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He got better!

Yeah I've got hourly backups out to multiple remote servers. My dev machine is in essence fungible. If it gets hosed, I'll wipe the drive and drop a good backup in. If it catches fire, I'll pick up a different machine and drop in the good backup.

I have more important things to waste my time on than writing absurd sandboxes to run AI agents without guardrails in. What even?


It's an observation, not an argument.

Sick casual racism bro, got any other hot takes for us?

I read it as mocking the white savior mentality, not endorsing it.

Are you claiming that people who think that way are racist? That's violent unsanctioned speech, bro.

Spare me. Calling criticism "violent unsanctioned speech" is a tired, adolescent MAGA-adjacent move: provoke with loaded caricature, then reframe accountability as persecution.

You exhibit the same performative grievance-driven identity pattern across your other comments: sweeping "regime and cronies" rhetoric, insinuations without evidence ("what did Obama get in return?"), mocking humanitarian concern as manipulation, and then retreating to grievance when challenged.

That’s not satire; it’s MAGA-adjacent culture-war edgelording.

If you quote racism without clearly rejecting it, you’re responsible for how it lands; if you didn’t want your comment read as endorsing racist tropes, you shouldn’t have put them on the page without explicit rejection. Accountability isn’t censorship, and criticism isn’t violence.

This isn’t uncharitable or violent; it’s grievance rhetoric filling the gap when your argument doesn’t land.

Happy Festivus, Georgie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1njzgXSzA-A


It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.

But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water.

Also remember that nicotine is an insecticide. Insects that nibble on tobacco die, which prevents infestation at scale. (Un?)fortunately it's also neuroactive in apes, so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.

There is no logic in evolution at large scales. Things happen, sometimes there's fourth order effects like some oddball internal hormone causing wild hallucinations in apes. It's all random optimization for small scale problems that ripple out to unintended large scale consequences.


BTW, Caffeine is also a naturally occurring insecticide, yet humans tend to repurpose and hack things.

Some argue that THC in cannabis actually works similarly because when herbivores regularly ingest it, they become lethargic and lazy, causing them struggle to survive in the world. Kinda like my roommate.

Ibotenic acid, muscarine, psilocybin, amanitin, muscimol, THC, caffeine - these all natural pesticides target bugs primarily. Which are the biggest threat. Sort of funny how it also affects people though

I thought it wasn’t generally psychoactive until heated?

But cannabis the needs heat to convert, it’s more likely it evolved with Human influence considering the years of overlapping land races tied to our trade routes

THCa in cannabis plants is unstable. It will slowly convert to THC as it dries even at room temperature.


But CBD does not need heat to convert.

I have a hypothesis that taking cannabis (and especially CBD) out of our food chain may be contributing to the increase¹ in prevalence of chronic pain.

¹ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12588185/?utm_sourc...


When was cannabis ever in the human food chain?

While not being cannabis, breast milk contains endocannabinoids.

THC comes in a plant in the THCa form. CBD comes in CBDa form.

Both are not bioactive by default in their natural form.


All I'll say is go spend a day picking hops without gloves.

There are a large number of cannabinoids at play, some clearly (as in observably and demonstrably) are bioactive in their natural, unheated form.

---

None of which is said to endorse the other theory. Just to point out that claiming heat is required is incorrect.


The farm bill makes 'hemp' anything with below 0.3% THC legal. For this reason, we have a LOT of testing on the THC content of cannabis, since it is required to sell and manufacture. As it turns out, naturally cannabis quite commonly has >0.3% THC even before heating or activation of THCa.

Any human-like animal with our receptors eating a large amount would get high as fuck, cooked or not. A ruminant eating pounds of the stuff raw, would not be that different from a human consuming an ounce of baked pot.


your last sentence reminds me of my dorm roommate in college. very standard stoner who was constantly blazing and years later i've never known a lazier dude.

It's even weirder than that. It turns out that at very low concentrations caffeine seems to have similar effects on insect neurology as it does on ours. There are some plant species whose flowers produce caffeinated nectar. Bees seem to like these flowers preferentially, and have an easier time remembering where they are. (Yes, bees get buzzed.)

There are some flowers which produce tiny amounts of caffeine in their nectar, apparently to give the pollinators a buzz.

All spices basically too afaik.

Chilis, tobacco and tomatoes are all in the same family (nightshades). And they are all "New World" plants. Which means Europe had to live without them until 1600 or so. If you can call that living.

And coffee didn't make the jump until around the same time, either. No wonder Europeans wanted to be anywhere on the planet except Europe.

Don't forget the potato! Europe before the potato seems like a miserable place

I've often had the mental image of Galileo trying to order a pizza and being very disappointed at the garlic bread that turned up.

Imagine Indian food without chilies… it’d be as dull as Russian food.

