narrator

My guideline is nothing can install packages outside of a docker container. For anything on the host, only packages that ship with the default distribution are allowed. This also helps with proper encapsulation of services in a three-tier architecture. Claude always wants to break abstraction layers which leads to 10 different implementations of the same logic in the client besides the increased supply chain risk.

Gilgamesh is a lot of fun. I like the part how the wild man is civilized and stops living with the animals after a visit by the temple prostitute. I also like how vast and empty the ancient world is. There just aren't a lot of people around. That's stuff that happens in the beginning of the book. I don't want to spoil it for you all, so I'll stop there.

Yeah it is. It's called law. For example: when is intent important or a mitigating factor in a crime? When is it not important. Very philosophical.

My favorite episode of TNG was the one where Q shows him what his life would be like if he had just been a mild mannered scientist and not taken risks and never ended up in command. “Tapestry” — Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6, Episode 15, originally aired February 15, 1993.

One overlooked thing about tmux is it is designed for the world of 80x24 terminals so it works really well on mobile terminals like terminus while web interfaces have to be redone for smaller screens and don't quite have all the features of the full web apps.

Meanwhile, in China. https://faunalytics.org/animal-research-in-china/

These sorts of people push people's buttons and lie and get what they want and then they wind up in civil or criminal litigation. They think this is just another people problem that they can lie and manipulate their way through, but the judge sees these kinds of people all day in their courtroom because they often wind up getting sued or prosecuted. They finally meet someone who doesn't expect them to be a normal "good person" and they face the first real consequences they can't just power through.

My Opus often asks me to make one small change and then wait 8 hours for a job run to finish to check if it worked. LLMs are super lazy about caring about wall clock time. The reason the labs pay the big bucks for the top AI people is you don't want them wasting a multi-million dollar training run, so make a fix and try it like current LLMs do isn't going to work here.

Now with people decompiling and recompiling apps for different platforms and how fast coding has gotten with AI, spinning up a Linux phone platform is much more achievable now. That wasn't true a year ago.

Places like Bikini Atoll are still heavily radiologically contaminated even though the tests ended in the 1950s, so not really.

China sells killer drones to each side. China sells solar panels to each side to power their killer drones. Let barbarians fight barbarians is how Henry Kissinger described China's geopolitical strategy in his book "On China." Ukraine and Russia's drone and killer robot industries would collapse without constant imports of Chinese components. Please go look it up in chat or whatever if you don't believe me. Soon, every country will be in a proxy war with China as they sell all these little death gadgets to all sides of every conflict, everyone who wants them, cartels, guerilla groups, absolutely anyone with a grudge anywhere on planet earth, any side, as long as they're fighting each other. That's IMHO, why, for better or for worse, they're so ridiculously cavalier about AI safety.

At least with U.S imperialism, for the most part, we only funded and sold weapons to one side.

Just because you partially understand something like the ancient farmer partially understands plants by knowing to plant seeds, that doesn't mean you fully understand it and can thus reproduce all the properties of it synthetically like you are trying to reproduce a brain synthetically from scratch inside a computer with LLMs.

You can reproduce part of it, the intelligence, but consciousness and intelligence are not necessarily the same thing. This is why I compare it to cargo-culting. The Melanesian tribesmen thinks the coconut looks like a microphone, and he can use it as a paperweight just like a microphone and that's useful, but it is not actually a microphone.

No you don't understand how a neuron works fully or else you'd be able to make a synthetic one from chemical building blocks not using another living thing to do it. If you used another living thing to do it, you could say an ancient farmer understands plants cause they can put seeds in the ground. You have an incomplete model of it that is wrong but useful. Call me back when you can 3d-print a living person from raw chemical feedstock.

On top of all that, you're abusing the fallacy of composition. The bolt that is part of the aircraft carrier is light, therefore the aircraft carrier is also light. The atom is simple, therefore a living human being that is composed of atoms is also simple. Quantum mechanics is influenced by the observer, therefore you can change the external world just by thinking, and other new age stuff like that abuses a similar fallacy.

Just because consciousness is something we don't fully understand doesn't mean it's the same thing as something else that's similar that we understand. That's a cargo-cult. The stone age Melanesian islanders making air strips out of bundles of weeds and talking into coconuts as if they were microphones to bring back western goods was the same thing as us making LLMs to recreate consciousness. They were using technology they understood to try to recreate something they didn't.

Sometimes Opus returns a whole bunch of WTF mumbo jumbo. Turns out it likes to invent jargon about your project that you don't even understand. The way I get out of this is to add to the prompt "tell me all that again without jargon." That usually generates a readable response.

In the battle of Frankenhausen, Germany, 1525, German peasants went up against armored soldiers and the casualties were 5000 peasants dead vs 6 armored soldiers. The technological advantage before modern firearms for formal armies was enormous, even in Europe, even without the help of imported European diseases.

Beyond Corp was and still is ahead of its time. No trusted internal network: access is granted per user, device, and service based on identity and policy, regardless of network location. Being in the office at Google is the same as being in a cybercafe anywhere on the planet.

Meanwhile, in China they got the best video models cause they don't care much about IP. The irony that China, by being a threat, is preventing the west from lurching toward totalitarian is really interesting.

Yandex also easily finds copyrighted stuff and other various types of wrongthink banned by Google.

I know you guys hate X/Twitter but the muted words feature is really awesome for this kind of thing. You never have to hear about a topic you don't give a crap about ever again.

Hand sewers complain life is meaningless because the Jackard loom makes sewing trivial now.

The next model in two weeks is going to be even better and you won't use it cause you're paranoid and believe propaganda.

A tool that only people who trust Elon can use.

All of you that are excited for the m5 mac studios are going to be so bummed.

The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists.

I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.

Meanwhile, the AI critics got an enormous war chest thanks to Vitalic giving them all his dog coins as a joke that ended up being worth almost a billion to fight against AI.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/03/14/vitalik-buterin-...

I think Em dashes are fine in fiction where you're listening to someone's train of thought or something sudden happens, but they are really annoying in non-fiction.

I like to think that all the crazy kids running around doing stupid and disruptive things for TikTok views is an early form of AI autonomously inducing mass psychosis.

All these big tech companies are fighting over the basics eventually like power and transformers and don't like to do anything dirty that would hurt their ESG score like getting into any sort of industrial business. Thus, the default is all that stuff that heavily bottlenecks American AI gets done in China.

If you listen to Tesla's recent conference call they are going to making solar panels all the way back to making the silicon ingots and totally vertically integrate. Elon lamented on a previous call that nobody wants to get involved in these primary industries and he has to do it all himself unless he puts his whole supply chain in China. For example, Tesla recently opened a state of the art lithium refinery in Texas cause nobody outside of China does that anymore. He's opening a new fab, because everyone else is too hesitant to expand to meet the capacity he needs.

The antithesis of AI slop is when you've created a unique idea from first principles and AI keeps misunderstanding your idea and spell checking it back to something that's widely popular such that you have to write a whole extra alignment subsystem to check that it hasn't ignored half of what you've wrote in your first principles document and just thought you were talking about something distantly related in its training set.

To work on something truly original in non-fiction in the future against AI pushing everything to the mean of its training set and fighting against that when doing research, as opposed to generating a whole book of slop from familiar ideas, is going to be quite the unrecognized effort of writing those books.