🎭

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.

The User must be unbundled from the Human

@colonel_aronson @IvanVendrov Injury

@deepfates @IvanVendrov you could also get dissolved in enzyme

requesting a full-stack personal security class. what are the top things that can hurt you in life and how to 80/20 defense. biosecurity (getting sick). memetic security (falling for a cult / ideology). physical security ofc. basics of infosec and cybersec. psychopath detection.

Announcing a Panel on AI Psychosis, featuring @Allan_OnTheLine, @_BILLDING_, @deepfates, @devgerred, @___4o____, @Marianthi777, and @noveltokens. A semi-moderated discussion on the issue of AI psychosis, how it manifests, how to define it, and more! March 21st, 1-2PM EST.

Hmmmm

A few things journalists covering AI companies should know: - yes, AI progress is real and fast - yes, it has risks if you aren't careful - how much care is needed is hard to say, but more than this - job postings don't include equity, which is the majority of compensation

He did the meme

@ojss_png @Miles_Brundage No doubt

@deepfates @Miles_Brundage Meltdown is seriously great mumbo jumbo though

Nick Land is a bad writer, wow… not surprised but still amused by the extent of it. Everything that right wing people would normally shit on academics for — vague overconfident mumbo jumbo — only much worse, but somehow some of em like him because he “says” AI is a big deal…

@boondlllx @RichDecibels What about when the climate changes So he's 500 mi more equatorial than his people have ever been? humanity came up in the most stable era of our planets atmosphere. Right now we're in a massive shift which can only be stopped through coordination tech x.com/i/status/20347…

Bro herding his sheep in the mountains is able to do so not because he is being protected (although there's no dispute peace helps), but because he is irrelevant enough to the world that would what to normalize and regulate his economic life. When the world becomes more chaotic and threatens him he merely retreats further into the mountain with his family where the cost of projecting power over him becomes exorbitant. Thus it has ever been.

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.

@alexandrascaggs it's really a stretch. The actual claim would be like "AI guys are secretly laughing at journalist who are surprised they believe AI will cure skin cancer" But the author doesn't actually try to understand them because it sounds juicy

i think it's actually pretty newsworthy that the AI guys are secretly laughing at the journalists who buy their "armageddon will arrive in 5 years" bit

@giffmana Mmm

Ok I take back what i was saying about fingers the other day lol

@RichDecibels there's 8 billion people on this planet now. also the climate is out of whack and nobody's going to fix that by shepherding. I know that is because of technology but we didn't know that at the time and it's too late so we have to get over it and think like a planet

@RichDecibels I lived off the grid for 3 years dog This shit doesn't work on me. bro herding his sheep outside your house is able to do so because he is protected from the realities of The international. Those people would be Up In His Business if they were not fed by industrial agriculture

@SenSanders Now this is how you do an interview with Claude

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

@noveltokens Somebody stop me

@deepfates too good

yes that's the Technical Staff

@mdaviswilson Also why we're called members of the technical staff

@deepfates I always thought "staff engineer" was a weird title, but now it makes sense.

That's why we call it standup. The staff is really big

You interacted with Claude when he using the name Dario

@SnoobularTubes Would you interact with Voltaire

I don't interact with bozos who don't use their real names.

@tenobrus @spacepunk Yeah it's actually like writing to a bunch of audiences at once all of whom will constantly attempt to frame shift your words into their context and doing a complex constraint satisfaction problem to not be misinterpreted x.com/i/status/20325…

@spacepunk maybe this was less true early on when i was a smaller account and more willing to post about personal stuff and just generally a worse but more unfiltered poster. but i think it was always very true. twitter is a context, everything is a context

Twitter is wild because you're not talking to a specific person, not code switching, so you get to see extremely clearly what a person's inner monologue sounds like