Fernando Borretti
Fernando Borretti
Fernando Borretti
I’m a software engineer. In my free time I write code, a blog, fiction, and build a programming language.
Latest Posts
Any rigorous thinking about the long-term future leads to extreme outcomes. It cannot, by construction, produce normal or mundane futures. “Rigorous thinking” means you have a model: a formalism for representing the state of the world,...
So, I have this little app, Epoch, that I use to keep a journal. It’s a tiny Rust web app that runs as a systemd service and uses SQLite as the database. I use a desktop and a laptop regularly, and use Syncthing to synchronize them,...
The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit....
Many of the people building AI, and many of the people working on AI safety, share a common vision of what a good AI future looks like: We figure out alignment, build superintelligent AI, and it takes over the world, for our benefit....
Fiction Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Beautiful prose and imagination. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. Beautiful and surreal prose, but completely unpretentious. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm. I had...
There’s a game called Mass Effect, which I haven’t played, but I’m told in the game there’s this species of sentient robots, the Geth, whose creators try to exterminate them, and the trigger for this Butlerian jihad was a domestic...
Marcus Hutter—oldheads will remember him from AIXI—recently published a book: Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of AGI. I’m always curious what the people building AI think or want the future to look like, and I’m also always...
Yesterday, OpenAI announced the solution to ten open problems in mathematics, all discovered by a yet-unreleased model. There’s only one, the coding theory one, where I know enough to say “huh, that’s important”, but according to the...
Today, the world is made of people. This gives people a tiny measure of leverage: factory workers can sabotage the machines and halt production, truck drivers can strike and halt the entire economy, the police can stand back and let a...
Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better, what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be...
The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of the physical world. — Jean Gottmann, Geography and International Relations In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief: “a European war would be economically...
When I open a link, say on Hacker News, and I see a blog post or a GitHub README obviously written by AI, I feel a few things. I feel offended, because it’s like I’ve been tricked, like the author thinks I’m a rube who won’t notice or...
The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen, it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. — Philip Roth We’re halfway through 2026, and...
AI models are very capable and get more capable each year. So naturally people feel they’re underusing them. There’s a tweet that goes like: your laptop has a 100M USD startup in it, you just have to figure the right sequence of words to...
Spaced repetition has a natural domain of applicability: information that is systematically organized as an unambiguous key-value mapping with short keys and values. The “Hello, world!” of flashcards is the NATO phonetic alphabet: A →...