Finished a hard Sudoku today. The really hard ones require you to wrestle with them for days. You have keep a lot of conditionals in you head as you make assumptions within assumptions and keep it all straight. I couldn’t do this level for five years, but I cracked it in the last year or so, not sure what clicked. Feel like I’m lifting weights with my brain. https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq6knu235sx9320yp7jx93azw2xv70d8u3klr0qg2qqxuu0yska6qqq2ku5mjffa9g62ffez5cdmsvyukcw2zgdxnyz4u4sq

good sci-fi story, but wonder if these AI-disobedience stories are being pushed to usher in strict AI-regulation that only large companies and incumbents can comply with, making it illegal for people to develop their own. Because every technology loses its power when democratized. The internet can be used to spy and propagandize, but it can also be used to disseminate true information, create soveign money, record and spread crimes of the state. AI could be the same, but if we all had our own personal AIs, we could counter it. By making us afraid of it, they could deter us from using it to level the playing field. View quoted note →

It's weird, I used to work in the fantasy sports industry, attend all the professional conferences, go out drinking with the guys from all the big companies. Then I started posting in earnest during covid, we sold the company and I left to do my own thing. I also live in Portugal now, so I even see my former partners and friends a lot less. Essentially, I more or less disappeared around the same time I was already getting cancelled (they couldn’t really cancel me, but some tried, and others kept their distance.) Now I imagine the industry and the conferences go on, but without me, though it feels like everything is more fractured now after covid, but I really don’t know. An entire community of which I was once at the heart, totally gone from my life. They will have their dinners and drinks, their conferences, their network, but I am no longer part of it. No doubt a few are occasionally talking shit, “what happened to that dude? He went crazy during covid, who knew he was so “right wing” (LOL)? But mostly you are forgotten as they have their own problems and aspirations that don’t have anything to with you. On one hand, you might feel like you’re missing out, but on the other, in 100 years we will all be dead, and the gossip and partying and networking will disappear into the void for all of us, no matter how long you stuck with it. (For me, it was 22 years.) In a way it doesn’t exist, can be said never to have existed except in one’s mind, in one’s transient self-identification. It’s like I died, and they are still alive for now, but will die one day too. And eventually no one alive will know you or remember you, no matter how important it seemed at the time. It was another life, a past one, where I was someone for a short while, and now I have reincarnated as someone else. I look back fondly on those memories mostly, but I prefer this incarnation now. Reminds me of that Don Henley song: “I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, a voice inside my head said, ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back.’” I wonder if I’ll have another “incarnation” this lifetime when my daughter (13 now) grows up, and @Oscar Liss (almost 5) has moved into his next *real* incarnation. (Been talking him into becoming a person, but he seems set on remaining a dog.) Everything is impermanent, and the feeling that arises when I reflect is mostly peace. I have few regrets.

I expect to win.

Hear a lot of talk about globalists, CBDCs, one-world government, totalitatianism, and while all that shit is probably intended by the sociopaths who purport to be in charge, I expect to win.

The *core* beef with populist leaders worldwide IMO, is that they are essentially uncouth, low class. Elites loved Obama because he spoke and joked like them, the practiced self-deprecation, the vocabulary he used, the refined tone. He was one of them. Trump is openly boastful (very low class), has gaudy taste, eats McDonalds, doesn't use the words and tone that comforts the educated. Imagine getting into debt for a worthless degree, making less money than the plumber or electrician and only having *status* to show for it. Even though you were duped, even though you are totally replaceable and live at the whims of your corporate overlords, at least you know the right protocols and pronouns to navigate elite discourse. You have no material benefit, but at least you are *superior* so you've been told. You are *righteous* and *good*. You are not *racist* or *misogynistic* or *transphobic*. You get a pat on the back from the powerful. Suddenly this person comes along who gives zero fucks about any of that, whose ascendance is counterfeiting your status payoff entirely. Even though you got screwed in a real and material way by the very elites you servilely aspire to join, you are in denial of this, and the meager status boost was keeping that denial at bay. But now this guy comes along, and you're faced with the pointlessness of your entire endeavor, the shallowness around which your entire identity was built. Of course, they hate Trump and the other populists who are exposing them to the catastrophic self-betrayal.

