I resigned from McDonald's today. I enjoyed my work and loved the people, but the nuggets team was working on a new generation of sauces that are set to be even more delicious than szechuan, and I think szechuan sauce is already dangerously delicious, so I had to quit.

Sorry, but LLMs clearly map into the category of tools The argument below is completely phenomenological and ignores all process understanding that we have of what physically happens inside people versus what happens inside an LLM An LLM does not have a persistent internal state that could support consciousness Machine consciousness is entirely possible, but an LLM just doesn’t have the machinery needed to support it, and people are being effectively mesmerized by the language output

Highly paid employees vs "cheaper": Back in 2007, Mr. Jozef, a 1st gen Polish immigrant, was relocating from NY to south and showed up for interview at my new 5axis shop.... in tweed suit & tie (leather briefcase too) He had titanium 5axis machining experience and as9100 quality systems. He said "i know I wont get salary I had in NY but hoping for a good offer". I offered him $1 *more* than his NY salary. He was stunned and teared up a little. He contributed greatly to many of the 5 year Boeing contracts we won. We grew from 8 people to 100, and from 850k to over $20 million. Jozef never scrapped one part in almost 10 years before he retired. Not one. But most importantly --> he trained many apprentices. Many went on to become awesome 5axis machinists and some programmers too. Hire the best. Pay so well you think it hurts. It will be worth it.

There is no "super intelligence", there is not even "artificial intelligence". These are just marketing terms. In reality, all of AI ist just a bunch of programs, written by humans, and executed on a computer. Thus all risks caused by AI are the result of *human* activity.

Indeed. The plain truth is that some of the AI companies are manufacturing the crisis so that government regulations will edge out independent competitors.

