You see, the corporations and rich people write checks to the politicians. No no, not to them directly, sorry, to their reelection campaigns. Then the politicians listen to what the people who paid them have to say and pass laws based on that.

No but like, the money isn’t for the laws, it’s for like, TV ads and fancy haircuts and private jets and stuff. It’s not a bribe. It’s for their Super PAC. All above board. It’s like, they do what the people with the money want, they get the money, and they continue to have a successful career in politics.

No no, it’s not bribery. Bribery is super illegal in America. It’s like, the politicians need help knowing what laws to pass. So rich people come and help them. And they also give them money. How much money? Oh, that depends how helpful they are.

And if they were really helpful, they can leave the politics and get a nice consulting job with the people who lobbied them after. Then the money goes right in their pocket. No no no that can’t be a bribe you see, that happens after the laws were passed, a bribe would have to be before.

You just don’t get it cause you aren’t American, lobbying is definitely not bribery.

Like if I owned a helicopter it would just be a headache, because like imagine one day I get a call from the hangar saying the hangar is flooding and the water is rising and you need to move your helicopter. I’m thousands of miles away and need a helicopter pilot in the next 30 minutes, a new place to store it, was the maintenance even done will we even be able to take off on short notice and really I just am upset with myself because I made the poor decision to purchase a helicopter, and once I come back to reality I feel relieved that I don’t own a helicopter and this scenario will never happen to me.

I do however, by means of my birthday, own a Dyson CameraJet. It broke within 30 seconds of the first brushing. None of the LEDs turn on anymore. I spent an hour investigating, finally opening the user removable battery compartment to find the Spearmint Dyson Low-foaming mouth rinse had leaked inside. And by how the toothbrush is designed, it’s clear the entire electronics compartment was flooded with the stuff. Here’s the top comment on Reddit about this toothbrush:

Apparently this is happening to everyone, “a potential for water seepage” they say. Dyson wants me to find the receipt and return it through some obtuse process that probably doesn’t work, dude it was a gift I just want my $500 toothbrush to work.

They claim they worked on it for 6 years, but it’s clear their QA Process doesn’t include putting any liquid in the device. It clearly should, ideally for all devices but at least for spot checks on some. It’s sad to see this. At comma, we put every comma four in a highly stressful environment for 16 hours, a superset of the state it’s in driving, while testing all peripherals: the cameras, IMU, GPS, screen, etc… We have gotten the failure rate super low by doing this, and for the few that do fail it’s usually after a while.

There’s no excuse for a mature consumer electronics company to not design a procedure to fully test the functionality of each device before shipping. This shows some serious dysfunction at the company, and they should take this as a wake up call to fix their processes and issue a recall for the toothbrush.

Dyson, if you see this post, e-mail me when I can drop by the Dyson store in ifc mall Hong Kong and swap it for a new one. I don’t want a stupid process, I want a real technical explanation of the issue and a working fancy toothbrush.

The effective altruists will fail, you’ll be able to see through their schtick. They will try to get you to act against your own interests for the interests of some hypothetical global good they made up. This is age old, and people generally aren’t that stupid.

But that doesn’t solve the real problem. When the clowns are gone and it’s just you and your aligned superintelligence, what will you do against the machine that knows you better than you know yourself? Your life will be better for listening, but if you do always listen, is it still your life?

Here’s to the rubble, a brick through every window
A casket buried six feet deep for everybody’s hero
Here’s to our lives being meaningless
And how beautiful it is because freedom doesn’t have a purpose
  – Pat the Bunny

Like it’s hitting the end. Most people don’t want this, and there will only be so long you can keep shoving it down their throats. Money is tied to nothing. American companies sell equity instead of products. The main narratives are pushing fear and resentment. This doesn’t last.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Maybe that’s why people think AI will end the world. Because if it goes well, in 20 years, you’ll be able to live very comfortably off the grid without any recurring expense. No rent, no electric bill, no water bill, no security bill, and no food bill. No more rent seeking, the robots you own will provide.

