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Pulled up at a stop light Imagine flying an x-wing down a corridor, having to turn the plane sideways to fit, a missile on your tail and closing, hitting the turbo, feeling the g force, coming up on the end of the corridor, pulling back hard on the stick the second the corridor opens, turning 90 degrees and watching the missile continue straight. Tingles. Adrenaline. Release. Or if you don’t want sci-fi, imagine winter circa 1645 in America. Several of your group almost dead from lack of food, tracking a deer, spotting it, shooting it with your bow, hitting but the deer is trying to run, fast twitch muscles charging and leaping, plunging a knife into its heart and knowing at that moment everyone is going to be okay. Heart rate calming laying on the warm deer. The modern world doesn’t have any real experiences like this any more. Survival has become a technocratic plod, making the right boring and careful decisions. There’s only fake experiences like the above, video games, sports, and drugs. And things like reckless driving, which are just kind of stupid. As we march toward ASI, this will only get worse. What the unabomber describes as Type 2 experiences, ones where you can achieve results with serious effort, will vanish. All that will be left are things you can have for no effort (like food) and things you can never have (like world peace). Even when humanity goes to Mars, we will be going as cargo. I was told recently I’m not engaged in my life, and it’s pretty true. Until I see a solution to this problem, even a sketch of a solution, what’s the point? Why sprint if you aren’t sure where you are going? I’m trying my best with comma and tiny corp, how do you make technology itself more accessible, not a fucking packaged product like when the default world talks about making technology more accessible. That’s just hiding complexity. But it’s so hard. Companies don’t work like how I thought they did, they just…exist. Which I guess in retrospect is obvious, there’s no adults in the room. Knowing the future doesn’t help you change it. I am continually shocked at how little people understand about anything, they don’t even understand that they don’t understand. Am I the same way? I try extremely hard to constantly test myself, if my predictions are wrong it’s clear I don’t understand. If I can’t build it I don’t understand. I’ll frequently read comments saying I don’t understand, but when I engage with these people they can’t explain what my world model gets wrong. A different meta world model? Or are they just idiots? To anyone who wants to supersede rationality, you better understand how to steelman every rationality argument. If I want to succeed, I believe I have to change who I am, and I’m not sure if that’s possible. I believe I’ve been making efforts in that direction, but I haven’t seen results yet. Working on AI is both the only thing that matters and also so demoralizing because of the above. I believe you have to give individuals control over the technology. And not by setting permissions in AWS that can be revoked, I mean in a nature sense. The ghost gunner is the real second amendment. This ideology holds me back so much in business, to the point I struggle to be competitive. But if you abandon that ideology, what’s the point to doing it at all? I have to win with a hand tied behind my back. We only make products for spiritual tops, not the majority of the world which is spiritual bottoms. Now, perhaps I have an ace in the hole. With the rise of AI, the spiritual bottoms will soon have no cash, because AI is the ultimate spiritual bottom. It would take a highly skilled terrorist to build spiritual top AI and even I’m not that crazy. So we’ll only have bottom AI, and it will outcompete all the human bottoms. Advertising will vanish once the hypnodrones have been released. Those humans will likely wirehead themselves out of the picture. This is the world I’m building for. Have you ever unconstrained your mind and thought about where the world is going? This won’t be like the steam engine replacing the horse, because all horses were bottoms. Ever seen a horse riding a human? Humanity bifurcates. Humans will retain control for the foreseeable future, the only question is, how many humans? If it’s 10, I’m out. If it’s 10k, 50/50 I’m in. If it’s 10M, I’m definitely in. My goal is to make this number as large as possible, it’s my best chance of survival. Give control of the technology to as many people as possible in a deep nature sense, not a permissions sense. In my opinion, this is what Elon gets wrong. Of course, he’s likely to be one of the 10, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t care. But what if he isn’t? Tesla and SpaceX are huge silos begging to be co-opted. I don’t think building silos like this is a good idea, compare the fate of the Telegram founder to the Signal founder. Build technology and structures that are inseparable from the narrative you want, as opposed to ones you think you can wield for good. On a long enough timeline, it will always end up in your enemy’s hands. Imagine if the only thing they could do with it furthers your goals.
