Rick Atkinson

dad, husband, software developer, guitar enthusiast

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@RobUsry 3 of 4 goals in past 2 games on him.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@RobUsry I like it. But Pepi and Weah for Balogun and Reyna would not be awful.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@AlexiLalas How good is Senegal?

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@Jcrudess @Microtonalgtrs What are the wires or strings in your picking hand?

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

The road to Hell is paved with closed-source citadels disguised as good intentions.

The Pope is right: AI takes on the characteristics of those who build it, finance it, and regulate it. So the question is: who gets to hold the great and wonderful power of AI?

If the answer is a handful of closed source companies, murkily censored, quietly surveilling every step of our lives, every private conversation, enshrined in law as 'safe' and 'open' when they're nothing but the surveillance economy squared, then all we've done is build a few modern East India Companies, digital oligarchies of the few, cloaked in the language of safety.

Open Source and Open Weights are how you spread the fantastic enabling power of AI to everyone, everywhere.

Permissionless innovation.

Everyone gets the hammer and nails to build houses and churches and factories. The more hammers, the more widely spread, the more the decentralized genius of humankind can flourish.

Everyone gets the Printing Press.

The printing press singlehandedly uplifted and spread of intelligence and knowledge around the world. The more we could record all kinds of knowledge, the more we spread the ability to read, the more equal and advanced society became.

Before the press, knowledge was learned by one person and passed into dust with them when they died or passed only to only a small group of students.

When we only had monks in a cave copying religious texts, a closed system, it limited the spread of intelligence and limited the growth of civilization.

The printing press was the single greatest invention in the history of the world because it let anyone print anything and spread knowledge throughout the whole world.

AI can do the same, but only if we build the bazaar, and never let the citadel people convince the world that they're the special people who should control who gets access to intelligence while pretending they're building the bazaar.

What the world needs now is more intelligence, more widely spread and more widely available.

Open is the way.

And it always has been.

And the road to Hell was always built with walls, towers, spiked gates and moats so that only the few could enter.

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

Eric Schmidt should’ve stopped mid-speech and said:

“Fine. Boo AI.

But make your next Preply class Chinese, because the civilization cheering this stuff is not waiting for you to finish your campus struggle session.”

China’s grandmas are lining up to install AI tools. Chinese developers are shipping open-source models like their hair is on fire. Their public is overwhelmingly positive about AI (83% feel positive about the future while in the west we are circling the drain around 30%). Their companies are moving fast, copying fast, improving fast, innovating fast, deploying fast.

And in America?

Our most educated children boo the mere mention of the most important technology since electricity.

Why?

Because our AI leadership class has spent three years doing the dumbest possible PR campaign in the history of technology.

One half of them tells everyone AI will kill them.

The other half tells everyone AI will take every white-collar job in 18 months.

Then the closed-model cartel runs to DC whispering that ordinary people cannot be trusted with powerful open-source AI, that the future must be locked behind a handful of corporate APIs, safety boards, export controls, permission slips, and East India Company monopolies.

And everyone acts shocked when the kids hate it.

You told them AI means unemployment.

You told them AI means extinction.

You told them AI means no future.

Then you walk onto a graduation stage and say “AI” and wonder why they boo.

This is what strategic suicide looks like.

The country that taught the world to love computers, the internet, open source, startups, hackers, builders, weirdos, tinkerers, and permissionless innovation is now teaching its children to fear the next platform shift.

Meanwhile China looked at AI and said: deploy it, open it, copy it, improve it, integrate it, normalize it.

We looked at AI and said: regulate it, monopolize it, catastrophize it, litigate it, protest the datacenters, ban the open models, blame every layoff on it, then act mystified when the public thinks it’s a demon machine.

NIMYBs are moving from blocking housing to blocking datacenters. The same folks that stopped nuclear, the cleanest energy we have, are now joining hands with the NIMYBs. The hard right nationalists in Bannon and the hard left socialists in Bernie are joining hands in a new American party with mad Max Tegmark spending billions to terrify children about AI. Wonder what they'll call themselves? Maybe the National Socialists?

