Where the map ends, I start building. Writing on minds, machines, and meaning.

Atlanta, GA
New Essay: A small failure at a climbing gym, and what it taught me about thinking. Fast and slow thinking, the galaxy-brain trap that catches trained minds, and why the best guard for a powerful mind is the belief that we're all fallible. buddy-williams.com/writings/…
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@VitalikButerin thanks for the the "galaxy brain resistence" inspiration.
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Opus 5.5's writing quality is really good. The Claude Desktop app performs poorly, and its security posture makes the product unattractive. Terminal Claude Code is great for writing and coding. On the Desktop, Codex wins hands down - it's competent and fast (same for their terminal Codex in terms of speed). Once OpenAI improves the model's writing capability, I'll probably use it exclusively. Obviously, things are moving so fast that they could go in any direction, but the recent signals from the White House do not bode well for Anthropic.
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Pot meet kettle. He calls people midwits who disagree with his certainty. Wow. A breathtaking amount of arrogance.
Math ain't conscious. AI is not conscious. I am right about this. If you disagree you are wrong. This is a classic bifurcation between midwits and those that are actually intelligent. Don't end up on the wrong side, you'll look so stupid if you're saying models are conscious.
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Buddy Williams retweeted
Replying to @WilliamHogeland
Are AIs human? No. Do they have human-like qualities? Yes. Being "designed" doesn't refute the original claim of the misuse of anthropomorphizing. Using the word "illusion" only biases readers and your own mind. Substrate independence, or functional symmetry, is important in the same way that airplanes fly like birds: both fly but have different forms that leverage the same physical requirements of flight.
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In a word, friendship. I teared up at these two superpowers and nations expressing a commitment to work together. I don't care what motivated this. I don't care if it was all for show. I'm just happy it happened.
Legacy media REFUSED to show you a SINGLE SECOND of President Trump's speech and historic state dinner with Xi Jinping tonight at the White House So here's the ENTIRE thing, from start to finish, with translations for Xi's speech DO NOT LET LEGACY MEDIA KEEP YOU IN THE DARK
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I see a lot of misuses of 'anthropomorphizing'. The quote below shows one example. It assumes that substrate variance necessarily means no shared mechanisms or properties. There is an obvious fight taking place over the society view whether AI is a tool or a being. The founder of Jev said in his launch video, "prod not god." People are picking sides. This is obviously poor thinking. The lines are blurry because it's not a yes/no question. As Nick Bostrom suggests, conscious is likely a range with no hard boundaries.
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it. apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
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One of the things that holds science back is that good testing is cognitively challenging and logistically cumbersome. Whether it is thinking tests or real-world experiments, testing is just plain difficult. The rate of progress is bottlenecked by the slowest component in the system.
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The only path forward is bold guesswork followed by rigorous attempts to refute. We need both optimism and skepticism, neither may be omitted.
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The signals are pouring in…
We’ve updated our timeline for full RSI to July 2027 instead of August after our eval of Opus 5.5. It’s telling that the biggest advocate for pacing is still very much racing ahead. Even the most rational can fall prey to this multi polar trap. The only solution is coordination.
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Pay attention. Exciting times ahead.
Here are some vibe predictions of what I expect to happen in AI. Within 6 months: computer use big moment, office workers start adopting agentic AI in masse Within 12 months: we learn of communities consistent of thousands of autonomous agents interacting through the internet By end of 2027: AI revenues somewhere between $0.5-1 trillion By mid 2028: all millennium problems solved, AI is being used for all STEM work as much as today in math, breakthrough scientific advances in other domains By end of decade: robots aplenty, they work with precision, they are in the tens of millions and we are ramping up capacity to build more, fast. Job displacement is huge, AI is a huge political topic By 2035: AI reaches cognitive parity with humans in all domains, pro AI rights movements are picking up, economy is moving faster than >10%/year growth By 2040: there are >10x more general purpose robots than humans, economic growth is >30% year (10x faster than today)
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Worth wrestling with.
i don't think nearly anyone, myself included, has truly internalized there'll soon be a machine better than us in every single intellectual & physical capacity deep down we all share a feeling that our 'entrepreneurship' or 'taste' or... is special & safe. it isn't. it's over
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Food for thought.
Many people think that LLMs are limited by human training data, but pretraining is just establishing a common sense baseline. Most compute goes into reinforcement learning now, allowing models to move beyond the human level by exploring themselves, just as they did with Go.
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Yep.
Read this. Read all of it. And then draw your own conclusion. My conclusion: he’s right on.
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Ways life makes it hard to level up: shiny books, social media, sunk cost fallacy confusion, work stress, boredom, and how the body innately wants conserve energy. Committing to a study even at a page a day rate is difficult today, but it can pay off. You need to quit when value is too remote, but most of the time you need to continue because the value you want at the other side is waiting for you. Just be sure you want the reward.
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Very interested in RLCD. Enterprise applications are wide ranging.
After co-inventing ChatGPT, I kept asking myself: why have superhuman chat models not led to AGI? I’ve spent the last 2 years in stealth building a new way to train models (RLCD), and a new type of frontier AI model that we are releasing today: Jev • 20-200x faster • 40-400x cheaper (w/ output tokens free) • Frontier composable intelligence optimized for decisions AFAICT the shortest path to AI-based economic revolution
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Wow. Big update for me. Thanks @CompleteSkeptic
Jev Founder, Diogo Almeida (ex-OpenAI): "The next era is not the Claude Code era. Claude Code is still part of the assistance era - Jev is the next step Jev is x200 faster, x400 cheaper and has 0 hallucination. This is what comes after RLHF" In 17 minutes he explains why every model you use has a human-shaped flaw baked into it and why Jev is better worth more than a $500 Claude Code engineering course watch today, then read how to actually boost yourself x100 with Jev in the post below
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Yep.
"AI writes terrible code." Does it work? Yes. Do the tests pass? Yes. Can another AI understand and modify it? Yes. Then I have terrible news about how much your definition of terrible code matter. Humans aren't reading this stuff for much longer, many already stopped.
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My last CEO didn’t value symbols. I loved him, but this was the key issue which caused my departure. It’s why no effort would truly grow or expand. What is a symbol? Symbols go by other names like brand or identity. A symbol is a purpose, a cause. A symbol is a “WHY” that incentivizes people to rally, to critique, and to contribute. Symbols are also dangerous for the same reasons. Many bright lights have dimmed to the dogma of symbols. A good symbol is one which promotes expansion, movement, growth, and harmony. A good symbol causes life to flourish. That’s why I’m encouraged by my new CEO. I don’t know his position on symbols, but I can say I’m going a tailwind. That feels really nice. The best leaders embrace and amplify symbols: “Spread the light of consciousness.” “Think different.”
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