survirtual

You're close but the idea gets much broader and extends to augmented intelligence as well.

Once the brain is readable, it actually becomes easier to justify legal protections for augmented compute intelligence, ironically enough.

The inevitable end result for a benevolent manifested planet / universe is we all have equal share of impenetrable compute.

This result is unavoidable if we want to live a free and prosperous life.

It requires encoding certain human rights, freedoms, privacy protections, and corporate / government limitations that human beings are not remotely ready to encode yet.

So by extension, I won't hold my breath on brain scanning being a technology I would be comfortable with in the hands of this current world and thinking.

The point to posting anything is to share with your fellow kind new knowledge that lifts them, entertains them, or teaches them.

If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. How sad.

Michelangelo had apprentices and assistants, many of which did a significant portion of the work. You could model him as the executive artist, directing the vision. Is this so different from prompting? Whose name is attached to all those works?

I will say Michelangelo was particularly controlling and distrusting of assistants, and uniquely did more work than other master artists of the time, but the point remains. The vision has always been the value.

In ordering a meal from someone else who makes it, I think that the relationship is rather well defined. One person is asking another person to use their skills to make a meal.

With AI, there is a vision and there is a tool executing it. This has a recursive loop involving articulation, refinement, repetition. It is one person using a tool to get a result. At a minimum, it is characteristically different than your comparison, no?

To add, my original statement was concerning going into a grocery store and buying ingredients. That was once a much more difficult process.

As an aside it reminds me of a food cart I would go to regularly in Portland. Sometimes the chefs would go mushroom foraging and cook a lunch using those fresh mushrooms. It was divine. If we ever reach a time when I can send a robot out to forage for mushrooms and actually survive the meal, I would celebrate that occasion, because it would mean we all made it through some troubling times.

Dumping money into a company until desired results is not "building a company". I have nothing against capital, but the hubris of the people investing is insane. /s

Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money.

You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small.

This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier.

I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris.

Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are.

This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing.

The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed.

The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes.

Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.

How much of other people's tax dollars do you expect to spend to safeguard the bad purchases of land (soon to be water) owners?

Rising sea levels aren't new, it's ancient. Buying coastal properties always carries risk.

Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this.

No, it actually doesn't. The system I am describing is not controllable by a state actor.

I didn't say any of this...

There are methods to produce anon credentials without tying it to an identity, independent of any other credential claims. It doesn't leak any information at all. What are you on about?

Bitcoin doesn't need to be usable for small scale payments. That's what a payment processor is for.

We need a system for digital identity that can be confidently connected to a singular living organism. That identity acts as a sort of credential. With that credential, you can anonymously take online action that is untraceable to the identity, besides knowing the anon identity is a real, singular human.

If you can follow that logic, you will see that this makes many, many things possible. Anonymous credentials are possible right now and extend to anything. It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law", etc. But this sort of mechanism starts with being able to say "this is a singular person, with identity verified by X mechanism".

It is absolutely foundational and the opposite of dystopian. It allows us to combat every current dystopian mechanism without creating any additional compared to what already exists.

You may be overthinking it.

It is simple. This world as it stands has no future, and is too stressful. It is incompatible with happy women. Unhappy women destroy this world. Not with war, but with apathy. Take away the passion to exist in women, and the planet dies.

Consistently taking away women rights, belittling them, ignoring their complaints, and making everyday life a needlessly complicated rat's nest of intricate nonsense tends to kill any desire to procreate.

Make a world worth living in, that is safe, fun, prosperous, and happy, then people will have kids again.

No one cares about your retirement. They also don't care about their own retirement. They sure as shit aren't having kids for their own retirement plans. It would be extreme narcissistic selfishness to have kids as a retirement plan, I can't imagine anyone in the real world thinking that way.

I like this technique for prototyping and one-off circuits a lot. Thank you for sharing. I may throw together a similar device.

The cost came from the context size and repeated queries without changing context. It adds up fast.

Using my own API tokens is effectively equivalent to "burn mode" when using Zed's subscription model.

At the current pricing, I value my time more than these costs and maintaining context can save a lot of time as opposed to maximizing context vs cost.

