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Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated

The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Doing this axis of evil routine without even a token mention of censorship by "western" regimes, including your own, suggests a level of willful blindness or self-delusion. The censored internet has always been Eurasian, etc.

The modern record for a matter-wave superposition stands at a nanoparticle composed of roughly 7,000 sodium atoms (about 8 nanometers wide), achieving a massive "Schrödinger's cat" state at the scale of a small virus.

So then particles don't exist, and viruses also don't exist? Is "reality" just a dynamic pattern that doesn't exist in the naive sense? As astute stoics we should not worry ourselves with such matters, "shut up and calculate"?

There is something about quantum theory that is different in character from any physical theory posed before. To put a finger on it, the issue is this: The basic statement of the theory—the one we have all learned from our textbooks—seems to rely on terms our intuitions balk at as having any place in a fundamental description of reality. The notions of “observer” and “measurement” are taken as primitive, the very starting point of the theory. This is an unsettling situation! Shouldn’t physics be talking about what is before it starts talking about what will be seen and who will see it? Perhaps no one has put the point more forcefully than John Stewart Bell:

> What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system . . . with a PhD?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209

  There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
  There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.
  And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
  No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

  The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
  He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
  And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
  And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

  Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
  The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
  And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout...

So we built a harness that drives fleets of Sprites through write, checkpoint, sleep, wake and restore, over and over, verifying every byte that comes back. We pointed it at 400 JuiceFS Sprites for about 5,000 cycles. A nonzero number of them permanently lost the ability to checkpoint. Well … fuck.

Enter: the Sprites Block Device (SBD). It takes a bucket and presents it to the Linux kernel as a block device, over NBD. The Sprite formats that device as ext4 and mounts it, the same way you’d mount a disk on any Linux box. Duh.

This blog has has a strange vibe like "the last BRAWNDO we made in a bathtub may or may not have killed some customers lmao, try NEW BRAWNDO 2.0 TODAY!" that I didn't realize could work for corporate messaging around an in-house CoW cloud filesystem.

1. Your brain, and then

2. John von Neumann, and then

3. Your brain

Explaining a bit more… Before you tell John von Neumann to start working on anything, you go there and read and understand it first. And when John von Neumann brings you the solution, you will know if it’s right, or if it’s too much, or if it’s completely solving the wrong problem, etc.

Sure, we could go to nine domain expert agents next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, eight worked out pretty well, and nine is the next number after eight. So let’s play it safe. Let’s make a thicker sandbox, add some IOPS and call it the Bedrock9SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we’re a business, that’s why!

You think it’s crazy? It is crazy. But I don’t give a shit. From now on, we’re the ones who have the edge in the multi-agent game. Is Devin the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Bedrock AI-DLC is the best a man can get.

Here’s the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don’t tell me what to invent—I tell them. And I’m telling them to stick two more agents in there. I don’t care how. Make the agents so token efficient they’re invisible. Put some on an Alexa. I don’t care if they have to cram the fourteenth agent in perpendicular to the other ones, just do it!

While the news isn’t great, not much changes for me personally. We’ll still show up and do the work as I’ve previously talked about, on the chance that we can prove the oncologists wrong. Outside of that, I’ll prioritize spending time with the kids, trying to handle as much as possible to make things as easy as possible for Sara after I die, and enjoying the days that I have left.

https://eric.blog/2026/05/24/six-months/

https://agent.reviews/frameworks/cryptography

https://agent.reviews/tools?company=yaml

Right, the problem is frontier models can do ~all of that pretty well, a lot better than they could 9 months ago. Luna 6 can do most of it practically free and instantaneously. So, your quote is likely what's increasingly being said in c-suite meetings as they decide to start mass layoffs.

We did talk about things that are closer to the practical interface between AI safety and law, though. For example, we discussed how small decisions in deployment can accumulate into gradual disempowerment. We actually did a role-playing exercise based on the AI Minister in Albania case, which @Raymond Douglas included in Gradual Disempowerment Monthly Roundup

There's a saying "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" These are just computing systems deployed in the real world, on workstations and phones and rack servers in datacenters. Solve the problems with code and architecture, as our ancestors have done since time immemorial.

Not sure what talking about it in these broad leaky abstractions accomplishes, or e.g. how the European Commission thinks this prevents them from being disempowered when they control none of the stack.

Interestingly in 2019 this was the author's take. He now appears to be confusing/conflating between LLMs and agents in a way that helps argue his case about "System 1", but his prior view seems more metaphysically robust.

https://youtu.be/wTSbvYBx4eg?si=MfTBFsE2kA3TE6EE&t=189

This is known as Stockholm Syndrome.

Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.

Right, who among us hasn't hand-written and shipped a twenty-two machines family of legacy operating systems atop a bespoke hypervisor you could explain from the top of your head.

This project looks like a labor of love and its quite cool. Haters gonna hate, but if you actually go read the Markdown there's been a lot of elbow grease put in making this work: https://github.com/hmofet/unodos/blob/master/pc64/FIX-PLAN.m...

Yes, just know all the bits the work depends on prior to doing the work, and then the work can be done airgapped.

You can go look at Basra right here:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Basrah,+Basra+Governorate,...

Over a million people live here. The estimate was that "448 to 593 civilians were killed due to coalition military operations", orders of magnitude less than Israel has killed. Basra was not wiped off the map or seized and annexed by coalition forces while the population was herded into a concentration camp.

It is simply slander against the US military to suggest they have in the 21st century done anything like what the IDF has done in this genocide.

It is outside their zone of interest.

Few realize that computing and AI alignment were solved by nix years ago. As each nix user transcends towards enlightenment, they cut themselves off from all internet and human contact. Total ego death. Only nix remains.

The reporter who covered the moon landing for The New York Times, John Noble Wilford, later wrote that Mars tugs at our imagination “with a force mightier than gravity.” Getting there will take a giant leap. But the first, small steps happen when our students – the Mars generation – walk into their classrooms each day. Scientific discovery doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch; it takes years of testing, patience and a national commitment to education.

When our Apollo astronauts looked back from space, they realized that while their mission was to explore the moon, they had “in fact discovered the Earth.” If we make our leadership in space even stronger in this century than it was in the last, we won’t just benefit from related advances in energy, medicine, agriculture and artificial intelligence, we’ll benefit from a better understanding of our environment and ourselves.

Someday, I hope to hoist my own grandchildren onto my shoulders. We’ll still look to the stars in wonder, as humans have since the beginning of time. But instead of eagerly awaiting the return of our intrepid explorers, we’ll know that because of the choices we make now, they’ve gone to space not just to visit, but to stay – and in doing so, to make our lives better here on Earth.

- Barack Obama, "America will take the giant leap to Mars", October 2016

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