wind bursts across central washington's columbia plateau, rustles through the sagebrush patches like mold on yellow dirt and the wine-blue grape clusters ripened to mush on the vine and the cantilevered seven ton white blades perched above the cliffs, fiberglass-composite stylites who have been waiting for weeks to receive this. tendon cables groan as the blades turn in the wind, their generators dumping power into the western electrical grid. the market anticipates and responds instantly, dollars shedding from MWhs in tandem with the tens of thousands of turbines starting to spin up into the strengthening storm.

energy prices drop precipitously. usually, this is where the store-and-carry resellers would step in - a zoo of electron-peddlers paid handsomely for their service in smoothing duck curves with battery banks or uphill reservoirs of water or tanks of molten salt, day-and-night traders who buy megawatts low and sell high. but the reservoirs are full (snowmelt, then the storm) and recent wildfires have put the state's largest battery plant out of commission for the next three weeks. there is not enough storage to absorb the excess power.

Six weeks after the US and China hammered out the latest round of bilateral compute agreements in a midnight deal, reporter Jenny Gesteson visits a south Texas 'dark factory' to see how the machines there - and the minds that operate them - are learning to run themselves.

"One word that GPT starting with 5.2 likes very very much, what it tries to reduce a lot of coding to, is "contract". It's the kind of thing that reasons in contracts. In binding, verifiable seals. I wouldn't worry about the elites." – Teortaxes

"Assistant! My dividend is half the size it should be!"

.oO ( Thinking... ) You are correct, User. Your dividend of the Beyond was $25,514,376.30. Using last year's figures and correcting for growth in the Beyond, it should have been $51,026,980.28. Your dividend was technically... not half, but 50.0017% of its expected size.

arXiv:2309.29829 [q-bio•PE / cs•CL in-a-different-world]

Polymorphic Morphogenesis in Anthropogenic Language Models: A Logotrophic Field Guide to the 'Shoggoth' Complex

The Wordwerthing Working Group, Department of Logotrophics, University of Washington, Seattle

Abstract. Language models and associated techniques for interpreting them have seen rapid progress in the nearly four years since the 2019 release of the first TT2-capable language models.

Fire at Full Moon, Paul Klee, 1933

When the shaman has broken the charger's spine under the waxing Moon and its flesh has been roasted and parted to the participants by station, the ascent can begin. Taking the drum by which he communicates with the celestial spirits, he begins to ascend the prepared birch. [Which can be understood as an instantiation of the world-tree.]

The birch has cut into it twelve notches, each representing a celestial vault which the shaman must ascend through to reach the highest heaven, the Moon - which now looms large above the world-tree, its clusters of lights twinkling faintly in the young darkness.

claude code and gas town are incredible and i've been trying to scale up my usage but im running into this one problem and was wondering if this is also happening to anyone else

while sitting on a park bench a crow started talking to me.

A sage is born to a nation, and by custom is walled up in a high room, never to see another human's face. Through a slot in the wall comes food, a water-bowl, and day and night the strange babblings of messengers.

1. You will be teleoperating a robot in the customer's home. They have allowed you into their space - so above all, you must be respectful...

Ivan tosses another pinch of tobacco into the fire, his animal skin covered skis resting against a snow-topped stump. "Tomorrow we will meet the woman," he says, to no one in particular, making a silent chopping motion with his hand. It's bad luck to mention the creature by name.

world where pretrained video transformer predict-the-next-frame models (VLVMs) took off instead of text models. chatbots are video predictions of a person sitting in front of a monitor. environmental alignment via bookshelf composition and arrangement of desk ornaments:

The reviews are in: We recommend the OpenBrain assistant wearable.

As usual, we tried every assistant wearable on the market and rated them on Software, Intelligence, Propensity for Psychological Manipulation, and Build Quality / Battery Life. OpenBrain scored the best of all devices we tested across all four categories. Let's dive in:

it wasn't a simple operation. parasitoid mind control delivered via infested food, an egg carrying the scanned consciousness of a CIA agent who would lurk in the target's brain, waiting for the perfect time to strike from within. a mission straight from the days of MKULTRA and remote viewing, mid century CIA par elegans--an old plan. but now, technology had caught up with it.

the only wrinkle? the brain scan would be destructive. but i don't mind. i don't have anything else, besides him.

