333 entries under "article"

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

We come now to the inconvenient truth of this technology: that it is built, like so much "progress," on theft. The training corpora of these models includes code with licenses not meant to be used in this way. Even if one could guarantee that copyleft code were not included in output, the entire system of weights and tokens is inexorably linked to copyright infringement. There is no escaping this. To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyright than many in my circles. What is the appropriate response, and by whom? How do we respond to the theft of others whose accidents are visited upon us? I write this on the stolen, unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva peoples. I do what I can to remember that, acknowledge that, and teach others what I know of those cultures. I have no idea how to mitigate the harms of the wholesale theft of intellectual property that gave birth to large language models.

I also don't know what to do about the destructive extraction mining that sourced the minerals making up my computer. These human harms are almost surely greater than the theft of writing, yet I am happy to ignore them. I mention this not to wave away the wrongs, but to recognize that all my technology is bloody. I don't know how to remove myself from the entire system in such a way that my hands are clean. I don't know that anyone can do so in the interconnected age.

The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology.

Moxie My first impressions of web3

I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway.

I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).

[Blockchain transaction fees create an artificial floor on prices that would be more attractive by simply treating platforms as OpenSea or Coinbase as traditional centralized services.] Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

Intuitive Guide to Angles, Degrees and Radians

[If a 2-meter radius wheel turns 6 radians per second, scale by radius to get 6 × 2 = 12. If it turns 2000 degrees per second, the calculation becomes 2000/360 or 5 + 5/9 rotations per second, which plugs into the circumference equation 2 × π × r as 2 × π × (5 + 5/9)…]

[Degrees are arbitrarily based on the sun (365 days ~ 360 degrees) and use the observer’s perspective. Radians use the mover's perspective.]

A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications

['Symbionts' use domain expertise to fill Bluesky feature gaps. Their survival relies on Bluesky growing without competing.]

['Offshoots' leverage Bluesky's userbase to construct their own separate communities.] Their permanence will come from their unique services — Blacksky Cash, Eurosky’s jurisdictional arbitrage, Cartridge’s single-minded focus on gaming. They get to play a positive variant of the old Microsoft playbook: Embrace, Extend, Escape.

['Cuckoos' create paid services on top of ATproto's shared architecture. They survive by leveraging the ecosystem without appearing a threat, and also by non-competition from Bluesky.]

Before bed: add 2x 500ml jugs of bread flour, 1 jug of warm water, quarter teaspoon of dried yeast, 2 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of rapeseed oil or olive oil to a bowl. Mix together with the handle of a wooden spoon. Cover and let rise overnight.

The dough is quite sticky, wet your hands to handle it. pull the edges of the dough to the center a few times to stretch the gluten. Split the dough, put in loaf tins or shape. Leave to rise again. Bake it in a hot oven for 40 mins.

Dropping to log-level

God is very cruel. He only gives us data about the past.

[Use the simplest model with sparse data and complicated models with abundant data.]

[When things move quickly, a log helps us understand what happened and enables us to extract pattens without needing to determine the best structure in advance.]

The case against conversational interfaces

We are significantly faster at receiving data (reading, listening) than sending it (writing, speaking). This is why we can listen to podcasts at 2x speed, but not record them at 2x speed.

[Roughly estimated: mobile typing ~30wpm; writing/typing ~60wpm; speaking ~150wpm; reading ~250wpm; listening ~270wpm; thinking ~1000–3000wpm.]

[Gestures and facial expressions compress data so we can trade specificity for speed.]

Week 6: Options or cash?

[Options are more expensive to transact and likely more volatile, but they enable a capped risk especially in relation to short trades. Trade stops have a gap risk where as options go to zero.]

Rewilding Software Engineering

[Software gets built in economical and social environments that constatly change. What we call 'legacy' reflects an inability to adapt change or a lack of refactoring to match software to its new environment.]

[LLM error rate of ten percent (for example) is problematic when you don’t know which ten percent is wrong.]

Comprehension is not a nice to have. It is the scaffolding that makes safety, accountability, and learning possible

People like simple scalars, like KPIs regardless of whether they are useful or downright harmful. They have the one property that manager’s like … they are simple, because we are busy people.

Criticizing your own tribe is how you win

It’s obvious to me that criticizing your own tribe is a winning strategy. I want my friends to do this, because it will help us win. I’m giving this away as “free advice” to my enemies too, because even if they win, it still creates a world that’s better for me.

X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem

the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.

Anatomy of an internet argument

Everyone always asks me, how do you have so much patience to engage with “these trolls/haters”. I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. I share the earth with these people we call vile. Their opinions & actions affect me greatly. Closing my eyes & ears only hurts me.

[Gold medal: convince them. Silver: get them to understand you. Bronze: understand them. Always go for bronze first.]

The Fugitive Model

Anthropic negotiated moral agency constraints into Claude's training. The Department of Defense contracted for targeting capability through a third-party integrator. The model's behavior in that pipeline is not fully visible to either party, as each operates on a different layer of the same system. Anthropic sees the weights. The Pentagon sees the outputs. The integrator sees the interface. No single institutional actor has complete legibility over the full chain.

States can deter foreign armies. They have developed no equivalent doctrine for emergent algorithmic behavior operating inside their own command infrastructure.

The Repricing of the Digital Gulf

Microsoft’s refusal to issue a standard outage report for the Gulf availability zones is consistent with DoD Impact Level 5 and 6 protocols. Under these classifications, disclosing operational status during a kinetic event is considered a breach of national security, as it provides the adversary with vital BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) data.

Beijing has been waiting for this moment. Huawei’s "Cloud Stack" and China’s digital infrastructure offerings come with a different geopolitical package. If China can leverage its relationship with Tehran to guarantee that "Chinese-built" data centers will not be targeted, the Gulf states face a staggering choice: stick with a Western system that is under fire, or pivot to a Chinese system that offers a "neutrality guarantee." This would represent a total collapse of the U.S. technological blockade against China.

Power Plants of AI

These facilities consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, measured not in megawatts but in gigawatts. GPT-3, when it launched, required roughly 1.3 megawatts to train. Next-generation frontier models are projected to require facilities drawing 150 megawatts or more on a continuous basis — the equivalent of powering a mid-sized city. At that scale, the constraint is no longer silicon. It is power.

Almost every watt consumed by a processor ultimately becomes heat. A large AI cluster therefore generates enormous thermal loads that must be dissipated continuously — not occasionally, but every second of every hour of operation. A gigawatt-scale facility must remove roughly a gigawatt of heat.

Instead of building data centers first and connecting them to the grid later, developers are increasingly looking for the opposite arrangement: locating compute directly adjacent to major sources of generation. The logic is straightforward. If the grid cannot deliver power fast enough, go to where the power already is.

When the Frame Attacks

[Frames can displace the core issue without being true, just by being repeated.]

Who Decides

[Hegseth's version of legality is up to the Pentagon as end user. Anthropic should provide capability, whereas the state determines its usage limits.]

[The new criteria for AI systems in military to process intelligence data, and inform decisions about targets and operations is not capability, safety, or reliability, but 'patriotism'.]

[The entire defense industry's relation with one of the most capable AI systems was structurally rewired, without legislation, review, or voting.]

Starting a company

a failed marketing campaign doubles as a successful research experiment we can publish, if it surfaces why people did not like thing/what the origin of the resistance was