Paul Preece

@getjonwithit @naval AI is essentially causing a massive regression to the mean. Doing things close to mean is now easy and requires minimal context.

I think one of the conclusions we should draw from the tremendous success of LLMs is how much of human knowledge and society exists at very low levels of Kolmogorov complexity. We are entering an era where the minimal representation of a human cultural artifact... (1/12)

For ppl who 'craft', AI is a cheat mode. And cheat modes are deeply deeply unsatisfying.

@Lutra_Gaming Babylon 5 ran so DS9 could walk.

In a way, this ties in with Babylon 5. #StarfleetAcademy #StarTrek WTF happened Star Fleet Academy? Star Trek: Deep Space Nine proved that you could tell a story with real substance while keeping the setting mostly stationary. Instead of a ship exploring a new world each week, the fixed location allowed for deeper political arcs, long-term character development, and layered storytelling that built over time. What do you think, did DeepSpace Nine go with the same premise as Babylon 5?

@The_AdProfessor I don't think #9 is true anymore.

24 lessons from David Ogilvy: 1. Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees. 2. The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible. 3. You are advertising to a moving parade, not a standing army. 4. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. 5. Remember you are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution 6. Tell your prospective client your weakness before they notice them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points. 7. Avoiding excess in all things is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity. 8. A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. 9. There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50% more readers 10. Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well-informed, or your idea will be irrelevant 11. People who think well, write well 12. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is 'test'. 13. On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. 14. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. 15. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating 16. Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things. 17. Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals. 18. Raise your sights. Blaze new trails. Compete with the immortals. 19. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. 20. If you're trying to persuade people to buy something, use the language in which they think. 21. Insist that due dates are kept even if it means working all night. Hard work never killed a man. People die of boredom 22. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. 23. At the start of your career in advertising, what you learn is more important than what you earn. 24. When Fortune published an article about me and titled it: 'Is David Ogilvy a Genius?', "I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark.”

@HariSel57511397 When they cast Captain Archer I anticipated a return to the Kirk era of heart, charisma and humor. Instead we got the wooden yet hyperactive performance of a 13 year old doing Shakespeare.

