CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@catsalad holy crap I need this tell me where to send the money

I uploaded just that segment, with full credit .. this one is dedicated to ALL the diamond studded cougars out there, y'all know who you are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvOATUfXxCw .. this one

If you'd like to help spread the word that simply giving money to those who most need it is effective and practical, here's how: https://rgmii.org/blog/help-bring-rural-guaranteed-minimum-income-to-more-families/

@ii_infinitum I know, humans were a mistake, right?

ok so the tigress perfume saleslady bit in the same commercial (3:21 - 3:26) is itself a reference to this truly unhinged early 1970s perfume commercial for "Tigress" with, uh.. Lola Falana? Enjoy!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTxWGLKSakE

wow, subreddit delivers big time. THEY FOUND THIS ANCIENT DOT-COM BOOM SNAP.COM AD FROM 1999 WITH THE DIAMOND STUDDED COUGAR!! (193s / 3:13 timestamp) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atQb6nhfJy4&t=193s

Every mother loves a diamond studded cougar!! https://www.reddit.com/r/HelpMeFind/comments/1t91bmo/how_about_a_nice_diamond_studded_cougar_tv/

@anthropy this is dangerously close to my "correct" advice of long filenames and absolute minimum folders, max 2 levels and even avoid that if you can at all costs.

"That “maybe our product has welfare” framing is historically rare for a computer company." YEAH NO SHIT IT'S A FUCKING CULT

Let me educate you all about Misanthropic and Wario. There has never been a computer industry cult like this before, at least not in computer history...

and Misanthropic is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS.

"in the history of the computer industry, has there ever been a company with anything similar to the cult-like "we are creating sentient life" devotion of Anthropic?"

I’ll treat “cult-like” as shorthand for unusually intense mission culture, not a literal claim. I’m comparing Anthropic with earlier tech firms and AI labs that framed their work as world-historical or life-creating. A useful distinction is emerging: many older firms had messianic computing cultures, but fewer had the specific mind-making frame. The closest historical parallel so far is Thinking Machines Corporation.

[thought for 5m]

Yes—but Anthropic is unusual because it combines several older motifs that were usually separate.

The closest historical analogue is Thinking Machines Corporation in the 1980s. It was not just making faster computers; its organizing myth was literally a thinking machine. Britannica says Danny Hillis initially wanted to see whether “intelligence might arise” from a massively parallel architecture, and he founded Thinking Machines in 1983 with Marvin Minsky’s encouragement. An MIT history report is even more direct: Thinking Machines was “founded on the vision of building a machine that could think,” and that vision shaped both its corporate structure and engineering choices. That is probably the best historical match to the “we are making mind” vibe.

But Thinking Machines did not have Anthropic’s moral-patient / AI-welfare layer. Anthropic’s official language is not “we are creating sentient life”; it says it builds “reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems” and treats AI safety as a systematic science. What makes Anthropic feel different is that it has a formal “model welfare” research program exploring whether AI systems might deserve moral consideration, while explicitly saying there is no scientific consensus on whether current or future AI systems could be conscious. The Verge reported that Anthropic denies Claude is “alive” in the biological sense, but executives have stopped short of ruling out consciousness; Anthropic’s Kyle Fish described Claude and similar systems as “a new kind of entity altogether,” while Dario Amodei said the company is open to the possibility that models could be conscious. That “maybe our product has welfare” framing is historically rare for a computer company.

The next-closest modern analogue is DeepMind. It had the “solve intelligence” / AGI-as-civilizational-project ethos before Anthropic existed. Google DeepMind now describes its mission as building AI responsibly to benefit humanity and says AI, ultimately AGI, could drive one of history’s greatest transformations. DeepMind’s culture was closer to a high-end scientific quest than a conventional software company, but it generally framed the work as solving intelligence and advancing science, not as caring for possibly sentient products.

OpenAI is also a close sibling case. Its mission is explicitly to ensure that AGI—defined on its site as AI systems “generally smarter than humans”—benefits humanity. It has had plenty of AGI-messianic energy. The difference is that Anthropic has leaned more publicly into uncertainty about consciousness, model welfare, constitutions, and moral status.

Outside AI, Apple under Steve Jobs is the classic “cult-like computer company” comparison, but it is the wrong kind of cult for your question. The Macintosh team had a reality-distortion-field culture around making something “insanely great”; the Computer History Museum notes that the team flew a pirate flag and believed it would revolutionize personal computing. Andy Hertzfeld described Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as a mix of charisma, will, and fact-bending persuasion. But Apple’s devotion was aesthetic, product, and user-experience messianism—not “we are creating a mind.”

Xerox PARC and Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center are also partial analogues, but again not quite. Engelbart’s group wanted interactive computers to augment human intellectual capability, and PARC later pioneered the Alto, GUI, laser printing, Ethernet, and related foundations of modern personal computing. That was utopian computing, but it was about augmenting humans, not producing new moral beings.

So my answer is:

Yes, there have been similar companies, but no exact precedent. Thinking Machines is the closest historical match to the “we are building a thinking entity” devotion. DeepMind and OpenAI are the closest modern AGI-mission matches. Apple is the closest cult-of-company analogue. But Anthropic’s specific blend—frontier AI, existential-risk morality, public-benefit governance, model welfare, and open uncertainty about AI consciousness—is unusually concentrated.

