tldr
- lab city locked in for the project’s fictional metropolis — jazzbard and joe rejected slop city, embraced the “simulation engine being studied” angle
- fred’s Culture Orbital render sent the gc into megastructure math — ring geometry, spin gravity, ancestor simulation concepts
- jasmine sun’s AI populism piece reframed the altman attacks as warning shots for populist energy around AI
- vibecamp city-building workshop brainstorming: jazzbard + joe scheming, street magick input, dl secret society recruitment
- port infrastructure detour — pacific circuit, cemetery overlooks, the vulgar materialism of shipping
links shared
- ai-populisms-warning-shots — jasmine sun on AI populism, the altman attacks as populist warning shots, “because AI” as the new “because china” · shared by joe
- https://boac.artstation.com/projects/8eb00Q (couldn’t fetch) — AJB’s Culture Orbital rendering from Iain M. Banks’ universe · shared by fred
- https://x.com/mattparlmer/status/2043731060782240179 (couldn’t fetch) — matt parmler on lab-city-state vision · shared by jazzbard
- https://x.com/berggrueninst/status/2043711713263104474 (couldn’t fetch) — vectorpunk, berggruen institute · shared by fred
the day
The naming debate landed. jazzbard and joe went back and forth on “slop city” vs “lab city” — slop city has immediate clarity but risks aging fast, lab city has the “simulation engine being studied” angle and a connection to john-dewey’s lab school. Fred: “lab city literally sounds like meat slapping.” Jay s k caught the inversion — lab city reverses citylab, bloomberg’s urbanist publication. Word flagged slab city proximity: “someone will point it out.” Jazzbard shared mockups. Robotson: “lab city is fine.” Joe started thinking about lab city as a network state — “an intentional community acts like it knows what will work in advance, a network state is obvious libertarian propaganda but the seed of something fun.”
fred dropped AJB’s Culture Orbital rendering and the gc got into megastructure geometry. Jake asked which book, Fred clarified it’s not a Niven-style ringworld — 3M km diameter orbiting a star, sized for 1G spin and a 24hr day/night cycle. “Like, un-drawably huge.” Joe floated an ancestor simulation set on one of these rings for the Ken Burns documentary, with slenderman ring dwellers as talking heads. Fred noted the Niven ringworld is 1AU — 93 million miles.
Jasmine sun’s AI populism piece made the rounds. joe dropped the link alongside a broader thread on AI and belief systems. word brought in teilhard de chardin — “teilhard de chardin is my copilot.” alex h.: “slim bets on christlike AI as the Good Ending.” robotson i.y.b pitched manufacturing hoaxes with faked model outputs — “you could manufacture any kind of narrative you want.” Jake: “AI that hallucinates fun and interesting fake data like a Sam Kriss essay, instead of just telling me some API has functions that don’t exist.”
Port infrastructure took over for a while. jay s k recommended alexis madrigal’s the pacific circuit, recalled watching the port of oakland. Jazzbard: “I’ve done this from the mountain view cemetery in piedmont, one of my favorite bay experiences.” Word: “oakland was my town for a decade.” Fred explained the Chesapeake bottleneck — old tunnels can’t pass double-stacked rail cars, they’re fixing that now. Jake now lives next to LA/Long Beach: “awe-inspiringly massive.”
Vibecamp planning kicked off proper. Jazzbard shared a Susquehanna estuary map, proposed a city-building workshop. Joe: “take the company credit card, anything you need.” Wants it “dl and secret society coded.” Jazzbard laid out a working doc: narrative frame (the Darlington vibeopolis as catalyst), incorporating master plan elements, deciding whether it’s a wine dark production. Fred: “the reason Havre de Grace is not a larger port city is bc Chesapeake is very shallow there.” Alex H. declared eternal war against the dockworkers’ union in favor of fully automated Shanghai-style ports. Brooke bowman: “pls inform me of any city/society building events and i’ll join as long as there aren’t any active fires.”