ugh the deep state didn’t come for me I just realized that what gets engagement is so boring. you wish there was a deep state that came for me. then at least there would be some adults in the room. I used to fantasize about being or kissing Skrillex the whole album is bangers btw. that’s my third quote from it. and now the blog post. Western society is predicated around the existence of the individual, and what really is the individual without the soul, or consciousness if you want the secular term. I used to believe in the individual, but I hadn’t really thought about it that much. You are a machine learning algorithm. You have some priors in your DNA. You learn on data, RL style because your actions affect the next data you see; the dataset depends on the model. There’s no room in this for an I. Control the DNA, control the data, control the outcome. Sad but true. How much of this graph is people starting to figure this out? (US religious affiliation) Can Christianity survive the death of the soul? Can liberalism survive the death of consciousness? How will it cope harder as progress in ML makes this belief more and more ridiculous? There will be everything on a continuous spectrum from logic gates to human level and beyond. Which models are individuals? People used to believe the sun rose cause some dude pulled it in a chariot. People still believe they aren’t computers. Like the chariot people, they are just as wrong.
I wrote a tweet about this but deleted it, since it’s a much more nuanced topic than can be discussed there. Nuclear weapons are the Chekhov’s gun on the world stage. When, if ever, are they going to be fired? When should they be? I suspect this is not a question a lot of people give much thought to, since it’s obvious nukes are terrible and we should never use them, right? Mutually assured destruction and all that. But what if you think about this in a long term historical context? Surely in the past some terrible weapon was created and there was a great moral panic about it, probably something today that we consider quaint. I suspect that in 100 years nuclear weapons will seem quaint. It’s so easy to imagine weapons that are way more horrible, think drone swarms and bioweapons. Oh that’s cute, it blows up a city. This new weapon seeks out and kills every <insert race here> person on earth and tortures them before they die. Even worse, these sort of weapons can be deployed tactically, where for nukes that’s actually kind of hard. Nobody wants an irradiated pile of rubble. With that understood, when do we want to fire the nukes? Firstly, they will not kill all humans. Probably around a third, on par with the black death or the Khmer Rouge. And they will not create a nuclear winter ending all life. They may change the climate, but not more than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. I understand the loss of short-term growth is a hard pill to swallow, but would we be better or worse off in 100 years if we fired all the nukes today? It is not clear to me that the answer is worse. The nukes will force systems to decentralize and become less complex, but in exchange those systems will become more robust. Will Google survive an all-out nuclear exchange? Will the Bitcoin blockchain? “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” – John von Neumann The more I think about this, the more I think it’s not the worst idea. I’m not a terrorist, and will do nothing to actually further this cause, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. Once the gun has been placed on the stage, it will be fired. Now or later? If you are an accelerationist, you want whatever is going to happen to happen sooner. Welcome to nuke/acc
Have all the jobs been fake for years? Read this, a NASA critique from 1992. Basically society is run by useless people making work for other useless people so that together they can all alleviate their deep concern about not having a place in society. Elon has a bigger tent of types of people that can help on his mission than I do, and even that tent is too small to include most people. I think that’s the deep reason for the Elon haters, it’s that they don’t see their place in his society. I lashed out at a fan in Bangkok, when he told me his friend was a fan of mine, I replied with “why do I care?” I was already in a bad mood, normally I’d be nicer and if you read this sorry it was directed at you, but I do sort of stand by the point. Low commitment from lots of people is useless. I’m not going to milk you for merch sales. By the way, if you ever see me in public, I don’t care that you are a fan, I don’t understand why people think I would. If you want to talk, why would you open with that? Tell me something technical that I don’t know. Then we are having a conversation. We are in the middle of a revolution. Modern AI is the cherry on top, it’s just continuing the same trendline that had spreadsheets replace 4 bookkeepers with 1. The industrial revolution required labor at mass scale, hence we got liberal democracy. But I think it’s over. If we don’t have a society where there’s a place for most people, governance will have to change. Though don’t worry if you consider yourself one of those useless people, I do not think your life will become materially bad. Between the fact that it’s cheap to keep people alive, fed, and entertained, and that everyone no matter how secure believes they may be useless, it will be a lot more like retirement. UBI is a double edged sword. If you take it, you are no longer meaningfully a citizen. It remains to be seen how this will all shape up, but the unprofitablity of the average person in rich countries cannot be ignored for too much longer. Their expectations exceed their market value, hence why protectionist economics to bring manufacturing back to America will not work. Every society has its problems, but as I’ve been spending more time in China I think they are living in the future. Your average American has no idea how nice the cities are here. Walkable. I can’t get over how quiet the roads are, Chinese brand electric cars with big touch screens. High trust society. I also learned that the ubiquitous mobile payments are not due to heavy handed government policy, but rather free market choice. And after you have used Alipay for a bit it really is convenient. Unlike credit cards, you can send money phone to phone by scanning a barcode, and I don’t think there’s a 3% fee sapping the economy. Of course, a strong government is a devil’s bargain. When things are good they are really good, but when things go bad they can go really bad. However, things are good now, and it’s anyone’s guess how it plays out. If Yudkowskian AI safety is a real concern, you might need a strong government to have any hope. Here’s a simple chart that shows where life will improve. These blog posts have become a bit of a travel diary. But these questions are way too big to ignore, and I think about them a lot. The optimism after the election was short lived, we are going to get bullshit protectionism and obstructionism. Are we ready to strike a new deal restructuring Western society? I suspect not. The neoluddites still think they have a chance. But structurally they can’t ever succeed, they can just choose if they want to bring the West down with them or not.
