Ragebait isn't about seeing what the other side says.

It's about seeing an inflammatory caricature of the other side.

For example, a Liberal isn't going to see some Conservative discussing some of the hard tradeoffs we'll need to pay down the debt. They'll see a Conservative proposing that Trump be given a 3rd term and trans kids get rounded up and forced into conversion therapy or some crap like that.

Meanwhile, Conservatives won't see some Liberal discussing the economics of Universal Healthcare. They'll see someone proposing that the police be defunded and all drugs are legalized.

Ragebait creates echo chambers because it gives the false impression that everyone on the other side is insane.

It's a fun conspiracy theory, but this is actually just how biology works.

There's basically four kinds of things that can go wrong with our bodies. Infections, mechanical issues, system errors, and cancer.

Infections we can cure by helping the body to kill off the infection, it's only some rare stubborn ones like AIDS that are chronic like you describe.

Mechanical issues we can fix with surgery.

System errors? That's stuff like genetic disorders where our body creates too much of hormone A or doesn't create the proper form of protein B. The problem is in our DNA and you can't cure it without rewriting our DNA (which we're getting to).

And then there's cancers, which are similar to infections, where we try to kill it (as they're doing here), though weirdly, some research suggests treating it as a chronic issue might be better for the patients.

In either case, it's not the fact that pharma is deciding "don't make a pill to cure it, just find a lifetime treatment!". It's only in the past few years that we're reaching the point where we can actually cure things that were traditionally chronic.

An LLM is just a stack of Transformer layers - they are great at what they do - prediction - but that is all they are built to do.

Humans are not just intelligent predictors. As a social species we have also evolved to (mostly) peacefully co-exist and co-operate, and a lot of our intelligence seems in fact to be collective intelligence.

If we want LLMs to behave in more human ways, then we need to make them more brain like, and start adding all the extra moving parts that evolution has equipped ourselves with.

And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

I've heard almost nothing about Threads recently. Certainly no indication they were more popular than Twitter.

Is their user count some sort of trick with how they interface with Instagram? Or is Twitter just turning into a ghost town without people realizing it?

Yeah - makes no sense to me either, but notable that this "you'll all be on UBI (government welfare)" is the best outcome he can think of.

Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO)'s "Machines of Loving Grace" was the first of these, and if effect explains why others like Altman and Zuckerberg are chiming in.

Amodei's prediction:

1) AI will take ALL the jobs

2) Since people won't have any jobs, the government will have to provide UBI (universal basic income), aka food stamps

This is the most positive spin Amodei can put on the future that he is rushing to create, and not surprisingly people are not happy. The public increasingly see AI as an unwelcome technology that will create more problems than positive benefit.

This is at least part, a large part, of the reason that others like Altman and Zuckerberg are coming out with their own spin on how wonderful the AI future will be - because they realize public perception is massively against them (and also they are a bunch of arrogant pricks who think they are creating god, and are entitled to tell us how grateful we should be for it).

Well, I guess you could call a cruise missile a "mobile" application.

Bottom line it's a Russian weapons system enabled by an American electronics component.

This is one of the reason why Western governments do invest in foreign aid.

It's not just charity (though that's certainly an element), but the more stable and prosperous developing nations are the less likely they're going to have to deal with a refugee crisis.

> As for the Fermi's Paradox, I think the Occam's answer is Adam's Observation: "space is big. Really, really big..."

Right, and and given a failure to find the evidence we're looking for in a given neighborhood (~50 light year radius perhaps - SETI 50 years old), there are multiple ways to interpret this, including:

1) There is a) no life where we've been looking, and so b) we assume (why??) there is none in the almost infinitely bigger entire universe

2) There may be tons of life in this radius, just no advanced life

3) It seems more logical to assume that alien life does exist than not exist, so use this data to estimate an upper bound on how common it is

etc

We exist and have only been transmitting radio shows into space for 100 years or so, so put the shoe on the other foot and imagine an alien species in our own galaxy looking for life and not finding it. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter, and our measly "we're here" beacon has only spread out 100 years. Even if they are our neighbors only 50 light years away, are they looking for an ultra faint radio signal in Earths FM radio band ?!

