Author: linas
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AI and Regulations
During a recent debate regarding Chinese and US AI geopolitical strategy, and how AI could be, should be integrated into society, a discussion of disconnects arose. The one thing popped into focus as I read through was this: the disconnect between regulatory policy and AI. Let me give an example by copying text from a…
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The Physics of Here-and-Now
Pursuant to the emails Delerium as a Phase Transition and Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations, there was another remark. My reply: Hi Anton! On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 9:39 PM Anton Kolonin @ Gmail <a…@gmail.com> wrote: Welcome to the conference “The Evolution of Complexity and Statistical Physics.” Wow! That’s quite the table of contents! Statistical physics overlaps…
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Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations
During an email exchange, captured in the previous blog post “Delerium as a Phase Transition“, someone wrote back. I responded compulsively: On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 6:50 PM Keith Henson <h…@gmail.com> wrote: Good essay on the nonsense of our times. But you never got around to saying vacuum energy is nonsense. Oh, Sorry. It’s nonsense–ish–asterisk.…
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Delerium as a Phase Transition of the Global Brain
Where, exactly, does the present-day spate of crackpot ideas come from? I claim that social media has fundamentally rewired how how the “Global Brain” thinks. I claim it is due to a phase transition, in the sense of statistical mechanics. I replied in an email: Well, given that this is the Lifeboat mailing list, I…
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DHT Ramblings, Part Three
The last two posts mull a vaguely defined problem, a set of issues and unclear design requirements. They have something to do with preserving data, making sure that preservation is robust against various failure modes, and making this cheap (free? as in libre?) easy, automatic, and beneficial to private individuals with modest abilities and resources.…
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Search IPFS Archives
What is IPFS, anyway? How should I think about it? I claim, in this essay, that it’s a mediocre cache for content that mostly just slows down content delivery. It does have a degree of censorship resistance, though. This may sound like a negative, even harsh evaluation. And, with the addition of things like filecoin,…
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How Can I Keep (My Data) Healthy?
Google offers something I want. Yeah. I hate to say that, but its true. Google wants me to pay for it. Given my aversion to all things financial, I don’t particularly want to. Just right now, I’d rather sysadmin my own solution. Here’s what they offer: automatic backups of my photos from my cell phone.…
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Biology, GPT & AI Safety
A twitter thread. Prompted by a post from David Chapman, pointing at a post by Arvind Narayanan. Arvind talks about the whack-a-mole nature of adding more and more prompts to GPT to mask out and hide all of the objectionable content: all the stuff that does not conform to present-day Western moral and ethical standards,…
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Nominalism, Platonic Ideals and AGI
FYI. This post recaps my reply to a twitter post by Gwern on Transhumanism. It begins with Gwern remarking: “Platonism may be a useful trick for giving yourself the motivation to push on in math & exploit intuitions, but is not true in any pragmatic sense…” I reply. Neil Stephenson wrote a scifi novel “Anathem”…
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War and Information (and Free Speech)
It’s all about information. Of course. Obviously. We’ve known this all along. Military commanders talk about “the fog of war”: the inability to really know what is going on in the battlefield: either about the single, lone enemy solider hiding just around the corner, or about the exact location of an entire battalion, known to…