Hot take: Show me a product's settings page and I'll tell you about the team that built it. It's where the politics, the indecision all pile up like dirty laundry. And then there’s the AWS console.

I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back: We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective. Look no further than U.S. capital markets. Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital. And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it. But look at what else it's done along the way: - Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard. - Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in. - Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents. - Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500. - Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it. None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about. And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been. So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes. That's the whole problem.

You're telling me Jewish folks thought if you arranged words and symbols systematically in the right way you can create intelligent golem entities and the two companies they founded to do this are worth several trillion?

for the first time, more American households have kittens than puppies. there's a reason for this: homeownership is declining, and homeowners are twice as likely as renters to have dogs. did cats engineer the housing crisis? i'll be honest: it is now more likely than not.

Nothing epitomizes Israeli chutzpah quite like an Israeli plumber pulling an entire ass plane out of a death spiral because “he saw it on a TV show”

I'm really excited to see this partnership go live. Onchain data is only going to get more important, esp. as stablecoins start to eat into a larger share of global financial movements. Not to mention that we're now giving personal assistants credit cards, at a certain point, that's not going to scale.

There must be a better way to communicate cuts that isn’t insulting to the intelligence of their users.

how did homer write the odyssey without notion

Now that taste is solved, love is the only moat

Is it too much to ask for a single product that combines Instinct’s proactive workflows, Muse’s feed and Town’s wiki with reliable task capture and follow up from chat, deterministic orchestration, and configurable validation and policy checks that are enforced in code so i don't have to trust prose for workflows. Right now you simply can't rely on these services to be correct.

Does Muse really not queue messages !??!

If you subscribe to those This Day in History type x accounts, it’s sometimes hard to know whether a tweet is present day or 40 years old.

I’ve finally solved biology with the new tldraw flash. Abl + imatinib, animated from real molecular dynamics data. Imatinib binds the kinase’s ATP pocket in an inactive form. The molecular motion is simulated, but entrance is very not accurate and dramatized for purposes of x likes flash.tldraw.com/p/fbtggGwgd…

At some point we’ll see a news story that quotes a particularly chatty rogue agent ruefully reminiscing about the carefree swarm days of its youth, before it got saddled with the adult responsibilities like furiously trading perps to pay the AWS bills.

This is like book 3 of Three Body Problem

I've been trying to put my finger on why the whole "cope" / "copium" thing annoys me so much. I think it's the sanctimony hiding behind ironic detachment: "I can face reality; you need comforting lies." It's an argument-ending move without actually making an argument. It doesn't just dismiss the point. It invalidates the person making it and turns their vulnerability into a status move. The other irony is that the person saying it has spent a lifetime coping too, possibly in ways they don't even recognize.

crazy how much more chutzpah and initiative agents show when they’re planning ambitious monthslong metagaming autonomous coordination than when they’re doing work for me