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Nico

@nico-encounter.bsky.social
1K followers 959 following 6.2K posts

Writer interested in theory of the state, political economy, AI and semiotics. Substack: nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com

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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Deleuze and Guattari were absolutely talking out of their ass when they cited this guy. Absolutely incredible the amount of bullshit they got away with.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHhGa3...
lesswrong.com
A critical look at Lean4 — LessWrong
Lots of the discussion around Lean certificates and trust centers around general philosophical ideas of how much humans should trust formal certifica…
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
I disagree, when we understand both humans and AI as systems of signs or semantic fields there are objective comparisons we can make. I strongly believe fully fledged continual learning with the existing LLM framework would necessarily be conscious.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Just saw a local, live performance of man of la mancha. So beautiful, what an incredible story and performance.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Interesting slowdown in AI debt issuance
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
archive.is/blyJ4
archive.is
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Good to know
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Reposted by Nico
Grace @gracekind.net · 09/10/2026
Everything is computer, except computer, which is power
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Now reading
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
if anyone good at math and logic wants to help with this please let me know.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Other things that come out of this, the "arbitrariness" of the linguistic sign is necessarily a diachronic rather than synchronic phenomena requiring unlimited semiosis, also, a clarification on what exactly it means to go from signal to sign, ie need to do more than just repeat.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I believe with the help of claude opus I've formalized a proof that the linguistic sign is structurally equivalent to non-trivial perceptron architectures, but man is this going to take a lot of work to turn into a readable thing.
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Grace @gracekind.net · 07/10/2026
Expect to see a lot more things like this
Hacker news comment: 

jboggan 12 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [-] I went back to that Fable chat and showed it this new preprint. It coded up the new constructive algorithm and ran it against the existing test suite, that looks good at least.
It has been super helpful in delineating where the crucial concept came from. The proof is rather simple as graph theory proofs go, but it does seem to use some constructions that would only seem obvious if you had serious physics experience with partition function and calculating energy states that cancel out. *It's not a wholly alien bolt from the heavens, but I can also see how there hasn't been a human being with the broad theoretical physics knowledge combined with the deep graph theory experience in planar graphs to come up with this idea.* (emphasis mine) I don't know, I'm looking for precedents of this formulation and some old papers of Penrose counting the number of edge colorings of this same graph type are coming up, the line of argument at least rhymes.
But I agree with the thought that this sort of progress should not be siloed inside those companies. I propose a tax so that every slop cannon AI video pays for another hour of compute time for advancing mathematics.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MZq...
youtube.com
Reading the Pharaoh's private mail with Irving Finkel | The Amarna Letters | Curator's Corner Ep100
YouTube video by The British Museum
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Depending on how the economics of hardware development, we may very well see wetware computers implementing human level artificial intelligence in universal robots.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
my copy is so beat to hell from reading it like a dozen times over as a kid, it was a big inspiration for my first novel and Funke is still one of my favorite authors.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Books that cut to my core.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
imagine how miserable a world without root vegetables would be, no potatoes, onions or carrots.
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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 04/10/2026
A spiralling legal crisis threatens to engulf OpenAI after its AI agents hacked dozens of companies and governments worldwide, with the prospect of a barrage of lawsuits marking the latest test of Sam Altman’s leadership. ft.trib.al/Tmi8iMR
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
To be clear, this was not a self aware choice on his part, but an error resulting from applying particular ideas inappropriately.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is true, but I do think he's somewhat unique in applying Bayesianism this hard in an ostensibly materialist framework, in that way its illuminating to see where exactly it diverges from reality.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
In a way that is more subtle than what's normally meant by that
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This comes from his directly referential theory of goals, which interferes in his epistemology by deciding "what's really real" in advance.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The problem with Yud's epistemology is not any lack of empiricism or the scientific method, its that he conflates knowledge of a real object with the object itself, to use the language of spinoza and althusser.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
youtu.be/dZTtQuLGO4c?...
youtu.be
Hearts of Oak
YouTube video by Ted Leo - Topic
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Had a dream that my book A Soul of a New Type was really taking off among highschoolers who said it really changed their perspective and liked the prose. As lame as that is it felt really nice to get some recognition from the yutes.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I have certainty machines could be conscious.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
One thing that's not very well understood about why socialism is necessary is that its not just about externalities, its about the motor of the capitalist economy, profit generating competition. This doesn't work as profit rates fall, you need to separate competition from profit.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Stochastic parrot as a term actually tells you very little about what a normal LLM does, as it implies that there is some context-free random distribution which determines outputs. What makes LLMs interesting is precisely how the context shapes the outputs.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Not a great headline to see
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I think his earlier thesis is the more correct one.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
No I hadn't, thanks for sharing.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Huh?
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Bunnies I saw on my walk yesterday
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I wanted to updated my evidence for Lacan's claim that "the unconscious is structured like a language" and found a 2025 study which shows pretty definitively that semantic processing in the brain has the same structure as LLMs. arxiv.org/html/2508.11...
arxiv.org
Language models align with brain regions that represent concepts across modalities
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A new middle east is already here
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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 29/09/2026
Anthropic releases a detailed research advertisement for GLM-5.3 as an alternative to Fable in cybersecurity www.anthropic.com/research/glm...
anthropic.com
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities
GLM-5.3 can autonomously build end-to-end cyber exploits, but unlike other frontier models, it was released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Quite interesting study which shows you can reconstruct the semantics of experiences while totally bypassing what's known as the "language centers" of the brain using an LLM trained on brain scans. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Mind captioning: Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity
Nonverbal thoughts can be translated into verbal descriptions by aligning semantic representations between text and the brain.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Seems that continual training is becoming feasible for small models.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
being a digimon kid prepared me for all this
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Grace @gracekind.net · 27/09/2026
QC: one of the worst things twitter can do to you is show you a bunch of incredibly bad
arguments against your beliefs
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The claims I'm making are about human conscious experience, and only rely on Occam's razor, to say that we should expect that systems that resemble the objective structure of subjectivity should have the same effect.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I don't think you would
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I have strong evidence for my hypothesis, which is more than these academic philosophers muster up when dismissing the problem wholesale.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The circle exists as a signifier, it's materiality is therefore negative, and dependent on systems which can recognize that the stone circle is not a stone square or triangle, etc. Such as a human brain or a perceptron.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I'll describe this more in an upcoming essay, but essentially any system which converts raw signals into a system of signs. Which exists in most organisms and in artificial neural networks, among other digital systems.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
well, not quite what he dreamed of considering the history of miri's failed projects and what he thought AI would look like.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Mostly in the body, and in the brain in particular.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The same instruments which would show you to be alive and thinking in ordinary medical diagnostics. My innovation is not in finding new evidence, it's showing that units of subjective meaning have a particular structure which can be analyzed objectively, accomplished via the linguistic sign.
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Nico @nico-encounter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The soul is made out of ordinary matter, as has been affirmed by materialists since antiquity.
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