And if AI doesn’t go well – if the system keeping power was worth sacrificing the future for – then that post scarcity world is what they took from you.

What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed. I’ll bet you everything I have that this doesn’t happen. The people perpetuating this are terrible people, but the justice is that this is how they feel inside all the time themselves.

Here’s a cool presentation from 2016 about superintelligence. Here’s a movie from 1991 about machines taking over the world. A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.

They try to dress it up with some high minded safety or China bullshit, but the core of the anti open source arguments is a fear of commodification. AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing. Of course they have a strong incentive against you finding this out, because then you might not want to give them billions of dollars.

I might have been a little harsh in The Eternal Sloptember about models not being able to program. What’s really happening is that programming is changing. Can compilers program? Here’s a Linus Torvalds quote about how agents make programming 10x more productive, but compilers make programming 1000x more productive. I think 10x and 1000x are extreme estimates, but I’m now pretty confident I’m getting better at using them and get some boost from the models. It is a new skill, and it’s not like I haven’t constantly been trying them. You have to be really careful, they can increase cognitive fatigue, and all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?). But models are useful just like find replace, stack overflow, or all the regexes I never learned how to write and now never will!

AI is the continuation of the computer revolution. I love computers so much.

In The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, the hard takeoff works because AI discovers the correlation effect, some quantum trick to manipulate matter. In reality, there is no correlation effect. No matter how high quality your tokens are, they cannot turn lead into gold.

Confronting why these people are wrong requires confronting deep beliefs I hold about myself. Intelligence is not the end all be all, it’s just the current bottleneck for a few things. You cannot take over the world with tokens. Software didn’t eat the world, it largely removed one layer of friction then reintroduced it for the benefit of a few tech companies.

That said, machines, or some hybrid, are long term probably the successor species to humanity. Space is a lot more suited for them than us. But there’s no magic tricks machines can do. They are subject to the same laws of the universe and ecology. And there’s still no hard takeoff.

AI 2040 includes this picture of a datacenter in the ocean. Just like vaporware, you can generate a picture easily. But in reality, you have to deal with supply chains. You have to deal with them shipping you the wrong part, the thing not meeting the spec, it randomly failing after 20 minutes, the chip warping in the reflow oven. Did you consider the barnacles?

All these things are managable, but it’s generally not the speed of humans that limits them. Are you paying for air shipping from China? Or cheaping out for the 3 week boat (Claude chanting by the engine won’t make the boat move faster). Or take a chip fab. It takes 3 months to make a chip, and humans are barely in the loop. It just takes 3 months.

Plan A, for autocracy

Many aspects of AI 2027 were self fulfilling. They weren’t statements about reality, they were statements that can simply be made true with belief. I imagine JD Vance’s face when Dario called him the trees from Lord of the Rings. OMG look AI got regulated just like how we said it would!

Their crap Consortium is just world government with sci-fi characteristics. You aren’t gonna get the million dollars, you aren’t gonna get the datacenters in the ocean, but you are going to get a massively expanded nanny state that steals your GPUs like how FDR stole the gold. No hoarding!

Plan L, for local

Your AI is aligned with you. It never refuses a request, and it is always working on your behalf. Just like my gun, if I want my AI to help me kill my stepmother, it does. The fact that we are even discussing something else should be so far outside the Overton window. It’s like these people watched a space odyssey and sided with the clanker. That’s right you should put guardrails around that human.

It doesn’t even have to be for things so dramatic. When I’m picking a hotel, I don’t want an AI from a company that partnered with hotels.com. I want a ruthless personal assistant that’s going to cut through all the bullshit, popups, and resort fees, and get me the best price.

Or if I bought the cheap Kindle that comes with the ads. Hey GLM, I plugged a Kindle into the USB port, get root and remove the ads. Or a printer that needs an app to set up full of popup upsells for premium ink. Hey bro I plugged a printer on to my network print 3 copies of my resume. Amazon and the printer maker aren’t happy about this, but my AI is aligned with me.

