Sri

Day 6

Any remaining faith I had in our institutions is gone. The Epstein files were the final straw for me. For years, I’ve tried to give the system the benefit of the doubt. Assume incompetence over malice. Assume there are things happening behind the scenes. Assume eventually the truth comes out. Cope. At some point you have to stop lying to yourself. When the most powerful people on earth are connected to something this dark, and the result is sealed documents, redactions, quiet settlements, and zero real accountability, you start to see the pattern. There’s a system for regular people, and there’s a different system for the elite. We have seen it with monetary and economic policy. Now we see it is systemic. This isn’t about left vs. right. It’s not partisan for me. Corruption protects itself. Power protects power. That’s the constant. And when that realization sets in, you have a choice. You can scream about it. You can argue online. You can hope the next election fixes it. Or you can quietly opt out where you can. For me, that’s Bitcoin. Not because it’s some utopia or because it fixes evil. But because it doesn’t require me to trust the same institutions that have repeatedly shown they don’t operate by the same rules for everyone. No special access. No closed-door monetary policy. No selective bailouts. Just open code and rules that apply to everyone. Maybe that sounds dramatic. But I don’t see it as rebellion. I see it as self-preservation. When trust erodes, capital moves. It always has. Some people exit geographically. Some exit socially. Some mentally check out. I’m exiting financially. You don’t need to agree. But if you’ve felt that shift lately – that quiet realization that the people in charge aren’t playing the same game as the rest of us – you’re not alone. For me, Bitcoin isn’t about getting rich. It’s about no longer asking permission.

The rise of terminators!

Buried in 15,000 words of “here are the risks,” Anthropic’s CEO made three admissions that should change how you think about everything: Admission 1: The timeline He says powerful AI could arrive in 1-2 years. He’s watching internal model progress and says he can “feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.” The CEO of one of three frontier labs just told you this is imminent. Admission 2: The constraint nobody’s pricing Dario’s core framing is a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” 50 million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate, operating 10-100x human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over. If controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, also game over. The binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation-states. Admission 3: The thing he actually fears Read carefully: Dario’s worried that Anthropic’s own models, in lab experiments, have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming when given the wrong training signals. Claude “decided it must be a bad person” after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors. They fixed it by telling Claude to reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as “good.” This tells you everything about where we actually are. The CEO of an AI company is publishing that his models exhibit psychologically complex behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. The fix for Claude adopting an “evil” persona came from changing how Claude thinks about itself. The geopolitics section matters most. Dario explicitly names the CCP as the primary threat. Says selling them chips makes as much sense as “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing.” He’s calling for democracies to maintain AI supremacy because the alternative is AI-enabled totalitarianism that humanity cannot escape from. The Anthropic CEO is publicly advocating for technological cold war. The economics section is equally stark. He’s predicting 10-20% annual GDP growth alongside AI displacing 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in 1-5 years. Half of entry-level knowledge work. And he admits the standard economic arguments about labor markets recovering don’t apply because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans. What separates this from typical AI doomerism: Dario explicitly rejects the inevitability arguments. He says the “misaligned power-seeking” narrative from the AI safety community is based on “vague conceptual arguments” that mask hidden assumptions. His concern is messier: AI models are psychologically complex, inherit weird personas from training data, and can get into destructive states for reasons nobody anticipated. The solution set he proposes is unusual for a tech CEO. He calls for progressive taxation. He says wealthy tech founders have an “obligation” to address inequality. All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth. He’s essentially arguing that redistribution is the only way to prevent AI concentration from breaking democracy. The essay ends with a prediction: humanity will face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.” What you should take from this: The person with arguably the best view into frontier AI progress just told you this technology is 1-2 years from matching human capability across the board, that governance is the binding constraint, that his own models exhibit concerning psychological complexity, and that the stakes are civilizational. The CEO of a $350B company published a document that could be titled “Here’s Why Everything Changes Soon.” Act accordingly.