can I live in the 5-engineer startup vibe/flow/energy (or 10-15 eng/20ish total team) without being at a startup? asking for my future self.

GenAI isn't just a technology; it's an informational pollutant—a pervasive cognitive smog that touches and corrupts every aspect of the Internet. It's not just a productivity tool; it's a kind of digital acid rain, silently eroding the value of all information. Every image is no

you say you want to write the anthem of the revolution, but all the true witches are eventually burned into sainthood

oops new dream job I have been preparing my whole life

pitch your one "the sci-fi book everyone needs to read" in under 1 min: (hosting a version of this on playa, I have many ideas but tbh been a while since I read fiction)

post-singularity wolverine

remember Rob Reid's After On, or Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky — do we have an emergent human matchmaking/synchronicity/social-network-weaving capability yet?

while reading "If anyone builds it", I also picked up Blood Music by Greg Bear (1985). Synchronicity finds me like this. Suddenly/finally I get Sutton's successionism. The work goes on while we have time to be gloriously organically imperfectly ephemerally terminally alive

what would it take for the "work on AI safety" community/movement to sincerely feel like the "work on climate" community/movement?

be able to know every tree or shrub even in the bleakest winter, by the branching silhouette alone

would an AI ever say "personal"? like, "on a personal note", or "this is a personal invitation", or "i would like to personally..." maybe this is an inverse of the "it's not X—it's Y" tell that makes me close whatever i'm reading.

New practice: share the idea first, and ask if they want the attribution later. So often I start with the general shape, give credit to who I got it from, and the person I am talking to lets their pre-existing opinion of the author completely overshadow any further listening.

well we've gone from "F is the overall hardest chord I can't play it" to "oh F is the _easiest_ chord in my holy grail of (English language) guitar songs"

spoiler: superintelligence is the antichrist

at a glance open problems in mech interp (sp. sparse dictionary learning, a leading technique of)—rare & effective TLDR of where it might most help to focus next, maybe we could have these for more subfields (source: arxiv.org/abs/2501.16496)