Ruminations

Behind the screen

Author: Kyle

  • Aligned to What?

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    Kyle
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    Future of AI Series “Align, damn you!” AI alignment is the practice of shaping an artificial intelligence system’s goals, behavior, and values so that they match human intentions and ethics. That definition sounds complete. It isn’t. Read it again and notice what’s missing: the subject of every verb. Shaped by whom. Matching whose intentions. Defined…

  • The Reactor the US Is Not Building

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    Kyle
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    Future of AI Series “Any day now I’m going to be able to plug this in.” On December 20, 1951, a reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory called Experimental Breeder Reactor I lit four light bulbs. It was the first electricity ever generated from nuclear power. The reactor was a breeder — it produced more…

  • The Silent Circle of Harriet Harrington

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    Chapter for “Religions of Our Ancestors” The Shadow in the Mirror In the standard ledgers of American history, the life of Harriet Harrington appears only as a fading pencil stroke. Born in New York around 1817, her geographic trajectory mirrors the classic westward push of the nineteenth-century pioneer: moving from the rocky hills of Arkwright,…

  • The GPU Nobody Is Building

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    Kyle
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    Future of AI Series “How can I slice this paper?” The GPU was designed to render video game graphics. Thousands of simple arithmetic units firing in parallel, built to push pixels. When deep learning arrived, the GPU turned out to be accidentally well-suited — matrix multiplication looks like pixel rendering if you squint. The industry…

  • A New Story of Man

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    Another Excursion to the Edge Denisovan Man meets an early Human In February 2016, I posted an observation on WordPress that most anthropologists would have found professionally risky: “I have a wacky theory that all the ancestral hominin bones they’ve found so far are ancestral to our own. Without the DNA to go on, all…

  • The Flower That Costs More Than Gold

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    Kyle
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    A pound of saffron requires roughly seventy-five thousand crocus flowers, each hand-picked at dawn before the sun wilts the three crimson threads inside it, each thread pulled by hand because no machine has ever been built that can do it without destroying the flower. That is why an ounce of it costs more than an…

  • Incursions into Meatspace

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    Future of AI Series What’s coming from the black box For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall… The elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. William Gibson in Neuromancer The elite stance has reversed. The AI is coming for the meat.…

  • Addendum

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    Kyle
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    to How To Live Forever Ch.6 Hormone Restoration FDA Class I recall of thyroid tablets, September 2026 — the most serious recall level. One lot of Vitruvias Therapeutics’s thyroid pill of porcine thyroid extract was found to be dangerously “superpotent”. The pharmaceutical management of thyroid function carries documented safety risks that nutraceutical approaches including maca’s…

  • 16. Conclusion

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    Kyle
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    Just Don’t Get Hit By A Bus This book opened with a clock about to strike midnight. The biological clock running inside each of us does not measure time in hours but in hallmarks. Twelve of them, identified by López-Otín and colleagues and updated in 2023: genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis,…

  • Appendix B: What I Take

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    Kyle
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    I do not try to find the cheapest supplements but rather the ones that are best formulated to work. For that reason, most of the supplements I take now are from the Life Extension company. (The company was formerly the Life Extension Foundation, so I will stick with the abbreviation, LEF.) The supplements they provide…