Adam Saks

PROPAGANDA I’M PUSHING: - go to the gym - or go for a run - eat real food - sit in sun - take a breath - get some sleep - joymaxx bb - you should be having fun with this - double. down. - stay hopelessly optimistic - ruin them with your enthusiasm - be kind. but take no shit. - quality over quantity every single time - tell the truth. over and over again you tell the truth - drink your coffee slow - say hi to strangers - denim. white tees. leather. - just be hot (hotness as a state of being, has nothing to do with how you look and everything to do with how you act)

the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market. like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer. the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions. that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous. you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all. this all leads to some interesting questions: - what is a file when the system understands context? - what is an app when intent can route itself? - what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents? - what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember? - what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all. the old computer assumed navigation. the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency. we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors. the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.

Big personal news: I’ve been recruited by Google DeepMind for a new Philosopher position (actual title), focusing on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness, starting in May. I’ll continue my research & teaching at Cambridge part-time. Absolutely stoked!

Absolutely insane week for agentic engineering 37K LOC per day across 5 projects Still speeding up

- Drafted a blog post - Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours. - Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing! - Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite. - LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true. - lol The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.