The race towards what exactly? More advanced AI would take research funds, and the US cut research, so… What are we racing towards? A dystopian surveillance state?

they shouldn’t get to vote in local elections

For a long time I assumed this was a rule. Figured, I’m not from here why would I have a say.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize I’m not really from anywhere anymore. I think I visited my hometown maybe once in the last decade. Didn’t really feel that comfortable weighing in on local politics as a student in a college/university town/city. I still voted on national stuff (not that it did any good), but at this stage I struggle even to think of myself as American. It’s not a country where me or people like me have had any influence or agency. It’s not my country it’s their country, the oligarchs. Feels like there’s no place where I belong, and any push for my views is just interfering in other people’s business.

It creates a bit of a paradox since (broadly speaking) it’s good when people don’t push their views onto others, yet in this case that’s creating a terrible selection bias. I still don’t know if there’s a good solution to this. I don’t want to vote where I don’t understand the situations and won’t fully face the consequences. Yet, I don’t want society to crush me out of negligence either.

Nah, that can’t be right. What would protect the powerful if there was no government?

I heard one of the Green Brothers claim that billionaires tend to develop really strange out of touch opinions. To me, they often seem a mixture of stupid and self-serving. I suspect any actual laws will be undermined within a month, but it’s really annoying that these people keep sticking their nose in other people’s business.

I’m just glad people will write off my terrible code as AI.

My American post-doc prospects are bleak. My best post-doc option right now is a lab in China, and I’m probably going to take it. I don’t know what that’s going to do to my career prospects. All I can do is keep doing research.

We should have a lottery, like a true democracy.

Florida elects manatee claiming to be mermaid in AI generated ads.

I’m only just learning, but my approach is to essentially built a bunch of functions around every prompt. I just too many stories of AI deleting everything to trust it to run without checks upon checks upon checks.

I mean, I don’t want to detract from what they’ve done, but this sounds like pretty standard wafer fabrication research. I’m not in the field enough to comment on how significant of an advancement it is or isn’t, but it’s clearly lithography and deposition not some sci-fi nanotech that makes me look up who K. Eric Drexler is.

I mean, where are we drawing the line here? If he makes a stirling engine that stirs the pot that works that works by… you know, however stirling engines work.

The “It’s not clear who’s doing it” section is what’s baffling to me, like I’m very far from into networking and I’ve definitely done some crude scraping the few times I’ve needed it, but even I am pretty sure I could do better than this. Makes me think someone with more money than sense hooked up an “Agentic” AI and told it to gather data to train the next AI then just let it decide how – except not because I’m pretty sure the AIs would have more sense. It’s really weird.

Infinitely fast travel at warp 10 that comes with serious, but entirely curable side-effects

Janeway and Paris preferred to stay in the delta quadrant rather than explain their giant Yeerk babies.

Depends on what you want. You’d be surprised just how appealing increasing that monthly dividend is – If I have just a little more invested I could do X, Y, or Z. For me, the more freedom / agency / financial independence I get, the more I want and so the more I save.

Having little with no obligations is very appealing. Having a bit more with no obligations is even more appealing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV8H8HVD with linux mint installed.

Same. I’m running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-IQ4_XS.gguf) via the turboquant fork of llama.cpp with a few tweaked memory settings, and I get like 40 tokens / second – nothing that required special insight on my part just following the instructions I saw on a youtube video I found via !LocalLLaMA@sh.itjust.works and asking claude to help me through the installation.

AI has no economic moat. There’s nothing stopping anyone from running LLMs locally.

I was just gonna point out that Odo’s whole race amounts to a gestalt fascist enslaving other races.

Wanting less, buying less, and spending less are the open secrets to success.

Then invest most your income, and you have a lot of time and money (relatively).

Depends on who you’re abusing / pissing-off. Can’t imagine it’s good for your health to have large numbers of people angry at you.

I study proteins and I chatter on about them, but once in a rare while I’ll talk to a normal person and they’ll say “like, the food group” or in introductions I’ll say I’m a structural biologist and some people look at me blankly then say something about “bone structure”. It kills me a little inside.