The other day, I was repairing a raidz2 cluster. Power instability during a heavy / long term write operation caused problems resembling defective drives and corrupted metadata all over the drives. I came up with a strategy to repair it but I needed some code which was pretty straightforward.

Rust is easier for me than shell scripting so I started writing what I needed and remembered Zed added agent mode. I decided to give it a shot. I had it use Claude 4 with my api tokens.

It wrote the entire program, tested it, debugged it. It made some bad assumptions and I just steered it towards what I needed. By the end of about an hour, I had my complete fix plus an entire ZFS management layer in Rust.

It did cost $11, but that is a drop in the bucket for time saved. I was impressed.

Just sharing this because I got real and measured value recently that is way beyond the widely shared experience.

Look, I know it is hard for an ego to hear the things I say and the way I say them sometimes. For that, I am sorry. But I am not arguing with you, I am informing you.

Challenging media empires was child's play compared to challenging the world's financial system. Bitcoin has successfully illustrated a new and better way. Presidents have been killed for less. Civil rights activists have been killed for less.

Bitcoin and the crypto economy is now inevitable, just as gasoline vehicles became inevitable, and a nuclear armed world became inevitable. The world is changing, please do not let your self-identity interfere with the reality of this.

When a new and revolutionary invention becomes part of the human mental strata, you cannot take it back. This has never been done before since the knowledge of building a campfire or sharpening rocks. It doesn't matter how powerful, stable, beneficial, or otherwise the old system was. It has been super-ceded by something that outcompetes it.

That's reality. I hope that you and others like you realize it and have a prosperous life.

Let's regulate mathematics. No, it isn't enough...let's regulate physics itself. If we could just control when molecules are allowed to form, we could make it so mean molecules don't exist unless they're allowed to exist by our Council of Very Good People Who Have The Most Money. Since they have the most money, they know better than everyone else. /s

Did you know in some countries, a good loan for someone with perfect credit is 20% apr? Do you know in some countries police can confiscate all the money you have and never give it back? Have you ever heard of civil asset forfeiture? Did you know in some countries, just protesting can have your accounts frozen? Did you know in some countries, sending money can take over 3 days with no knowledge of what is happening to your money during that time? Did you know that Debit and Wire transfer often cost well over $20 to perform?

This list could go on for days. Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.

That's the thing, fighting against kings and monarchs with a stranglehold on the colonies means you get invaded by a world superpower, right? Who would tolerate fighting for freedom if it means getting murdered? Such a short sighted pursuit that won't lead to anything better, it is foolish. Clearly we should bow down before the supreme authority and accept their benevolent ruling. /s

History has this way of repeating itself. And it seems the blind will never see. Those who can see, just keep working. Talk is cheap. We will drag humanity into the future kicking and screaming if needed, because we know what waits for us on the other side.

I do not see how to use this system. It just says what it is. The github also specifies a format but says nothing about usage, and neither do the Rust docs.

How do I feed in a mesh or something and it outputs an algorithmically generated slat furniture? This simple example would make things usable.

Short answer: It is difficult because you aren't familiar with it, and your brain is still wired for memory-unsafe or GCed languages. But it is actually easier to read than most other languages when you understand it and how to navigate it.

When I first started learning Rust several years ago, I shared your viewpoint. With a heavy preference for C++ syntax, I thought Rust looked atrocious.

Then I learned it. I got good with it. I got comfortable with it. I switched from VS Code based IDEs to vim, then to IDEs with vim bindings (trying Zed now). Now, Rust reads like a dream -- aside from lifetime specifiers, which I think could be much smarter than they are now.

Anyway, it has superior pattern matching and code searching. snake_case is easier to navigate than camelCase or PascalCase. Keywords are short and easily recognizable. Branching logic is much, much easier to follow. Error handling is explicit and also easier to follow (and I started out really missing try-catch). Code gen with macros eliminates a lot of headaches. A 1st class package manager that is fast & can be easily inspected, that seamlessly integrates into the code...the list goes on.

The point is, it is a paradigm shift that doesn't hide much of anything away. When you consider there is no GC and you are in full control of memory, that there are strict syntax and styling rules that make the global Rust codebase universally accessible, once you switch to it you find yourself wishing everything was written in Rust. That is why people using it want to rewrite everything, even well established packages. A Rust-only codebase is buttery smooth.