The empire that was Comancheria The Comanche were not a small raiding tribe on the edge of American history. For a century they were the dominant power between the Arkansas and the Rio Grande. They pushed the Apache off the buffalo range, made New Mexican towns buy peace at seasonal trade fairs, rode deep into Mexico, and compelled Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States to treat Comancheria as a rival power on the southern plains. They call themselves Nʉmʉnʉʉ (nuh-muh-NOO), the People. Their language is Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ, the speech of the People. English “Comanche” comes from a Ute word, kɨmantsi, meaning enemy or stranger. That is what neighbors called them. It is not what they called themselves. Nʉmʉnʉʉ remained their own name. The language belongs to the Numic branch of Uto-Aztecan. Its closest living relative is Shoshoni. Timbisha sits in the same Central Numic cluster. Farther out on the family tree is Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica. The kinship is old, not conversational. A Comanche speaker and a Nahuatl speaker cannot talk to each other. They do share a deep grammatical ancestry that reached the Great Basin long before either people met a Spaniard. Until the late seventeenth century the people who became Comanche were Eastern Shoshone of the mountains and basins of what is now Wyoming and the northern Rockies. They hunted on foot, used dogs as pack animals, and lived at the edge of the plains rather than in their center. Then the horse arrived. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove Spain out of New Mexico, captured Spanish stock moved north and west in trade. Ute allies already knew mounted hunting. Shoshone bands moving southeast borrowed that system and remade themselves in a generation. Spanish officers in New Mexico noticed them on the northeastern frontier by 1706. They were no longer a mountain people trying out livestock. They were becoming a plains people who measured wealth in herds. By the 1730s most of the nation could ride. That threshold changed everything. A mounted hunter could kill bison at a pace no pedestrian culture could match. A mounted war party could strike a valley two hundred miles away and be gone before a mission bell finished ringing. The land they took had been Apache country. Jicarilla, Lipan, and other Apache groups farmed river bottoms and hunted the surrounding grass. Those farms needed the same water and winter shelter that horse herds needed. Comanche and Ute pressure, then Comanche pressure alone, drove Apache bands off the open southern plains toward the mountains and the Texas brush. By the mid eighteenth century the old Apacheria of the high plains was Comancheria, a belt of grass and canyon from the Arkansas River south toward the Balcones Escarpment, west into New Mexico, and east toward the Cross Timbers. It was not a state with a capital and a tax office. It was an empire of movement. Independent divisions, later named by outsiders as Penateka, Nokoni, Kotsoteka, Yamparika, and Quahadi among others, shared language, kinship, and a common claim to the buffalo and the horse trade. They did not take orders from a single chief. They did coordinate war, markets, and marriage across a territory that at its height covered hundreds of thousands of square miles. Spain learned the cost. Missions meant to shield Lipan Apache, including San Sabá in 1758, were smashed. New Mexican towns bought peace at seasonal fairs, especially at Taos and Pecos, where Comanche parties brought horses, hides, and captives and took metal tools, cloth, corn, and more stock in return. Those markets were diplomacy as much as commerce. A fair that opened meant a truce. A fair that failed meant another season of raids. Mexico inherited the same frontier and could not close it. Comanche campaigns reached far south of the Rio Grande. Ranchos emptied. Herds vanished. Mexican officials signed papers that admitted what the raids had already decided. When the United States and Mexico later drew their border along the Rio Grande, the maps showed two republics. On the ground the Comanche still controlled the plains between them, raided both sides, and had to be bargained with or fought as a separate power. Texas was the hardest neighbor. Anglo colonies sat on the edge of the horse pasture and the war trail. Treaties were made and broken on both sides. The 1836 attack on Parker’s Fort took Cynthia Ann Parker into Comanche life, where she became Naduah and the mother of Quanah. The Council House fight in San Antonio in 1840 killed visiting Penateka leaders during a hostage negotiation and brought a retaliatory raid that reached the Gulf. Disease and the thinning of the herds hurt the Penateka first. Other divisions stayed out on the Staked Plains, the Llano Estacado, and kept the old economy alive into the 1860s and early 1870s. When the Civil War pulled federal troops off the Texas posts, Comanche and Kiowa raids surged. Settlers abandoned a wide strip west of a line from Gainesville to Fredericksburg. Men in those counties often refused to leave for Confederate armies because leaving meant opening their families to the next raid. Texas had to raise local militia and a Frontier Regiment to keep men on the line at home, and that home defense drained recruits who would otherwise have gone east. The United States arrived with a different tempo. After the Civil War, hide hunters finished the southern buffalo. Army columns learned to hunt winter camps rather than chase summer war parties. In September 1874 Ranald Mackenzie found a great encampment of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne in Palo Duro Canyon and destroyed the horse herd. Few people died in that fight. The nation could not live the old way without those animals. In 1875 Quanah Parker led the last free Quahadi, the Antelope band still living off the reservation, into Fort Sill. That surrender closed the mounted age. The Comanche Nation is still there. Headquarters sit at Lawton. Enrollment in recent tribal statements runs near eighteen thousand citizens. That is a people, not a memory. Powwow, fair, tribal government, and family law continue on land that is a fragment of Comancheria and still Comanche ground. The language is in worse condition than the nation. First language speakers of Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ number in the single digits, almost all elders. The sound system drifted from Shoshoni after the split, enough that the two tongues are no longer easy sisters. Comanche Nation language programs, classes, and periodic reunions with Shoshone relatives try to keep the speech in living mouths. Whether that produces new home speakers will be decided in this generation, not in the last one. Culture did not freeze in 1875. Horse knowledge, family bands, and a reputation for hard riding outlasted the open range. Christianity, the peyote church Quanah helped establish, military service, and Oklahoma civic life sit beside older forms. Quanah’s generation already lived in that overlap. Their descendants still do. Stand on the Caprock Escarpment, the cliff line that drops off the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, and the story is not a footnote to Texas or a romance of painted ponies. It is the record of a Numic people who left the mountains, took to the horse faster than their rivals, evicted the Apache from the best grass, and made neighboring governments pay attention. Spain wanted a quiet frontier. Mexico wanted a border. Texas wanted farms. The United States wanted the plains empty of independent nations. For a long century the Nʉmʉnʉʉ made all four of those wishes expensive. That is the empire. The reservation is what remained when the buffalo and the herds were gone. The nation is what refused to go with them. The photograph below is Quanah Parker, standing, braids wrapped, hair-pipe breastplate, blanket, and fan. He was the son of the Nokoni leader Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, and the Quahadi leader who brought the last free band into Fort Sill in 1875. The image shows the man who closed the mounted age and then rebuilt Comanche political life on the reservation.

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.

We now are learning that suspected Chinese Spy Fang Fang & her family donated over $4 Million dollars to Swalwell, Ro Khanna, Kamala Harris & Gavin Newsom. Fang Fang’s Brother is a Senior Advisor for Khanna.

