Hi! I'm Emma. I'm an ideator, optimizer, and personal growth nerd, with a dash of woo and politics. This is my "kitchen sink" blog, where I share random notes from my life, including the various rabbit holes I go down.
“Autism is a Spectrum” Doesn’t Mean What You Think
It’s not a gradient that goes from “less autistic” to “more autistic”. That’s the entire wrong way to think about it. If you think about the visible color spectrum, red and blue are on opposite ends, but blue is not “really intense red”, they are actually just different colors. So, my understanding now is that “the spectrum” is a set of different traits that, if you have a lot of them, that makes up autism, but the traits show up differently in different people.
Hope is a fragile motivation
On doom, hope, and releasing expectations and control over the future.Sam Altman plans to be a benevolent dictator
In this video we learn that Sam Altman thinks inventing AGI, or at least staying at the leading edge of AI development, will allow OpenAI to suck up all the world’s wealth–and Sam Altman plans to “redistribute” that wealth, possibly through a UBI. But he doesn’t exactly know how that will work–especially on a global scale–and he hopes GPT5 will be able to help figure it out.
But he also seems to think that the current massive inequality only exists because people “tolerate” it and with AGI’s even more massive inequality, people “won’t tolerate it”–which shows an absurd level of ignorance as to what it means to be powerless because all the power has been concentrated out of your hands.
Currently, money is a proxy for power, but in a post-scarcity world where these are decoupled, his plan is to redistribute money in order to keep the capitalist game going. But of course, that isn’t the same thing as redistributing power itself. I guess he is aiming for the Brave New World rather than 1984 outcome…but I am not sure he is accurate in his assessment that he will stay at the front of this race.
We will be able to create hyper-realistic virtual people soon
We are not too far away from being able to create extremely life-like virtual partners. We could help people heal their relational trauma, provide partners for people who can't find one...or destroy our society with hyper-addictive relationship simulators. Exciting times!YouTube: ChatGPT + Wolfram: The Future of AI is Here!
I can’t say I understood all of this, but it was pretty fascinating nonetheless.
Jon Stewart interview on the US Classified Documents system
As you can imagine, it’s a mess. Really interesting, though. Data scientists will have to sort it out.
Real Engineering: Helion (Nuclear Fusion)
A different way to achieve nuclear fusion that avoids some of the pitfalls of Tokamak reactors (fuel cost, byproducts). Looks promising! Fusion is coming along, slowly.
I’m sad that Elon bought Twitter
I am not temperamentally suited to using Twitter myself. But I can see the significance and impact of it, and I'm sad that Elon bought it because I don't think he has any idea what he is doing.decluttering as inventory management (like in a game)
Ditching my guilt and mental noise around not being a minimalist by using the frame of inventory in MMORPG games.How the Brain Perceives Fear
We’re getting closer to understanding the biology and biochemistry underneath trauma reactions. Here’s another article in a similar vein about the role of neurotensin.