You get it off the ground the same way you get a calculator off the ground. You build it as an indispensable & obvious tool.

You have to imagine the auxiliary applications that become possible with this model. Start with useful personal tools and grow it outwards.

This model can ultimately replace every search engine, every social media experience, every e-commerce website, etc. it allows for actually much easier app development, and significantly less compute centralization.

What I am saying is don't look outward for ways to make it happen, look inward. This model goes against every power structure in the world. It disempowers collective entities (corporations, governments, etc) and empowers individuals. In other words, it is completely politically and economically infeasible with the current world order, but completely obvious as the path forward for humanity.

You will not make money pursuing this line of technology.

Your idea is the start of something I model as a "consent framework". Dialog boxes don't seem effective to me, but tracking your data does. Who accessed your data, and when? Who has permission to your "current" data? Did an entity you trusted with your data share the data?

And more. Nothing can perfectly capture this, but right now, nothing even tries. With a functioning consent framework, it would be possible to make digital laws around it -- data acquired on an individual outside a consent framework can be made illegal, as an example. If a bank wants to know your current address, it has to request it from your "current address" dataset, and that subscription is available for you to see. If you cut ties with a bank, you revoke access to current address, and it shows you your relationship with that bank still while also showing the freshness of the data they last pulled.

All part of a bigger system of data sovereignty, and flipping the equation on its head. We should own our data and have tools to track who else is using it. We should all have our own personal, secure databases instead of companies independently having databases on us. Applications should be working primarily with our data, not data they collect and hide away from us.

This, and much more, is required going forward.

I am surprised to see this is using AES-GCM instead of XChaCha20-Poly1305 for its authenticated encryption scheme.

The poor cats and dogs need special hardware for speedy encryption, and can't accidentally reuse nonces without catastrophic failure :(

Just to clarify, by wrong opinion, you are speaking to the "authority's" opinion of what right and wrong is, as opposed to the universe's objectively right and wrong?

As in, anything that can realistically challenge an entity with power (say, energy companies using non-renewable systems like oil vs infinite / abundant systems like nuclear) is deemed "wrong"?

Except in the case of the arguments I make about nuclear, they were verifiably and very obviously correct. I would talk about the energy density of u235 nuclear reactions vs burning coal, the energy of a neutron vs the energy of photons, things like intermittent generators and baseload, etc. it is not controversial, and anyone with some basic background in physics or chemistry could verify it.

There must be some method to remove posts without informing a user and making it appear to them it is still visible, while making it invisible to everyone else (shadow removal), because that was the state all my posts related to nuclear power were in.

My posts that were humor or otherwise "low-impact" were unaffected. I had many submissions with well over 1,000 karma, but only the submissions that had no economic or political impact were ever seen.

This isn't conjecture or paranoia, it is verified, and I traced it back years once I realized it was happening. I wrote a lot about nuclear energy and I was writing to the void. That is a very cruel thing to do to someone.

This is not true.

When I was active on reddit, I advocated for nuclear energy using math and physics. One time, I wrote a comment calculating energy vs used land vs used infrastructure, including mining and logistics, to show how radically more efficient nuclear is than any other power source. It got little / no engagement.

That comment triggered me to check pushshift and see if I was banned for some reason. Turns out, every comment I had ever made about nuclear technology was shadow banned, even relatively innocuous ones. This was universally across all of reddit.

They don't allow advocating for nuclear energy, what else don't they allow?

One time, I wrote a historical warning about how the rich don't generally do well with massive wealth inequality during times of revolution. This was flag as violent content and I got a warning saying I would be banned if I did it again.

This was roughly ~5 years ago. How much do you think the noose has tightened since then?

Keep in mind, my comments were well thought out, posted in good faith, and respectful. I was not trying to hurt people or prove them wrong, just truth seeking and truth sharing.

It became clear to me truth is no longer allowed on mass platforms.

The capped supply just makes bitcoin a no brainer. It is the first cryptocurrency, so it will always have value, even in a purely historical sense. This makes it brain-dead easy to justify owning some of it, which is a very favorable trait in the invisible war for freedom it fights in.

