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 protest topple the government, the military can mutiny. This sets a limit to how...

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 automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people cope...

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 disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways,...

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 mind. I feel sad at how common this experience is, how many people are happy to...

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 according to Goodreads I’ve read 80 books so far, fiction and non-fiction 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 get it out. And beyond money, people imagine AI could boost them in every area...

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 → alpha, B → bravo, etc. Similarly, the periodic table can be thought of as defining...

Right now there’s a cruise ship parked outside Cabo Verde because of an outbreak of Andes virus. Yep, another cruise ship. I don’t get the appeal. It’s like a big open-air serial passage experiment: you get a bunch of old people with failing immune systems in close contact and race a pathogen through them. How much...

I write a lot of Makefiles. I use it not as a command runner but as an ad-hoc build system for small projects, typically for compiling Markdown documents and their dependencies. Like so: And the above graph was generated by this very simple Makefile: graph.png: graph.dot dot -Tpng $< -o $@ clean: rm -f graph.png (I...

The other day I went to an AI hackathon organized by my friends Lucia and Malin. The theme was mech interp, but I hardly know PyTorch so I planned to do something at the API layer rather than the model layer. Something I think about a lot is cognitive architectures (like Soar and ACT-R). This is like a continuation...

“For man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings.” — David Zindell, Shanidar Re: A Call for New Aesthetics. At some point in the 20th century, we filled out the last few basis vectors of humanity. We explored the whole game map. This is what it means to live at the end of history: every aesthetic movement,...

Earlier today I noticed the syntax highlighting on this website was broken. But not fully: on reload I’d see a flash of highlighted text, that then turned monochrome. The raw HTML from curl showed rouge tags, but the web inspector showed raw text inside the <code> elements. This didn’t happen in Chromium. My first...