The West does not have an AI capability problem.

It has an AI civilizational-confidence problem.

And if we keep telling our kids that the future is something to boo, don’t be surprised when the future answers back in Mandarin.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

Three things in life are definites. Death, taxes and if you are losing 8-1 to Chris Sale, you have already lost.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@Dan_Jeffries1 Thanks. Just picked up on Audible.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

This. You can bootstrap an idea without needing to raise or spend a lot of money.

Everyone can now be an entrepreneur.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I actually think the whole "permanent underclass" narrative is wrong.

I think we're about to see the largest EXPLOSION of entrepreneurship in human history.

I get why the fear exists. Jobs are getting cut. AI researchers are privately saying most people are screwed. The models are getting ridiculously better and faster than anyone expected. Project that forward linearly and yeah, it looks BLEAK.

But linear projections are usually wrong during platform shifts. Nobody projected that the internet would create 50 million small businesses. They projected Walmart would eat everything. Nobody projected that mobile would create a million app developers. They projected phones were just phones.

What actually happens is intelligence gets cheap and a flood of new builders enter the market with domain knowledge the incumbents never had. Millions will get laid off or just never hired over the next 24-36 months. Those jobs are not coming back. So they become entrepreneurs. Out of necessity at first. Then out of opportunity.

The underclass idea is VIRAL because it confirms something people have been feeling for a decade. That the ground is shifting and nobody at the top is reaching down. And they're right.

But the interesting thing about this particular technology is that it doesn't check your resume or your zip code. The same tool that eliminates your position hands you the ability to build the thing that replaces it. The weapon and the escape hatch are the same object.

We're about to see more new companies started in the next 5 years than in the previous 50.

And I think we're going to look back at this moment the way we look back at 1995.

Everyone was scared. Everyone was right to be. And the people who built anyway became the next generation of owners.

I know you might be reading about the permanent underclass and it's scary. Who wants to "get stuck in the permanent underclass no one.

My POV is the permanent underclass isn't a foregone conclusion. I know some people are genuinely struggling right now and "just go build" sounds tone deaf when you're worried about rent. I get that.

But the reason I'm optimistic is that the cost to start something just dropped to nearly zero, intelligence on tap, and eveyr category/industry you can think of is getting reshuffled.

The explosion of entrepreneurship is just beginning.

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

I see a surge of new jobs coming.

Agents and people working together on ever more complex software and problems. Smaller, more agile teams. Abstracting up the stack.

That is true intelligence. Coordination. Communication. Working together. Abstraction.

Solve lower level problems and move to ever more complex ones higher up.

We already have superintelligence. It's people working together. It's us as a whole. No one human agent is responsible for all. It's specialization all the way down. It's iteration and refinement. Sharing ideas. Learning from each other and from our tools. Comparative advantage.

These are the foundations of civilization and true intelligence.

It's mass coordination that took us out of the dark ages and into the globe striding civilization that we are now.

Have no fear.

We will defeat the sociopaths who can't tell the difference between their dark dreams and reality.

We will defeat the psychotics whose job it is to sell fear and produce nothing for society, living off it as parasites.

We will build a better tomorrow, step by step.

Together.

[Aman @Amank1412]

USING Claude Opus 4.7 TO CENTER A DIV

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@AlexiLalas Seeing Ratt (Pearce and Demartini, basically Ratt) at Monsters on the Mountain in August. You should come.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

Another day. Another #Atlunited win.

[Awni Hannun @awnihannun]

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:

Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@Dan_Jeffries1 Which one to read first?

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@RobUsry Make it so

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@AlexiLalas Easier to track here watching on the field. But yeah. Make Belgium wear dark.

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@djminkster @elonmusk Nice wrap. Satin black?

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@joshuaarey @elonmusk Is it street legal to not have side mirrors?

[Rick Atkinson @Rickatkinson]

@SpreadsheetJky @TaylorTwellman @ATLUTD Yes. Yes they are. Yes they did.