What was the science fiction story about a society with special monks who spend their days cultivating deep domain knowledge while cut off from the culture so they can be clean judges of the AI models?

Sometimes the long arc of history means that we are stuck with some bad decisions someone barely paying attention made 50 years ago.

Software development trying to adjust to the new world...

There’s something wrong with our current moral calculus, where we are willing to sacrifice entire actual populations in exchange for theoretical individuals. I blame Star Trek III.

C Thi Nguyen-style “value capture” should be called “values capture”. Makes it easier to differentiate from the economic idea of value capture.

Attention is a limited resource. Is affection?

I need a better genealogy of good things

Reviewed my writing from the past year vs 5-10 years ago. Recent stuff is worse despite decades clarifying the concepts. Problem: machine-generated prose appears so finished I've become insensitive to when the substance misses the point I'm trying to make. uncertaintymindset.substack.com/p/gbw32026

I bet @californiajoe.bsky.social would find this thread interesting…

Just starting Nguyen’s book The Score and see that the kindle gave me a score for using the app four days in a row.

I didn’t know Pablo Torre was on Bluesky! Plus everyone should listen to this episode on the dealing with a ludic life.

We should talk about standard deviations rather than rating 1 to 10 and I have made this handy table to provide intuition.

“the cybernetic equivalent of logic is oscillation”

if you turn on notifications for specific accounts (like I have with @vaughn.bsky.social) it is like you can have your own custom created WhatsApp group with people you like and admire!

Turns out this social network is a perfectly good place to follow my favorite sports columnist!

I think every @vaughn.bsky.social post needs a photo of some incredible high modernist cuisine, and how it relates to management or AI...

Something that happens to me a lot: Me: I would like to pay you money for this thing you sell Them: Great! Let's set up a call! Me: ... well I guess this is never happening, dang it.

Don’t be intimidated by the news focused on the innovations of big companies and their great PR teams. Individual, idiosyncratic creators unlock all sorts of possibilities and drive the world. www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/h...

No year. You fill it all in.

Timeline cleanse. The world is hard and terrible things happen. There is also joy. That’s why we push back against the terrible things.

I don’t know C Thi Nguyen and haven’t met him but found him very funny and clever in interviews and I’m looking forward to reading The Score. (And if you don’t like reading books you can always just read his very long and nuanced papers!)

This is a great idea and there’s so much low hanging fruit to make the world a little better.

Getting a chance to read Craig’s terrible jokes is a great reason to hang out here!

The irony is that you’ve got the most freedom to decide where to spend your time online and yet we so often feel like we are trapped!

Taste is a social skill and is highly dependent on context! So it is not like Steve Jobs came down from the heavens with perfect taste. Instead it was developed as a conversation between him and his audience that was highly contingent.

Here’s to more innocent forms of social organization: > “even the ‘most innocent forms of social organisation can … become transformed into centres of opposition’”

I am listening to C. Thi Nguyen’s interviews for his new book and I really hope that someone like @beenwrekt.bsky.social reviews it.

The LEAP RCT on peanut allergies: A randomized trial in which equipoise arose from parental anxiety, not scientific uncertainty.

From Arvid Narayanan, sounding a very @dsquareddigest.bsky.social note: >> The animating question becomes: “How should we design algorithmic bureaucracies?” www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/pub...

Because I always forget to boost stuff, here's my post on what I did last year and what's coming up in 2026. adriantchaikovsky.com

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

For 2026, I am going to try to reference as many 20th century social scientists (broadly defined) as possible. Just tried a post that referenced Albert Hirschman as explicitly as possible. Next up: perhaps Harrison White?

An important point about EV and also other technologies…

What you think the likely consequences are depends on whether you expect to see a pooling or separating equilibrium.

Now there is a very strong torment nexus-vibe here but feel like a few friends of mine are basically proto-Manfred Macx’s. Time to re-read Accelerando! “pronoiac meme-broker”, “automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries”, “silicon rust belt victims”

Another @dsquareddigest.bsky.social style unaccountability machine style problem. I know there are many problems in the world but I wish we spent more time thinking in these terms... rein.pk/over-regulat...

This is a good time to let everybody else know that I've got a mailbag column coming up in a few days... If you've got a question, fire away here. 49ers, Warriors, Giants, everything. First slot guaranteed to BlueSky questions.

Was reminded by a friend that air traffic controllers are working without pay right now.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto: First pitcher to win 3 games in a single World Series since 2001 Randy Johnson First pitcher with 3 road wins in a single WS 4th P to win G6+7 in a WS, joining ‘01 Johnson, 1946 Harry Brecheen, 1925 Ray Kremer — FIRST to do it on road

The Good Samaritan, by Joseph Highmore, 1744, 📸 by @patricksmith04

I worry that Kahneman was right about AI 7 years ago: “Yann LeCun said yesterday that humans would always prefer emotional contact with other humans. That strikes me as probably wrong. It is extremely easy to develop stimuli to which people will respond emotionally.”

Smuggling this over from a @jamescham.bsky.social post over in The Bad Place: Rather than using 1-10 ratings to describe things, here's a handy chart for describing things using standard deviations (assuming a normal distribution).

everything is a diffusion of knowledge problem! here's a nice reference to @dsquareddigest.bsky.social from one of the best ai investors -- tomtunguz.com/the-accounta...

I love every frame from Spider-Verse but this is particularly great.

Thanks @delong.social for summarizing this chat with Dan Wang. Everyone should subscribe to Brad's newsletter! braddelong.substack.com/p/on-dan-wan...

It's a great book

I know that everything is terrible but this A$AP Rocky vs Spike Lee episode is so much fun-- www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8w4...

vibe coding says more about demand than supply. the pent up demand has always been sitting there!

I’m in the middle of reading an advance copy of Dan Wang’s book Breakneck. It is very good and he’s convinced me that I don’t think about China enough. I think it is important enough that I’m hosting a virtual chat before the book comes out in hopes that it breaks through the zeitgeist.

A disconcerting number of high status people upended their worldviews because other people did not affirm that status in the way they thought appropriate. And social media accelerated this because for high status people it is often the experience of people telling you that you are wrong.