important to read max on the silicon valley political divide between awful nerds and evil nerds

funny memory about this story: Balaji reached out privately to say how much the boys at a16z loved it, after which they all spent the next few years letting Twitter drive them completely insane www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/m...

Cry "Havoc!" and let slop the dogs of war

not for nothing but the insistence that graham platner is "the new fetterman" feels like a misunderstanding of both platner and fetterman

Yes they really sincerely believe they're raising gifted, precocious children. This colors everything from how they think about "personas" (which may or may not exist) to who they hire to what contracts they seek

The best thing I’ve read on the Anthropic dispute by far 👇

one way of seeing anthropic vs. the pentagon is as a fissure between the two silicon valley tribes most enthusiastic about ai: "rationalists" and "accelerationists" maxread.substack.com/p/what-anthr...

probably the best racist writer of racist horror since hp lovecraft

this is all very on point and it reminds me how many protests were going on and bubbling up around Cambridge MIT Google etc and the Tech Workers Coalition circa 2018/19, project maven. not mentioned here but the misogyny, the Epstein stuff, mit media lab, was also mixed into this around then

Dying at the idea that the Pentagon gave Dario Amodei a hypo that was essentially the dril woke sniper tweet

one way of seeing anthropic vs. the pentagon is as a fissure between the two silicon valley tribes most enthusiastic about ai: "rationalists" and "accelerationists" maxread.substack.com/p/what-anthr...

Here’s a dumb little blog about the experience of witnessing Wemby in person: defector.com/victor-wemba...

nets game is packed and energy is completely dead. only solution: bring back the Brooklyn knight. The people want him back

RIP tren-addled crypto kick streamer gold chain zuck 2024-2026

still hits

does anyone have that video of the tamale truck with the broken speaker? i can't find it anywhere anymore

i think part of this is a cultural shift in the media, politicians, external sources of accountability generally, but to a large degree it's also a consequence of tech's ongoing effort to discipline its labor. these issues used to get driven into the news & sustained in it from within the companies

crazy to me that no one at youtube or google is ever even, like, asked about this stuff anymore, let alone pushed to take responsibility. regardless of whether a PRMC/moral majority-type campaign would be a good idea, is the respectable center really so anemic/captured that it won't even try?

seems pretty likely that the DoD/Anthropic showdown is being driven by katie miller crashing out over the anthropic constitution using the phrase "classical liberal democracy"

funny to think about a far future where anthropic is a large, mature, boring public company and its founders' belief in the imminent machine god is a bit of funny trivia like wk kellogg believing bran stopped masturbation

buddy, they won't even let me

i suspect some small amount of "AI hype" is down to the fact the fact that the kind of people who do economic analysis and forecasting (economists, journalists, analysts) themselves see pretty immediate AI productivity gains in their work

live with ganz! gonna discuss AI, the left, maybe jesse jackson

as annoyed as i often am by certain strains of anti-a.i. criticism, i'm not really convinced that anything described in here constitutes an actual political problem for 'the left' (yet, or maybe ever)

the internet in 2026 is like if they made tv but worse

when they have me flying a bomber in Civil War Woke im painting this on the payload

on the increasing use of "the pandemic" as a metaphor for where we're at with ai maxread.substack.com/p/ais-pandem...

ppl say LLMs can't innovate but this bot is the first developer to ever apologize after a crashout

blindsight is a great read and a useful frame for understanding llms but its altogether not funny enough to really give you a wholly accurate picture of llm-being

just finished stephanie wambugu's excellent "lonely crowds." recommended, but i need to get off my chest that the jacket flap says it takes place in "the early-'90s art world of New York City" but the characters take Adderall (1996), wear Spanx (2000), and are written up on Hyperallergic (2009)

we have so many sci-fi stories about alien and artificial intelligence as a byproduct or function of consciousness, but it's hard to think of examples that concern language/intelligence *absent* consciousness... what else is out there besides peter watts' blindsight?

twitter essay designed to one-shot bosses everywhere x.com/mattshumer_/...

the "mac vs pc" consumer-ideological forumwars of the 90s should return with ai companies. i dont mean justin long and john hodgman, i mean bootleg "sorry i dont do chatgpt" shirts, freeware games where you can shoot dario amodei, that sort of thing. would be good for morale

live with @lioneltrolling.bsky.social right now ! open.substack.com/live-stream/...

It's been really lovely reading all the tributes to Dan. Many people have asked if they can contribute to support his wife and son. You can do so here: everloved.com/life-of/dan-...

one funny consequence of educational polarization is that dems become the party of sober experts and GOP the party of wacky cranks. this has been electorally bad for democrats but crucially i think it's also substantively politically bad. many experts are wrong! many conspiracies are in fact true!

need to defend tooze here--all evidence suggests he is NOT a "treatler" but rather "upper west side guy who has never actually grocery shopped in his entire life," a well established NYC archetype which predates doordash by decades

Will be thinking about Max Read's essay (maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...) for a VERY long time.

admittedly not the most important question, but what was the process by which epstein's emails were archived/published? lots of the weird typos look like OCR errors--were they scanned from documents?

"the Trump administration is, as always, happy to make the subtext text: The penguin rocks because it’s killing itself in beautiful full-color video. Just like us." maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...

on the right's new pantheon of heroes: "sky king," killdozer, and that penguin maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...

great blog maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...

feel like “moltbook” is effectively “sydney 2,” insofar as: (1) it’s genuinely cool and spooky, but (2) most of the posts are the bots "performing" implictly for the approval of human readers, including a lot of confabulation, which we should expect because

on the right's new pantheon of heroes: "sky king," killdozer, and that penguin maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...

an administration of commenters maxread.substack.com/p/the-commen...

interesting thread/link here on sensei's tbird in the year's best car movie

i wrote about the trump appointee who is a former gawker commenter maxread.substack.com/p/the-commen...

"podcast with joe mazzulla and liam rosenior" - a concept so powerful the fbi will show up at your door just for reading this tweet

funniest running bit on twitter is "gentle r kikuo johnson new yorker cover drives idw and tpot types insane trying to interpret it"

live now with @vinsoncunningham.bsky.social and @lioneltrolling.bsky.social open.substack.com/live-stream/...