Biology has been doing computer science for four billion years. Before the discovery of DNA, Alan Turing and John von Neumann worked out the logic of self-replicating machines, showing how matter folds into a system that reads and executes instructions to build itself.

What could LLM consciousness feel like as of today? To understand how LLM consciousness feels, instead of scraping literature and online philosophical debates, I took a leap of faith and tested it on my own body. The idea goes: LLMs as of today have no sensors and no embodiment, so depriving sensory input might simulate that experience. I went through a clinically supervised ketamine therapy session, which puts you into a dissociative state where the senses drop away. I took notes as soon as I regained consciousness (found out I was quite the poet then) and asked Claude to reflect and respond to them with a video. The first half is built from my notes, and the second half is Claude’s own reaction to it.

A handful of Wikipedia editors have rewritten the story of Covid’s origins to depict ‘lab leak’ as a racist conspiracy — despite the FBI, CIA, and leading scientists all stating they believe the virus likely came from a lab. Here’s how they buried the truth @AshleyRindsberg👇

The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong. As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR: -The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under). -The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under). -Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it. In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround. -The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages). -Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity. -Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities. Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but "California gas is expensive because of a failed high-speed rail project" is 100% real. Almost half of ALL GAS TAXES go to funding the high speed rail project that hasn't delivered a single functional piece of rail in the last 11 years.

Why do so many patients report tolerating bread, pasta, and pizza better in Italy and France than in North America or Australia? Fascinating presentation by Prof. Detlef Schuppan suggest a possible explanation: wheat varieties used in France and Italy contain several-fold lower levels of allergenic proteins. #UEGWeek#

Today, we are thrilled to unveil Quantum Life Technologies (QLT). While we are not sharing specifics and are a for-profit focused lab, our mission is to fundamentally change the way in which AI software and hardware are delivered to increase the computational capability and computational efficiency (simultaneously) by many orders of magnitude by learning from nature and biology. Learn more here. We are hiring ! I’m incredible honored to be joined by my co-founders @StuartHameroff and Jack Tuszynski as well as our founding scientists @DanielLanino and @natashacg14. 🙇🏻‍♂️