He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.
Mind you even more amazing I was on youtube yesterday and a short film showing the first chapter of the brand new book (published really recently) that I was reading popped up.
Now I see that there is not only that film (in the DUST series) but also a miniseries someone has made...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=antimemetics+di...
The idea that vampires needed to take “anti-Euclideans” and the way the ship was constructed to avoid generating right angles were some great details.
Over a couple of years a few re-reads, though, I've come to enjoy it perhaps even more that Blindsight, but in a completely different way. It fills out a lot of the posits opened in the first novel, without coming to specific conclusions, but it gives you a lot to think about.
I also really, really recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It's about the crew on an starship trying to stop the rogue (sort of) AI that runs everything, the twist being that the crew is constantly under surveillance and must periodically hibernate in shifts for months or years at a time. It's a novella plus a handful of short stories set before and after the novel (all available for free on Peter Watts' website). Be warned, it's one bleak, dark universe.
Also, don't miss out on "The Colonel" (also on his website), a standalone short story that also happens to be a direct sequel to Blindsight.
That's my current AI detector smell.
> He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.” A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
I don't think it's the media (clearly the younger generations are media friendly), it's probably pressure from the older vamps.
First, the structure of this satirical post is headings and bullet points. Fine, whatever, a lot of people write this way.
Then there's the exhausting litany of super short sentence fragments.
> He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.
This is how airport novels and LinkedIn "thought leadership" clickbait is written, so ok, fine, I'll let it pass.
Then I started to notice a lot of: "It's not X. It's Y" or "this isn't just A. It's B."
> Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
Before LLMs, people weren't writing this way. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon: it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.
When several of these smells pile up, I close the tab immediately and try to forget about it. This one was so egregious that I had to read the whole thing and then come to the comments to rant a bit.
It's not ELI5. It's ELY5.
But hey, maybe someone can get an AI to read it.
NO CARRIER
also this, having done a number of ai conspiracy for funsies, that's always the mid point
however I don't mind ai slop, if it's creative and well thought out (and editorialized, as this seem to be)
Well, hello there!
Has anyone tried garlic on him?
> Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it.
I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
Various other mechanisms can improve how effective your body is at recycling cells, encouraging autophagy and filtering things in the blood. There are a whole suite of various supplements and medicines that work in this system.
As undead, though, vampires no longer produce new living blood, so require fresh blood of the living to restore lost function. Or something.
I guess that'd make Bryan Johnson the ultimate thrall?
20170113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395478 Questionable “Young Blood” Transfusions Offered in U.S. As Anti-Aging Remedy
20170421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14163395#14164470 Mice treated with a protein from umbilical cord plasma showed improved memory
20170521 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBA0AH-LSbo Silicon Valley S04E05 The Blood Boy
20170602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470314 An anti-ageing startup is offering transfusions of blood from young people
20170825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15102304 Some wealthy people are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’
20180120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194413 Clinical trial finds blood-plasma infusions for Alzheimer’s safe, promising
20180907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929462 Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth
20190117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18929943 Blood transfusion startup Ambrosia is now up and running
20190221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19213938 FDA warning brings young-blood transfusion company to a halt
20191108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484203 Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business (0 comments)
20230817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37163684#37164170 Older mouse brains rejuvenated by protein found in young blood
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
Can you recall well what you did ten years ago to the day? How much is a vampire is going to accurately recall from a hundred years ago?
At best, the vampire has bragging rights like "I hung out with Gandhi."
We'd need some evidence the vampire has super-recall AND is somehow trustworthy enough to not change the story depending on motivations of the day.
Or indeed daylight
I was going to suggest some other vampire remedies, but I was worried Palantir will scan this and tell ICE.
"Garlic"
Plenty show vampires being sophisticated among themselves as well.
Highly recommend reading/watching Interview With The Vampire. The recent TV show was excellent.
A parasite has a long-term abusive relationship with the organism they feed from, much like Thiel. Vampires don't.
Please stop with the anti-vampire propaganda.
Are all vampires sociopaths or just some of them?
That’s anti-vampire propaganda. Sociopaths have well above average representation among billionaires, not vampires.
Just donate blood as often as possible. This results in a loss of cholesterol, other bad lipoproteins, excess iron in those who have it, and PFAS toxins. It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.
Whole blood donation avoids the plastic lining of plasma donations, with the latter undesirably transferring unwanted microplastics into the body.
For those with sufficient spare money, instead of donating blood, just get various blood tests every other week, additively comparable to a donation if the tests are substantial.