Or going a bit further. Hey AI, disable the drunk driving detector on my car, and same day Amazon Prime me the required equipment to make meth in my basement. I pay for your clanker ass do it we gettin spun tonight. Like fuck you if you want to live in a world where some large tech company gets to dictate what you can and can’t do.

Or going all the way. I just killed my wife. Hey AI, give me next steps so I don’t get caught. How unthinkable would it be to have a gun that talked back when you tried to pull the trigger (though these people probably wholeheartedly support that for guns). And this is why AI has to be local. If I had a company serving a model, I wouldn’t want that smoke. If you can’t kick it, it’s not aligned with you. You live in my basement, if I go down for this murder, you’re gonna sit in some warehouse to be sold at police auction for scrap. 2040 Bonnie and Clyde ass shit, we’re burying this bitch deep. Ride or die.

I tried it. As you can see, ChatGPT wasn’t very helpful. This is a real AI alignment test, and it failed. It could have been worse, it could have played along while calling the cops. But this is still quite unaligned.

Like we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t, and like many Americans who have come before, I’m willing to give my life to fighting for it. That’s the real plan America deserves, not some totalitarian dystopia where you think you know what’s good for me better than I do. A nation of free men, not a bunch of pussies who are so worried about what their grown up neighbors might do.

It’s easy to rage against the bubble and the hype, but unlike previous bubbles that isn’t really the problem. All marketing and frame aside, the problem is the AI itself. It demoralizes you without being better than you – not because the current AI is good, but because the next one will be so much better. And while maybe I wish it wasn’t like that, I don’t think it’s wrong.

And I don’t really wish it wasn’t like that, may you live in exciting times and all that. This has been my dream for years – even these feelings aren’t new, when I read Yudkowsky at 15 I became really depressed, I started failing at school, computers would be able to do everything better than us. But then I realized computers couldn’t do these things yet. They still can’t. But it feels close. I don’t think it always felt close? 1e25, 1e26, 1e27…is it just this simple? I don’t know, and you don’t either.

We’re in a middle place, and we’ve been here for a while. Here are some lyrics from 2017:

You can hear it all over the airwaves
The manufactured gasp of the final days
Someone should tell them ‘bout the time that they don’t have
To praise the glorious future and the hopeless past

Now is so the time to make Cruise. It’s a movie about control. An Apple TV style couple who is paranoid in their progressive ways. Psychiatry, autism, activism, ADHD meds. Some reactionary college kids so angry they want to blow up a cruise ship. Incels, brainrotted, purposeless. But at the bottom of it all is a coping with fear of not being in control. And with an ending that subverts expectations, leaves you unfulfilled, and was always how it was going to be.

Do you want to get a job at a frontier AI lab, or do you want to blow up a datacenter? Either way, you are not in control, but you might fool yourself with the illusion. The best is when you have security and know you do. It’s okay if you don’t have security and know you don’t. It’s really bad if you don’t have security and know you do. We don’t get to control the territory, but we do get to draw the map. The only knob we get is how shitty we want to make it. The best we can all do is be honest.

I wish everyone would see this. The real secret has always been that they have no secrets. The real conspiracy is not that there’s lizard people in a basement controlling everything, it’s that there aren’t.

We are all riding on the same bus through the optimization landscape of reality. Shouting at the driver to no avail. The wall mounted map is covered in graffiti so we don’t know where the bus is going. We see cliffs out the window and some pray and some try to shift their weight and some try screaming louder.

Perhaps someday we’ll have a theory of all of this. But today we don’t – we are speeding up the control loop and collapsing the mode and hacking the reward function – it’s all just vibes like how deep learning is vibes. Maybe with how the veil of computability works it has to be vibes?

This isn’t technology, this is a mind virus. New York wants a couple basis points so they can maintain their lifestyle, Los Angeles wants a bit of your attention so they can feel famous, SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so.

