Kurt Gödel, an Austrian logician working in 1931, proved something that broke mathematics. He showed that any formal system powerful enough to describe arithmetic contains statements that are true but cannot be proven inside that system. Mathematics, the most certain thing humans had ever built, has holes in it that can never be filled. Hofstadter spends hundreds of pages making you understand this proof not just as a mathematical theorem, but as a structural fact about every sufficiently complex system. Including the brain. Including any AI. The reason AI alignment is genuinely hard is not just engineering. It is structural. Any system smart enough to model itself will contain truths about itself it cannot reach from inside itself. Hofstadter showed this 50 years before AI safety was a field. The second thing the book does is introduce his core idea. He calls it the strange loop. A strange loop is what happens when a system, by climbing through layers of itself, somehow ends up back where it started. Escher's drawings of staircases that always go up but somehow loop back are visual strange loops. Bach's musical canons that modulate up through keys and end on the original note are auditory strange loops. Gödel's self-referential statements that talk about themselves are logical strange loops. Hofstadter argues that consciousness is a strange loop. *Your brain builds a model of the world. Inside that model, it builds a model of itself perceiving the world. Inside that self-model, it builds a model of itself thinking about itself perceiving the world. The recursion does not bottom out. The self is what the loop feels like from the inside.* This is the part that AI researchers cannot stop returning to. Modern transformer models use self-attention, which is technically a mechanism where a network attends to its own internal states across layers. Recursive reasoning, where a model thinks about its own thinking, is now a research area with its own conferences. Meta-learning, where models learn how to learn, is a direct descendant of what Hofstadter described in 1979 as the necessary structure of any conscious system. He wrote the philosophy. The engineers are now building the implementation. https://twitter.com/ihtesham2005/status/2051296304740069635

That’s not my question. I’m asking why you are using the phrase. Perhaps you don’t know what it refers to and you think it’s a clever turn of phrase? Or you know exactly what it means… and I’m asking you why you chose to say it and how it could possibly be relevant.

Oh holy fuck, and here we get the overlap of Jew hatred with Flat Earther, which just a *chef’s kiss* example of brain worms dying of starvation. In case you needed to remove any doubt…

“grift shekels” Are you serious with this??

Is Lea on Nostr?

Art critics… pfft. Is there a job that adds less to society? I don’t think so. Consider that, unlike *artists*, who earn notoriety (and money) for producing creative work that expresses something universal, or something personal, in a novel way, art *critics* literally only get famous for writing something nasty. No one pays attention to an art critic who writes POSITIVE things about a famous artist. Art critics are there parasitic high school mean girls of the art world. Starved for attention. Fed by jealous feelings for the success of others and sustaining their careers solely by attempting to “take them down a peg.” It’s a pathetic career choice for a failed artist. Now, with that out of the way. That critic’s quote you pasted above has *some* merit against Banksy, as does yours. To your point, he seems to be generating the same message rather than pushing the envelope. Yet, why was it (y)our expectation that he “grow” as an artist? Perhaps he found his niche and feels the most important thing he can say, repeatedly, as you said is “Governments are bad. War is bad. Following other people blindly is bad.” You wish he took more risks as an artist the way he used to when you were 14 but, my point is, perhaps he is. Perhaps it’s not laziness that keeps him repeating himself. Perhaps it’s society’s persistent ignorance and the risk *he’s* taking is the same. As for criticizing his commercial success, I dunno. That’s a bit like being unhappy that other people like your favorite local band. You liked them years ago, and then they got big, and now their 3rd album “sucks” because it sounds like the first, and you wish they’d branch out and take more risks, and are unhappy that floor seats at their sold out stadium show cost 5x a fancy dinner in the city. Right? Personally, I think Banksy is laughing at Sotheby’s and its ilk. Laughing all the way to the bank. Let him continue to poke his finger in the eyes of the establishment. If that’s an easy message to understand, all the better. When it becomes a BORING message for people to understand, he will become less commercially successful. But, you know, I think that once “war is bad” or “following other people blindly is bad” becomes boring a message, that would be the most positive outcome for both him and the world, actually.

Congrats and all of us who benefit from this material. https://bitbo.io/news/bitcoin-fud-fighting-ai-database/

Consider yourself fortunate to understand the message at an early age. Some (most?) people don’t, and others not until later (or maybe never). Remember, too, that, just because *you* were exposed to his art and understood its message when you were 14, there are 14 year olds TODAY who aren’t familiar with Banksy’s back-catalogue. So this piece and its message are new *to them*.

#FreeSamourai

Never attribute malice to that which can be explained by incompetence. Mais parfois, c’est les deux.

There are two types of people in this world: those who think they can, those who think they can’t. …and they’re both right.