The Book They Burned Before the Raid
A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.
CIqSi
Carbon intelligence bonds with silicon intelligence. Essays on AI, human-machine collaboration, and what it means to think alongside the tools we build.
The Name
Carbon
Organic, biological, embodied
The intelligence of living things — pattern-recognizing, context-sensitive, prone to distraction and wonder. Carbon-based thinking has been running for four billion years. It is strange, inefficient, and difficult to replicate.
Intelligence
Fictional, bridging, catalytic
The made-up atom in the middle of the molecule. Intelligence is the invented element that lets carbon and silicon form a useful compound instead of sitting apart as separate materials.
Silicon
Digital, scalable, tireless
The substrate of language models, neural networks, and their descendants. Fast, vast, and oddly good at things we thought were uniquely human. Silicon thinking is strange, efficient, and difficult to understand.
Recent Writing
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A Tale of Two Bubbles
The consensus name is wrong by one word. On the difference between a financialization bubble and a technology, and why only one of them pops.
The Cruelty Is the Point
I pay for a gigabit and get a tenth of it. The support chat went silent the moment the problem got easy. Maybe the robot is the humane one.
I Know It When I See It
Autonomous agents don't develop taste. They execute the taste someone was disciplined enough to write down. A worked example from a real pipeline.