BioMan

I kind of read wayyyyy too many preprints and some of that is the result of super briefly summarizing some things I have read recently. Here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.26.625518v2 poor codon optimality for your translation system leads to immunogenicity and activation of innate immune signaling in animal cells

As for length and super optimized proteins, it's mostly about RIG proteins (see https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005077107 for an old bit of a review) and the whole DRIP hypothesis about how short mismanufactured proteins are preferentially the source of presented antigens

Biologist here.

This REALLY reminds me of how jealously cells guard their genomic DNA from interaction with nucleic acids out in the environment.

Most genetic information on Earth is malicious information, selfish replicators in the form of viruses or transposable elements or selfish elements. Things that subvert the signals within a cell for their own propagation and provide nothing productive that the cells care about. So cells jealously guard their own genomic DNA and have all kinds of checks to make sure that nothing other than that sequence gets used, and outside sequence does not get incorporated into it. ANY DNA in your cytplasm gets rapidly destroyed, double stranded RNA sets off your immune system like crazy, even RNA with sequence statistics that are not quite like that of your species can set off an inflammatory reaction, immune system cells seeing RNA inside them that is overly compact and optimized like viral RNA treat them as sources of antigen rather than self.

I cannot help but think we are living through the transformation of our non-brain-information sphere into a state like that of the genetic information sphere. Most material out there being meaningless for our purposes and us needing to jealously guard the provenance of information we use so as to not use bull, or worse, huge amounts of malicious information made to subvert us to the purposes of the powers that be that generate it.

Evolution makes parasites more reliably than anything else. How did we train text-generation systems? Basically, to mimic the written word on the page like a stick bug on a stick. They're like those beetles that live in ant colonies, sending out social signals that make the ants see them as offspring that have to be babied rather than parasites that don't contribute. They replicate the form while not being the thing that they have subverted the signals of being.

EDIT: There is something wrong with the upvote counter

Am I right in understanding that almost all the big name results in LLM-derived math recently come from big publicity projects in which someone spent ungodly amounts of money to have the thing nondeterministically fuzz huge numbers random seeds leading to independent random outputs around a topic, putting out simulacra of ideas which could be then deterministically algorithmically checked? In fields where something like finding one counterexample to a conjecture would be a big deal, or where you just need to try a huge number of possible solutions until you happen to hit on one that works, rather than follow a long train of logic?

You speak as if either he or his audience has a coherent worldview other than awe of the AI god

Comments in FAVOR of billionaires being those who seize control of the entire universe (flksdjflkdfjlsdjfl) at the expense of everyone else (!) are appearing.

Land reform / redistribution is always popular with the populi, but per your other point, unless you somehow forbid them from selling or leasing it, it will inevitably end up in the hands of those better able to use those resources pretty shortly. And I will argue that this is a good thing, at least in a capitalist and non-coercive society - much like people think of heiresses leaving their floofy little dogs mansions and million dollar annual stipends as wasteful, leaving an equal proportion of the cosmic endowment with a bunch of v1.2 murder chimps who were so unsuccessful that they couldn't even buy any of it is a colossal waste of that matter/energy. Much like land today is much more valuable to people / governments who have money, the cosmic endowment will be no different.

Today we waste something like 99. nine 9's percent of our sun's energy. If we're the only conscious and intelligent life in the universe, every other star is wasting 100% of their energy. That energy is going to be similarly wasted in the hands of average people, just like the mansions and stipends are wasted on the dogs.

"Well lease it out and profit share!" I bet you're saying. But what will a base human even DO with that energy? It's like the dog. Most "regular" people who remain human will be eaten by digital Infinite Jests, where they can the be tippy top of made up status hierarchies and live out their wildest, meaningless dreams 24/7. You probably barely need $10k a year to do that in terms of matter energy budgets.

Sure, let's guarantee a really generous UBI, Scotts $1-$2M per year in today's wealth equivalent. That's fair. But the cosmic endowment is many, many orders of magnitude more than that, and allocating it to a bunch of floofy dog equivalents is a huge waste.

Awww, but I like the pure science fiction.

I am most amazed at two aspects... how to put it:

One is just, they don't know what they are and what the universe is. The idea that things downstream of things like us can push around galaxies never ceases to amaze me. I felt the same way watching the movie Interstellar. They were using chemical rockets to navigate around a supermassive black hole. The gravitational potential between places they occupied in that film was a third of their rest mass. Chemistry means nothing there. FUSION means nothing there.

(to say nothing of the fact that if interstellar travel were possible there would already be replicators and an ecology throughout the universe, but that's another story)

The second is, things happen because of ideas and agreements rather than actions. You can speak into existence billion year plans for what happens to whole galaxies, and it happens because that is what you said. Laws exist because a bunch of people continue to agree that it's better for them to act like they do than to do what they CAN do. This is a universe without interactions, without agency of anything but the rich weirdos steering the AI god, without for lack of a better word ecology emerging from the interactions of many agents and resource constraints and capacities.

Oh Yud has DEFINITELY taken advantage of his followers like a cult leader.

They are claiming that company value is the metric? holy crap

God I remember having to explain to dozens of people that 'reasoning' models just exude a lot of text 'talking to themselves' and then summarize it. They were all just "It CANT be that silly" and many outright would not believe me, because that was not 'reasoning'

It is not a coincidence that there is a major overrepresentation of Mormons among the transhumanist singulatarians.

So they really do live in a fictional world, confirmed.

Oh man, the "Post ASI" epilogue is a trip. Here's what happens in 2040:

Space beyond the solar system is divided into parcels, increasing in size cubically with distance from Earth. Everyone is given their one-ten-billionth share as a portfolio of lottery tickets, each representing the right to one-ten-billionth chance of getting each parcel. So every human gets a ticket representing a one-ten-billionth chance of owning each star in the Milky Way and each distant galaxy.

Before the lottery is drawn, most people who are interested in control over distant space choose to trade their tickets for space properties that suit their interests.

Many people aren’t interested in the space lottery, so when they receive the tickets, they sell their tickets for money on the open market to people who value control over space. Somewhat uncomfortably, this leads to the wealthy having disproportionate control over cosmic resources. But it is hard to avoid: if people are allowed to trade their control over the stars for Earth assets, then people wealthy in Earth assets inevitably end up disproportionately influential, and proposals for extreme redistribution of Earth assets have already been rejected as politically infeasible.

You can, if you want, go to your space property and live there. If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey. If you hate the idea of cryosleep or uploading, or you want to visit Earth regularly, you should get property in the Solar System. If those don’t bother you, but you’re worried about nearby aliens, get property in the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy. Otherwise, why not claim a distant galaxy for maximal space?