DS1

Chop Wood Carry Water.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Marcus Aurelius wrote this over 1800 years ago:

“Until death, all defeat is psychological.”

[Mo @atmoio]

a few of you have been riled up by this video which includes such iconic phrases as AI “sucks balls at coding,” “go fuck yourself,” “materialist propaganda wet dream bullshit,” passing AI through a “glory hole,” and lastly, failing to properly take accountability for my children and mother-in-law.

for posterity, i’d like to make a written record of actual claims i’ve made without the seemingly not-so-funny shit-posting wrapper.

1. there is no consensus on intelligence in animals. why are armchair thinkers claiming AGI is already here? and why is demis hassabis meanwhile saying we are nowhere near AGI?

2. often when the shortfalls of LLMs is brought up, proponents say “yeah but, 12-18 months these issues won’t exist anymore.” this constant prognostication about future progress is not useful discourse and is a form of religious psychosis. i say that in future videos, i will simply judge llms by their current abilities, and not by future potential.

3. i say that llms are not actually intelligent and that david deutsch argues intelligence and consciousness/personhood seem to be inseparable. i say that for this reason llms are not actually intelligent but “trick” credulous people into believing they are. here of course we are getting into axiomatic word game territory so no one wins. that feigning intelligence is equivalent to it is not a settled matter and while this “fake” intelligence may help you do some work, it does not obviate the need for clearly delineating between true intelligence and a model of it. actually nothing is more important than this very question.

regarding ai “sucking balls at coding”, i was somewhat re-enlivened to make this claim after watching a 20 minute video i uploaded on yt back in february when i used to do coding screen shares / daily dev logs. i was (am) a huge user of these tools. the “sucks balls” isn’t that it can’t do some things for you. it’s that it can’t ultimately get you to your final final destination. to me, it wasn’t so obvious there were net gains in productivity, all things considered, even though day to day you kind of felt like there were.

i make about 2-3 videos a week and it’s easy to miss that these videos are usually performative storytelling. they are presentations meant to get you through the whole thing. that this one was particularly over the top was precisely the point. it’s a “drunken rant” genre that is meant to be a vicarious/cathartic ventilation of pent up frustrations that many of us feel towards the industry-wide token mania that is resulting in the serious loss of what it even means to be human. and for what? higher productivity gains? my job is simply to tell stories that draw attention to this fact.

[Naval @naval]

The new competition isn’t Humans vs AI. It’s Humans with AI vs everyone else.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

We have been using the open source tool Bumblebee at The Zero-Human Company over the last day and find it amazing!

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

Thomas Sowell on engineers vs intellectuals:

“The engineer is judged by the end product. If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn’t matter how brilliant his idea was—he’s ruined.”

“Conversely, if an intellectual has an idea for rearranging society and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.”

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Exciting.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

Follow this advice

[Naval @naval]

What you really want is a challenge at the edge of your capability.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

2 of 2

Anthropic’s approach does the opposite. It centralizes power in a handful of labs infected with EA ideology.

It pushes policies that treat American companies and researchers as the problem instead of the solution.

It weakens national security under the banner of “safety.”

Their two scenarios for 2028 read less like objective analysis and more like a brief for why they should keep controlling the frontier while the rest of us slow down.

I fully disagree with their solutions.

More controls.

More closed models.

More distillation bans and chip restrictions that ultimately hobble our velocity while China finds workarounds.

This is not winning the race. It’s running it with one foot in a philosophical ankle weight of our own design.

The stakes are existential for American leadership, not just some abstract x-risk checkbox.

We cannot let an EA-captured company’s ends-justify-the-means worldview dictate the terms and hand the decisive technological advantage of our lifetime to the Chinese Communist Party.

Open the models. You don’t have a moat with models, learn this fast or learn it slow.

Clean the data foundations. You can’t build in the junk fill data you use.

Unleash American talent and speed. With a culture of innovation and NOT FEAR.

Anything less is not prudence.

It’s surrender.

—

“2028: Two Scenarios for Global AI Leadership”: https://t.co/TQxYnAC18m

[Matthew Berman @MatthewBerman]

Anthropic: Chinese AI is a threat.

They've correctly identified the risks, including cheap Chinese AI capturing American businesses even when it's less capable.

But they completely blundered the solution: zero mention of an American open source strategy. In fact, they actively campaign AGAINST open source. 🤦‍♂️

Full breakdown of their paper from today:

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The physical commitment he had to this song has always made me like it more. I don’t think we will see anything like this again.

[John Ennis @johnennis]

https://t.co/b89862LIqj

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Jordan Peterson on a truth that should humble all of us:

“I’ve never seen anyone get away with anything. Not even once.”

You might twist the fabric of reality for a while — bend the rules, cut corners, play games — but it always snaps back. Sometimes years later, in ways you never saw coming. That’s why “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Not terror, but deep respect for the order of things.

You get away with nothing in the end.

In a culture that increasingly celebrates short-term cleverness and moral flexibility, this is a sobering reminder that reality keeps perfect score.

God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.

What about you — have you ever watched someone “get away with it”… only for it to catch up with them later in unexpected ways?

[DS1 @Infosec_Convert]

Naval

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

You're under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The T-800 is on patrol… Over 13,000 have been ordered.

[DHH @dhh]

What a delightful TUI! Next version of Omarchy will ship it as a lazy-installed default. So you can just type ghui and it'll get pulled, just like we do with opencode, codex, etc. https://t.co/sCfPSdDfHp

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

If you want to know the future, take 15 minutes to hear what it will be like.

This interview will help show you a compass point and help you build a map.

Listen up and listen in…

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

LISTEN UP.

TRENDSLOP has taken over most AI models.

It will only get worse.

I talk about how to fix it.

Join us and listen in…