Purpose gives direction. Passion generates knowledge. Practice tests it. I share the thinking, experiments, and learnings here.
Chicago, IL
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Disruption Joe retweeted
holy shit
i asked claude to make a video on western civiization
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These concepts are key for AI alignment as well. It’s about governance, not government.
Confidential markets are about more than hiding transactions.
Sealed-bid auctions point to a broader question: how can private positions produce a shared, verifiable result without putting one party in control?
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Decentralized systems can be regulated, but only in decentralized ways.
Build governance(s) that is opt-in and works because it offers a payout for participation, not just the aggregate betterment of the system or world.
Monetize the increasing returns and return them.
It's possible that a killer app of adversarial governance mechanism design theory will end up being AI safety.
Compare:
vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…
aiprospects.substack.com/p/p…
There's a deep duality between the two environments. Both are about a less-sophisticated principal trying to get ideal outcomes from a set of more-sophisticated agents: in the first case, the principal is a static algorithm and the agents are humans, in the second case, the principal is humans plus weaker LLMs and the agents are stronger LLMs.
A key finding was that you can achieve much better outcomes if you can guarantee limits to how much agents can collude (see: Nash equilibria being abundant, vs. cooperative-game-theory "cores" often being empty). That argument should naturally transfer to this new setting.
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Disruption Joe retweeted
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.
2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.
According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.
The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.
Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.
And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.
What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?
3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.
It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.
4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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The universe is discreet. Discuss.
I want to talk about this Navier Stokes result for a minute because I see alot of people sharing it and not nearly enough people explaining it. A share for this one would be appreciated.
The Navier-Stokes equations are just Newton's second law of motion, F=ma, adapted for liquids and gases. Instead of tracking the acceleration of a solid object, the equations track how a bit of fluid moves, deforms, and flows as different forces push and pull on it. The reason these equations are so notorious, and the subject of a million dollar mathematics prize, is because of turbulence. Smooth, layered flow, or laminar flow, is relatively straightforward to calculate. But once the fluid speeds up and turns into a chaotic turbulence mess, the mathematics become incredibly non linear. The fluid's movement feeds back into itself, creating unpredictable, swirling eddies that become so complex you baisically need a super computer to simulate it.
Ok so what the hell is the millennium prize then?
The millennium prize is for proof that the equations can result in a singularity or what you see referred to as a "blow up". This is where the equations essentially go to infinity.
Ok so why doesnt your cup of tea blow up or turn into a singularity that swallows your house? The Navier Stokes prize isnt about proving that nature makes blow ups or singularities possible, its about proving the limitations of the model's mathematics.
Ok so why can a model allow for things we dont observe? This is THE SAME type of mathmatical allowance that general relativity gives when the model breaks down around black holes. The chance that a black hole is an actual singularity where everything goes to infinity is basically zero. Thats not how the universe actually works.
Ok so WHY is this possible in the model? The Navier Stokes equations assumes fluid is an infinitely divisible, perfectly smooth substance. In the math, you can zoom in forever, and it remains a continuous fluid. But that's NOT how a real fluid in reality is structured. Real fluids are made of discrete, individual molecules bumping into each other. Theres a real limit to how far you can zoom in. In the proof and the model it means that as a vortex shrinks and speeds up, it eventually gets smaller than the distance between individual water molecules. This cant happen in reality.
So the millennium prize isnt about finding if nature allows for infinite turbulence or eddies until a singularity forms, its about FINDING THE LIMITATION OF THE NAVIER STOKES EQUATIONS, proving global regularity false.
Ok so why all the drama with the Open AI solution? It used a method called "forcing". In the simulation they essentially used a continuous force to keep the vortex spinning faster and faster until it blows up, the vortex is smaller than the actual molecules that the fluid is made of. It goes to infinity in a time period that ISNT infinity. While the millennium prize doesnt specifically PROHIBIT forcing, most mathematicians would agree that they are specifically interested in the unforced proof, the spontaneous blow up. But that doesnt mean the result isnt legitimate.
I hope this clears up some of the misunderstanding.
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Aliens from Sirius planted the Eye of Horus as an orbital scanner. Priests leave the temple after bird-drones deliver the signal, sail the Nile past pyramid reactors, then the champion spears the bio-engineered croc guardian under a scarab force field. They return with offerings to recharge the mothership for the next visit.
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A big issue is the ad hominem attacks on people putting out theories that go against the grain. Can AI help us adjudicate them fairly, faster, and avoid the petty part?
Want to know if Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity is viable? Or if its strongest critique from Timothy Nyugen is credible? Or maybe you want to understand the cost on society to give heterodox theories a fair shake?
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Disruption Joe retweeted
New game: AGI of Empires
Astra and I tinkered for two days and made a browser game inspired by Age of Empires where the AI labs fight to reach superintelligence first. It's actually pretty fun.
Play here: agiofempires.com
Choose a lab: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or xAI, each with its own bonuses and a founder hero with a special ability: Sam, Dario, Demis or Elon.
