Readit NewsThat's a weird thing to end on. Surely it's worth more than one sentence if you're serious about it? As it stands, it feels a bit like the fearmongering Big Tech CEOs use to drive up the AI stocks.
If AI is really that powerful and I should care about it, I'd rather hear about it without the scare tactics.
On one hand, as this explains, they've taken utopian ideas quite seriously and have always been great innovators in the sciences, the arts, and technology. First orbit, first person in space, designed the Tokamak, could easily have been first on the Moon if things had gone a little different, countless great artists and composers, etc.
On the other hand there seems to be a side of Russia that's cynical and nihilistic. There's a joke I heard once that goes something like "in America you die for freedom, in France you die for your country, in England you die for the Queen, and in Russia you die." Today you seem to have dominant thinkers in Russia like Aleksandr Dugin who believe only a tiny number of humans are worthy of agency and this is, with a lot of sophistry, romanticized. For a large number of Russians to swallow this implies to me a level of cynicism about the potential of the human condition.
Or maybe it's not a contradiction. Maybe the utopianism and innovativeness is a brave stand against the cynicism and totalitarian cults of misery-for-most.
The USA of course has its contradictions, like being simultaneously progressive and reactionary. It's a nation built on both slavery and liberation.
However, there's a sad fact about Dugin. He experienced a personal tragedy – his adult daughter was murdered, likely for political reasons. So, while I'm not a supporter of his ideas, I can never judge him for these ideas considering what he went through. Maybe advocating for these ideas is his way of surviving his tragedy.
(Stumbled upon the answer while formulating the question – no, being capable of doing anti-entropy self-maintenance work isn't AGI-complete because there's plenty of life that's perfectly capable of that without being generally intelligent.)
Advantages: - smaller (but still a macro-sized animal) - multiple surrogate options rather than just African Elephants - the ecosystem would be better with its capstone apex predator back - it only died out so recently that it has footage from zoos
Then, after the answer, I ask follow-up questions. I also try to check the answers against other sources, e.g. docs or Wikipedia in order to spot hallucinations.
There's a period of time between the nineties and mid 2000s when ubiquitous and fast internet access wasn't easily accessible, and so games like Myst and Riven had the space and time to be digested and savoured. Now it seems this just isn't feasible anymore. There are of course games in the same category, e.g. Outer Wilds and The Witness, but these have much more concessions to the internet age
FWIW it seems like it heavily depends on the agent + model you're using. I've had the most success with Claude Code (Sonnet), and only tried Opus 4.5 for more complex things. I've also tried Codex which didn't seem very good by comparison, plus a handful of other local models (Qwen3, GLM, Minimax, etc.) through OpenCode, Roo, and Cline that I'm able to run on my 128 GB M4 Max. The local ones can work for very simple agentic tasks, albeit quite slow.