A meditation on the final two Star Trek Captains, excerpt from my essay. Captain Janeway was the only Star Trek Captain who “won” and that’s a fact that frustrates me to no end. She got everything she wanted out of her storyline (which is quite humorous in hindsight. She’s the only female Captain and all she wants is to go home). It isn’t that she’s a poor Captain—she has the aid of the writers after all—but she’s a thoroughly unremarkable one. Besides a few questionable choices that strike me more as poor scriptwriting than a commentary on Janeway, there’s not a lot I find especially interesting about her. Which is, ironically, the very interesting thing. The Left want to put women in leadership positions, and that’s fine, but to pretend that this doesn’t drastically alter the social dynamics is nonsense. The writers genuinely want Janeway to be the woman Picard. But making Picard a woman destroys what Picard is. Throughout watching Star Trek: Voyager, it felt like the show was in a constant state of unease. It wanted Janeway to inhabit this very masculine role and pretend that a woman in the Captain’s chair changes nothing. But it changes everything, and it requires so much work to brush past that. Every word and line of script has to be second-guessed so it doesn’t get misinterpreted. How quickly disciplining a subordinate can become scolding! How fast emotional drama can become bitchy pouting! How easy it is to step over from the professional and into the personal! And even still, Janeway was never so much a military commander as she was grandma—which makes the episodes with sexual themes really bizarre—but that’s leave that aside. The problem is that professionalism cuts very deeply into the grandma archetype and vice versa. Janeway is the Captain with the least internal conflict, and that’s because the writers can’t access those dimensions without compromising her as a ship commander. They have to rely on gender neutral or masculine plotlines because expressing the feminine aspects would very quickly lead them down dangerous waters. And meanwhile, the problem of grandma affects all the relationships with the rest of the crew. It might surprise some people to hear this, but Chakotay had the most potential out of any second-in-command officer in Star Trek. He was a defector from Starfleet who joined up with the Maquis (a rogue faction from the Federation). He had a spiritual side to him, well, as much as a person can have in Star Trek. And during the pilot episode, he was his own Captain before joining up with Voyager. This sounds almost like the kind of well-written character we see from DS9! So how did he clash with Janeway? How did his command style conflict with hers? What were his ideological and religious misgivings which must’ve been a recurring plot arc as the series progressed? How did this rebel with a very real cause mesh with the Starfleet Captain who represented everything he stood against? Well… he didn’t. He just shrugged his shoulders and went along with it. And while you can argue this is from a lack of vision on the writer’s part, I want you to try to imagine how a strong Chakotay would play out against Janeway. It’s very clear if any serious conflict happened between them, Chakotay could overwhelm Janeway with a force of personality and access to violence that she fundamentally doesn’t. I could imagine a fistfight or even a shootout with Kirk, but how would this ever resolve with Janeway coming out on top? It becomes almost farcical to consider. There are a lot of stories where two opposing sides come together to work for a common cause, and usually that’s mediated through threat of mutual violence. But Janeway doesn’t have that kind of spiritual force in the believable way a man would. You’d have to walk a really thin tightrope with some seriously competent writers to pull that off, and even then it could only ever be Janeway wearing the archetypal guise of a man. There’s very few realistic options for Janeway to force Chakotay to submit and work together if he doesn’t want to. And so the easiest path for the writers is just to neuter Chakotay and kind of go along with everything. You’ll notice a lot of stuff around Janeway happens like that. That’s why the best stories in Voyager are almost always away from its titular Captain. Just compare her with the charisma of her own helmsman, Tom Paris, and you’ll quickly see the issue. There’s so much mental calculation that is needed to prop up Janeway, and that’s why Voyager was the weakest of the five. All that narrative energy was being spent on selling her as a strong commander. I imagine it was probably to the point where they were axing more interesting plotlines and character beats because they might’ve made Janeway look bad. How can you have a serious treatment of the feminine soul in a profoundly militaristic—a.k.a masculine—context? The result could only be at best an uneven mediocrity, and that’s exactly what Voyager was. Archer is a strange ouroboros for our final Captain. Now I’m not against prequel shows like Star Trek: Enterprise on principle, but the reason our culture defaults to prequels so regularly is because we have lost the ability to look forward, to create something new. And so the function of many prequels is as a self-devouring commentary, always circling further and further inward, explaining minutiae that never needed explaining in the original product. And while Enterprise does a far better job than most, I still find the practice superfluous. Did I really need to know why Klingons had no forehead ridges in the original series versus The Next Generation? It’s nice, but not really. I mention this as Archer takes on his most interesting dimension when viewed as a prequel character. Because the future he is set up to explain is not the future of the Federation—at least not as we would have in the original series and The Next Generation. Archer starts off as an optimistic explorer not unlike Kirk, but instead he’s slowly worn down as the series progresses. You have a man who is supposed to lead the way for a prosperous utopia who instead embraces increasingly militant positions. He realizes the value of weapons and force of arms and comes to strongly advocate for them. The galaxy is hostile and indifferent in a way that it never was in Kirk’s day. The narrative won’t let Archer away from his destiny to found the Federation, but it’s so incredible that the final episode of classic Trek ends with a tragedy—the death of a close friend—rather than a glorious victory. It casts a surprisingly somber shade over everything that comes after, despite the heartfelt message it’s going for. It highlights how despite moving narratively back in time, writers weren’t able to really roll back the clock. They couldn’t reach the same hopeful optimism you have with the first two entries. Instead, there’s this creeping cynicism that underlies the whole project. While I doubt it would’ve ever threatened to rock the franchise, the realism points to a far grimmer version of events, one where the Federation takes on the connotations of empire. We’re supposed to believe that things improve by Kirk’s heyday, but the objections Archer faces and articulates are never really disproven or go away. Archer is the most reactionary Captain besides Sisko. And you see in this man a niggling crisis of faith. Archer doubts in a way that sets him apart from all the rest. Should humanity explore the stars? Does the galaxy want us poking around? Would it be better if humanity stayed home, or barring that, send out warships instead of exploration vessels? The narrative rushes to reassure Archer at every turn, that this is the best path forward, that this is the manifest destiny, but it never feels final. The doubts always come creeping back, and Archer never stops pondering. I can never fully make the leap from Star Trek: Enterprise to the original series, despite the story itself setting me down and recounting the events. Archer’s is the story of a Starfleet Captain set at the Federation’s inception when he ought to have been at the Federation’s collapse. His narrative makes infinitely more sense as the last of the galactic explorers rather than the first. But there was no way you were ever going to find a writer’s room bold enough to do that in the early 2000s. And so from that time onwards, we could only create ever more cynical versions of the same product, first narratively, and then finally on part of the writers. But Archer was, in a sense, the last of the Captains anyway. He was the last who honestly dreamed of the Federation, and he was the last who made you want to believe in it too.

@elonmusk @waitbutwhy Problem with this is that the ant has no idea the bird is smarter than it. Nor the bird vs the chimp, chimp vs the human. So to will it be from human to super AI. We won't know how smart it is.

This @waitbutwhy illustration is 👌

@OldDegen @sabrdance If an officer is aware that their own actions will likely lead to increased danger for themselves and, via use of force escalation, other nearby civilians they should be required to weigh those consequences against the original reason for those actions.

@sabrdance Great thread. As a former USAF cop, you are correct on your training points. The Use of Force model is widely misunderstood by the general public. It heavily depends on perception of threat in the moment. I agree with both your anaylsis of the BP agents and your criticism

There's a scene in the book "The Sum of All Fears" when, after a nuclear bomb goes off in Denver, the President goes to Defcon 3. In the Mediterranean Sea, a carrier has passed east of Malta, and is now in a strategic position, which means its defense condition is always -1 1/

@jonatanpallesen Parents care about outcomes not traits. Disingenuous to conflate the two.

@webdevMason This is the most Reddit-level thread on X right now. Congrats.