More in programming
One of my recent home organisation projects has been sorting out my LEGO collection. I have a bunch of sets which are mixed together in one messy box, and I’m trying to separate bricks back into distinct sets. My collection is nowhere near large enough to be worth sorting by individual parts, and I hope that breaking down by set will make it all easier to manage and store. I’ve been creating spreadsheets to track the parts in each set, and count them out as I find them. I briefly hinted at this in my post about looking at images in spreadsheets, where I included a screenshot of one of my inventory spreadsheets: These spreadsheets have been invaluable – I can see exactly what pieces I need, and what pieces I’m missing. Without them, I wouldn’t even attempt this. I’m about to pause this cleanup and work on some other things, but first I wanted to write some notes on how I’m creating these spreadsheets – I’ll probably want them again in the future. Getting a list of parts in a set There are various ways to get a list of parts in a LEGO set: Newer LEGO sets include a list of parts at the back of the printed instructions You can get a list from LEGO-owned website like LEGO.com or BrickLink There are community-maintained databases on sites like Rebrickable I decided to use the community maintained lists from Rebrickable – they seem very accurate in my experience, and you can download daily snapshots of their entire catalog database. The latter is very powerful, because now I can load the database into my tools of choice, and slice and dice the data in fun and interesting ways. Downloading their entire database is less than 15MB – which is to say, two-thirds the size of just opening the LEGO.com homepage. Bargain! Putting Rebrickable data in a SQLite database My tool of choice is SQLite. I slept on this for years, but I’ve come to realise just how powerful and useful it can be. A big part of what made me realise the power of SQLite is seeing Simon Willison’s work with datasette, and some of the cool things he’s built on top of SQLite. Simon also publishes a command-line tool sqlite-utils for manipulating SQLite databases, and that’s what I’ve been using to create my spreadsheets. Here’s my process: Create a Python virtual environment, and install sqlite-utils: python3 -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip install sqlite-utils At time of writing, the latest version of sqlite-utils is 3.38. Download the Rebrickable database tables I care about, uncompress them, and load them into a SQLite database: curl -O 'https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/downloads/colors.csv.gz' curl -O 'https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/downloads/parts.csv.gz' curl -O 'https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/downloads/inventories.csv.gz' curl -O 'https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/downloads/inventory_parts.csv.gz' gunzip colors.csv.gz gunzip parts.csv.gz gunzip inventories.csv.gz gunzip inventory_parts.csv.gz sqlite-utils insert lego_parts.db colors colors.csv --csv sqlite-utils insert lego_parts.db parts parts.csv --csv sqlite-utils insert lego_parts.db inventories inventories.csv --csv sqlite-utils insert lego_parts.db inventory_parts inventory_parts.csv --csv The inventory_parts table describes how many of each part there are in a set. “Set S contains 10 of part P in colour C.” The parts and colors table contains detailed information about each part and color. The inventories table matches the official LEGO set numbers to the inventory IDs in Rebrickable’s database. “The set sold by LEGO as 6616-1 has ID 4159 in the inventory table.” Run a SQLite query that gets information from the different tables to tell me about all the parts in a particular set: SELECT ip.img_url, ip.quantity, ip.is_spare, c.name as color, p.name, ip.part_num FROM inventory_parts ip JOIN inventories i ON ip.inventory_id = i.id JOIN parts p ON ip.part_num = p.part_num JOIN colors c ON ip.color_id = c.id WHERE i.set_num = '6616-1'; Or use sqlite-utils to export the query results as a spreadsheet: sqlite-utils lego_parts.db " SELECT ip.img_url, ip.quantity, ip.is_spare, c.name as color, p.name, ip.part_num FROM inventory_parts ip JOIN inventories i ON ip.inventory_id = i.id JOIN parts p ON ip.part_num = p.part_num JOIN colors c ON ip.color_id = c.id WHERE i.set_num = '6616-1';" --csv > 6616-1.csv Here are the first few lines of that CSV: img_url,quantity,is_spare,color,name,part_num https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/parts/photos/9999/23064-9999-e6da02af-9e23-44cd-a475-16f30db9c527.jpg,1,False,[No Color/Any Color],Sticker Sheet for Set 6616-1,23064 https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/parts/elements/4523412.jpg,2,False,White,Flag 2 x 2 Square [Thin Clips] with Chequered Print,2335pr0019 