Avel Guénin--Carlut

@fluffycyborgii

The world we engage with is not pre-given, it's enacted. Physics of biology & cognition; mind & socio-material practices; political organisation in the Anthropocene. All views, expressed or not, are the sole responsibility of the ambient Lebensform.

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Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 18d

A presentation-style slide with a pale blue-gray background and thin vertical border accents. At the top left, the heading “KEY POINTS” appears in large teal capital letters. Below it, a teal bullet point introduces a statement in large black text: “The claim ‘butterflies do not cause tornadoes’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that butterflies cause tornadoes.” The layout and typography resemble a professional infographic or educational presentation slide.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 19d

Screenshot of a Claude response to the prompt “Do a math breakthrough.” The response is written in exaggerated pirate speech and begins: “Arrr, here be a fine bit o’ mathematical treasure fer ye, told in me best pirate tongue!” A bold heading reads “The Riddle o’ the Infinite Primes.” The visible text explains, in pirate-themed language, Euclid’s proof that there is no end to the prime numbers, listing examples such as 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. The next visible line begins, “Here be the clever trick, matey:” before the screenshot cuts off.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 21d

Screening to avoid participation in what seems like an aggressive pile-on Yeah sure no one needs weeaboo666's opinion on interest rates, but at the same time the qualification of "mainstream" economics does an awful lot of work here

very tired of pretending that dismissing modern economics is somehow more reasonable than dismissing vaccines. if you’re not an expert, you don’t get to pick and choose parts of a field to believe! you have no way to tell between legitimate and illegitimate results in that field!

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 22d

I think it would be better if we talked about the actual issues LLMs do raise, rather than stuff that was wildly exagerated or overtly made up for dramatic effect

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 23d

Skill issue

Screenshot of a Claude chat on the Fable 5 Medium model. The user message reads "Am I gregonate?? Help!?" Below it, a "5 steps" web-search indicator is expanded, followed by Claude's response explaining that "gregonate" doesn't appear in any dictionary, slang site, or meme lexicon, noting closest relatives like "greg" (from the Danny Gonzalez fanbase/"we are all Greg" meme) and joke terms like "gregged" or "gregnant," concluding that by any verifiable standard the user is not "gregonate" since the word has no established definition. The response is cut off mid-sentence at the bottom, with the message input box, model selector, and standard chat icons (attach, share, play, thumbs up/down, retry) visible below.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 23d

"We should improve society somewhat - your antisemitism is showing!"

"We should improve society somewhat" meme

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 29d

A meme shows a white cat with its mouth wide open, appearing shocked or distressed, facing a green plastic crocodile toy. The cat is labeled “Having faith in peer review,” while the crocodile is labeled “Peer review.” The crocodile is humorously edited to hold two pistols pointed at the cat. Two speech bubbles emerge from the crocodile: one says, “great work but have you considered that I disagree,” and the other says, “I can't help but notice you've failed to cite relevant literature on the 1569 Battle of Bresonwoods.” The joke portrays peer review as aggressively nitpicking or criticizing academic work with arbitrary objections.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· 29d

Now with an ALT. Be the bubble my friend

A six-panel “expanding brain” meme uses progressively more enlightened-looking brain images to illustrate increasingly extreme views about technology bubbles. The text advances through these stages:
“Bubbles are bad. Technology is bad. People are silly. The technology is nonsense.”
“Bubbles are bad, but bubbles often accompany the emergence of ultimately useful technologies.”
“Bubbles are bad, but bubbles are a function of the potential of the technology itself. High-potential technology triggers bigger bubbles.”
“Technology is good. High-potential technologies need bubbles to emerge and be deployed.”
“All of human flourishing is a bubble.”
“Bubbles are the only true departure from entropy we have. Be the bubble.”
The meme humorously depicts a progression from skepticism about speculative technology bubbles to an almost mystical celebration of bubbles as the driving force behind innovation and human progress.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 11

NGL I was confused for a moment

Screenshot of a social media app in dark mode showing the “Complexity Science” feed. A post by Avel Guénin--Carlut reads: “I have discovered a new configuration of the is-ought problem where I say it would be good if [x] and then people get angry that I assume [x] would happen.” The post quotes an earlier message discussing a “good timeline” in which LLMs accelerate diploma inflation, universities become places primarily for people who want to learn, and schools focus more on cultivating curiosity and autonomy in a Montessori-like way. Below, another user, Grace (@gracekind.net), replies: “This train of thought eventually leads to becoming an atproto evangelist.” The app interface shows navigation icons and engagement buttons beneath the posts.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 7