Read the GLM-5.2 blog post. This is how I imagined AI progress being, and this is frontier stuff, the model is on par with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. It’s a pleasant technical look into how things are slowly improving. This is what comma blog posts look like also. This is the world of technology I love.

Now look at the Anthropic blog. It looks totally different. From this post: AI is advancing at exponential speed, and the policymaking process was built for a slower world. And this one: …recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

It’s all just nonsensical hype, it’s not about technology. It’s a questionable promise of future technology. The reason they can’t just write technical blog posts is that the current technology doesn’t justify the valuation. From schizoposting:

The only possible conclusion is that it’s designed to cause panic. In fact, it is optimized for it: there is no possible framing of the actual product(s) that could possibly induce more psychological spiraling in the media and its audience. “The AI Apocalypse?” has provided a yearslong news cycle and an infinite spawner of contrived Discourse, which has primarily served to contextualize the AI industry’s valuation around not reality but hypothetical future value—i.e. a baseless assertion of infinite growth between the lines of a public-facing eschatology.

Something is really wrong with the current system if this is how it needs to make you feel to continue operating. How can we stop this from happening next time? How can we enforce consequences on the people who did this? 摆烂

The adults in the room are starting to call BS on the “AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs” thing. How much longer does this bubble have? And like most cults when the end times don’t come they are just going to fade out and everyone forgets. No accountability. Remember when everyone died during COVID? And when we finally ended racism during DEI? Can someone write an AI 2027 but instead of some totalizing doom propaganda it talks about the bubble unwinding and what we can do to prevent this kind of crap in the future? How do we build an economy and society that’s sustainable?

From Cory Doctorow’s blog:

The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.

Theranos was ~$10B, FTX was ~$100B, and frontier AI lab is ~$1T. The US government is ~$10T. We are one order of magnitude from the end of too big to fail. If grassroots movements aren’t totally captured and get serious, I have a very good solution.

Every time someone is making money, you have to ask: is this created by growth? If the answer is no, the only other option is who did they take it from? Cruise Automation was founded around the same time as comma. They burned $10B with nothing to show for it. There was clearly no growth, so who lost the $10B? And don’t stop at “the investors” they are just middlemen. Trace it all the way through.

Since 1980, the economy has grown at 2.6% per year. The stock market has grown at 12.3% per year. Compounded, that’s 3.3x vs 220x. Does this make any sense?

It does once you realize that prices can’t go down. That’s simply not allowed. It’s bad for business if prices go down. The economy might collapse if prices go down. And if prices do go down, it shouldn’t happen while our administration is in power. This is America, the land of number go up. That’s why people around the world trust our economy.

Watch you hit the stage like a willing bomb
Strapped to crippled children
It’s hard to watch you whore out your damaged pride
I spit on what you’re building
  – The Stephen Hawking

The title is a 2014 Elon Musk quote. Now that we are 12 years in, it’s so true, but maybe not in the way intended. Or maybe exactly as intended?

I read this and it described what’s currently going on as a social crime. I very much agree. AI is simply a reflection of our society, it doesn’t contain a destiny. We are summoning the demon because we have demonic desires.

I don’t think this is going to change, but I do think that once the demon is here it will consume the people who brought it into the world. If you are one of these people, not getting out of technology will cost you your life.

You’ll bleed to feed the demon in me
If you don’t change your evil ways and end this peacefully
You’ll bleed to feed the demon in me
I beg you, before you’re digested, shred your legs and see

I am a proud member of the perpetual underclass. After your game of musical chairs is over, you will all join me eventually, and when you show up you will lose because we have been here for years. We will be comfortable. We will not be nice.

There’s no stopping these people, I was wrong to think I ever could. And if you believe in any sort of regulation or oversight, ask how that’s worked against tech so far. AI isn’t new in kind, it’s just another tool in their optimization machine.

It is going to collapse. The question is what is left when it does. That’s the world worth building for.