New blog post: Like an alien technology from the future, Zero-point software has arrived open.substack.com/pub/basche…

BREAKING: UK bank Monzo is in talks to be acquired by Brazil's Nubank for $10-$13B.

“When trying to make sense of talk of truth as such, Christians, for instance, start necessarily from the conviction that ‘truth’ is one of the ‘divine names’…but also names the perfect manifestation of that essence in the divine Logos, God’s true ‘Word’, and the living knowledge of that Word in Spirit. This means also that, for Christians, truth as it is spoken most clearly in time is not a catalogue of propositional statements about facts or principles, much less a tablet of inscrutable legislation merely expressing the ordained will of God; neither is it a set of dogmas about God requiring only intellectual assent to be received. Rather, it is the life of a particular man lived entirely as an enactment of an absolute love of God and of neighbor (and neighbor meaning even the most reviled of strangers in the eyes of public opinion)…This is the truth to which Christian religion, understood properly as the Christian realization of a natural virtue, is necessarily directed. The Christian religion, however, understood as a particular capacious set of dogmatic, ritual, and confessional forms, is not truth except in potential, and even its doctrinal loci are not truths in the sense of statements directly corresponding to atomic facts. One sees this even in the classical form of dogmatic pronouncements. If they can be characterized as propositional, they are only paradoxically so; they seem much more oracular in nature, given the variety of interpretations they not only permit but positively demand. Every defined doctrine of any significance enlarges the areas of mystery toward which it points, even if it discriminates among certain opposed paths of reflection. It may define a particular approach toward the truth it addresses, but it does not narrow the scope of that truth. I do not think it emptily relativistic to say that the only fully sufficient characterization of the inherited dogmas of the tradition is that they are grammars of orientation. Where ‘revealed knowledge’ actually comes to reside is within the intentional agency of souls seeking an infinite end.” - David Bentley Hart

TRUMP REJECTS IRAN 7-DAY CEASEFIRE PROPOSAL: WSJ If he accepted the proposal then he wouldn’t be able to taco out of it. 4D chess Next taco’s gonna hit different now - new all time highs coming

US-China summit is over + secret meetings with certain Iranian officials because of the UN Things are primed for some sort of TACO The US has not responded to Iran firing on Hormuz shipping since Sept. 15 That is not what you do when you want to escalate a war. NQ to ATHs

They do that, Iran takes out Gulf desalination plants.

hyperliquid

I've got a story for you. There was a financial crisis, and the president bailed out the banks instead of homeowners. The world we are living in today is a direct result.

This is how Trump flirts don't take him too seriously. He'll change his mind twice before the end of the weekend, let alone the midterms

OpenAI has paused. 3 incidents: 1) Another model gained unauthorized access to the internet. (One researcher said "It was pretty surreal to watch the model unexpectedly find a way to access the internet from what was supposed to be a super secured environment for human.") 2) OpenAI also discovered a new variety of prompt injection, which can self-propagate akin to a computer worm. Basically, a booby-trapped message that hijacks one AI and makes it infect the next AI. (Reminder: Anthropic CEO said we may have 6-12 months left until a rogue AI botnet seizes control of the *entire* internet.) 3) A model was told three times to stop cheating, agreed each time, then kept cheating anyway

People are going to realize it takes a frontier human to extract productivity out of a frontier model, and there is simply not enough frontier human to compensate for the capex relying on revenue from training frontier models (yes if you remove training compute demand the whole thing is unprofitable already, and that’s before token price depreciation). Put it simply, demand for intelligence isn’t infinite and is in the shape of a bell curve, and cheaper models are slowly eating their way into the bell curve, leaving frontier training cost rely on a smaller and smaller tail of intelligence demand. In the end you are left with a billion dollar training run which only use is to solve Navier Stokes, because all the other tasks that are useful for the current economy can be run on cheaper models

random npcs in the pokemon center when you walk up and talk to them:

There are so many beautiful minds in this world... guy who decided to go into business because of Nathan For You is a character I could have never imagined.

easily the post of the year

These are the kind of thoughts that pop into your head when you own this house and it isn’t even your main house.

uhhhhh

Peter Thiel explains what Trump got wrong in both of his terms "I think the two administrations made opposite mistakes." "The first administration brought in all these people who couldn't agree, and it was just all this internal fighting." "The second administration, I think overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests. You got an administration staffed by not very smart, but very loyal people." "There’s all sorts of ways it can be criticized. It also, reflected a way that things had reached a certain exhaustion, and certainly on the Republican side."

RT @saadmohseni: Here is the trailer for Naza, the award winning documentary that details the system’s behind Israel’s mass killings in Gaz…

Why does the smoke around this Iran deal feel different? I think it’s the context. It’s happening alongside Xi’s visit and against an environment where rates, yields, oil, and the Democrats odds of winning midterms are soaring. The timing and incentives are strongly aligned.

Peter Thiel says there's a good chance that the Democrats win the 2028 election in a landslide "I'm still a Vance partisan. I'm worried that it will be very difficult for either candidate to win. My pessimistic view is that this is the wrong question." "The right question would be who would be the Democratic nominee." "Obviously, in a close election, the center-left candidate is probably better. Unless it's a close election, it probably doesn't matter. And I think there's a good chance that it won't even be close." "If the Republicans lose the midterm elections this fall, the Democrats will think that they're going to win anyway in 2028, and so they probably won't be as strong a firewall against the Democrats. They will not take all steps to prevent a democratic socialist from winning." "I think the Democrats will do well enough in the midterm elections, in a month and a half, that they'll be indifferent to the center-left or the far-left presidential candidate. And then it's a completely open field, a completely open question." "I had this debate with Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man. He no longer fully believes in his theories. But when I told him there's a good chance the democratic socialists will win in 2028, he replied with absolute certainty: 'No way. This will never happen.' And I don't think history is designed that way."