This comment on Platner is the Platonic ideal of why I started working on identity capture back in 2022. Never seen such a pure expression of the core logic up to this day.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 7

Me and who 👉👈

"Lady slaps John Oliver" meme template

Panel 1&2

John Oliver says: let me put this in terms you'll understand. CLAUDE IS NOT CONSCIOUS

Panel 3&4

Lady slaps John Oliver

Panel 5

John Oliver stares in rageful disbelief

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 6

I don't think most people quite realize how much work it took to lock in fossil fuels as the default source of energy. Yeah the portability and density is nice! But by the time they really overtook renewables in France, we very well knew how to run transport on electricity, compressed air, etc

Cover of Jarrige & Vrignon's "Face à la Puissance"

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 5

The reason why I won't shut up about it is that this specific approach to politics is turbo-loaded with a reactionary view of the world. A little game: read the article above and count all of Eco's criterion to fascism which apply directly, and all that apply in an inverted but recognizable manner

into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 3

Is u ?

A man standing on a beach playfully squeezes sunscreen from a bottle toward another shirtless person in the foreground. Wearing a gray T-shirt with a lollipop stick in his mouth, he grins with his eyes closed while holding the bottle aloft. Ocean waves roll in behind him under a pale sky, giving the scene a lighthearted, comedic feel.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 2

It is wild that during my father's lifetime, social democracy went from the statu quo to a fringe idea pushed by openly radical academics. Maybe that's bad?

Think of it this way. The climate crisis is 100% driven by the system of production. It is about who controls production and what they produce. People say climate is a complex problem and difficult to solve, but this is false. It is in fact extremely easy. We know exactly what we need to do, and we have more than enough capacity to do it. The problem is that we are subject to the capitalist law of value, and thus prevented from taking these obviously necessary steps.

So what is the antidote to capitalism? Economic democracy. With democratic control over our productive capacities we can stop climate breakdown in short order. We can overcome the capitalist law of value, and organize production around social and ecological objectives.

This can be achieved with straightforward policies. We need credit guidance to reduce investment in damaging industries. We need public finance, industrial policy, and nationalization of key industries to do necessary production regardless of profits. We need a public job guarantee and public works to remobilize our capacities around urgent objectives, prevent involuntary unemployment, and abolish economic insecurity. We need universal services to ensure everyone has access to the resources needed for a good life. And we need to democratize private firms — workplace democracy! — so businesses can focus on meeting social and ecological needs rather than on maximizing profits.

The good news is that these policies are highly popular, and can form the basis of a winning political platform. Democratic socialism, where we extend the principle of democracy into the realm of production, is a viable path — indeed the only path — to a safe and just future.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 1

All right, copy-pasting babies won't be my only focus in the presentation. Still.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jul 1

Tomorrow at the FOCSY symposium, I'll answer the millenium-old question of why you shouldn't try to copy-past babies. Tune in for more details!

A presentation slide titled "Autonomous and heteronomous systems." Two columns, each headed by a photo. Left column: a smiling baby in a blue floral dress sitting on a blanket on grass with arms raised. Below it, three bullet points — "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO REBOOT OR COPY-PASTE," "Will open a door if left unattended for 3.7 seconds" and "Quite soft." Right column: a Dell desktop computer setup with two monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse. Below it, three bullet points — "Can reboot and be copy/pasted without loss," "May open a door within our lifetime with multi T$ R&D," and "Pretty hard." The joke contrasts a living organism (autonomous) with a computer (heteronomous), inverting the usual framing by presenting the baby as the more impressive but non-copyable system.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 28

Thank you, math guy talking about things that are beyond me, for pinning down my issue with "superintelligence". Humans and LLMs do fundamentally different things. "Which is better" is a meaningless question, much like comparing a hammer and the color red. davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-o...

AI systems and humans process mathematics in entirely different ways. The best models are insanely stronger on certain aspects, which necessarily implies that humans are still insanely stronger on others.

AI is at the same time superhuman and subhuman, depending on how you look at it.