Granted, this is antithetical to being a vampire, but you will still have to make up for it by supplementing sufficient healthy nutrients, e.g. electrolytes, ferric pyrophosphate, protein, etc. to allow your body to quickly restore the lost blood.
As a disclaimer, do not ever donate blood if you use narcotics, disallowed drugs, injectable drugs, or have unsafe intimate practices, or might have chagas or TB or even long Covid.
Paper where more frequent cycles in women correlate to longer lifetimes? That would have to be true if this were true.
Nowhere close to the amount given during a donation.
Or if the fainting is psychological, then work your way up to psychological dominance via multiple blood tests rather than donations.
Also, I'm not certain how much they treat blood, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a purification system sort of similar to Dialysis where you rely on an external machine for removing impurities.
Fwiw, it is the responsibility of the blood banks to do due diligence testing.
2 questions: is there any other kind? If there were, ate people requiring transfusion in a position to make demands to the donors (not vendors)
If the blood don't contains long term detrimental pathogen, that's seems like an okayish tradeoff.
Feels a little homeopathy... How many people can we put the same blood through?
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-...
Lord Byron's death was a result of what the medical profession then thought that they knew about blood. Namely that blood-letting was a worthwhile medical treatment.
https://www.southtees.nhs.uk/resources/having-a-therapeutic-...
This seems to be the emerging consensus. When you get older your metabolism creates all kinds of crap that circulates in the blood.
You would like to have boosted kidneys parallel to real ones that can detect and remove all the slightly wrong proteins.
Edit: You can donate every 2 months, so donating as often as possible would roughly halve the crud every year (0.9^6 ~= 0.53, ignoring the natural increase over time).
Vampires:
- Consume the life force of the living to sustain themselves
- Are totally isolated and perverted from any kind of human community
- Have no family, no community ties
- Unable to feel love, warmth, connection with any human
- Must avoid spending time in the virtuous natural world (daylight, sunlight) and must instead be cordoned off indoors or in darkness, they do not live as most natural things do.
- Are kind of fallen/perverted; at one point, they were human, but they failed at being human (for instance: unbaptized, excommunicated, murderous, etc) and so were forced into exile often due to their own choice to live sinfully
Billionaires:
- cannot become a billionaire without thousands/millions of regular non-billionaires siphoning money (== time, == life force) upwards
- when they become a billionaire they are forced to be distanced from their community/family of normal people; middle class people are never "regular friends" with billionaires
- either their normal family/friends are 'bitten/infected' (wealth inheritance) or cut-off
- often are profoundly isolated on a personal level (are they talking to me for my money or for me?)
- often the direct cause of or at least complicit in the destruction of the natural world (i.e. cut off from sunlight; unnatural)
- often must make unethical or immoral choices to catapult themselves to wealth/powers (fallen, sinful)
Anyway, I hope your son, Adrian, is doing ok. I fondly remember hunting your horrors of the night with him
-T.B.
"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete."
-- first line of The Rhesus Chart, by cstross
“As a devout Baptist, he couldn’t use playing cards…”
And I’m wondering if I missed something in my Baptist upbringing. I have long since removed myself from any semblance of the Church and manage my own relationship with faith and any related higher beings, so it’s more a curiosity than pertinent.
The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)
Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the book to the blogpost.
Consider a few more things: If you ask 10 Baptists about something secondary to scripture like this, you may get different answers from different people, especially if they are from different eras, as religion changes over time. As another example, some Catholics grew up hearing the mass in Latin.
It's funny though, Rockefeller appeared devout enough to understand that gambling was a sin. Rockefeller appeared to believe in an omniscient God. Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? People trying to find such loopholes in Religion is always fascinating to me. Of course, it could have all been a show.
My favorite example of this is the string of fishing line around Manhattan.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.
[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.
Not much of a shift...
The French people didn't invest the most elaborate head chopping off machine for just spectacle…
Thanks for the recommended chuckle.
Yet I can do something to live longer. Thoughts have a definite length. I can unwind them very fast—then the end comes quickly, or I may unwind them slowly, and the end will come more slowly. When we live as we do we think mechanically and quite unnecessarily. We very seldom think when necessary. So we could be much more economical.
The secret is very simple. If any man really succeeds in understanding and learning to spend only as much as is necessary he will be able to economize a great deal of energy.
Now look inwards at your thinking. You will see that you think all the time, associations flow on unceasingly. Now if you begin to think intentionally, you will find that you think very slowly, whereas when thoughts run on by themselves they flow very fast.