Treasury companies are obviously boosting price in a significant way by widening the pool of who is willing to buy, but they’re de-boosting it in another via their premiums. If 116B of capital goes into MSTR for its 60B worth of bitcoin, that means 56B worth of capital demand is not hitting the supply. Of course if mNav goes below 1, the reverse is true, but in that case a lot of these treasury companies will get liquidated and forced to sell.

New podcast: https://rumble.com/v6tqeav-day-at-the-beach.html

I was working for an AI company, but they replaced me with AI.

Reality always wins

Heather cleaned some fleas off @Oscar Liss' coat. What a bunch of parasites.

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Saw the Nuggets and Thunder were playing Game 7. I would easily pay $5 just to watch the one game, but NBA wants you to subscribe for like $30 to watch the rest of the playoffs. Found a link to YouTube NBA India, set the VPN, watched the third quarter before it became a blowout. But even besides the non-competitive game it was borderline unwatchable because in the MANY breaks, instead of commercials which are bad enough, it had shots of the crowd hamming it up for the camera to bad pop-rap music, tatted up women and men, half of them fat, gyrating and sticking out their tongues to the over-volumed bass and beat. I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but it was kind of like demons in hell worshipping Satan.

Draft of my latest post: SHORT CUT When I was a kid, I wanted to be rich, but found the prospect of hard work tedious, pointless and soul-crushing. Instead of studying for exams, getting some job and clawing your way up the ladder, I wondered why we couldn’t just build a device that measured your brain capacity and awarded you the money you would have made had you applied yourself. Eliminate the middleman, so to speak, the useless paper pushing evoked when by the word “career.” But when you think about it, it’s not really money you’re after, as money is but purchasing power, and so it’s the things money can provide like a nice lifestyle and the peace of mind that comes from not worrying about it. And it’s not really the lifestyle or financial independence, per se, but the feeling those things give you — a sense of expansiveness and freedom. But expansiveness and freedom don’t actually happen for you if you did nothing to achieve those things. You would likely still feel bored, distracted and unsatisfied were someone to hand you financial freedom and the ability to travel or dine out as you saw fit. People who win the lottery, for example, tend to revert to their prior level of satisfaction despite being handed the means to avoid work. The feeling you really want then is the sense of rising to a challenge, negotiating and adapting to your environment, persevering in a state of uncertainty, tapping into your resourcefulness and creativity. It’s only while operating at the edge of your capacity you could ever be so fulfilled. In fact, in such a state the question of your satisfaction level would never come up. You wouldn’t even think to wonder about it you’d be so engrossed. So what you really crave is a mind device that encourages you to adapt to your environment using your full creative capabilities in the present moment, so much so you realize if you do not do this, you have the sense of squandering your life in a tedious, pointless and soul-crushing way. You need to be totally stuck, without the option of turning back. In sum, you need to face reality exactly as it is, without any escape therefrom. The measure of your mind in that case is your reality itself. The device is already with you — it’s the world you are presently creating, providing you avenues to escape, none of which are satisfactory, none that can lead to the state you truly desire. You have a choice to pursue them fruitlessly and wind up at square one, or to abandon them and attain your freedom. No matter how many times you go down a false road, you wind up at the same place until you give up on the Sisyphean task and proceed in earnest. My childhood fantasy was real, it turns out, only I had misunderstood its meaning.

New Podcast https://rumble.com/v6tgkb9-killer-robots.html

If no one told me about climate change, and I just compared winters and summers of today to those I remember growing up, I would not think anything was amiss. That doesn’t mean it’s not real, but you should be very circumspect about things the authorities are telling you that are contrary to what you observe. One of the biggest lessons of the covid era. View quoted note →

Should program them to kill workers on purpose, so we can come up with effective defenses against them should they ever go rogue. Call it “gain of function” research. View quoted note →