This is a compliment to both AIs and humans. This plurality of aspects makes the whole “benchmarking” enterprise extremely fragile, if not ludicrous. There is a real possibility that AI will achieve problem-solving supremacy long before it achieves concept-building adequacy. What are we going to call that? “Superintelligence”? Seriously?

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 28

Oh btw, I wrote this on "laws of history" a while back, maybe this would be of interest @bretdevereaux.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/os...

We investigate here the scientific realism of cliodynamics, a novel research program in the social sciences which aims to investigate historical dynamics through dynamical systems and complex systems methodology. In particular, we introduce the argument that dynamical models of historical dynamics lack grounding, due to the fundamental role of contextuality in social and cultural change. This argument should cast doubt on the notion that cliodynamics’ capacity to explain or predict historical dynamics are in any meaningful way beyond those of established social scientific frameworks, although we do not find reason to invalidate cliodynamics as a research program. We propose an alternative framework for the naturalistic description of historical dynamics, and argue for the fundamental importance of critical realism about social scientific concepts.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 27

L’utilisation de ce modèle soulevait également des questions quant à la sécurité de certaines informations publiques sensibles. Sur ce point, Bercy assure qu’il fonctionnait « sans accès à Internet ni possibilité de porte dérobée, et donc sans transmission de données à l’extérieur ». Un modèle déconnecté du réseau Internet est indispensable pour éviter les risques de fuites, même si « on n’a pas encore complètement les possibilités d’analyser la sécurité de l’ensemble des modèles », note Annabelle Blangero.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 26

Someone you know

I walked into the room. I saw the whiteboard. I saw the markers. And then I placed my laptop on the table, opened a browser window to ChatGPT, and prepared to do what I do every single day in my actual scientific practice: type a prompt and receive a coherent, well-structured response that I would then lightly edit and present as my own thinking.

The room went silent.

“What are you doing?” asked the search committee chair.

“I’m preparing to answer your questions,” I said.

“With ChatGPT?”

“Yes,” I said. “How else would I do it?”

Apparently, “how else would I do it” is “from memory, using only my brain, like some kind of medieval peasant.” This was news to me.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 26

As compared to Dulles, an explicit Nazi sympathizer who organized the flight of German officials and looted treasure during WWII, Nixon was the dovest dove who ever doved

Seeking to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, Nixon ordered military operations and carpet bombing campaigns in Cambodia. He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 25

Not so fast! It also turns out that biological grounding / embedding is a fundamental aspect of intelligence We are free to define "intelligence" as we like, but at least it strongly suggest that quant comparison of human and machine is a category error

Cover of "The Embodied Mind", by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 25

Oops, turns out that human intelligence is largely embedded in linguistic skill rather than an innate, intrinsic property Does it mean that LLMs can be just as smart, maybe smarter than us?

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 25

Me: Mom can we have free energy? Mom: we already have free energy at home The free energy at home:

A detached brick house with a red-tiled roof covered in large blue solar panels under a bright, cloudless sky. Three white wind turbines stand behind the house, their blades extending above the roofline. Sunlight streams from the upper left, casting a warm glow across the scene. Shrubs and flowering bushes fill the foreground, emphasizing a residential setting that combines rooftop solar power with nearby wind energy generation.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 24

Diagramme en barres intitulé « Comparaison des décès : chaleur en Europe vs armes à feu aux États-Unis (2022–2023) », montrant des barres rouges (décès liés à la chaleur en Europe : 61 672 en 2022, 47 690 en 2023) systématiquement plus hautes que les barres bleues (décès liés aux armes à feu aux États-Unis : 48 204 en 2022, 46 728 en 2023). Note : la comparaison est méthodologiquement incohérente — les chiffres européens sont des estimations de surmortalité modélisée portant sur 35 pays (~540 M d'habitants), tandis que les chiffres américains sont des comptages directs issus des certificats de décès pour ~335 M d'habitants, rendant les deux séries non directement comparables.

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 24

Yeah

Same picture cropped around the kitten's face, looking absolutely done with this shit

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 22

Let them have growth

Cover of Carbon Democracy, by Thimothy Mitchell

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 22

What if managers and politicians can never be held accountable? What would be the logical conclusion?

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

Avel Guénin--Carlut@fluffycyborgii· Jun 22