I came across this interaction in the wild and it perfectly encapsulates my issue with parenting philosophy discourse A lot of perfect parents are kinda just lying to themselves and others about what they're doing

@TheCinesthetic It feels like one story layered on top of another. The original being one where the human (Sam) is forced to become logical and the computer (Clu) is forced to become emotional. It has many faults as a sequel; Tron not actually appearing in the movie is the biggest.

Tron: Legacy (2010) has aged beautifully. What once felt cold now reads as deliberate, the Daft Punk score does half the world-building, and the digital minimalism finally caught up with the era it was imagining. Time was always on its side.

@newstart_2024 Strip away the technology that has driven all other technologies for the last 50 years and well... yeah.

Jimmy Carr drops a wild take on AI + physics "Strip the screens away, and we're still living in the 1970s. Nothing real has happened in physics since 1972. String theory? Nowhere. But point AI at real physics now? Everything else is just stamp collecting. Physics gave us all our technology. We could get a 50x productivity leap and true human flourishing... or it could go the other way." The real revolution isn't just AI—it's AI meeting physics. 1:02 clip inside—mind-blowing perspective.

@abarrallen Apply Pay + tracking in Wallet is as good - especially as Amazon's delivery has become more unreliable over time. Shame Apple does not advertise it better. I'm 10x more likely to buy if a website supports both.

You forget that Amazon delivery & fulfillment is 100x better than any other online retailer, until you decide to order from somewhere else.

It is true that we cannot predict the results of commoditization. In previous cycles the intelligence and effort that was freed up moved on to solving other friction points; preserving the need for (human) intelligence and effort. This time it is intelligence itself being commoditized. This cycle is not like the others.

I met someone this week who shared that in the 90s Bain paid employees to make slides for customer presentations. This was pre-PowerPoint so the job was literally using an exacto knife and ruler to cut and splice together materials for overhead transparencies. As soon as laptops, PowerPoint and digital projectors became widespread this job went away. Somehow the consulting industry is 10x the # of employees that it was then 🤣 What Aaron is describing is how almost every technology adoption cycle has played out. No evidence to suggest AI will happen differently

It is obviously not his first time through the simulation

@curious_vii This one stings. As an ex-coder, manually doing the same thing multiple times immediately makes me want to create better tooling.

Don’t try to automate the thing you should be doing

Over time the number of human compatible AIs will trend to between 0 and 1.

@BackTheBunny Or an unnatural system where people keep what they build.

this is completely misguided. a top-down story to describe bottom-up phenomena. power laws are synonymous with natural systems. the term "capitalism" is just a politicized, quasi-pejorative term to say "natural system where people do what they want". wealth, accolades, sales, financial success: all these abide by intense 80:20 Pareto-style distributions. nature breeds extremes, by design. number of books sold, paintings painted, hockey goals scored, three-pointers made, doesn't matter. life is fundamentally unequal and trends towards concentration and extremes in open arenas where people compete. why do you think anti-trust laws exist? they are literally "keep power laws in check" rules. that's it. monopolies are a natural product of a natural system when left unconstrained. they only way you'd stop this is by imposing the very centralization you're accusing these participants of doing. this is a form of leftist thinking (denial of power laws, appeal to fairness/cheating moral foundations) masquerading as rightwing. it's a top-down story to explain a bottom-up phenomenon.

@garrytan @ZacharySisson3 Horrible take. One of the worst I have seen.

@ZacharySisson3 Freedom to commit crime is not guaranteed by the Constitution

Flock Safety currently solves 700,000 reported cases of crime per year, which is about 10% of reported crime nationwide And they're just getting started

@BackTheBunny The reason intelligent systems resort to growth is because the more complex something is the easier it is to bump it into nearby states, which tend to be less complex. Overcoming this process requires structure duplication at a rate that exceeds complexity reduction. Aka growth.

Atoms and molecules are stable not because they give off entropy but because they won't. They sit at local minima and require added energy to change. Life and intelligent systems do not function in the same manner. They are not bound by minima but by maxima. They construct themselves in such a way that they grow. Because things that grow persist more than things that shrink. And persistence IS existence.

Politics is the visible behavior of biology constrained by physics. Successful societies persist by balancing the order that forms containers with the freedom that fills them. Physics authors laws, biology issues templates within them, and the human-readable submission to them is seen by how we organize at scale. Everything obeys the dictates of physics, not metaphorically, but materially. An immutable constitution that all earthly inhabitants abide by. Some domains have optics that make this difficult to see. We gaze into them. The same competition between entropy and emergent order that sculpts stars also births civilizations. The thermodynamic edict that compels atoms to form molecules guides man to form countries. - Under gravity, diffuse matter coalesces into stars even as the universe’s overall entropy climbs. - Electromagnetic interactions drive atoms into molecules by lowering energy and releasing heat, trading exported entropy for localized structure. - Human societies mirror these fractals. By organizing into complex institutions and coordinating ourselves into increasingly intricate patterns, we establish localized structures that resist the winds of chaos. Star, molecule, and nation: different scales of self-organizing systems that trade energy flows for stability and order. All are dissipative structures that only differ by degree. Why would this apply to us? A better question: why would it not?