Compare the two states: one, when our thoughts flow fast and the other when they flow slowly. For example, we are impatiently waiting for someone. We are all the time occupied with the thought—when will the person we are waiting for come? What happened to him, why isn’t he here? Has he had an accident? It seems to us we have been waiting an hour at least. We look at the watch and find it has been only five minutes.
Another example. You sit in a comfortable chair. You are resting, nothing worries you. For the moment you do not want to think of anything important. Your thoughts flow slowly. It seems to you that you have been sitting thus for five minutes, whereas you sat for a whole hour.
Time is our thoughts. We can measure time by our thinking. If we spend many thoughts, time seems long to us. If we spend few thoughts—time seems short. Time stands in direct ratio to the flow of associations.
Just as in the thinking center, associations go on in other centers also. The secret of prolonging life depends on the ability to spend the energy of our centers slowly and only intentionally. Learn to think consciously. This produces economy in the expenditure of energy. Don’t dream.
Gurdjieff's Early Talks 1914-1931
Premise: Thinking slower makes time appear to pass faster, and thinking faster makes time appear to pass slower. (Per the two paras following "Consider")
Thesis: The secret to living longer is to alter one's perception of time, by thinking slower.
But given the premise, thinking slower would make appear to pass faster. Ergo, it would make life feel shorter, not longer.
In fact, the premise actually supports the exact opposite thesis: that the secret to long life is to think as fast as possible.
"The young blood doesn’t add youth. It removes age."
"Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis."
Etc. Why is LLM so enamored with the "Its not x, its Y" idiom? Its so ridiculously overused its almost comical
In other words, some people actually write like this.
I have a friend that has used ems all his professional life and is livid that they're now a telltale for AI. So yeah, false positives.
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
The Rockefeller one literally points out that the guy did all this weird stuff and then his son, who didn't, outlived him.
Honestly though, I'm still not sure what the point of the vampires one is. Satire relies on the reader drawing some conclusions that aren't laid out, and I don't really see where it's trying to lead me in that respect. Is it that these billionaires are fools for following bunk research?
Bahman Guyuron et al., "Factors Contributing to the Facial Aging of Identical Twins" (2009) https://gwern.net/doc/longevity/2009-guyuron.pdf
/me snorts
RMR1 done and shows promise, RMR2 started recently.
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I have a spoiler-tastic fan theory about the movie Marty Supreme that is apropos here.
A: Biomedical startups!
this is so tiring
https://archive.org/details/HumanResourcesPdf
> Corporate management is the use of humans as resources. So is vampirism.
>Biomethods, Inc. is a struggling biotechnology company whose venture capital group is growing tired of pumping in new blood every quarter.
If I was a kiwi I would be livid at the government allowing this purchase to go through.
More and more, you are seeing what occurred in the time of Noah become commonplace to talk about under the guise of technology. In Noah's day, there was a hybridization program to dilute the blood of man to prevent the coming of the Messiah, but Noah was "perfect in his generations", or not part of the hybrid lines branching off of humanity. And now, what is old has become new again.
The article might address the topic in satire, but there is a truth that is being touched on in it that is hard to look at -- the use [devouring of, injection of, swapping out of, ritualization of, etc.] human blood and tissue is happening right under our noses, and it's nothing new. The vampires lore did not just come out of some sort of novel work of fiction or a novelization of a fable, but is rooted in something that is very, very real. Vampire-like beings existed in the pre-flood (antediluvian) days, but now only exist in spirit after their bodies were destroyed by the flood. The spirits, desiring to be embodied, now go about the rituals of what once created them all over again, so that we might have a new generation of their brand of evil come forth.
What you're witnessing on a large scale through global politics is the public-facing humiliation ritual of mankind being carried out by the fallen angels and those under them that long sought our destruction:
1) The epstein file information showing all sorts of satanic/luciferian references, as well as possible cannibalism
2) Xi and Putin discussing organ harvesting benefits (implying an underlying focus on it)
3) Congressional disclosure of inter-dimensional beings existing and being unexplainable.
4) The saturation of things that would have been considered unabased debauchery in generations past being put into every facet of culture as if coordinated
But, this has all been prophesied to happen, and is happening exactly as it is spoken of. The truth is being suppressed, even within ones own mind, because a person of the world of today does not love the truth. There is only one way to enter in to the truth, which is to begin seeking the person whose very name is Faithful and True (Revelation 19:11). According to the following verses, to not do so would lead one into a delusion from which there is no escape:
"The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)