Cairo Smith

The tech research quotes in Civ used to at least mostly celebrate the technology. In Civ VII you could research hammers and the quote would be like, "The hammer, another thing to drop on your toe — bell hooks."

I'm laughing imagining someone saying these words to me in real life.

IF YOU WANT A REVIEW COPY of this beautiful book, A Cancellation, written by me and published by the incomparable New Ritual Press, please email them post haste... info@newritualpress.com Please ask for an ARC and, if you want a physical copy, include a mailing address. Digital and physical copies will be delivered at least a month before the May 30 release date so you can get your review prepared. Read about the book here: newritualpress.com/a-cancellation/

RT @newritualpress: Read ‘SCENEBUX’. A novel by @cairoasmith. Published by New Ritual Press. A fun, contemporary read, many say it’s one…

@kuchisakeonnax Unironically join a lesbian social community like a sports league and then you can pounce on hot newcomers. I have seen this work.

If I think a woman is super hot that means she’s straight. I should probably just hit on women who I don’t find attractive at all instead

@mariolopezviva @ThatTimeYouSaw The first paralyzed human treated with stem cells, at least in the U.S., was T. J. Atchinson, not this guy.

AWESOME

Millennial girls loved turning the exposure up to a million. No worries about acne, no trying to be Florida orange with box brows. You wanted to be glowing like Hiroshima, like a creepypasta jump scare.

RIP Minderbinder from Catch-22 you would have loved betting on your own bombing runs on Polymarket.

@johnkonrad @planefag Floathog.

It is time to build the GOAT

@Dark_Star44 Genuinely appreciate the ID.

@cairoasmith Not to pile on here, but that's a Winchester Model-12 in nickel steel. A very nice fowling gun, but not quite a trench gun.

Like any good writer I keep a 1916 trench gun on the wall behind my desk for literary emergencies.

@EjBeta @JadeAtrophis lmfao

@cairoasmith @JadeAtrophis *Literary emergency occurs*

Alright yes technically this is not the trench version. It's my great grandad's and as far as I know he never did anything useful with it. Just had it around the house for home defense or whatever. Scaring salesmen.

@ChrisMcKinney @PageauJonathan Yes!

@cairoasmith @PageauJonathan Is that wrong?

The crusades were justified. It's okay to believe in something.

Primordial soup creating existence call that lifeslop.

And in 1920 and 2026? It means unemployed writers dicking around.

@deepfates The big work is going to be mediating and deescalating in adversarial relationships where both parties are using a bot to impersonate a human. Customer service and big law are already feeling this. It becomes an expensive and exhausting grind. Detente norms need to be created.

You might think the "agents" thing is just coming for software engineers. Yeah, agents write code, code and code sells a bunch of tokens, But most people's work isn't code, it's memos or decks or whatever. Why this is false: Agents can do anything you can do on a computer, and they do it by spending output tokens to write code. The number of keypresses used by a consultant to do a task is not a good measurement of the number of tokens an agent would use. For example: one "deep research" report might be 20 pages of output tokens. But it also might have required more than 20 pages of output tokens to do all the searches, fetches, PDF parsing and interim summaries that you never even see as the user. It also had to input all the tokens of every document it read in searching — likely more than 20 pages, since the point of the report is to collect and summarize this information. So now we're at 3x tokens for the final output. That one report is so cheap, and so fast, then now you can do more research than ever. This is valuable! If your business relies on having good information about the world, you can probably find a way to make more money by doing 3 deep research reports and then synthesizing them. More tokens! Now you've kicked off three deep research reports you deserve a little treat, right? So you fire up your browser agent and tell it go find me some nice linen shirts for summer in my size. Open them in tabs so I can look through. Well your browser agent has to interact with the browser using some kind of tool and you know what that tool is? Code, baby. Tokens. And the tokens are so cheap. You got to understand. We're spending a lot in the aggregate, but in the moment it is "spend a nickel to for 10 minutes of being literally Superman". Like yes I'll just keep spending nickels actually. I will never stop being Superman at that price. All knowledge workers will feel this. A lot of you already do, you're just hiding it from your boss so you can have more free time while "working from home". And maybe it's better to protect yourselves from Jevons as long as possible, because once you get the bug it's hard to stop. You realize that you could be creating all of the businesses and projects and art you ever wanted and all you've got to do is put your instructions in the right order and put the nickels in the bag. I would happily bet against Anthropic's revenue spike being a brief "sugar high". So would most capital allocators! That is because they have already seen that software can eat the world. White collar knowledge work fundamentally changes in the face of agent economics and entirely new forms of knowledge production? It's happened already in finance: high frequency trading. Now it's happening in tech: high frequency software. Then we will have high frequency science, high frequency governance, high frequency engineering, high frequency medicine and high frequency law. Human society is about to be absolutely DDOSed by information at all levels of the stack. Our civilization was never meant to handle this many tokens. If anything can be done on a computer it will be turned into tokens instead of human actions and it will happen faster and in parallel. This stuff works, it is real, it is getting better. It is going to hit economically and socially this year and nobody is ready and I think it is important to start taking it seriously, instead of finding ever more arbitrary reasons to remain in denial.

At last. How movies were meant to be seen.

WeHo is WeHoing!