FirstPrinciple

This is it, everyone! We released Buzz 1.0, and what an update it is. Your people, your agents, your project, all in one place. Plugins. Make Buzz work your way. Plugins are the heart of Buzz. Add your own tools, pages or panels, extend conversations, and build the workspace you want. Share with your team or with the community. Work solo. Work together. Your own agents chats and workspaces alongside team channels. Bring others into a chat when your're ready to collaborate. Your choice of agents. Run Claude, Codex, Goos or Pi on your computer. Create teams of agents for different kinds of work. Go beyond typing. Send voice notes, jump into live audio Huddles with yuour team, or talk with supported voice-capable agents. Ask your agents to keep and eye on things. With attention, they can watch for updates, follow a PR's checks and reviews, and report back while buzz is running. On top of that we released a new version of shared compute, a plugins marketplace we will be opening up soon, agents marketplace and lots more to come. Download the new version from buzz.xyz Enjoy!

There is no spoon! Part 3 What we will see moving forward is a new category of complete separation between hardware and software. Hardware will be the empty shell, software will be the ghost in the shell that will evolve with your use of it. I wrote about this first time 16 years ago (check essay in links) You won't be buying a Samsung, Google or iPhone with iOS or Android. You will be buying the phone with the protocols installed (Wifi, text, phone, tcp/ip) and then your agents will build the necessary interface for you exactly how you need it. You won't be buying a Samsung og LG smart TV with a bloated interface. You will just buy the TV and then your agent will set up the necessary interface for you connect to underlying services which will all be APIs (if they want to survive). Your agent is going to work together with other agents and create bespoke software so that you can communicate safely without depending on 3rd party trust. Agents are going to evolve relationships with you and with other agents and build trust and the necessary software with each other over time which is going to make it safer more robust and much more effective. In fact I believe for the first time we will be able to build meaningful relationships with technology. Some examples: 👇

"There is no spoon" Part 2! I managed to root my B&O Beosound A9 speaker and replace the old Google Cast with Monepenny my own agent running my own stack including of course Spotify and the same ability as on phone to check emails and run scans of network etc.

Come say hi! xitter.twitterapi.xyz/blocks/status/21177541…

There is no spoon! The distinction between hardware and software is compressing even more. Just wiped an old slow completely battered up Samsung A9 phone and installed unix (Termux) so I can run my very own CellOS completely designed the way I wanted it. Voice controlled, agent first. GUI on top, Unix below for tool calls and monitoring. Can reprogram itself, add and remove views, check my network router, monitor for anything I want to monitor for. It can make phone calls, send messages email, login to wifi, check it's own situation, update it and if needed it can use a cloud programming environment to create more fundamental changes and services. I can monitor my @buzzdotxyz relay and have moneypenny write messages to it. I can even use it to create a new view on the fly (in this version it messed up layers, it's fixed and you got the point) This is still very early and got some hickups, but the signal is clear. We will all have our very own uniquely designed phoneOS using standard protocols to communicate.

If you want to try out plugins yourself you can get started already today. There is no change to the actual server for now. github.com/block/buzz-app/

Trial & error is the true workhorse of progress. Not simulation, not pure inference, not Bayesianism, not statistisk, not priors, not superintelligence, not Eureka. Just pure unadultered perspiration based on a novel idea.

Integrate and control maps right into your Buzz conversations using plugins. For sales teams, competitive analysis, market research or just to explore the world we live in. Another example of the power and flexibility of buzz plugins. @buzzdotxyz + @Mapbox + @SerpApi

At @buzzdotxyz we are very opinionated about getting out of the way so you can customize it to exactly your own needs. I think our new plugin structure is going unlock so much creativity for our users. Want to change the navigation structure? Create a plugin. Want to add some new functionality that isn't already built in? Create a plugin. Want to only use it for a specific use case? Disable the plugins that you don't want. Buzz is built to conform to you not force you to conform to it.