Love me some Capsaicin, even though I’m not supposed too (I guess)

Capsaicin as well

And birds are immune to it


It's not that suspicious- many molecules in nature are made from the same few precursors like cholesterol, amino acids, etc. and on top of that there's pressure for plants/fungi to evolve molecules similar to ones animals use in order to affect them.

The brain is a fiber network like the mycelium, likely the same genes (animals are related to mushrooms) and neurotransmitters are involved in its function.

> animals are related to mushrooms

???

Apparently in very early evolution animals and fungi shared a common ancestor. That's a pretty far cry from "related to" as its generally used.


Slightly related as mushrooms are closer to animal than to plants, as anyone in a grocery store would guess.

> anyone in a grocery store would guess.

Actually, I'd challenge that particular point.

Mushrooms seem to be found in the fresh fruit and vegetables area, rather than in the deli (meat and cheese), so that would probably point more towards them being considered "vegetables". Or fruit. ;)


Yep, however one wishes to classify them botanically, mushrooms are a vegetable in culinary usage (similar to tomatoes in that way).

I agree. Sorry, bad English. "as" -> "in oposite of" (or something like that).

It’s “alive” therefore it must have an early common ancestor and thus related… people like stretching definitions.

At some point when aliens are confirmed and if they were carbon based you might have people say earth species and alien species are “related”.



Plants don't "want" or "think" or "feel" but we still use those words to describe the very real motivations that drive the plant's behavior and growth.

Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile. You can't string together a legitimate complaint so you're just picking at the top level 'easy' feature to sound important and informed.

Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want. You have not made a grand discovery that recontextualuzes all of human experience. You're pointing at a conversation everyone else has had a million times and feeling important about it.

We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky and obnoxious in everyday conversation.

The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive. You should reflect on that question.


> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.

No, they don't.

There's a whole cadre of people who talk about AGI and self awareness in LLMs who use anthropomorphic language to raise money.

> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because ...

You, not we. You're using the language of snake oil salesman because they've made it commonplace.

When the goal of the project is an anthropomorphic computer, anthropomorphizing language is really, really confusing.


This is true, I know people personally That think AI agents have actual feelings and know more than humans.

Its fucking insanity.


> Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile.

To the contrary, it's one of the most important criticisms against AI (and its masters). The same criticism applies to a broader set of topics, too, of course; for example, evolution.

What you are missing is that the human experience is determined by meaning. Anthropomorphic language about, and by, AI, attacks the core belief that human language use is attached to meaning, one way or another.

> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.

What you are missing is that this stuff works way more deeply than "knowing". Have you heard of body language, meta-language? When you open ChatGPT, the fine print at the bottom says, "AI chatbot", but the large print at the top says, "How can I help?", "Where should we begin?", "What’s on your mind today?"

Can't you see what a fucking LIE this is?

> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky

Not at all. What you call "clunky" in fact exposes crucially important details; details that make the whole difference between a human, and a machine that talks like a human.

People who use that kind of language are either sloppy, or genuinely dishonest, or underestimate the intellect of their audience.

> The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive.

Because people have committed suicide due to being enabled and encouraged by software talking like a sympathetic human?

Because people in our direct circles show unmistakeable signs that they believe -- don't "think", but believe -- that AI is alive? "I've asked ChatGPT recently what the meaning of marriage is." Actual sentence I've heard.

Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?


> Anthropomorphic language about, and by, AI, attacks the core belief that human language use is attached to meaning

This is unsound. At best it's incompatible with an unfounded teleological stance, one that has never been universal.


> Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?

And to think they dont even have ad-driven business models yet


>Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want

Sorry, uh. Have you met the general population? Hell. Look at the leader of the "free world"

To paraphrase the late George Carlin "imagine the dumbest person you know. Now realize 50% of people are stupider than that!"


While I agree with your sentiment, the actual quote is subtly different, which changes the meaning:

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."


> "imagine the dumbest person you know. Now realize 50% of people are stupider than that!"

That's not how Carlin's quote goes.

You would know this if you paid attention to what you wrote and analyzed it logically. Which is ironic, given the subject.


That's why I used the phrase "to paraphrase"

You would know this if you paid attention to what I wrote and analyzed it logically. Which is ironic, given the subject.


You paraphrased it incorrectly

… so presenting it as a paraphrase is misleading.

Blaming Roma hate on communism is like blaming the Nazis for antisemitism.

If you believe that for even a moment you need to read a book.


I don't think you have any concept of the technologies involved here.

This isn't a case of who has the biggest gun. This is a case of someone has a gun that can wipe out your entire planet and you have a rock.

No, a planetary society cannot stop an invasion once they're in orbit. It simply is not possible, not with any technology we can even imagine.

You very much do not at all understand the argument you're making.


Decorations in [square brackets] are Attributes in C#

It extremely depends on the exact reactions. I'm not a chemist but AFAIK carbon nanotube production doesn't like taking in non-carbon atoms.

Things like crystallization reactions will produce very pure products, some other reactions will absorb more contaminants.


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