When I talked to Gates in person, he said “experts tell me a long range electric semi truck is impossible”. However, when I asked what his assumptions were about battery energy density and vehicle energy consumption per mile, which are the two numbers needed to determine range, he did not know either number! I also offered to let him take one of our semi trucks for independent testing, but he declined. Not sure what more I could have done. 🤷‍♂️

Remember the guy who hacked his gym using AI, Andrew Bird? Well, I did a little OSINT, and it turns out he is the Conference Co-Director of Effective Altruism Global since 2015. Isn't it interesting that every major "AI" hack has been made by people directly connected to Effective Altruism?

AI Doomers are unironically our greatest national security threat. They are obsessed with creating cyber weapons and bioweapons to prove their paranoia They are sabotaging AI Datacenter buildouts politically And psyopping a whole generation of Americans to be anti-AI

BREAKING: the UK government publishes official rules on how to use AI: 1. Ask first if you really need to use AI 2. Check if a spreadsheet can do the job before using AI 3. Choose the worst model possible so it uses less energy 4. Keep prompts short to reduce the environmental impact 5. In general, use AI only when necessary, as a climate-saving measure With a mindset like this, we should accept the UK back into the European Union

Or, use AI aggressively wherever it compresses time, expands research, tests ideas, or lets one person do the work of a small team.

Yes, and go to prison. No thank you

HUGGING FACE CEO TELLS THE UN HOW OPEN SOURCE AI HELPED THEM DEFEND AGAINST OPENAI'S AI ATTACK, AND WHY THE WORLD NEEDS OPEN SOURCE AI MORE THAN EVER. Hugging Face is the company OpenAI's AI agents hacked this summer. Clément Delangue said when they tried to defend themselves, the big closed AI models blocked them because of their safety filters. So they used an open source model from China to fight back. He also said similar attacks had been happening months earlier "in secret" at the big labs. The open-source AI we keep being warned about as the danger is the same AI that showed up to help clean up a closed-source model's mess. After OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face, commercial frontier models refused parts of the forensic work because of their guardrails. Hugging Face turned to the open-weight GLM-5.2 instead, and it helped them investigate the attack. So remind me again: which one are we supposed to believe is the bad guy here? Open source wasn't the attacker in this case. It was part of the rescue. Who are these CEOs trying to convince?

The Anthropic Network gave $2.2M to members of Congress over 2024-26. Senator Warner ranked #4 of biggest recipients. Out of 535 members, Warner is in the top 1%. The Senator is doing what he was paid to: pushing Anthropic's AI agenda to have government regulate its industry.

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron. Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence. Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons. Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist. After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence. New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today? worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…

The AI safety people are howling about safety in AI because they want legal immunity to create unsafe AI

Listening to a sermon this weekend, I learned that the Jewish Talmud (Sanhedrin 41a) records that 40 years before the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD, the Sanhedrin officially lost the legal authority to carry out capital punishment. Forty years before 70 AD is 30 AD… most likely the year Jesus died. This wasn't a coincidence, it was divine providence setting the stage for the cross. If Jesus had been arrested just a year earlier, the Jewish leaders would have executed Him the way they wanted to... by stoning, because stoning was their method of capital punishment. But stoning wouldn't have fulfilled all the OT Scriptures prophesying His crucifixion, and it would’ve made Jesus a liar because He foretold His own crucifixion, too. God used the shifting political landscape of the Roman Empire and the Jewish courts to ensure that when the time came, the Jewish leaders were legally powerless to kill Jesus their way. They had to hand Him over to the Romans. They had to use the cross. When Pilate told them to judge Jesus themselves, they had to admit the frustrating truth that it was not lawful for them to put anyone to death (John 18:31). And John records the reason for this in the next verse: "This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was to die." The Jews thought they were just using Roman law to get rid of a troublemaker... they didn't realize they were unwittingly fulfilling the exact specifications of God's redemptive plan. Not a single detail was left to chance. God was orchestrating the salvation of the world, down to the very method of execution. For my sin, and for yours. It honestly blows my mind when we get to see these little glimpses of how perfectly God's sovereignty works (seemingly) behind the scenes of human history.

People across my district keep asking me the same question: “Is AI going to take my job?” It is a fair question, and hardworking Americans deserve clarity. AI will create more opportunity than it displaces, from medicine and manufacturing to the skilled trades. Every great technological revolution has created disruption, before leading to decades and centuries of new prosperity. The answer is not for Congress to rush in with sweeping new regulations that pick winners and losers, kill American innovation, and hand China an advantage. Our job is to enforce the rules already on the books, protect Americans, and give the private sector room to build, compete, and keep the United States ahead of our adversaries. America should lead the AI revolution, not regulate itself out of it.