It has apparently only fairly recently dawned on SETI researchers, or at least they are only starting to take it seriously, that maybe we are looking for the wrong signal in the wrong place.

The most scientific guess would have to be that primitive life - replicating metabolic soups - exists pretty much anywhere with the right conditions (it's just chemistry - why wouldn't it?!) - must be very common even within our own galaxy, even if it depends on a bit of luck (meteors hits delivering key elements). Complex multi-cellular life may be much rarer (on earth primitive life appears almost immediately, multi-cellular takes another 2B years), and complex life evolving human-level intelligence much rarer still (basically didn't exist for all of earth's 4.5B yr existence until "yesterday").

But, yeah, the visible universe is big enough, maybe ~1T galaxies, and then there is the non-visible universe beyond which is unimaginably bigger (maybe 10^20 times as big, at minimum).

This isn't what the article is saying.

LUCA (the single common source of all modern life) already had RNA/DNA.

The article is talking about LACA and LBCA - the archaea and bacteria lineages that both evolved from LUCA.

What the article says is the LUCA had an "incomplete" (partly still external) metabolism, and LACA and LBAC each completed it in their own way.

I don't know if the Chinchilla scaling law (which is what I assume you are referring to) includes RL-based post-training, or even non-text input tokens for that matter?

The base model certainly makes a difference, but for areas like math, coding and hacking (to compete with and counter Mythos) the power of the end model mostly comes from the RLVR post-training, and these are all areas where they can generate synthetic data, as well as pay for human-generated data if they care/need to.

So much for the US attempt to starve China of compute! We've now already got ~3T open weight models from both Moonshot (Kimi 3) and Alibaba (Qwen 3.8), and now apparently another 10T one here from ByteDance.

> If this is accurate, this suggests that abiogenesis is easy once one has a stable, watery environment

It obviously takes a bit more than that, but it's probably fair to say that simple life is inevitable when all the necessary pre-conditions are there. Chemistry is going to happen.

The necessary pre-condiitons do include things like an energy source, maybe more than just sunlight, certain rarer chemicals such as phosphorus that earth acquired via asteroid/meterorite impacts. For complex life a metallic core and magnetosphere to protect you from ionizing radiation may be necessary.

This summary of "life evolved twice" is just click-bait.

The article it is referring to has the much more sober title of "Intermediate stages in the origin of metabolism at a
phosphorylating hydrothermal vent".

This doesn't change the understanding of LUCA as a single last universal common ancestor cell that gave rise to LACA (last archea common ancestor) and LBCA (last bacteria common ancestor).

What the article is saying is that the metabolism of LUCA was "incomplete" and not yet self-contained, still relying on external catalysts and reactions. LUCA then branched off into LACA and LBCA which evolved (completed) their own differing metabolisms.

Obviously it's a bit arbitrary how exactly you define life - where do you choose to say that complex chemistry is "alive" due to being able to self-replicate etc. Maybe better to regard the origin of life as a gradual process of environmental metabolic soup complexification and eventual encapsulation in the form of protocells and cells. By the time you get to LUCA, a cell with RNA and DNA, it seems this is already well past the point of any fuzzy chemisry-life distinction. LACA and LBCA don't represent "life evolving twice" - they are just early evolutionary steps giving rise to the distinct archea and bacteria branches of life.

I think there's some nuance needed there.

Pelosi's trading is legal, it's highly problematic from an ethics perspective, but it's completely legal and somewhat common for legislators to do. So she can be criticized for using an unfair advantage, but it's not unprecedented nor a major sin.

Trump's grifts on the other hand do violate laws and precedent, those laws just aren't enforced.

For an extra $100k you get a pardon!