But just as easily, a network of people can agree with different rules, and that's why I don't think it's so important. As long as the rules are transparent and well defined, that transparency itself is the revolutionary improvement.

The fixed supply / deflationary nature is actually less important than the method of minting. PoW demands massive energy & computational input, which can spontaneously arise without any human regulating authority. In other words, physics / the laws of nature are the authority. This creates an implicit resilience in the network and elevates the standard of money creation to go beyond human authority, and enter something higher.

I see PoW systems as mechanisms to quantify human technological development and mastery over energy. As access to energy & computing increases, the implicit value of crypto increases in kind. It is a crystallization of energy into value, and a rather "pure" one at that.

As people sit here and talk, debate, buy into propaganda by dying platforms, this value crystallization marches on. It cannot be stopped. Because of the limited supply, it motivates people who see and understand these facts to buy in, but even when "easy" access to the crystallization ceases, it still promotes 2nd tier energy to value capture via transaction fees, which also scale with energy & computation.

People get confused and think it is imaginary money. Managing the logistics of server farms, optimizing access to cheap energy sources, and developing increasingly powerful / efficient circuits is far from imaginary. This and much more is required to compete in today's crypto mining. The crypto itself is representative of countless modern industries working in harmony, all in cutting edge industries that push humanity further.

The criticisms are largely thoughtless and nonsensical. The energy is agnostic of the production; you can mine bitcoin with coal power, but you can also mine it with solar and nuclear. You can even mine it with a dyson sphere. It doesn't matter.

It isn't wasted energy, insomuch as massive office buildings in the center of every city dedicated to an inefficient banking system is a waste of money, or countless lives lost over wars and access to resources is a waste of money.

Anyway I could write all day about this, but I believe what I am saying strikes closer to the heart of what you were bringing up.

There is a significant amount of ignorance and bad faith in your comment that I usually don't bother replying to people like you, but I am in a patient mood.

Have you ever tried to transfer money, I don't know, ANYWHERE with the legacy banking system? ACH transfers can take days, and you don't have a single clue what is happening with your money between banks -- let alone what your real balance is anywhere until it clears. And there is an upper limit on the amount you can transfer.

If you want "instant" transfers, you get to pay a paltry fee of a PERCENTAGE OF YOUR TRANSFER if using debit. For wire transfers, you only have to fill out a massive transfer sheet with a ridiculous number of values that you absolutely cannot get wrong, and after you slog through that mess you get to pay a small fee of over $25.00 to make a transfer -- assuming your bank allows it after you ask pretty please to move your money.

That is just with money movement.

With Bitcoin? I get an address, I paste it, I double check, I click transfer. Boom, done. I get to see exactly where it is in the transfer process, exactly what is happening, and I can send ANY AMOUNT for the same tiny fees. That is on the mainnet. If using lightning, those fees largely vanish and the transfer becomes instantaneous.

Just the FUNCTIONAL experience is absolutely leagues ahead of the legacy banking system, without even talking about minting, auditing, fraud, etc. it really isn't even close to the systems before it.

Places like Brazil have much better experiences. The PIX transfer system resembles the crypto experience, but more ironed out, instant, and free. It makes the legacy banking system much more tolerable, but it still suffers from the other reasons crypto is better; like international remittances, and sovereignty of wealth.

We should not have to ask an authority permission to move value we have ownership of.

There are explicit and implicit aspects of connectivity.

Explicit are things like racism, lineage requirements (like Ivy leagues asking if you have family that attended), etc.

Implicit are things like growing up in poverty and not having the knowledge, access to mentors, or access to the money to secure ideas.

The rich and connected have access to everything to buy and secure ideas. They can even buy people and take their ideas for themselves without proper compensation, because generally, creators are not negotiators.

It is a rigged system that empowers slavers.

People in poverty, for example, expend significantly more energy to develop a creative mindset, and have little to no energy for negotiation and navigating legal frameworks. So because of this, they relinquish that power to abusers who benefit for their relative disability.

I could write a book about this but if you think it through, it is clear. You could also paste my comment into AI and have a discussion about it.