Bitter Lesson

they are effectively the same thing: a literary psyche transmuted into hyper-orality through algorithmic feedback

Many people have claimed that with AI-assisted bug finding, secure code (and hence trustless anything) will be impossible. I have a much more optimistic take, and AI-assisted formal verification is a major part of the reason why: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/05/18/fv.html

It’s weird that we created open source to be free to fork and personalize however you want without any agreement from upstream, and then we created social norms where we shame people for doing that

Paradise Lost by John Milton v0.25: Added 8 new achievements.

*Well, I don't like reading this, but I can't pretend to myself that I'm surprised by any of it *When and if this famine happens, everybody in Privilegeland is gonna be in full "Why don't they eat brioche" mode *They'll be more surprised than a Moscow oligarch-matron with oil-stains on her laundry

Because McCulloch and Pitts defined a mathematical model that kind of looks like a neuron and when Rosenblatt ran it, it started doing things that kind of look like thinking. That’s pretty surprising!

the purpose of a system is the purpose of a system is the purpose of a system is the purpose of a system

Linus's Law 2.0: "Given enough tokens, all bugs are shallow."

I like things that work

if programming truly gets automated away, I'll spend my time in the post-scarcity paperclip economy hacking on music and demoscene stuff 😌

i thought it was obvious, but i guess not, so.. Ashbey's Law — variety should match variety checking email is very low variety. Most of the time nothing happens. An LLM has far too much variety (capability, complexity) to warrant using for this handling a *specific* unread email is high variety

--dangerously-rewrite-in-rust

The internet as a collection of links is a better vision than the internet as infinite scroll

Imagining a version of the AGPL with a viral license that applies to any derivative work created by pointing an agent at the source and asking it to rewrite.

Claude has the complicator’s gloves thedailywtf.com/articles/the...

WWW!

Man, the web is so good. Incredible W for humanity.

Do not repeat the meme, but if you must repeat the meme, do it in your own words.

people are becoming better at being bots while bots are becoming better at being people

This is maybe obvious to everyone, but it just occurred to me why bioterrorism is such a significant model risk. It's analogous to code with vulnerabilities that can never be patched.

adding another muted phrase and thinking about how much bs accumulates around just a few memetic glue traps

i'm pretty sure the single most useful class i ever took in college was Introduction to Control Theory, even though i struggled with the math and never really internalized it very well. feedback control and stability might be the most broadly applicable concepts i have ever encountered.

"Even more bugs are inevitable, software is all going to become probabilistic now" is cope. "AI bug-finding means we have to embrace closed-source now" is a psyop. Writing buggy code has moved from hard to trivial. Writing secure code has moved from impossible to hard.

My take of these arguments is that they are true as long as we try to simulate the life as we know it. Many ALife models are not simulations.

"Somebody starting a PhD next academic year will be finishing it in 2029 at the earliest, and my guess is that by then what it means to undertake research in mathematics will have changed out of all recognition."

It used to annoy me that Safari and Firefox would surface bugs that chrome did not have but now in my wiser years I am thankful there is divergence and multiple vendors for such an important technology as the web. The bugs are fixable, ecosystem capture cannot.

Revisited this Rich Hickey talk after @gozala.io mentioned it. Reflecting once again on the wisdom of Unix processes and pipes. - Assembly lines that take input and produce output = simple - Click em together - Queues decouple producers and consumers github.com/matthiasn/ta...

the bitter lesson 😔

"No Think! Only Code!"

Challenge: terrify an alignment researcher using a single image

Been experimenting with organizing codebase by feature-slice for vibecoding. features/ arxiv/ exa/ ... shared/ Much easier to see the blast radius of agent changes.

C has a borrow checker it’s called mythos

"Paperclips, you say?"

Yeah, basically the browser is the “everything app” that won.

"an everything app" = a set of platform apis and human interface primitives that enable the use, distribution, and composition of some basic unit of interaction. This is what the browser does, what iOS does, what whatsapp does, and what can be done again.

the market can remain solvent longer than you can remain irrational

Carry is a CLI tool we built on top of Dialog-DB to make the source of truth problem tractable in practice. A structured, persistent collective memory. The schema forms at query time. Repositories sync whenever they connect. Try it: github.com/tonk-labs/carry

an agent that doesn't get frustrated or bored with rote tasks is also an agent that won't proactively think how to improve it. as Bill Gates is purported to have said: "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."

One of David Attenborough's best speeches. Today we're celebrating the 100th Birthday of the humanist and naturalist David Attenborough! Thank you for a lifetime of inspirational broadcasting and devotion to science and the natural world.

🤔 folding@home but for local models...

I think open source might win in this new equilibria. In an arms race between AIs finding exploits and AIs fixing exploits, it makes way more sense to pool the resources to find and fix vulnerabilities, and then ship those fixes at zero marginal cost.

the first recursively self-improving agents will probably be a virus, just like the first life was probably a virus

tfw the Equity Lords overturn matter feed neutrality and my desktop refuses to print me an illustrated primer

what if it was blocks but with exponential backoff? that's it mister you're on timeout.

yes. honestly this i why I am a bit obsessed with Durable Objects from CloudFlare they are essentially micro state machines that are getting more and more brain capacity.

A Secular Age