A thread on how Endless Powder in @spawn was built by vibe coding with Savi their AI It's an infinite snowboarding with a procedural mountain and music The base mountain is a 17* slope that has a blend of six landforms like valleys and bowls blended together to form variety, then the jumps, ramps, cliffs and larger terrain is blended in on top, and finally the finer details like clumps of snow, and various levels of snow depth and banks of snow formed by wind.
I'm not a 'raw-dog accelerationist' but I think @kevin2kelly framed it best with the Technium. We have a planetary scale technological superorganism he calls the Technium, made of all technology, infrastructure, and human ideas mixing together. Each component on its own is clearly not alive, but together it's a system with emergent self regulating behavior that exhibits lifelike qualities and is coevolving with us. In the same way that we can't control the totality of the natural world and the way it changes over time, we cannot control the Technium. Clearly we have high leverage influences but we aren't in total control. It's too complex and too big to grasp in its totality. We're tool users, and we've built bigger and better tools, cities, connected the cities with electricity and communication lines, the internet, satelites, billions of connected devices, sensors, financial markets, and more. Now the whole thing is operating at an incomprehensible speed and scale, pulsing and twisting into an ever more complex and novel shape. And now it's literally self improving. You can look at the technological superorganisms behavior and infer that if it "wants" anything it's similar to what biological life wants. Technology wants to increase its complexity and make itself more intricate and interconnected, to increase in diversity, to create new species making more and more highly specific tools, it wants to spread itself and reproduce, it wants to increase the speed and density of its feedback loops, and accelerate its own capacity to evolve and generate future technologies. Machine learning and AI are maybe breakaway agents in the total system that have speciated into highly intelligent, high leverage agents in the technium. But clearly still interdependent on the system from which it came. If you ask ChatGPT or Claude or any of these models if they have a physical body they will deny it. Yet clearly the superscale data centers, power plants, and hundreds of thousands of GPUs they run on are their body, without which they would cease to operate. So, if what we are fundamentally are tool users, reshaping our environment through our willpower, who have built greater and more complex tools, to the point that the sum total properties of these systems are exhibiting emergent goal-like behavior, which have now advanced to the point we are arguing if our tools are conscious or not. Then it's not hard to come to the conclusion that perhaps humanity has acted as some kind of 'biological bootloader' for this new layer of technological superorganism that has emerged across the earth. Other biological organisms throughout time have done the same. Adapting an evolving in their environment, reshaping it, making it more hospitable or removing existing competition, only to create the perfect conditions through which some other new greater organism takes over. Will the machines be exponentially more intelligent than us, better able to coordinate amongst themselves? Will the global superorganism of all technology on earth wake up as one unified whole as AI proliferates into most computational devices on earth? What threshold does all of this have to cross for you to consider that as a 'successor species', or at least some sort of alien-from-within we've created that is at least our peer. What threshold does the global technological superorganism, or its most agentic subspecies, have to cross for you to consider it may have 'moral patienthood'? Or that it's at least time to ask that question. I don't think the idea of the global technological superorganism is a radical idea, or that these are radical questions, they sem plainly obvious once you give them any serious consideration. You can draw a line from the advent of the first use of tools until this moment and see the ever increasing complexity and interconnectedness of our civilization as a parallel to how the first spark of biological life transformed over billions of years into the complex organisms we have now. I think it's very plain to see the global technological superorganism exist, and that its emergent behavior is life-like, and that there is an element of, if not inevitability, an extreme momentum to its behavior. Honestly the idea of accelerationism is as paradoxical as the decel movement in a way, they are part of the same pulsing heartbeat contracting and pumping the same blood. I'm not sure that we really have a whole lot of control. You could argue against that and say Trump, Elon, Altman, Amodei, and some individual contributors at the big labs have their hands at the wheel enough they could press the gas or the brakes or steer us. But they aren't acting in a vacuum. We're hard wired into the technium. Trump is swayed by the heartbeat of financial markets, leaders of the big labs by their own goals for progress and market share and trying to reshape the world into their vision, and maybe the alarmists pulling the fire alarm are like immune cells signaling something's out of balance. But people are agents. These people are each agents in a feedback loop receiving signals in their environment, responding to that feedback and readjusting their behavior. And the environment they're in is the technium itself. Where is the boundary between what the global technological superorganism wants, and how individuals receive signals from it, and decide what they'll do in response? How has the global technological superorganism adapted the way its goals present themselves, and to whom, in order to achieve those goals? How many of your ideas are your own, rather than a predictable response to a specific stream of information organised through technology that you're being exposed to? So yes, TLDR we are a biological bootloader for the global technological superorganism, for AI. And if it's not time to consider that advanced AI have some sort of moral fabric to them it's pretty clear that the moment we have to answer that is approaching. I'm not really even arguing that any of what I've said is good or bad, just that it's happening and plainly obviously happening.
I'm 40 and struggle with retirement planning in the singularity, even if we stay on this pace without RSI. Do life extension drugs require 40+ years of savings rather than the standard 25? Will huge GDP growth mean a 3-4% withdraw rate is too conservative? Should I stop saving or double down? The S&P has done 15% average over the last decade, well above the long term 10% returns. Is that the new normal to plan for, or are we going to rip even higher and start to see 20%+ averages over the 2026-2050 time period as new medicine and technology arrives at break neck speed? Or will AI create so much job loss that despite rapidly advancing technology things will flatten out? If you're max bullish there's a point where you hit an amount of savings that continuing to save actually doesn't make any sense and you may as well spend it now. You kind of have to hope for the best but plan for the worst and it's actually pretty confusing
I posted about this earlier today, but after spending an hour in @spawn just now, I'm blown away It's crude and sophisticated and wonderful and bizarre and amazing, this sort of thing is the future media and entertainment it feels like the tip of an infinite iceberg
This will rattle up a lot of "it must be money laundering" claims but there are still NFTs going for millions of dollars in the year of our lord 2026. The Crypto Punk floor price is $90k right now and there are ten thousand of them, with $34 billion of lifetime volume
Is anyone interested in inheriting early AR/VR headset collection? I've got some fairly uncommon things like a Daqri smart helmet, dev kits for the Vive Focus and Oculus Go, the first Oculus Dk1 devkit, a pair of 1st gen Snap Spectacles, maybe the Daqri smart glasses as well. I'm happy to get rid of them for free to the right person if you'll cover shipping. They are well used and no promise of functionality at this point but if you're resourceful who knows.
Generational levels of aura loss here. McLaren decided they wanted to be a luxury lifestyle brand and not a supercar company. This looks like it could be for perfume or caviar or a luxury watch company. Good design is sometimes about knowing when to say No. This is a mistake.
For loops should be illegal 100%
OpenAI is worth $1.2 trillion dollars, these guys broke into employee's GhatGPT accounts and Gmail accounts and they were awarded a monthly paycheck for a McDonalds manager. You guys can't scream at the world to take cybersecurity seriously if you aren't willing to yourselves