https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/parts/photos/15/2335px13-15-33ae3ea3-9921-45fc-b7f0-0cd40203f749.jpg,2,False,White,Flag 2 x 2 Square [Thin Clips] with Octan Logo Print,2335pr0024 https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/parts/elements/4141999.jpg,4,False,Green,Tile Special 1 x 2 Grille with Bottom Groove,2412b https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/parts/elements/4125254.jpg,4,False,Orange,Tile Special 1 x 2 Grille with Bottom Groove,2412b Import that spreadsheet into Google Sheets, then add a couple of columns. I add a column image where every cell has the formula =IMAGE(…) that references the image URL. This gives me an inline image, so I know what that brick looks like. I add a new column quantity I have where every cell starts at 0, which is where I’ll count bricks as I find them. I add a new column remaining to find which counts the difference between quantity and quantity I have. Then I can highlight or filter for rows where this is non-zero, so I can see the bricks I still need to find. If you’re interested, here’s an example spreadsheet that has a clean inventory. It took me a while to refine the SQL query, but now I have it, I can create a new spreadsheet in less than a minute. One of the things I’ve realised over the last year or so is how powerful “get the data into SQLite” can be – it opens the door to all sorts of interesting queries and questions, with a relatively small amount of code required. I’m sure I could write a custom script just for this task, but it wouldn’t be as concise or flexible. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
For some purpose, the DOGE people are burrowing their way into all US Federal Systems. Their complete control over the Treasury Department is entirely insane. Unless you intend to destroy everything, making arbitrary changes to complex computer systems will result in destruction, even if that was not your intention. No
A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces prevented the end of human civilization on September 26th, 1983. His name was Stanislav Petrov. Protocol dictated that the Soviet Union would retaliate against any nuclear strikes sent by the United States. This was a policy of mutually assured destruction, a doctrine that compels a horrifying logical conclusion. The second and third stage effects of this type of exchange would be even more catastrophic. Allies for each side would likely be pulled into the conflict. The resulting nuclear winter was projected to lead to 2 billion deaths due to starvation. This is to say nothing about those who would have been unfortunate enough to have survived. Petrov’s job was to monitor Oko, the computerized warning systems built to centralize Soviet satellite communications. Around midnight, he received a report that one of the satellites had detected the infrared signature of a single launch of a United States ICBM. While Petrov was deciding what to do about this report, the system detected four more incoming missile launches. He had minutes to make a choice about what to do. It is impossible to imagine the amount of pressure placed on him at this moment. Source: Stanislav Petrov, Soviet officer credited with averting nuclear war, dies at 77 by Schwartzreport. Petrov lived in a world of deterministic systems. The technologies that powered these warning systems have outputs that are guaranteed, provided the proper inputs are provided. However, deterministic does not mean infallible. The only reason you are alive and reading this is because Petrov understood that the systems he observed were capable of error. He was suspicious of what he was seeing reported, and chose not to escalate a retaliatory strike. There were two factors guiding his decision: A surprise attack would most likely have used hundreds of missiles, and not just five. The allegedly foolproof Oko system was new and prone to errors. An error in a deterministic system can still lead to expected outputs being generated. For the Oko system, infrared reflections of the sun shining off of the tops of clouds created a false positive that was interpreted as detection of a nuclear launch event. Source: US-K History by Kosmonavtika. The concept of erroneous truth is a deep thing to internalize, as computerized systems are presented as omniscient, indefective, and absolute. Petrov’s rewards for this action were reprimands, reassignment, and denial of promotion. This was likely for embarrassing his superiors by the politically inconvenient shedding of light on issues with the Oko system. A coerced early retirement caused a nervous breakdown, likely him having to grapple with the weight of his decision. It was only in the 1990s—after the fall of the Soviet Union—that his actions were discovered internationally and celebrated. Stanislav Petrov was given the recognition that he deserved, including being honored by the United Nations, awarded the Dresden Peace Prize, featured in