san

building
—thoughts at

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.

1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.

2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.

3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.

4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.

5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.

6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

So much has been said and written about Star Wars – so let’s do it with a twist or two.

The original trilogy is the adventure. The prequels are the civilizational lesson. And nobody was paying attention to the right film.

1. The prequels show how a free Republic destroys itself. Not conquered from outside. Not defeated in battle. Hollowed from within – through fear, manufactured crises, and emergency powers accumulated legally, one Senate vote at a time. This is not science fiction. This is Rome. This is Weimar. This is every republic that discovered, too late, that the constitution is only as strong as the people operating it.

2. Palpatine doesn’t seize power. He is given it – democratically, gratefully, with thunderous applause. He manufactures the crisis, presents himself as the solution, and asks only for temporary emergency authority. The temporary becomes permanent when the crisis is resolved – as it never quite is, because the crisis is the instrument. Every step is legal. Every step is popular. Every step is irreversible.
Reminds us of anything?

3. “So this is how liberty dies – with thunderous applause.” Padmé says it watching the Republic vote itself into an Empire. The most important political sentence in fifty years of popular cinema. And yet nobody puts it on a banner. It came and went in two seconds in a film everyone considered inferior to the originals. The originals gave you the adventure. The prequels gave you the explanation. The audience preferred the adventure.

4. The Jedi Council is the failed establishment – a priestly, unelected caste with special knowledge, too political, too institutional, too convinced of their own wisdom to see the corruption metastasizing around them. They sense that something is wrong. They form committees. They deliberate. They send one man to investigate. By the time they understand what Palpatine is, he has already won. The establishment always sees the threat last – because acknowledging it would require acknowledging their own failure to prevent it.

5. The Force is Hayek’s spontaneous order. You don’t control it, plan it, or impose it from above. You flow with it – or you fight it, which is precisely what turns you to the dark side. The dark side is the Ring: the totalitarian temptation that this time, in the right hands, for the right reasons, absolute power can produce good outcomes. Anakin falls not because he is evil but because he believes total control can save what he loves. He is wrong for the same reason everyone who reaches for the Ring is wrong.

6. The Death Star is the endpoint of central planning taken seriously: if the system cannot persuade you, it will destroy your planet and use the remaining ones as an example. This is not a metaphor. This is the logical conclusion of the General Will applied at galactic scale. Order through absolute deterrence. Compliance through the elimination of alternatives. It is Plato’s Republic with a superlaser.

7. And now the twist within the twist. The Empire is nasty. The Death Star is inexcusable. Nobody is defending either. But ask yourself one question: why has every studio, every cultural institution, every progressive establishment figure spent fifty years telling you the rebels are the good guys – and casting themselves as the rebels? Not a bit suspicious? The people controlling the algorithms, the narrative, the NGOs, the content moderation policies all go to work convinced they are Luke Skywalker. But aren’t the rebels — externally funded, media-celebrated, arriving with a program to tear down the existing order — actually the progressives? Aren’t they the color revolutions? (The real rebels are the ones being deplatformed, demonetized, and cancelled.)
At some point you have to ask: if everyone with institutional, cultural, and financial power is the Rebel Alliance – who exactly is the Empire?

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[san @san__42]

how we learn is how models *should* learn

except models learn exponentially which is kind of frightening

so beautifully written

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

Humans try hard things, fail, learn, and get better through repetition.

AI models aren't as different as you might think.

Here's how models "learn" explained in simple terms. https://t.co/gFaNuyVliT

[Teknium 🪽 @Teknium]

I have information that Anthropic scraped my github twitter reddit discord and facebook posts for the development of it's Fable model.

To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale scraping and obfuscation of their actions.

[Emil Kowalski @emilkowalski]

After my last post about turning someone’s content into a skill, a few people asked the same question: how do you know who’s actually worth learning from, given all the AI slop out there?

Look for proof of work.

If I wanted to learn font design, I’d read everything Rasmus has ever said about fonts, because he made Inter. I wouldn’t search for the most viral typography thread.

Shipped work that strangers pay for or depend on is the best signal there is.

Before taking someone’s advice, open their GitHub or personal site. Find something they built that people actually use: a product, an open-source library, something tangible.

This is why followers and likes are not a great proxy for what’s good and what’s not.

Many people are good at posting shiny things, but as soon as you look for any tangible work, it falls apart. Mainly because building is a completely different skill, and that’s the skill you actually want.

You want to learn from the builders. Be allergic to the talkers.

[san @san__42]

@jamesperkins @DanielLockyer 🤣🤣🤣

[san @san__42]

Dear X For You. show me what's happening but reality

[san @san__42]

today i noticed on X, some people read the comments to a post,
then use one of the valuable comment to Quote the og post

[san @san__42]

yup

[tobi lutke @tobi]

A huge amount of the Anti-AI code sentiment massively overestimates the quality of human code outside of a very small set of open source and high quality company codebases. Human Slop is everywhere and can trivially be improved on by any opus level model.

[san @san__42]

feels existential, """This is inevitable. Most of us will"""

WALL-E

[shadcn @shadcn]

Agreed. Two thoughts:

> This is why they horribly suck at writing! [...] they produce robotic prose… because they are robots.

I think AGI solves this. A true mark of superintelligence would be the ability to imitate human intelligence flawlessly. We are already heading toward a point where we can no longer reliably tell.

