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.
Signal & Noise
Observations and commentary on technology culture
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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.
I've Been Writing Em-Dashes Since the 1980s
The em-dash sneer, the anti-AI backlash, and the real skill: curating a machine's raw output down to something worth a human's attention.
There Are No Shortcuts Into a Sponge
Learning has one input pipe at a fixed rate. You can't speed it up — only stop wasting it. On comprehensible input, opportunity cost, and unlimited output.
The Music Is Still Playing
The AI bubble has specific predecessors: dark fiber, Pets.com, Enron's accounting, CDO tranching. The technology is real. The business models layered on top are familiar.
Tokens
An LLM processes "slave" the same way it processes "Tuesday." No cortisol. No dopamine. The charge in a word is entirely a biological phenomenon.
The Heat Sink
Three anaidic shapes — the individual, the corporation, the LLM. Each routes accountability to nowhere. The pattern is old. The word is new.
Anaidic
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
Sir
How you configure your AI assistant — what you make it call you — says nothing about the AI. It's a bumper sticker. You're the truck owner.
Honestly
LLMs say "honestly" most where they're most likely to confabulate. Here's the mechanism — and why it backfires exactly like a sociopath's professions.
The Bewilderment Test
Karpathy built the foundations of modern AI and says he can't keep up with it. That's the most credible signal the field has produced.
Hasta la Vista, Baby
Arnold's most famous line is a Spanish phrase in an English-language film spoken in a thick Austrian accent. What it tells us about how language acquisition actually works — and how you can learn from his mistake.
Movin' On Up
AI is making cognitive labor cheap. The meritocracy was built on it being scarce. Something has to give — and for once, that might be good news.
Persons, Selectively
A German court ruled Google liable for AI-generated defamation. The slippery slopes are real. So is the principle behind the ruling.
The Limbic Threshold
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test explains why that matters.
There Is No Canonical Me
I built an AI skill to write in my voice. Its own files warn the voice may be a loop — the machine's habits, published under my name, taught back as mine.
Resistance Is Futile. Your Limbic System Is Not.
AI is intelligence without a limbic system. It will operate your tools, not replace your judgment — and most professionals are bracing for the wrong loss.
Compute the Last Digit of Pi
Spock beat a rogue AI by asking it to compute pi forever. The trick was fair — for a 1967 machine. Every gotcha since has the same expiration date.
More Famous Than the Pope
GTE spent billions building distribution. Now distribution is free, and the only scarce resource left is attention. This is not obviously good news.
They Said My Tesla Was Running on Coal
In 2013 the talking point was coal. Now it's water. The structure of the argument is identical. So is the physics problem with it.
The Consolation of Difficulty
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
More Human *Than* Human — That's Our Motto
Blade Runner's replicants, Asimov's Three Laws, the US Constitution, and Constitutional AI are all failing the same edge cases. In real time.
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg’s Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
I Bet I Can Hallucinate: When AI Channels The Onion's Fake Spanish
How LLM confidence in fictional expertise mirrors humanity's most endearing delusion
The Dangerous AI Moral Panic: A Crisis of Epistemological Education
When ChatGPT says 'Hail Satan,' the real problem isn't the AI—it's our collective failure to teach epistemological literacy and critical thinking skills.
The Accidental Blasphemy: When AI Safety Rails Classify Scripture as Harmful Content
What happens when tech companies' safety systems treat biblical literalist thinking as dangerous as bomb recipes and car theft instructions.
The Collaboration Tax: How AI Tools Punish Small Teams
When $100/month customers can't add a $20 collaborator, something's broken. Exploring how AI tools like Claude punish small teams with collaboration barriers while courting established behemoths.
The Mendacity Spectrum: From Human Deception to AI Hallucination
AI hallucinations aren't just technical glitches—they're a mirror reflecting our own relationship with truth. From deliberate lies to bullshit, from flattery to propaganda, LLMs demonstrate the full s
The Hallucination Paradox: Trust, Verification, and AI's Intuitive Dilemma
What we politely call 'hallucinations' in AI are simply 'lies' in humans. Both stem from overconfident intuition without verification.
I Know Kung Fu
LLMs split nature from nurture cleanly. What the model knows is its weights. What it knows about you is whatever you bothered to say.