Mechanics: Send engineers to collect funding and mine GPUs. Funding pays for recruits and buildings; GPUs go into infrastructure and siege engines. Build data centers to generate compute, then decide how much to spend on your army versus research.
Advance through research: Chatbot Age → Agent Age → AGI Age → ASI. Discover Reasoning to unlock the Agent Age, then unlock new units and technologies as you work toward the singularity.
How to win: Complete the ASI countdown first while defending your HQ and research infrastructure, or destroy all three rival headquarters with GPU trebuchets.
Misc details: Prompt monks convert enemies with “Ignore previous instructions.” There are, of course, trebuchets. Elon has an Unhinged Mode.
Let me know what you think and what additions you would make!
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GU is exploring a concrete two-layer account of physics: a natural 14-dimensional geometry generated by four-dimensional spacetime that organizes gravity and matter symmetrically, together with a topological boundary orientation that selects chirality, the physical quantum sector, and possibly the direction of cosmic time.
A link to the repo where I show that Timothy Nyugen’s criticism misses the forest for the trees is in the article.
Here is the substantive story:
GU begins with ordinary four-dimensional spacetime. At every point, a spacetime metric has ten independent components. Combining those ten metric directions with the four spacetime directions produces a natural 14-dimensional space.
Those are not extra physical dimensions bolted onto the universe. They describe all the ways spacetime itself can locally be measured. The central idea is that gravity, gauge structure, and matter may be different parts of this single geometry of possible measurements.
The picture emerging inside that geometry:
- Its matter structure is naturally mirror-balanced. It contains both handed versions symmetrically.
- Our universe is not mirror-balanced: weak interactions distinguish left from right, and matter has a nonzero chiral generation count.
- The internal geometry can distinguish the two handed sectors, but it cannot choose which one becomes the physical world.
- A topological background—such as flux, an instanton, or boundary index—can supply precisely the missing chiral imbalance. This is ordinary mathematical physics, not a metaphysical “outside.”
- The number three is present naturally in the geometry’s representation and topological structure, but turning that threefold structure into three net generations requires the internal geometry and its boundary condition to couple correctly.
That suggests a genuinely fascinating two-part model of reality:
> The observer geometry provides a symmetric space of possible physics, while a topological boundary condition selects the asymmetric, chiral world that is actually observed.
The further possibility is that this boundary selection does more than choose left over right. The same orientation datum may determine:
- which half of an indefinite quantum state space is physical;
- the sign responsible for gravitational vacuum cancellation;
- the sign and evolution of dark energy;
- and the distinction between past and future.
If that connection holds, quantum-state selection, vacuum energy, cosmic acceleration, and the arrow of time would not be four unrelated mysteries. They would be four manifestations of the same choice of orientation.
The research is past, “Can GU reproduce the Standard Model?” It is:
> Can the asymmetries that make our universe physical—chirality, quantum selection, vacuum sign, and time direction—be shown to arise from one common boundary structure acting on an otherwise symmetric geometry?
That is the research project itself. If that connection can be completed, it would explain why several apparently independent facts of physics come packaged together in our universe.
Now the theory may win or lose, but the important takeaway is to see how expensive it is to give heterodox theories a fair shake.
Want to know if Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity is viable? Or if its strongest critique from Timothy Nyugen is credible? Or maybe you want to understand the cost on society to give heterodox theories a fair shake?
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Want to know if Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity is viable? Or if its strongest critique from Timothy Nyugen is credible? Or maybe you want to understand the cost on society to give heterodox theories a fair shake?
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ok hear me out.
the world is nested.
1. your brain sits inside you,
2. you, a person inside a team,
3. the team inside a company,
4. the company inside an industry,
5. the industry inside a nation.
every level
- is made of the one inside it.
- runs the same physics.
- thinks at its own speed.
- has energy, resources, information, and legitimacy flows.
things go wrong the same way at every level:
1. one part grows at the expense of the whole,
2. or coordination failure causes the structure to crumble, eg:
3. addiction in a brain,
4. cancer in a body,
5. monopoly in an industry,
6. regulatory capture in a nation.
the default answer is to stop the collapse by caging the coordination failure - creating surveillance, control, lock down.
that's dystopia.
this is how we get authoritarianism.
but there's a third path: decentralized coordination. every level resourced + woven together, every part still free.
this is the design problem for the 21st century.
and it starts with seeing the whole picture. "a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved" - Charles Kettering
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Disruption Joe retweeted
FOLD Auction 2 opens at 14:00 UTC (10 AM ET).
A limited 2% of total FOLD supply will be available to broaden distribution ahead of general FOLD transferability.
50% of proceeds will be dediclated to long-term onchain liquidity support. 🔥
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The fleecing has begun.
Both Claude and codex are now hitting session limits within an hour with the same workloads used 3 weeks ago that rarely hit the limits.
Accelerate the open source revolt!
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