> They stop being themselves: lose their identity, delegate all their writing, their unique thoughts, the creative ways...

This is inevitable. Most of us will, unfortunately, trade uniqueness for faster, cheaper output. We're already seeing this.

We're already accepting good-enough code as long as it allows us to iterate faster. We can argue if code is art of not but I bet it happens to other form of creativity too.

[san @san__42]

wholeheartedly agree, """the model would have to ingest your entire being as 'context' in order to produce the next token that is legitimately you."""

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

On 1️⃣: I'm skeptical because the model would have to ingest your entire being as 'context' in order to produce the next token that is legitimately you.

The most successful people on their platform / ones I like to follow most let their raw or close-to-raw existence come through their words. Their memes, history, scars, etc.

On 2️⃣: I'm all for AI that raises the floor. We have to keep demanding higher and more beautiful ceilings :)

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

On 1️⃣: I'm skeptical because the model would have to ingest your entire being as 'context' in order to produce the next token that is legitimately you.

The most successful people on their platform / ones I like to follow most let their raw or close-to-raw existence come through their words. Their memes, history, scars, etc.

On 2️⃣: I'm all for AI that raises the floor. We have to keep demanding higher and more beautiful ceilings :)

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

i'm slowly realizing that the code i'm writing is no longer code

traditionally when we build software, we write code. code tells the machines "here's what you do"

if we write wrong code, machines will do wrong things. and that's what we call a bug

earlier this month, i wrote a pretty bad bug into one of firstmate's bash scripts. the code literally can't run, and should have broken firstmate

except it didn't. it went unnoticed for days. i discovered it when i came across the code and spent minutes wondering how on earth this could work

i then found that the agent ran the script, saw it fail, figured out what the script was trying to do, and did a workaround to achieve the same goal

so a bug that should have crashed the whole software almost didn't have any visible impact

that's when i discovered that what i wrote in the bash script is no longer code. it's not "here's what you do"

it's intent. it's "here's what i want"

intent doesn't crash and can't be broken. it gets executed regardless whether it's "correct" or not. i can no longer write "bugs"

what can still happen in intent is what i call "misses", which could be -
1. a misalignment between what's written and what my real intent is - this happens when i fail at articulating my thoughts
2. a misalignment between my real intent and the real demand - this happens when i fail at understanding the world

those are becoming the most important human skills in this new era

[san @san__42]

i need a flying physical keyboard

or

i need a way to type just by thinking

[Alvin Sng @alvinsng]

https://t.co/AUKp96JRpQ

[san @san__42]

@yongfook i just watched backrooms

[san @san__42]

@noah_schochet @kleinerperkins @NoahMcGuinn @SpaceX Guns and Bulldozer

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

This is really powerful and distills my earlier post into a mere 8 words:

"Credentialism is tribalism under a guise of meritocracy."

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

when the dream becomes the job

i used to think the dream was to make my hobby my work.

to spend my life close to the things i loved: computers, tools, interfaces, systems, tiny details, the feeling of making something from nothing. the things i used to do at night, after school, after work, in the margins of life, somehow became the center of my life.

and it is a dream. i don’t want to pretend otherwise.

there is a very specific happiness in getting paid to care. in meeting other people who care. in building a language around your obsession. in seeing something that lived only in your head become real enough for other people to touch.

but there is also a quiet pain in it.

because the thing that once belonged only to you no longer belongs only to you.

it becomes attached to deadlines, teams, customers, strategy, money, reputation, momentum... curiosity becomes roadmap. taste becomes decision-making. play becomes output. the thing you once used to escape the world becomes the thing through which the world reaches you.

and now there is another strange layer: the machines are getting good at the work too.

not just the boring parts. the parts that used to feel close to the heart. writing, coding, designing, reasoning, making taste-like decisions, turning vague ideas into something real. the things we once used as proof that we had something special inside us are becoming things a model can approximate, remix, and sometimes do faster.

that can feel scary in a very specific way.

not only because of jobs or competition, but because it touches the myth you built around yourself. if the thing i became good at can be done by a machine, then what part of it was really me?

i think that question is painful because it arrives at the same place.

the original love.

before the title, before the company, before the taste became a role, before the work became useful to other people, there was a small fire inside. curiosity. obsession. the feeling that the world became more alive when you understood a little more of it, or made a tiny piece of it bend to your will.

AI can make the output faster. it can even raise the floor of the craft. but it cannot want on your behalf. it cannot decide what is worth loving. it cannot protect the strange private thread that made you care in the first place.

maybe that is what becomes more important now.

not whether you can still produce the artifact by hand. not whether you can outperform the machine at every task. that game is already changing.

the real question is whether you still have a relationship with the source.

the part with no audience. no roadmap. no deadline. the part that can wander, collect strange references, make useless things. follow beauty, be wrong, be slow, be you, be true.

because that part is not separate from the work. it is the source of the work.

if you lose it, you can still operate. you can still manage the machine. you can still prompt, review, decide, ship, and keep things moving.

but the work becomes thinner. safer. more explainable. less alive.

so maybe the real discipline is not to work harder, rest more, or care less.

maybe it is to keep returning to the place where the love began – before it became useful, before it became legible, before anyone needed anything from it, before even the machine could mirror it back to you.

not to escape the work.

to make sure the fire inside is still alive.