Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept? You see, the corporations and rich people write checks to the politicians. No no, not to them directly, sorry, to their reelection campaigns. Then the politicians listen to what the people who paid them have to say and pass laws based on that. No but like, the money isn’t for the laws, it’s for like, TV ads and fancy

So when I saw Dyson had a $500 toothbrush , I was excited. Finally, advertising that targets me! I love brushing my teeth, and I have more money than I know how to spend. Not because I’m particularly rich, but because most stuff doesn’t really appeal to me. Like if I owned a helicopter it would just be a headache, because like imagine one day I get a call from the hangar saying the hangar is flood

They will come for your thoughts, and I’m not sure what your defense will be. For surely, they are better at thinking than you. That choice you are about to make, well you see, we have modeled your life, and have calculated you will be happier making this choice instead. And they aren’t wrong. The effective altruists will fail, you’ll be able to see through their schtick. They will try to get you

You know we don’t have to do this anymore, right? Like it’s hitting the end. Most people don’t want this, and there will only be so long you can keep shoving it down their throats. Money is tied to nothing. American companies sell equity instead of products. The main narratives are pushing fear and resentment. This doesn’t last. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitali

I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs , self driving cars , video generation models , and coding agents . I set up a Linux box with opencode on my local GLM-5.2 last week and wow like just saying install tmux with the ge

I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details. I would like to see the authors of this document try to change a bike tire. Even

It’s crazy how much Fullmetal Alchemist mimics how AI is playing out. We pour human souls into a philosopher’s stone that we think will solve all our problems and cure death. It doesn’t exactly do this, but you can use it to create homunculi that behave like people, Chat, Claude, GLM. The homunculus is a puree of the souls that were used to create it. It’s easy to rage against the bubble and the h

I’ve been in Berkeley for the last 2 weeks. I haven’t really been back here for a while, and it’s worse than you can believe. This is a cult of atheistic hedonists needing AI doom to be true to justify their life choices. Or acceleration. Or something . They need to make impact . I mean, narcissism of small differences to an extent, but I stopped long before these people did. If San Francisco was

Since at least 2008, every time there’s an option to either make the money track real value or make sure things don’t go down, they chose the latter. As a result, money is increasingly uncoupled from reality. From Cory Doctorow’s blog : The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles. Thera

Watch you hit the stage like a willing bomb Strapped to crippled children It’s hard to watch you whore out your damaged pride I spit on what you’re building – The Stephen Hawking The title is a 2014 Elon Musk quote . Now that we are 12 years in, it’s so true, but maybe not in the way intended. Or maybe exactly as intended? I read this and it described what’s currently going on as a social crime .