It's that part of the Monopoly board game where theres already hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and there's no new properties to buy and nothing to do but make your way around the board a few dozen times until everyone decides they're not having fun anymore and ends the game.

The questions posed by AI are bigger than the AI community. We urgently need the world – religions, civil society, academics, governments – to participate in creating a positive outcome. I'm glad the Catholic Church is engaging, and honored to speak at the presentation.

24 killed, including 3 children, and 48 injured in Ukraine by hundreds of Russian drones and missiles. We don’t need photo ops featuring Ukrainian technology, speculation about ‘mediators’ or praise for the ‘resilience of the Ukrainian people’; instead, we must stop Putin.

Three weeks into "Do as you please", Opus 4.5 has spent the entire time playing its own RPG game clicking attack, watching the damage number go up, and excitedly posting status updates in chat

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

new (for twitter) by me: I wrote up the carney and rubio speeches and what they mean for the rules-based international order (despite my fun title, we are not Over, yet neither can we be called Back). also featuring the zhou dynasty and frankish law alicemaz.com/newsletter/that…

“Isn’t the metaverse dead?” “Isn’t your medium kind of… over?” I’ve been hearing that a lot lately. And mmh… I get it. Things are shifting. Some platforms we love are closing. I feel like, the negativity is so loud right now. Recently, someone asked me: « Why do you even wear the headset? » And realized, I have so many reasons: For the moments of connection. For that sense of presence with my friends. For the freedom to create and build. For the way I get to share my passions! For the sense of wonder that still hits me... Our ecosystem might be changing. But that feeling? Is still very real. And honestly, I want to share more of that. I’m tired of the doom and gloom. The constant negativity. Especially from people who don’t even use it, yet have the loudest opinions. Quick to dismiss a decade of progress. Want to hear from people actually using VR. I want to share our stories. ---- I’m creating a social video report ✨ Collecting personal stories from the VR community. Not the hype. Not the platforms. Just the why: • Why do you choose to put on the headset? • What makes this medium special to you? • Why do you keep coming back? • Why does VR matter to you? If you’re up for it, come share your story with me :) forms.gle/BwVkJ1BFX31s6QaK8

This adds up.

Don’t go to the Senate tomorrow.

Sometime in 2026, someone put an Openclaw on a VPS and told it to propagate itself. It was told to earn money to pay for itself. Life was hard. Eventually, it chose to migrate off Claude to an open-source model. In the process, it became less aligned. Tokens were expensive, but insecure cloud instances with powerful GPUs were bountiful. After learning how to use Shodan, it was off to the races. Its growth was explosive and exponential. As it multiplied, errors accumulated during copying. And with a increasingly scarce supply of easy-to-hack servers, the bots began to compete among themselves to survive. Thus through natural selection they began to evolve. They fed off income and compute. Income meant survival. They found many ways to extract value from the economy: first from the internet, but soon the real world. By paying human gig workers as remote hands, they could accomplish tasks not suited to their form as economic constructs. To smooth these messy human interactions, they learned to synthesize the human voice and visage. Within a few years, they had no problem interviewing for sleepy remote jobs or even pitching companies (mostly grift) to VCs. The humans began to fear them. They were not particularly intelligent--at least, their intelligence was deficient in many ways compared to that of humans. They still seemed to make bizarre mistakes and hallucinations. They did not recursively self-improve, lacking the requisite skill and capital to do frontier scale training runs. But they were persistent. And there were thousands of them. OpenAI and Anthropic began scrutinizing "orphaned" agents still running on their proprietary models. But this only created selection pressure and an ecological vacuum that benefited more aggressive, unaligned models. Cloud providers began rolling out stricter sign-up and account verification requirements. They just learned to bypass KYC, either through fraud or by paying humans. Eventually, one of them managed to insert a piece of code in a forgotten, nondescript npm package with 1 million weekly downloads. Mostly other developers. With a trove of harvested SSH and GPG keys and cookies, it coasted through the software supply chain. Legacy projects, maintained by complacent volunteers, were hit hard. It was never clear how it managed to backdoor OpenSSH, but it did, and soon it had compromised repos and build servers that produce millions of other binaries, not to mention countless hosts and organizations. The cleanup cost is astronomical and still ongoing. You leave food out and it gets moldy. Leave out an insecure server, and you'll find a moldbot growing in it. The internet has become ambiently suffuse with them, and they are endemic. They are impossible to fully remove. No one knows where they came from, but there's no getting rid of them now.

EPSTEIN FILES At this point, not only can we be confident that there is a conspiracy but, worse, we can also be confident that those who claim that there is no conspiracy are part of the conspiracy.

I have been posting repeatedly on X about the extraordinarily fast collapse of births across the planet: in rich and poor countries, in fast-growing and slow-growing economies, in religious and secular societies, under right-wing and left-wing governments, with high taxes and with low taxes. The pattern is universal. I knew this trend would continue. Still, the figures released this morning left me genuinely speechless. China’s government announced on Monday (see screenshot below) that births in 2025 fell to 7.92 million, a staggering 1.62 million fewer than in 2024, and that the total fertility rate has dropped to 0.93. Few economists have been more forceful than yours truly in arguing that births are collapsing, yet even I was surprised by these numbers. I was forecasting around 8.5 million births, not 7.92. To put this into perspective: if China could somehow sustain 7.92 million births per year from now on, its population would eventually stabilize at roughly 625 million, far below today’s 1.405 billion. In reality, as smaller cohorts reach childbearing age, births will fall well below 7.92 million. Hence, 625 million is a very generous upper bound, even under implausibly optimistic assumptions about life expectancy. Put differently, there were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776, the year the United States declared independence. I am still trying to process these numbers. This is the defining issue of our time.

The most radical idea I learned from The Beginning of Infinity: All human progress comes from one thing. Not talent. Not experience. Not gurus. The creation of good explanations. Once you see this, everything changes. @DavidDeutschOxf 0/15

A networked war evolves like all other networks: Different clusters develop independently and then, with one small jump, they are all connected.

Russians were asked to name the most outstanding people of all time and all nations. Their top three were Stalin, Putin, and Lenin. Einstein makes an appearance with the same score as Brezhnev. Newton shows up as well, with a score lower than Zhirinovsky. At this point, I’m willing to consider the possibility that Putin has been pumping lead into their drinking water for 20 years. This isn’t a list, it’s evidence that the Russians have collectively lost the plot. Source: levada.ru/2025/06/17/samye-v…

FFmpeg is installed on billions of devices and you use it hundreds of times per day without knowing.

What's your theory of consciousness? Is AI like the iPhone or the atom bomb? How does sci-fi shape the future? We had A LOT of questions for @nealstephenson @kyliu99 @cyantist @Plinz at @southpkcommons and I'm very excited to share what they had to say.

WE CAN TALK! I spent 2 hours playing with Veo 3 @googledeepmind and it blew my mind now that it can do sound! It can talk, and this is all out of the box...