBS.org, YouTube, and via the PBS app for iOS, Android, and smart TVs. #BetterTomorrows

FYI

nytimes.com/2024/05/23/cli…

Apparently it was not Scarlett Johansson's voice, but another voice actor, and it was recorded before Altman asked Johansson to use her voice, and its been out for months for GPT4o. And so....the story was wrong.

If as many AI critics told us, the first version of the tale

Wasn’t the Sky voice part of ChatGPT for a long time ? I remember hearing it months ago . Am I nuts ?

Read both carefully.

As The Stack evolves into The AI Stack, this is the future of geopolitics. Full stop.

In 2018 at Strelka we called this isolation of models from one another and curation toward performed political norms “Potemkin Ontologies”

Germany: “Obwohl wir führend in der Präzisionsfertigung sind, ist künstliche Intelligenz aufgrund der Berliner Ideologie verboten”

Nvidia: “OK, we will buy you”

Today in embeddings visualization

Literal Decels?

Science fiction is a 20th century phenomenon, like World’s Fairs.

21st century is about Scenarios: non-fiction articulated as fiction.

It’s less about plots, worlds, and prediction of the future than a collaborative technique for Bayesian navigation of next week.

“TSMC and

Reading Sam Kriss essays is like watching a cat with wounded prey, torn between eating it and playing with it. This time he is eating/toying with Curtis Yarvin.

samkriss.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvi…

You'll have to pry my 10^27 FLOPs from my cold dead fingers

Thinking about the AI deskilling thread...

Recall Socrates complaining to Plato about this new technology called writing that would ruin everyone's memory and even let them talk to the dead.

I see this apparent risk more as an autonomization of skill; it becomes embedded in

'Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions...you can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions...what are you going to