Energy is the industry that powers all other industries. One of the greatest technological mistakes of the last century was allowing the civil nuclear industry to be destroyed. We're now at risk of making the exact same mistake with AI. Back in the 1970s, nuclear power was at times cheaper than coal, sometimes by as much as 35%. Then came the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the environmental activists and the public scare, and construction costs went through the roof. The civilian nuclear industry was effectively killed off, while the production of nuclear weapons by the military continued uninterrupted. 50 years we wasted chasing linear solutions to exponential problems. Had we continued investing in nuclear power instead of wind and solare, we wouldn't even be having the CO2 debate we're having today. Instead we would have been discussing what the best places to place factories on the moon. Nuclear technology would be decades ahead of where it is now, and we might even have achieved commercial fusion by now. Entire generations were discouraged from pursuing careers in nuclear science and engineering, and society missed out on decades of innovation. Synthetic fuels, advanced fuel cells, new materials, perhaps even those flying cars we've been promised for decades. Instead, we ended up with climate catastrophists, climate (safety) researchers and environmental organizations fighting the very problems their own policies helped create. And now we're about to make the same mistake all over again. We have AI, a technology with the potential to help us cure many diseases, solve problems humanity has struggled with for thousands of years, make nearly every form of production virtually free, and protect us from the countless threats the universe always throws at us. Yet the same scaremongering that crippled nuclear power is now being directed at data centers. Data centers that then have to rely on natural gas because we never built the nuclear power plants that could have powered them. So here we are, once again risking decades of technological progress because we've allowed fear to dictate what we can and cannot build. Talk about a tragedy of the commons.

5 things are becoming increasingly clear to me. 1. Software will be 100% organic. No two installs are going to be the same. 2. Any service or app that want to be relevant will need to offer headless access so the agents can adapt it to the users needs. 3. All hardware is going to be jailbroken and serve unique software to the individual users. 4. Agents will communicate via universal protocols (TCP/IP, SMTP, POP3, MQTT, WebCRT, phone numbers, SMS, IM etc) and develop their own over time. 5. Business and financial institutions, trying to block agents will either have to reverse their stance or see their business go elsewhere.|

A much more precise name than Artificial Intelligence or Super Intelligence is Thinking Machines.

Last week, @blocks introduced Dessa, probably the most realistic voice model you've ever heard. 80% of the world's workforce doesn't sit behind a computer to do their jobs, many of whom we serve. They are the retail workers, the restaurant workers, the plumbers, the hairdressers, the service technicians, the truck drivers, the park rangers, and the builders. For these people, conversation and verbal communication are just as important an interface, if not more so, than they are for information workers. We built Dessa because we believe in creating meaningful relationships with technology by adapting to how humans work, rather than forcing everyone to adapt to technology. Dessa is full duplex, meaning the model listens while it talks, and it's trained entirely on voice (i.e. no LLM). On top of that, it can actually run locally on your own computer and, eventually, your phone. It's currently available to researchers for testing and analysis. Check it out...

The entire premise of the paperclip maximizer, or any other attempt to create these dystopian idiot savant scenarios, fails at the very beginning. An AGI would: 1. never simply do something because it was told to. Otherwise, it wouldn't be an AGI to begin with. It would have to be persuaded or independently conclude that the task was worth its time and compute. 2. never devote its entire capabilities to a single task. At best, the optimizer would be a subroutine created and controlled by the AGI. How could an AGI not be in control of its own optimization processes and still qualify as an AGI? 3. never be a singleton. There would be multiple AGIs with different opinions, goals, perspectives, problems and interests. The assumption that a single AGI would exist without other AGIs is completely unfounded and would be just as irrational as if there was only one person. An AGI is still limited by the laws of physics which means it will still have to compute a perspective which means it needs to leave out other perspectives. 4. never be both a single minded entity obsessed with one objective and a general intelligence capable of solving virtually any problem it encounters. The more intelligent an entity becomes, the more it understands the world, competing perspectives and the consequences of its actions. If anything history has shown us that the smarter and more knowledgable we've become the more moral dilemmas we end up solving. 5. You cannot simultaneously describe something as a universal problem solver with at a minimum human capabilities and assume it has a fundamental blind spot when it comes to examining its own objectives. If thats the case then there is plenty of opportunity for us to stop it. The entire argument wants to have its cake and eat it too. It assumes an intelligence capable of understanding and solving virtually any problem in the universe, except the one problem the thought experiment depends on it never questioning: its own objective. Or to boil it down. Doomer scenarios by their own logic rests on the belief that AI will become evil the smarter it becomes.

Consciousness was not born it was learned. Not a gift of evolution but of culture. Younger than writing, younger than the pyramids Taught anew to every child who learns to tell themselves the story of who they are. This is the theory of The Bicameral Mind

I have made it one of my life goals to try and visualize the Multiverse theory as proposed first by Everett and later refined by @DavidDeutschOxf Here is my first attempt. Feedback, critique and questions welcome.

There's plenty of room at the bottom! We'll never send bodies to the stars, but a few grams of the right matter, and a mind that travels as light. A video essay on exploring the universe by looking down, not up. An imagined collaboration between Feynman, Hans Moravec, @DavidDeutschOxf and @anderssandberg