AI discourse in late 2025

Poppy's music is really holding up. It'll be playing in grocery stores by the 2040s. Gets a little screamy, but we'll probably be used to that by then.

The best thing we can do to honor Charlie Kirk's memory is to elect the sorts of politicians that he loved - moderate centrists who stand up for his treasured values of consensus-building and measured, reasoned common-sense policies.

Your chattering classes were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they never stopped to consider whether they could.

There's a cliche about having strong opinions, but loosely held. I think the right formulation is *specific* opinions, loosely held. That's basically the definition of a hypothesis. It's an opinion you made specific enough to test, but you know that you don't really know what the outcome will be.

Telling my business partners that my SQL CASE statement is an AI agent

The biggest technological advance in my lifetime was when they made RStudio stop executing an interactively-run code chunk when the code throws an error.

You exaggerate literally all the time. You're the biggest exaggerator in the universe. If I had a penny for every time you exaggerated, they would have their own Schwarzschild Radius.

Before social media people vagueposted by writing folk songs.

i hope no one hacks the system prompt by which i generate audio and text with my mouth and fingers

my neighbor gloria just bought a sweet new bike. i sighed and said, sic transit gloria.

I just learned the term "wowslop" and I don't think I'm doing that but it's still funny

I love that the new OpenAI IMO Gold was not predicted by anyone, even the guy who had the breakthrough idea and personally saw it through to the end. We are in astonishing times.

It's interesting how "you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor" changed to "don't lie". The former is a lot more unambiguously toxic and you can immediately understand why that behavior got on the shit list thousands of years ago.

Why did it take so long to create Mateo's salsa? Is the overlap between people who know how to make good salsa and people who know how to get rich selling salsa so small, that it took like 50 years for a single person to exist in that overlap?

I wonder how many people would vote for the executive and Congress to be controlled by different parties, if it were a single box they could check.

And now he's eagerly awaiting a bill that is both massively fiscally irresponsible AND hurts the poor. Whomst? Whomst is the constituency for this?

How do people talk about politics these days? Do you really say the Big Beautiful Bill? It's like going to a restaurant where they name all their menu items weird and you have to order the Sexy Coyote Burger.

I like the thing modern society has where if I type on a computer from a company for a couple hours, I get electronic tokens that I can use at various buildings in my vicinity to receive food.

the Lord: did you eat the fruit? adam: eve gave it to me eve: the snake gave it to me snake: i’ll organize a blameless postmortem. no finger-pointing. just focus on process improvement

Thought experiment: start with the iron ball out. Equal water on both sides so they balance. Then slowly lower the ball in. It doesn't change anything, right?

But he still won't nuke the filibuster. Shows where the real power is in this country, doesn't it?

"I could walk onto the set of Sesame Street and decapitate Elmo on live television, and I wouldn't lose any voters"

An important story. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/o...

This is... so terribly sad and upsetting www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/u...

I hope people are listening to this guy, he's been talking the most sense www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/o...

I want to ask the people who forecast artificial superintelligence in 3 years when they think self-driving cars will become a majority of cars on the road. Few people seem interested in predicting this, and those who try generally say it's very far out.

There is a silver lining to Trump's boldness. If you're president and you have some self-awareness that you lack the understanding to help the country, the usual thing to do is don't rock the boat and position yourself to take credit for anything good that happens. He's now closed that option off.

While we worship AI and bemoan the dangerous car-centered city, there is a company that makes self-driving cars with a 90% lower rate of injuring people over tens of millions of driving miles and no one cares about celebrating or accelerating this.

Why does he have to be so energetic. Why? He's 78. He could just eat Big Macs and drink Diet Cokes in the White House for four years and be remembered as a decent president.

it really elegantly captures the whole experience of being on social media doesn't it?

i finally found a good use for google's emoji blender

I don't care so much whether it's going to be the Chinese century or the American century. I care if it's going to be the century of warmongering conmen or the century of peace and safety for the common man.

My children sometimes fail to understand, or fail to care, that just because they're angry doesn't mean they're right. That's frustrating, but you have to put it in perspective. Plenty of fully grown adults never learn this. My kids are ahead of the game.

Here's Google AI claiming that the daughter of a famous academic couple, John and Lena, is also their granddaughter, because it found an obituary of the daughter's grandfather where "granddaughter" appeared near John and Lena's name

We are in a strange moment for our Constitutional order. Congresses of decades past created the agencies of the administrative state, and presidents have generally agreed to run them within a plausible interpretation of their charters. What happens when a president wants to burn them down?

how is this simple? should i simply do the hokey pokey too?

the internet has made us so stupid

Destroying the judiciary by legal means seems politically impossible in the US for the foreseeable future. Impeachment of judges by two thirds of the Senate won't happen. That leaves ignoring judicial orders. But then Trump can only enforce his will with the military, which probably won't comply.

...and this is why Trump froze PEPFAR, one of the most spectacular "effective altruism" programs ever. He's purity signaling. He's saying to the MAGA base: I'm putting America First. And I really, really mean it. I reject any outlay that doesn't immediately advance American interests.

What rings in my mind as the marker of the shift: Bannon's "we eviscerated the American working class to create a middle class in Asia". I've seen die-hard technocrats say "yes and that was good" and mean it. In good faith. But after Bannon said that, we weren't going back.

Coming to a point in my reflections on our political moment. For several decades, technocratic thinking has been ascendent. Its promise is to "make the pie bigger" and urges us to focus on that rather than the precise distribution of the pie. In the past decade, critics of technocratic ideology [🧵]

idk... if you're trying to make him look cringe instead of based, i feel like this does the opposite. sounds like Moses selflessly leading the people to the Promised Land, according to the dictates of the Divine, despite not getting to go there himself.

who knows what adventures i'll have between now and the time my life becomes unprofitable

In 8th grade music class we had to make up a melody. I'm just realizing today that the melody I made up was basically "what shall we do with a drunken sailor". Irish blood will out!

LinkedIn just served up a post from a man mourning the imminent death of his young adult daughter. He feels he failed her. The thought of it sure hits home. I get it. But, if letting her die is failing her, well, you... you were always going to fail her. You were just hoping not to live to see it.

I have a giant hole in the gutter joint on the corner of my roof but I kind of don't care because it empties in basically the same place as the downspout

I'm not on bsky for any ideological reasons, although that is perfectly valid. I'm here because it defaults to Following and it only shows me posts from @iroasmas.outgroup.social and @moultano.bsky.social and I love the homey feel of this

The best thing about the big bass of the newer MacBooks is they're great brown noise machines. Super soothing during coding

Cranked the Pastoral Symphony and did a stir fry involving a lot of chopping. I finished with the symphony, 42 minutes