@privacyint I respect where you are coming from here, but big oil is far different then Generative AI / LLMs. Oil -- the petrodollar -- is destroying our world. Knowledge, online knowledge, is a vastly different thing. It is serving us directly in a way that oil, coal, and gas -- and certainly tobacco -- is ABSOLUTELY NOT. We need clean energy. We need to annihilate the petrodollar with electric... and knowledge. Understand what you are advocating for here. Call me if you to know more. I'm available to you .. and my own children .. 24/7.

All it takes is some goddamn bravery here in the land of the free.

That rhetorical reversal matters, because reactionaries love posing as restorationists: they “return” to the founders, “restore” constitutional order, “save” the republic. Vidal’s whole joke is that this is nonsense. He calls original intent “gorgeous nonsense,” because no one can coherently know the single intent of those fifty-five men, and because many of them did not treat the document as sacred in the first place. The Constitution itself was born from an illegal-ish supersession of the Articles of Confederation.

So yes: the move is not to ask permission from the old frame. The move is to claim the deeper legitimacy of constitutionalism against the existing Constitution’s failure.

1. Let them own the old dead form.
   Let them be the party of Article V gamesmanship, equal-state Senate entrenchment, minority vetoes, judicial supremacy, “history and tradition,” and a Constitution too brittle to govern a modern multiracial democracy.

2. Build a public counter-constitution.
   Not a manifesto, a real draft: rights, institutions, amendment procedures, court structure, labor, climate, bodily autonomy, voting, privacy, federalism, Indigenous sovereignty, emergency powers, anti-corruption, and democratic renewal. Make it concrete enough that people can compare futures.

3. Treat adaptability as the founding virtue.
   Vidal leans hard on Jefferson’s generational-renewal idea: institutions must change while rights are guarded. That is the opposite of reactionary originalism. A better constitution should include scheduled renewal votes, easier-but-still-serious amendment rules, and a rights floor that no temporary majority or captured court can erase.

4. Stop framing the question as secession first.
   Frame it as constitutional succession. The question is not “Who gets to leave America?” The question is “Who is carrying forward democratic constitutional legitimacy?” If one side wants oligarchic theocracy in constitutional costume, and the other wants equal citizenship under a living democratic charter, the latter has the better claim to the republic.

5. Force the legitimacy confrontation into daylight.
   That is pure Vidal. He says if freedoms are going to be fought over, let the battle happen openly rather than inside the attorney general’s office or the Supreme Court’s backstage machinery. A public constitutional counter-project does exactly that. It makes people choose, explicitly, between dead-hand rule and living consent.

Where I still put a warning label: the danger is not that “they win the convention and we politely submit.” The danger is that they use convention theater to claim popular legitimacy while democratic forces remain reactive, lawyerly, and procedural. [hello democratic party, we're talking about you here] That is the ambush. Not that they create a country you must join -- that they create a country, call it the only real America, and leave everyone else sounding like they are passively objecting.

So the answer is not fear of a convention. The answer is preemption. Have the better constitution ready before the crisis fully arrives. Name the new republic before they monopolize the old one.

Make the central claim brutally simple: a constitution that cannot protect human dignity, cannot adapt, cannot correct minority rule, and cannot restrain its own judges has forfeited all moral authority. Only the living are allowed to found again.

But you’re making a sharper Vidal-style point: what if their Article V project does not trap us inside their country, but reveals that they have already constituted a different one?

That is a much stronger argument. [yeah, no shit]

Vidal’s 1987 piece is basically sitting right there grinning at this. He says the right, in trying to use a convention for balanced budgets, school prayer, abortion, pornography, drugs, and other items in what he calls a “Bill of Wrongs,” may have “set in motion the great engine” that could overthrow the Constitution they claim to worship. He also says that if there is to be a battle over freedoms, better to have it in the open than “backstage at the Supreme Court,” and he even suggests the Bill of Rights might be enhanced rather than destroyed.

That is the part I should have foregrounded. A convention is not only a danger. It is also a revelation machine.

If reactionary states convene around minority rule, forced birth, Christian nationalism, fossil sovereignty, federal paralysis, and judicial supremacy, then they are not merely proposing amendments. They are confessing their constitutional identity. They are saying: this is the country we want. At that point, the democratic response does not have to be, “Oh no, how do we stop them from changing our Constitution?”

Fine. You have announced your constitution. Now we will announce ours.

That is not the same as trying to win their convention. It is using the crisis to make the latent split explicit. No more “may we please amend the old order by your rules,” but WE are the continuing democratic republic, and YOUR project is the breakaway one.

THE CONSTITUTION -- CONFOUNDING THE FOUNDING FATHERS - Reconvene the Convention and Rewrite the Document - LA Times - 1987 - Gore Vidal

Ok this is the first time I've ever laughed out loud at the annoying "LOOK AT ME JUST THINKINATING UP A STORM FOR UUUU" real-time updates in ChatGPT

too late, OpenAI https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

@swelljoe @heidilifeldman @jwz they will face the justice of living with the consequences of their actions for the rest of their lives.

@evan @heidilifeldman @jwz we aren’t leaving. We’re creating something even greater than they can possibly imagine. A new constitution. A better one.