Ratish

A mother otter proudly showing off her baby while the dad showed off a rock

The entire AI productivity meme breaks down once you realize that being able to do fake work even faster doesn't really change anything I've vibecoded I don't know how many apps and the net economic impact of those apps is practically zero. The personal AI product I use the most is my own vibecoded AI trading bot and trade tracker. Works great, but, again, it has net zero economic or productive impact Same for all the AI videos and images I've made. Most of it is entertainment disguised as productivity We already had an abstractive economy where most of us were just doing various degrees of bullshit. None of the things I've ever sold - courses, monthly subscriptions, per-seat software - had any ties to economic or productive reality. I could offer 90% discounts and still make a profit at times because, again, the work was completely detached from the production of it And now AI adds another deep layer of abstraction on top and it's somehow productive that you can pump out articles and blog posts and cheap code even faster We've sort of memed ourselves, ngl

About 6% of all conversations are people asking Claude for personal guidance—whether to take a job, how to handle a conflict, if they should move. Over 75% of these conversations fell into four domains: health & wellness, career, relationships, and personal finance.

i keep thinking i want the models to be cheaper/faster more than i want them to be smarter but it seems that just being smarter is still the most important thing

any sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from art

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick, the novel Blade Runner is based on, starts with the protagonist arguing over their "Mood Organ", a device you dial to induce a specific emotional state. Replicants in the book, androids with the tagline "more human than humans", have false memories implanted, dreams that were never theirs. In that way, they themselves cannot tell if they're artificial or not. The entire book is a meditation on the idea that inner states, like empathy, mood, and dreams, have become technologically mediated.

Here’s a paper arguing that there is no progress in philosophy. The author claims that if Aristotle visited a modern university, he would be amazed by modern physics but feel at home in the philosophy classes, since the debates haven’t fundamentally changed. What do you think?

I'm a bit retroactively surprised that, before LLMs, I... don't recall any sci-fi stories where the AIs operated in short bursts of thinking, each mediated by a human. Or, where the AI is in a "memento" situation where it keeps getting reset. The story I recall that at least touches on this is some novel in the Star Wars extended universe, where it's remarked that droids are supposed to get "reset" periodically so they don't get wonky. Luke hasn't reset C3PO, which is part of why 3PO has acquired such a personality, and has maybe become sentient (which apparently isn't normal). Accelerando's early chapters has the main character send little AI agents off to do stuff, which seem like they could at least in principle be something like an OpenClaw instance, but it's not super specified. It is interesting that this feels like a relatively obvious story concept (in retrospect) but it didn't come up.

Imagine the math required to make this guess and aim 4 people at a point in space

Humans going to the Moon isn’t just another spacetrip, and it isn't made trivial by todays technology just because a group of absolute madmen managed to pull it off with calculators in the 1960s and 70s It is the farthest distance humans have ever traveled. Because the Moon looks large in the sky, many people underestimate how far away it really is. The Moon is about 1000 times further from Earth than the International Space Station. Artemis II will take 10 days, with astronauts traveling at thousands of miles per hour through deep space only to slam back into Earth’s atmosphere going 25000 mph relying on a heat shield to survive. There’s something both inspiring and reassuring about the fact that humans are willing to take that kind of risk and to come back home to tell us what they experienced