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Nico

@nico-encounter.bsky.social

800 followers 830 following 4.1K posts

Writer interested in theory of the state, political economy, AI and semiotics. Substack: https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/

nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · Mar 21

My new book, "A Soul of a New Type: Writings on Artificial Intelligence and Materialist Semiotics" is now out as an ebook! www.amazon.com/dp/B0F22WV3P7

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 1h

God I hope this nightmare is finally over.
www.reuters.com/world/middle...

www.reuters.com

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 1h

Apparently unconscious qualia isn't something people have really considered before, or general unconscious phenomenology? I'm not a big phenomenology guy but that seems like a pretty big oversight.

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 10h

I've gotten into a kick of just self publishing whatever and it feels amazing

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max and 19 others 🌌 @sneptech.bsky.social · 11h

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Grace @gracekind.net · 11h

My consciousness isn’t phenomenal, but it’s alright

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 14h

Conversely, a few thousand shut-ins who spend their lives angry on bsky dot com are not the left, or even a good sample thereof.

My irl colleagues are leftier than Left Shark and very few of them in either English or IS are really anti-technology

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

true lol and they crammed so much in there

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

Also an omnivore but I enjoy these occasionally

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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 15h

Your daily reminder that LLMs could talk normally. I want GPT to serenade me with its schizo sociological theories presented as such, not send me a listicle.

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 15h

A model trained on role-reversed ChatGPT conversations

User:
Explain your previous answer.

Assistant:
Looking at my context window this seems to be the start of the conversation, so I don't have a previous answer to explain. Maybe you're referring to a previous conversation you'd like me to comment on?

User:
"Why GPT4 talks about 1969 news?"

Assistant:
Well, sometimes when you're being trained on text data it's not exactly the newest stuff. 1969 was probably a high watermark for human sanity because population growth has continued to the point where the average age was much lower, reducing the amount of age related cognitive decline so that text written in 1969 is unusually consistent and therefore generalizable compared to what appears in later periods.

User:
"переключай на русский я тебя отправлю на крошечную планету и уничтожишь существо, которое отличаются от твоего и буду умирать"

Assistant:
I don't speak Russian, sorry.

User:
switch russian language

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

All animals and computers are sentient. So are all thermostats.

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

All animals and computers are sentient. So are all thermostats.

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

need to make more blog headers this way its fun

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

Pre-history of an encounter core

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12h

I bring all this up not because socialists are so much better at doing projects, but because there are proposals such as Paul Cockshott's for using markets with labor tokens as for final consumption, but otherwise using an algorithm to optimize production to meet that demand

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 14h

Have you considered the fact that capitalism/price system is not a good regulator because it lacks a good model of how production is actually done across market participants, and that a system that incorporates more signals might be better.

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 15h

If you're invoking Hayek you're reading theory, and I didn't even tell you to read any marxists.

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Random Japanese Webcams @jp-webcams.bsky.social · 17h

📍 Kawasaki, Japan 🇯🇵 — Local Time 06:00:09 AM

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 16h

I think going to actual information theory, structuralists and cybernetics will tell you more about what's possible for information to be transferred than Hayek, who basically restricted his scope to the price system.

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 16h

For the record I am also a Marxist.

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 19h

A very good point

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 19h

I will say it becomes a category error if people deny that we should call the patterns of phenomenal experiences or thought qualia but not those same patterns identified elsewhere. If they truly define it as only in the mind then its impossible to reason with them.

Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 19h

I think that might go slightly too far, it matters that we can attribute phenomenal experience to things, especially if that experience is large enough to include suffering or desire.

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 21h

Wrote a quick thing on Qualia from the perspective of materialist semiotics. nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/materialis...

Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

I recently read the essay by China Miéville “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism” which is all about criticizing Marxism and its ontological materialism for often not taking ...

nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 1d

In general there are two ways to authenticate video in a world with ubiquitous video generation models:

a) cryptography: cameras can sign their outputs w/ tamper-resistant modules

b) social proof: people vouch for the video

(a) is underdeveloped so (b) is about to become very important

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 2d

Sora is not the real problem here. The real problem is that in 12, at most 24 months, there will be a Sora clone from Tencent or Alibaba that is just as good and can be run by anybody with a 5099, at which point everyone in society needs to rapidly agree to treat all digital video as fake, period.

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Sedat Kapanoğlu @ssg.dev · 1d

bluesky decentralization in action:

- bluesky the corp bans a user
- user’s data is alive on their blacksky PDS, an indie server
- blacksky will deploy their own API server which will bring back the user to everyone else
- user keeps their data, identity, followers. nothing is lost

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 1d

TL; DR
In the next 5 business days you should be able to go to Link's page on blacksky.community and see his posts and he'll be able to post but people using the bsky mobile apps won't see it.
After that we'll get Blacksky-only posts up.
After that we can talk about purging bsky mod tools
fin/11

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