Nico
@nico-encounter.bsky.social
Writer interested in theory of the state, political economy, AI and semiotics.
Substack: https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/
Substack: https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/
Gemini breaks down the average Pre-History of An Encounter enjoyer. Alarmingly realistic lmao.
November 21, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Gemini breaks down the average Pre-History of An Encounter enjoyer. Alarmingly realistic lmao.
People will say stuff like this on bluesky and still act like the only thing that can fix this is the Democratic party.
November 18, 2025 at 11:02 PM
People will say stuff like this on bluesky and still act like the only thing that can fix this is the Democratic party.
Quite the admission
November 18, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Quite the admission
Share of income isn't as important as price here as people get priced out of the market, the explosion in housing prices is 70% greater than general inflation since 2000. Its not like renters are doing great either at over 25% higher than inflation.
November 18, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Share of income isn't as important as price here as people get priced out of the market, the explosion in housing prices is 70% greater than general inflation since 2000. Its not like renters are doing great either at over 25% higher than inflation.
CSIS saying Russia may now have the edge in drone innovation
November 18, 2025 at 3:48 PM
CSIS saying Russia may now have the edge in drone innovation
I don't believe this argument holds up, we can very easily understand qualia as a physical process as I write here.
nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/materialis...
nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/materialis...
November 18, 2025 at 1:01 PM
I don't believe this argument holds up, we can very easily understand qualia as a physical process as I write here.
nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/materialis...
nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/materialis...
This mischaracterizes the UC study being cited, which, unlike the Eugene chatbot, the users weren't told of the persona, and which produced perfectly intelligible responses on a range of topics, it was not "the same old tricks".
November 18, 2025 at 12:21 PM
This mischaracterizes the UC study being cited, which, unlike the Eugene chatbot, the users weren't told of the persona, and which produced perfectly intelligible responses on a range of topics, it was not "the same old tricks".
It seems like Trump spoke to Epstein in 2016 and said something that disturbed him, difficult to find via just word searches because they called him mcgyver as a joke.
November 13, 2025 at 2:18 PM
It seems like Trump spoke to Epstein in 2016 and said something that disturbed him, difficult to find via just word searches because they called him mcgyver as a joke.
Still reading through that report but this is the first time I'm hearing of GPU backed loans and that shit is crazy. This could easily blow up.
November 13, 2025 at 1:21 AM
Still reading through that report but this is the first time I'm hearing of GPU backed loans and that shit is crazy. This could easily blow up.
November 11, 2025 at 1:51 AM
Reading through this now, I will say this point about no one predicting LLMs isn't /entirely/ true, just that the correct predictions were largely forgotten. Here's Umberto Eco describing how a machine fed a lot of artifacts of human culture could learn our "semantic field".
November 11, 2025 at 12:51 AM
Reading through this now, I will say this point about no one predicting LLMs isn't /entirely/ true, just that the correct predictions were largely forgotten. Here's Umberto Eco describing how a machine fed a lot of artifacts of human culture could learn our "semantic field".
Some more thoughts about this. Even with continuous training, an LLM based AI would always be equally good at mimicking the text of its conversation partner (as measured by training loss) as its own past outputs, before post training.
November 10, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Some more thoughts about this. Even with continuous training, an LLM based AI would always be equally good at mimicking the text of its conversation partner (as measured by training loss) as its own past outputs, before post training.
called this two years ago, feels like it could happen any day now. cosmonautmag.com/2023/05/arti...
November 8, 2025 at 1:14 AM
called this two years ago, feels like it could happen any day now. cosmonautmag.com/2023/05/arti...
Seems like the Ukrainians are basically encircled around Pokrovsk.
November 6, 2025 at 5:27 PM
Seems like the Ukrainians are basically encircled around Pokrovsk.
Seems possible we'll see another North Korean deployment to the Ukraine/Russia front lines
November 6, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Seems possible we'll see another North Korean deployment to the Ukraine/Russia front lines
Here's an interesting paradox, when looking at percentage change, investment is positively correlated with the rate of profit, but when looking at absolute levels, it's negatively correlated
November 5, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Here's an interesting paradox, when looking at percentage change, investment is positively correlated with the rate of profit, but when looking at absolute levels, it's negatively correlated
Writing this section in my book unlocked it for me, I think, if you'll excuse some of the clumsiness talking about logic gates. Once you understand neural nets as things that make signs, you can cleanly plug that into structural linguistics, psychoanalysis and even political/social theory.
November 5, 2025 at 3:37 AM
Writing this section in my book unlocked it for me, I think, if you'll excuse some of the clumsiness talking about logic gates. Once you understand neural nets as things that make signs, you can cleanly plug that into structural linguistics, psychoanalysis and even political/social theory.
More evidence AI psychosis is connected with the desire to be mad, which originally I hadn't expected.
October 29, 2025 at 1:00 AM
More evidence AI psychosis is connected with the desire to be mad, which originally I hadn't expected.
I guess the more interesting question is how we've seen this big rise in debt even as capitalist consumption has recovered and stabilized. It's only really possible because the decline in investment rates has overcome the rise in govt deficits.
October 22, 2025 at 1:16 AM
I guess the more interesting question is how we've seen this big rise in debt even as capitalist consumption has recovered and stabilized. It's only really possible because the decline in investment rates has overcome the rise in govt deficits.
Very interesting relationship I found between debt and capitalist consumption
October 22, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Very interesting relationship I found between debt and capitalist consumption