every so often, gear techs involved with filming interviews can do silently heroic things

I don't know if this is a case of that, but given the skin shine from reflections, whoever set this up wasn't trying overly hard to make him look good. good on 'em

I never hated my parents. They said they loved me, and the cultural wisdom of the science-fictional literature said your parents genuinely love you no matter what you disagree about

"it is said that learning from others is wisdom. but those piddly people around you, pah, what could they know? I shall instead go right to the source, the many works of ~~entertainment~~ ~~idea-exploration~~ ~~drug binge output~~ fine, detailed, highly-accurate scifi literature that man has produced in checks notes the two or three decades that have preceded my birth. for I am yud, and I am very clever!"

MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it’s significantly more metabolically demanding

chemistry is when you ignore most of the structure of a molecule and its properties and decide it’s close enough to another drug you’re thinking of (and, come to mention, you can’t stop thinking of)

I learned my (extremely elementary) organic chemistry through chill afternoons in bars sipping beer and reading about ochem, and I know better than these clowns. brb establishing new school, Drunken Monkey Ochem

severely underestimating how much biohacking was really just coke the whole time

probably starting their own journey now to test it out! I look forward to their Incredible Journey post

aww, poor babies. if only they didn't literally have the leading nrx thinkers as figures of note in their own community makeup! alas, difficulty: impossible

my near-completely data-less guess: frozen in 2020 among many other things that year that had sudden stoppages, no clear reason to get unfrozen after that, and then when their ties and batshit ideas got a bit too popular recently it became easy to drop them like a rock

I'd watch this livestream

I haven’t checked but I wouldn’t be surprised if this came from the period when he was taking so many substances it fucked his health

"to any feds reading my feed: jk jk"

it is :chefskiss: exquisite that Thiel, of all the lot of them, is a snitch to usgov[0]

As a CHS, Thiel was assigned a code name and an internal serial number to track his reporting. The information he passed on about foreign contacts and Silicon Valley intrigue was reviewed

gotta wonder how many of the progenitors of the absurd are currently squirming uncomfortably. I hope it's a lot of them

[0] - funny in the "would be a self-contradiction against prior statements" way, but as usual all that stuff is windowdressing and the real mission is his personal gain

it's definitely the kind of thing that probably needs a whole lot more eyes on it than the gung-ho rats would be willing to give it

Just I think to summarize your beliefs

don't be puttin' words in my mouth yo

rationalists

this is a big set of very many people and lots of details

are wrong about a lot of things

many of them about many things, yes

and assholes

some, provably

And also the singularity (which predates yuds existence) is not in fact possible by the mechanism I outlined

whether it's the wet dream of kurzweil or yud or whoever else, doesn't matter? but as to the details.. you're engaging with this like the rats do (yes, told you, you only half escaped). you "set the example", and then "test the details"

just ... don't?

the siren song of this is "okay what if I change the details of the experiment slightly?"

we've had the trolley problem for ages, doesn't mean it's just "solved". you won't manage to "solve" whether the singularity can happen or not here, for the same reason

even though TREACLES was right there

I still wish there were a U in there somewhere, because ARSECULT