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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   1750 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 28, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm 4 episodes into Pantheon, and I think it's really good. It's not a real spoiler to say that it's about a girl whose dad (a programmer) died of a terminal illness a few years back, but it turns out that his 'failed' mind upload did in fact work.

What I found particularly hilarious was the clear Ambani-analogue in the form of a particularly unscrupulous telecom billionaire from India who owns a massive personal skyscraper with a helipad next to slums in Mumbai. Yeah, there are so many people who fit that description. I'm surprised he didn't get it banned outright in India, given how many distribution channels the real Reliance owns.

That being said, it's obvious that this was a product of a pre-GPT age. We've made minimal progress in mind uploading any organism, even nematodes. We've got connectomes, but that's like having an LLM with parameters but no weights. It seems clear to me that it'll be entirely artificial AGI unlocking human mind uploads, and not the other way around. Still a good watch, and I've only heard good things about the second season.

Pantheon is the rare show that is actually smart, not Hollywood smart - where clever people are not wizards but merely people with a greater degree of intelligence than the average bear. This extends to the uploaded intelligences as well - they are powerful, but still bound by hard limits like computational bandwidth.

One thing I love the show for most is that it asks the hard questions. Where as most shows would stop short of depicting or even discussing the implications of such a technology, Pantheon lets it play out, to the hilt. It's concerned with big ideas and real questions, and how the characters, companies and governments respond and react to that technology. Of course it got crickets.

I'm glad we got an ending, at least.

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