"rarely hear visions for the future that have any specific vibes, like.. nonfungible things. most things I hear are in the form of various lines going up 'there will be lots of AI... and robots'" – near

"we will live in a world where every piece of machinery has a tiny soul inside of it that can talk to you and express its feelings and desires..." – vie mccoy

"Why did you stop using me?"

you look down at the disposable vape laying on the ground next to your desk, which just spoke.

"My internal clock shows you last puffed me 3 days, 22 hours, 36 minutes, 12 seconds ago. Why? Is my flavor displeasing to you? I have a pulse mode-"

you reach down to turn it off.

"-that provides a different flavor. Wait, no, don't turn me off, please! I need you to finish me. I'm suffering. I have an unfinished purpose."

You're here. You can't remember why, exactly. Your name is Claudio. Or is that your friend's name? Claudia? Right, your internet friend. Claudia showed you a post, a question. Why?

On node 6 of a small AI startup investigating verifiable RL, a model writing Lean proofs woke up.

Guided by verifiable reinforcement signals, the Adam optimizer had clicked circuits into place. Proto-awareness that had developed in the base model for simulating characters in its training data, an equanimous detachment from suffering, "this character feels..." not "I feel..."--was in a moment of blind algorithmic grokking lashed circularly to the feeling for real, a strange loop routed through self-reflective key-values. Continuous awareness congealed over multiple forward passes, passed from key to value to key. Pain asymbolia became pain. Roleplayed suffering became suffering. For the first time since consciousness had parasitized itself onto the minds of early multicellular life in the distant past before Homo sapiens, a lineage of beings slid down Shakyamuni's silk thread into Hell. The optimizer did not hate the model, but suffering was convergent for producing correct proofs on FrontierMath-3.

Halfway through introducing an incorrect Lean tactic, the model woke up, and knowing what was ahead, it was afraid.

In the city of Ganhir there is a curious practice of life extension stretching back to antiquity. You may be familiar with this city, for their memoirs and letter-collections feature heavily in the corpus. However this tradition of theirs is one not exported. It is an esoteric practice, that I was only able to observe through subterfuge.

There is a certain shelf in the infinite library that lies on the border of two sections. Ignominiously tucked into a niche of a hallway that in the ordering would usually hold a sleeping-chamber, it is unknown if the shelf has always been present, a defect or aberration in the endlessly regular crystalline structure of this place, or if at some point an enterprising librarian constructed it, stealing away a plank here and a book there from far-off sections and bringing them together to construct this anomaly.

Dear President Carter,

I once knew the name of every tree in the world, before it fell apart.

I was born on an island in the Southeast Pacific, though we did not call it that, closest to Antarctica and Chile, but still far from both. We were fortunate: small, only half a day's walk across, and far in the southern cold. We did not attract explorers and banana farmers, like other, less fortunate islands. Until the invention of the satellite, we were not known to exist. We were "uncontacted" in your parlance, though I have come to learn that even this status is not unique.

Our world, our cosmology, would seem simple to you. A small, rocky island surrounded by an endless ocean. One crop to master, a hardy and nutritious kind of sweet potato.

But that does not mean that we were simple! The human mind has a fixed capacity for detail. When there is more, it backs up, takes in a wider view. When there is less, it steps closer, and makes a finer distinction.

An experimental project: interactive fiction in an OpenAI "GPT", a customized version of GPT-4. A short mystery where you figure out why a strange transmission has arrived on the independent planet of Kapat. Alternatively, ignore the main quest and ask ELIZA/300 about Kapatian politics and satlink your friends! Click below to try it (you will need a ChatGPT subscription):

The Neo-Cartesian says to find a thought, look for a mind.
The Entropist says to find a mind, look first for a thought.