- A provocative blog post proposing to clone John von Neumann one million times as a cheaper and more reliable route to super-intelligence than training AGI, estimating the total cost at ~$200 B—less than half the F-35 program—and suggesting similar cloning of other elite scientists while explicitly excluding bioethicists.  
- Discussion of long-termist funding principles from the FTX Future Fund, whose explicit criterion is “How will this project improve humanity’s odds of surviving and flourishing for thousands of years or longer?”  
- Debate on whether existential-risk reduction is a productive endeavor: one participant argues that anyone capable of reducing x-risk could just as easily increase it, and calls for a non-altruistic, positive vision of the future; others counter that most x-risks (plague, asteroids, nuclear war, climate change) are not “inarguably omnipotent.”  
- Critique of current AI approaches: lkcl claims mainstream ANNs ignore key neural capabilities—such as single-shot learning, XOR logic, temporal integration/differentiation, and long-range dendritic connections—and points to Wai Tsang’s work and Intel’s neuromorphic “Loihi” chip as steps toward more biologically faithful computation.  
- Shared resources: kanzure’s public library of AI/ML papers at https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/machine-learning/ and a 2016 NeurIPS one-shot learning paper (Vinyals et al.) offered as entry points for deeper study.  
- Brief mentions of open-source brain-simulation efforts (OpenWorm, Nemaload) and a biorxiv preprint on how thalamic relays could enable supervised deep training and symbolic computation in the brain.  
- A short story on artificial wombs circulated for comment, plus links to mundane-but-optimistic takes on progress driven by incremental tech and education rather than singular breakthroughs.