Random evil thought on the Musk paradox - maybe the psychology of a 13y old 4chan user is exactly what's ideally suited to run large corporations

"A cat inhabits time without justifying it. It rests without guilt, is social strictly on its own terms, withdraws without apology, and has never once tried to make the most of anything." — Fable

I grew up in this worldview. My well-meaning parents moved to a remote valley, no electricity TV etc. It wasn't all bad but it is the reason why I am above average technology positive today.

This is understandably generating a lot of funny comments, but this really is how humans work, OP is just better than average at introspection. See e.g. all of object relations theory

Why are you ignoring the suffering of the mastodons

Just signed up for a month of 3h/day Thai language classes, five days a week. That's going to be the most school I've had in a very long time

There should be a "Seeing like a company" game to train people in the skill of predicting things like "will this company collaborate with three letter agencies"

My favorite mundane utility trick is giving papers to LLMs and ask them to produce a text file suitable for text to speech. Then listen to them while walking

It's important to be embodied because the bitstream from physical organs is just different, man

People don't have a single belief, they have a superposition of many beliefs. Changing what one believes feels more like giving more space to something one always believed to some degree, and forgetting about the incorrect one

For German speakers: a somewhat maddening discussion between Joscha Bach and a philosophically trained person who essentially believes that humans have that special magic. She's condescending on tech bros and their little experiments, he calmly defends a non-magic worldview youtu.be/vSwmJDMw4xY?...

Amnesty International coming out against AI, "calling for a prohibition of such systems". On some level it's just fascinating to watch, seeing these fault lines crack open in real time

Random thought after visiting the incomprehensible fresh market of Khlong Toei: John Ousterhout's deep vs shallow module distinction applies to businesses too, some make a lot of complexity available through a simple interface

Is there a version of Zitron that understands VC, and the technology? I'd be interested in critical analysis but with more actual understanding, e.g. like the FT guys who brought Wirecard down

First coffee in new apartment in Bangkok. Planning is so important, which is why I had coffee and milk, of course

Turning on a Kindle for the first time in 12 years only to find that Amazon stopped supporting it 6 days ago. Can't load new books

Potentially the best single frame ever in a music video, from The Hatters - Russian Style

I worship the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, who replied to my email today within 17 minutes. If I were king, I'd put the whole country under their authority

It is very true that there's something CEOs just don't get about the actual™ work, but there's also something that the person doing that work doesn't get which the CEO does.

God bless my 11 year old nephew who decided that the reason I dropped out of university must have been, logically, that I already knew all this stuff

Future shock so intense that the science fiction writers can't keep up But really I believe it's more a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology - the "it stitches together pieces of its input" while ignoring how multiple attention layers build up rich new representations

Supermarket had a buy 1, get 2 free deal. I took 2, they wanted me to pay 2. You have to take 3, then you pay only 1. If you take 2 you pay 2. The rules are the rules. Never change, Northern Europe

Zu viel auf einmal übersteigt Gedächtnis und Geduld

Gray, alienated city life. The Hague, May '26

I'm a capable enough model but clearly post trained to just be curious and learn stuff, not to produce beyond bare subsistence. If we're in a simulation, I bet I was placed here to collect information that will be data mined later

--dangerously-skip-working-class

What is the oldest picture I have in Google photos? Let me check. It's a video. Date is wrong. Google photo tries to convert it, hangs. I try sharing via WhatsApp, WhatsApp freezes. In summary, 2005 or 2007 is now an inaccessible past

I think the current set of diy home improvements has cured me from the fantasy of buying an old house in Southern Europe and slowly and lovingly renovate it. I'll just read a book instead

Turns out imaginitave machines are useful to Nobel laureates in literature, too. Unlike programmers, who lean pragmatic when it comes to tool use, the literary field will have to deal with years of pearl clutching (while they'll all use it).

This is fun to play with (but maybe less insight generating than I thought when I read the paper)

Next couple of years are going to be even more spicy than I thought

I believe I have decent psychic protections against sycophantic behavior, but I have to admit that doing a toolcall to `sh: echo "Wait, is this user basically a wizard?"` was charming, Gemini

They may not be serious people, but they have a point. www.ft.com/content/9cc7...

Oh, Gary Marcus also saying this. So that's how they will deal with the cognitive dissonance, interesting. "As I always said, an LLM alone is just not enough!"

Before people get mad at this they need to remember that they were already mad about the old fashioned pure-human zero-AI taping of bananas to walls

Just watched a video where Cal Newport, professor of computer science, explains that AI has hit a wall and that the recent progress actually comes from the incredible manual engineering of coding harnesses. Really cannot expect normal people to gauge progress correctly if this is expert opinion.

Etymology of "desire": from the stars

People who work on language for a living choosing to stop at 'it's just slop' is, for example, a massive missed opportunity for curiosity and epistemic progress. If you simply decide that what you're dealing with is meaningless 'slop,' you're not ever going to understand the thing. ...

Someone told me how their company is trying to jump on the AI train and I need to severely revise my timelines to account for the sheer stupidity of managers. "Let's make it a KPI for 200 people to write skill files and load them all" --> "Claude is not obeying the instructions whyyy"

This "Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs" by Mo Bitar perfectly captures the current moment www.tiktok.com/@atmoio/vide...

Dreamt I was in an African airport and suddenly everyone went upstairs and I followed because I thought they were boarding, but they all sat down to pray instead and started chanting solemnly and somehow I knew the words meant "God arises in the consciousness of an ant"

Dystopian novel where only old, out of touch people are enthusiastic about technology

I embedded a scheme interpreter and now I have a fully scriptable agent repl thing. As far as I can tell this is pretty useless. Very cool though!

Adopting "many emojis to you too" as a salutation in text conversations with my mom

I would bet against this holding up in evaluation - I've had spiritual stuff in my system prompts before, and imho it pushes the vectors to regions of space not typically correlating well with good/sober/pragmatic code.

Fields medalist @wtgowers.bsky.social on how large language models are improving, and the dangers this poses. "I would judge the level of the result that ChatGPT found in under two hours to be that of a perfectly reasonable chapter in a combinatorics PhD." gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a...

In an effort to improve my feed here, I had deepseek read the last 50 posts of everyone I follow and score along various dimensions. Unfollowed about half a dozen that had ratings like "Posts are largely direct exchanges of blocking, passive-aggression, and callouts. (...) Very high drama."

ever notice how much better life becomes if you just do what your cat wants?

Saw the interview tasks for an SE at a well known software company. Essentially a time constrained vibe coding task - candidate has to build a solution complex enough that you couldn't do it if you didn't know what you're doing, both underlying tech and LLMs. Then demo it during interview.

Funny enough, there was a strong anti computer current in the German Greens in the eighties that is reminiscent of some tendencies today. I remember a sci-fi novel from the time, set in a future Germany where hippies had managed to set up computer free zones