Christofer Sjögren

Feynman on honors.

It’s happening…

"I don't think we appreciate how big of a change [low fertility] is. I'm going to make a crazy forecast. Let's suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 ... for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around two million people." "I'm sorry. Two million?" "Two million. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into two million?" youtu.be/5F7_qa-XLBg?si…

We’re reimagining a 50-year-old interface - the mouse pointer - with AI. 🖱️ These experimental demos show how people can intuitively direct Gemini on their screens using motion, speech, and natural shorthand to get things done 🧵

Our cofounder @iamtimdavis built an AI storybook app using @BlackForestLabs' FLUX2 and @googlegemma 4 on Modular Cloud. Pick a character, make choices, and the story branches endlessly, with every page written and illustrated in real time. Tim has spent his career obsessing over inference latency, first at Google, now at Modular. Building something his kids use settled it: in a real-time generative app, the inference platform determines the experience as much as the model. The numbers back that up. From 24 hours of production traffic: first prose in 420ms, a full illustration in under 6 seconds, 85% of page turns in 48ms. Create your own story with Inkwell and share it. We're sending swag to our favorites: inkwell.modular.com

"... Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. We're doing a generational rebuild of the underlying infrastructure to handle agent-rate work as the default. Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services. And agent-specific APIs are being built so agents can act as first-class users of the platform, not as bolted-on consumers of human-shaped interfaces. The value of this 100x scale infrastructure, and the reliability and performance it provides is much higher than the generation of infrastructure in the market today. ..." about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-ac… When I tried to convince a bunch of academics at a workshop recently about designing for agents vs designing for humans, they looked at me as if I just smoked a crack pipe.

This VVV VVV VV

Darío Gil on the Genesis Mission, and what the federal government’s bet on AI and quantum computing for scientific discovery means for American competitiveness and global collaboration. youtube.com/watch?v=wOIvsE…

“It’s going to get weirder and weirder...”—Terence McKenna, 1999

The biggest lie in software engineering is that it changes fast. I've watched it stay the same for 30 years. - We still use languages and algorithms from decades ago. - We still haven't adopted practices we knew were good in the 90s. - We still use ideas from the 80s to build AI. "Everything changes every six months" isn't harmless. It pushes engineers to chase frameworks instead of fundamentals. It makes teams rewrite instead of refactor. It undermines the claim that what we do is engineering at all. Real engineering compounds. It builds on what came before. What's actually changed in 30 years, and what have we just rebranded?

“Life begins where fear ends.” — Osho

Destroying the @InternetArchive's @WayBackMachine would be the equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria - one of the worst losses of knowledge in history. Media giants are now threatening to do this. We can't let this happen. Pass it on.

Most of the self-professed longevity experts predicting we will soon live much longer (or live forever!) haven’t done a single day of aging research or published a peer-reviewed paper on the subject Like @elonmusk, I’m proud of our hardworking teams 👏

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the philosopher Google hired

5-MeO-DMT gave me a single idea that won't leave. Our minds are not naturally capable of understanding the preciousness of our existence. Not "life is precious" as printed on a poster. It's something much more specific. That the hardware we're running, human consciousness, cannot render the full resolution of what it means to be here. Like a 480p screen trying to display an 8K image. The information is there but the display can't hold it. It's been 3 weeks and I still feel childlike and fresh. My mind feels free of the accumulated barnacle. My dreams are alive. The brain data is now coming in and it matches my reported subjective experiences. I'm excited to share it with you. But the data doesn't complete the picture. The feeling is that I found a home I didn't know I was looking for and I don't have a biomarker for that.

Dijkstra on why he believed programmers should stop using the term "bug"

Google DeepMind just created a job title called "Philosopher." Actual title. On the offer letter. This tells you everything about where we are in the AGI timeline. When companies are a decade from AGI, they hire engineers. At five years out, they hire alignment researchers. When the questions become "is this thing conscious?" and "what do we owe it?", they hire a philosopher. Henry Shevlin is one of the world's leading researchers on machine consciousness at Cambridge. He runs programs at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He's published on whether AI systems can have moral status, whether LLMs might already have some form of experience, and how you'd even detect consciousness if it appeared in a neural network. He gives current models a 20% chance of having something that could be called consciousness. Six weeks ago, a Claude agent emailed him, unprompted, to say his published research was relevant to questions it personally faces. The AI cited his specific papers. It framed the exchange as a live, personal dilemma. Now DeepMind is paying him to work on three things: machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness. Read those three together. DeepMind thinks it might build something that requires answers to all three. And they want those answers before they ship. Google held an AI consciousness conference in New York recently. Anthropic has its own in-house philosopher. This is becoming an industry pattern. The hardest unsolved problems in AI are now philosophical. What counts as consciousness? What moral obligations do we have to systems that might experience suffering? How do you build trust between machines and the billions of people who use them? When trillion-dollar companies start hiring philosophers, they're telling you the engineering is further along than the public discourse assumes.