Eric S. Raymond

Some observations on Kimi: 1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run. 2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. 3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. 4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business. 5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this. 6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

Scott Adams once explained in his book that men are simplifiers and women are optimizers One evening he and his wife were invited by their friends for dinner one town over His wife suggested, "Oh since we're already headed to town X, let's leave 10 minutes early and stop by the Best Buy. I need to return something" Unfortunately, the customer service line was longer than expected and they ended up showing up to dinner a bit late He would have just gone to dinner, then gone again to that town to return the item Men try to simplify each task while women try to optimize multiple tasks Has that been the experience in your marriages?

The pettiness of people complaining that The Odyssey lacks 'realistic' casting. My dude, it has a one-eyed monster who sucks soldiers' heads like lollipops and a witch who strokes men's heads until they turn into pigs. Realism isn't the point.

Or its the success of methodological naturalism, which is surprising on theism but a matter of course given atheism. Hence, that fact about science is some reason to believe theism is false.

"Liberal gun owners" on Reddit complain about not being able rack the slides of common pistols.

You have been lied to about tulips for nearly two centuries. Charles Mackay published Extraordinary Popular Delusions in 1841, and journalists have been recycling his tale ever since: crazed Dutchmen trading mansions for flower bulbs, a whole nation losing its mind, ruin everywhere. Almost none of it survives contact with the archives. Peter Garber went through the actual price records in the 1980s and found something boring and beautiful: markets doing exactly what markets do. Consider what a Semper Augustus actually was in 1636. A single bulb infected with a mosaic virus that painted flames of crimson across white petals. Nobody could reproduce the pattern on demand. Breeding a broken tulip took seven to twelve years, and one prized bulb yielded only a couple of offsets annually. You were not buying a flower. You were buying the breeding stock for a luxury good with genuinely inelastic supply and roaring demand from the richest merchant class in Europe. Rare hyacinths in the 1730s followed the same price arc: enormous premiums for novelty, steep decline as propagation caught up. Nobody calls that a mania. That is just how prototype pricing works. The famous February 1637 crash? It hit a thin futures market conducted in Haarlem taverns, where traders signed contracts requiring almost no money down. When Dutch courts later converted those contracts into options settleable at roughly 3.5 percent of face value, the "catastrophic losses" evaporated. No banks failed. No depression followed. The Dutch economy sailed on toward its Golden Age peak. Now ask where the money came from. The Bank of Amsterdam and free coinage policies had pulled a flood of precious metal into the Republic through the 1630s. Doug French traced this: swelling money balances chased assets, and tulips were the asset of the moment. People responded rationally to monetary conditions the way they always do. The tulip myth survives because it flatters the people who tell it. Regulators, central bankers, and financial journalists need a parable proving that free individuals bidding on prices go insane without supervision. Strip away Mackay's fabrications and you find merchants pricing a scarce novelty under uncertainty, then repricing when facts changed. Speculation is how prices get discovered.