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Transhumanism has long been pitched as 'the philosophy of the future,' with proponents wondering when they will get a chance to use radical technology directly upon themselves.

In my article, I propose that Virtual Reality will be where the rubber finally meets the road, and the challenges involved in delivering an ideal VR experience lead directly into body-modifying biotechnologies like BCI

arvrjourney.com/how-vr-could-b

This does seem like the kind of task that AI *should* be uniquely suited to, but the problem is that for that you need an extraordinary amount of data - the problem more or less needs to be solved already, which defeats the point. Once built though... parametric perturbation and coming up with good/bad values for each generated variation would let you make AI models that iteratively feel better than the human bootstrapped one

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Most VR input right now is, in the most complicated, a series of linear curve mappings. Pull the trigger inwards and the value goes from 0 to 1. Put a finger near the button and the glow does the same lerp, maybe with an easing curve. Connecting them together is the next step

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Thinking of multimodal VR input as a giant manifold the user's attention flows across where valleys smoothly embrace inputs as the benefit limit of one ends and the other begins. One could probably build this manually if they were obsessively single-minded enough.

Hello again friends! Sorry I've been away for so long. Does anyone have any interesting information about social systems design? To be more specific: how spaces influence group and individual behavior, and how rulesets, discovery, and user matching influence group behavior (like on social media sites)?

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Which brings me to a warning.

Tempting as it can be, under no circumstances should you use the instructions I’ve provided here to assemble your own personal arm of crows to carry out acts of unspeakable evil—or even to wage justified campaigns of retribution against your enemies.

Crows are wise birds, and they will catch own quickly. Once your crow army realizes that your seeming friendship is merely an instrumental ploy to harness their power to your own ends, may God help you—for I cannot.

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Modern computer users do not want to discover things, they want things to be obvious and to just work, because the child has been beaten out of them. If you design for these people in mind you are doing them a disservice by denying them the opportunity for adventure.

Trying to drop Disney IP into an AI art model to poison the data set and get IP lawyers into the fight is small potatoes

Some day an angry artist is going to find a way to get ITAR protected data into an art gen model and then shit is really gonna go down

One thing I find amusing is how the great defender of liberal democracy, Fukuyama, called transhumanism 'the world's most dangerous idea' despite the fact that, in its initial conditions at least, transhumanism imported so very heavily from liberal humanism. Given how near total pluralism flows from transhumanism, almost necessarily, it might be the most liberal idea in existence

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My new world "Morph your friends" has been published to #vrchat ! This world can manipulate every avatar's vertices, making everyone in the room chonky, wide, twisted, and much more! You can check it out here: vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId

One thing that really struck me while watching the monkeys use BCI in the neuralink presentation is that animal uplifting is going to be enabled _purely as a result_ of testing & development of this tech. Imagine being able to put a voice box on a crow or dolphin eventually

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I published a #VRChat world that got out of labs in a record time.. 3hrs!

A cozy bedroom in the retrowave style equipped for a classic homeworld, this was done in ~10hrs for a world Jam!

Featuring 800+ videos, fully controllable screen & projector, props, playlists & more!

"Retrowave Cove" is fully compatible for #Quest and made with #Blender & #Unity
[24mb] Enjoy ^^

Preview (slightly outdated): youtube.com/watch?v=yXAoX93kyJ
vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_d82

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Can we rename all speculative bubbles to stock overflow?

Thankful for all my internet friends
I hope it's nice and comfy inside the glowing rectangle

JCorvinus boosted

Optimist: The glass is ½ full.
Pessimist: The glass is ½ empty.
Excel: The glass is January 2nd.

anyways, as is glaringly obvious: all my homies are body freedom maxis

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I think there's a schism forming in transhumanism that, by 2030, will be obvious to everyone. It'll be similar to classic vs modern liberalism, with classic transhumanists being the grinder/diybio/body freedom maxis, and modern being the WEF/Davos/AI Safety types. They'll both agree that radical tech can improve the human condition, but the modern branch will be willing to embrace totalitarianism in order to (as they argue) prevent global catastrophe.

Anyways, go forth and abolish suffering it'll be fuckin lit

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2 reasons for this:
I know that the brain abhors a steady state, and 'keeping your finger on the button' will eventually result in downregulation
&
given the richness of everything I've experienced, in both sober and altered states, the idea of a 'single' pleasure state is just... completely wrong. There's 'firing on all cylinders' euphoria as well as 'melty warm blissful' euphoria at a very minimum

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To do some utilitarianism for a bit: there's this really common idea that you can't ever abolish suffering without losing something, but I think this is misguided. I feel there's a cluster of positive-valence states that are roughly equal in value that can be cycled through, some of which entail zen-flow productivity, & any superwellbeing maximizer will optimally explore this space without ever getting caught in the dreaded 'pleasure trap,' and without ever having to fall into negative states

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