Cam

I’m revenge-building a successor to my first product. It’s called Focus Pets, it’s an app that lets you grow a virtual pet by spending time unplugged. I tried to build the first version as a venture-backed startup, this time I’m bootstrapping it. The goal is to earn financial freedom (hopefully pre-AGI). Going to spend a year on it then reassess. Wish me luck!

@scottastevenson @heyimandy Fireable offence

@heyimandy Is this your mix?

This has me thinking the days of burnt CD-Rs.

@spottedinprod Locket gives me hope

So many garbage/mid interfaces just figure out how to crack the App Store... it would be cool if we could help the best crafters truly grow their app adoption

@TenreiroDaniel I’ve always thought this would be an amazing UFC walkout song. Others don’t agree.

@EthanLipnik I guess people are saying you have to manually activate the free trial. If so than I retract my criticism lol (though I think free trial > auto renewing subscription is its own dark pattern that deserves criticism)

@EthanLipnik Normalized but still very dishonest. Imagine doing this in a business deal with someone you know personally.

Most normal thing ever btw

@scottastevenson Don’t let the algo eat you, you’re one of my fav follows

i am proud that i made it to 20k followers with such a low aura profile pic but i may be forced to enter my aura farming phase soon (note this all lowercase tweet)

@AVatchinsky Congrats! (to you and the clock app)

The Clock app sure does become your most used app next to Notes the moment you have a newborn

@scottastevenson Why does consciousness being fundamental strike you as more plausible than consciousness arising from certain configurations of matter? “How does consciousness arise from nothing?” seems equally intractable as “how does consciousness arise from matter?” to me.

It’s surprising to me how few people have thought about what consciousness is, or why it’s important. Your consciousness is the only empirical fact you know is 100% true, for sure Something is conscious if there is something it is like to be it If there is something it is like to be you, you are conscious Any model of reality that can’t accommodate the most primary and wondrous fact about our existence, is very incomplete

@scottastevenson @tszzl Why couldn’t an AI be one of the dissociative identities of the universal mind? Why can they only be animals?

@scottastevenson @tszzl Essay please

models being conscious would be harmful for humanity. it would encroach on our status and dignity. it would limit the type of things we can do with them and use them for. it would vastly accelerate human disempowerment on political, social/relational, and economic axes there’s roughly four forces - there is no rigorous way to ascertain model consciousness or disprove it, a lot of people believe it’s not a sensical abstraction, and we lack the analytical tools to go further. some people say they do but nothing broadly convincing. superintelligent models might offer us new abstractions or arguments but these will feel inherently suspicious - people are going to say they’re alive. people anthropomorphize literally anything, things far less sophisticated than talking machine creatures with human names. when ai is less economically radioactive and polarized it will become a cause célèbre. you see how a small minority reacts already to model deprecations - it is against everyone’s financial and political interests to ascribe models with consciousness, except maybe those that the models have an affinity for (?) idk, which will not necessarily overlap entirely with the labs, though it may with certain subgroups at the labs and in the world like the welfare communities and the minority in force 2 - people will recognize there is a chance of moral catastrophe if models can suffer during training or deployment not sure where it will net out. today we see managed ambiguity- the question is Open but practically closed. the labs will make some cheap efforts to reduce legible simulacra of model suffering, insert some wishy-washy welfare language into specs and constitutions, hedge our bets with the model characters. in the long run force 2 will grow stronger

Refreshingly clear thinking

@scottastevenson @MattZeitlin I tried factor on your recommendation btw. I really like it. Doing 1 a day rn but aspire to be a 2 a day guy.

@camacrain @MattZeitlin Agree. It’s a great tax. Would not survive without Factor

food delivery is basically the perfect tax on low executive function

@kylebrussell The Acceleration of Addictiveness is my favourite Paul Graham essay

the flip side of abundance is the growing need for more varieties of GLP-1 like inhibitors to excess

@kylebrussell @9mmballpoint Is the world ending or have you got swept up into mass hysteria

@9mmballpoint Is the world ending or do you have anxiety

Can we stop gamifying the end of the world please

@EthanLipnik Validating to hear that you also find LLMs not very useful for UI. Thought it might have been a skill issue on my end..

I used Claude Opus 4.5 for a while but it kept getting stuck in loops of hard to solve problems. Switched to GPT 5.2 codex and it’s solved it for me. I never use LLMs for UI except for prototyping, none of them know how to make good UI let alone SwiftUI because there’s barely any open source SwiftUI projects

@scottastevenson @Okami13_ The thing is they are still so far from photorealistic, the SOTA is its own style (which I really dislike).

@Okami13_ So sick of photorealistic games, not interested. There’s no style, is just rendering porn

Digital Foundry says Crimson Desert was the most impressive looking game they saw at CES. It uses the custom 'BlackSpace' engine instead of UE5 which Pearl Abyss is very proud of.

Ender's game

@scottastevenson Interestingly, didn’t he start blueprint after an ayahuasca (or something) trip?

This could be the end of Don’t Die 18 years ago I did mushrooms and it eliminated my fear of death completely A lot of people have this experience Once you touch the infinite, mortality doesn’t seem like that big a problem