a documentary, and being able to visit a Minuteman Missile silo in the United States. On January 31st, 2025, OpenAI struck a deal with the United States government to use its AI product for nuclear weapon security. It is unclear how this technology will be used, where, and to what extent. It is also unclear how OpenAI’s systems function, as they are black box technologies. What is known is that LLM-generated responses—the product OpenAI sells—are non-deterministic. Non-deterministic systems don’t have guaranteed outputs from their inputs. In addition, LLM-based technology hallucinates—it invents content with no self-knowledge that it is a falsehood. Non-deterministic systems that are computerized also have the perception as being authoritative, the same as their deterministic peers. It is not a question of how the output is generated, it is one of the output being perceived to come from a machine. These are terrifying things to know. Consider not only the systems this technology is being applied to, but also the thoughtless speed of their integration. Then consider how we’ve historically been conditioned and rewarded to interpret the output of these systems, and then how we perceive and treat skeptics. We don’t live in a purely deterministic world of technology anymore. Stanislav Petrov died on September 18th, 2017, before this change occurred. I would be incredibly curious to know his thoughts about our current reality, as well as the increasing abdication of human monitoring of automated systems in favor of notably biased, supposed “AI solutions.” In acknowledging Petrov’s skepticism in a time of mania and political instability, we acknowledge a quote from former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry’s memoir about the incident: [Oko’s false positives] illustrates the immense danger of placing our fate in the hands of automated systems that are susceptible to failure and human beings who are fallible.
In our *Ambsheets* project, we are exploring a small extension to the familiar spreadsheet: **what if a single spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at once**?
I am not going to repeat the news. But man, things are really, really bad and getting worse in America. It’s all so unendingly stupid and evil. The tech industry is being horrible, too. Wishing strength to the people who are much more exposed to the chaos than I am. Reading A Confederacy of Dunces was such a perfect novel. It was pure escapism, over-the-top comedy, and such an unusual artifact, that was sadly only appreciated posthumously. Very earnestly I believe that despite greater access to power and resources, the box labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a man” is much smaller than the box labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a woman.” This article on the distinction between patriarchy and men was an interesting read. With the whole… politics out there, it’s easy to go off the rails with any discussion about men and women and whether either have it easy or hard. The same author wrote this good article about declining male enrollment in college. I think both are worth a read. Whenever I read this kind of article, I’m reminded of how limited and mostly fortunate my own experience is. There’s a big difference, I think, in how vigorously you have to perform your gender in some red state where everyone owns a pickup truck, versus a major city where the roles are a little more fluid. Plus, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a lot of friends and genuine open conversations about feelings with other men. I wish that was the norm! On Having a Maximum Wealth was right up my alley. I’m reading another one of the new-French-economist books right now, and am still fascinated by the prospect of wealth taxes. My friend David has started a local newsletter for Richmond, Virginia, and written a good piece about public surveillance. Construction Physics is consistently great, and their investigation of why skyscrapers are all glass boxes is no exception. Watching David Lynch was so great. We watched his film Lost Highway a few days after he passed, and it was even better than I had remembered it. Norm Macdonald’s extremely long jokes on late-night talk shows have been getting me through the days. Listening This song by the The Hard Quartet – a supergroup of Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus (Pavement), Matt Sweeney and Jim White. It’s such a loving, tender bit of nonsense, very golden-age Pavement. They also have this nice chill song: I came across this SML album via Hearing Things, which has been highlighting a lot of good music. Small Medium Large by SML It’s a pretty good time for these independent high-quality art websites. Colossal has done the same for the art world and highlights good new art: I really want to make it out to see the Nick Cave (not the musician) art show while it’s in New York.
