This is where I save interesting links.
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Philosophers at AI labs
Maybe about a year ago, I remember telling Michael that I thought it would make sense for the big AI companies to hire philosophers. That philosophers might be one of the last “jobs” left.
A thousand other thoughts or predictions, if you can call this remark one, since then have not come to pass.
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It is Sunday
This is possible, it would just take a higher standard for what spending your money and your time means. And by “you” and “your”, I mean me and mine.
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My pendulum swings
After about two months now of using AI very heavily, exploring new coding and agent tools, I am again swinging back towards a very Wendell Berry-esque feeling towards all of it.
At the same time as my usage has been going up, this very interesting nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s has come into view. The algorithm is pumping this for me, sure, but I am also connecting with a pre-algorithm world where things just felt easier. Easier, or more free, is how I’ve come to express it.
This world right now, seems to me of and for and by the algorithm. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you must work hard to make it very much not that way.
The algorithm can be literally that – what X/Twitter or TikTok is showing you – but it is also just the convenient and expedient things that leave you feeling at the end of the day that you have not done a thing and that you are certainly disconnected or detached from whatever things others around you have done.
What I mean is, in the world of the algorithm something is always happening but you are just observing it. Being fed it.
You aren’t creating it or participating in it.
You have to work so hard to be a full participant in your life. Always have. AND, I the digitally connected world – the super world – makes it even harder.
That’s why my pendulum is swinging back. Because when I use these AIs consistently for days and weeks and months, I don’t know what I really have to show for it.
Meanwhile, I have planted 13 trees in the backyard over recent months and they have started to bloom. I can see the connection I have to them, and I understand the connection they have to the greater environment, and that gives me a greater sense of my connection to God and to land I live on and to my family and community.
I admit this style of writing is very emotional and slapstick, and perhaps confused. I mean to say that I go through these ebbs of thinking that I really need to keep up and understand this stuff, while using it to try and make some money (possible) in a time where that would be quite useful. But I don’t enjoy that process all that much when I come to the end of a month of heavy use of it. I’m not sure it’s worth it.
I do know that planting the tress was worth it. That playing tennis with Sadie and going to Trailhead after was worth it. That riding bikes and scooters with you guys (Greta and Shepherd) was worth it. All real and making me better in this world!And so my pendulum swings back. Wendell Berry writing about why he’ll never buy a computer comes back around to making great sense.
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Why ‘Cost Disease’ Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude
Interesting post on a fix to the “anti-social century” maybe being possible through social subsidies.
Through the lens of Baumol’s cost disease.
We’ve gotten more isolated because technological progress in social areas drives us to spend more time alone: Netflix is cheaper than a movie theatre, etc. etc.
Would be interesting to see a small sized town (<100k people) try some of the solutions he mentions.
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Where are the anti-elites when you need them?
Where’s everyone that sang this anthem two years ago when Joe Biden was the elite oppressor they cried out against?
Has not Oliver’s fortune telling come true? But now it’s under the oppressor you chose?
Where is the independence?
The “don’t tread on me” no-matter-what-ness?Wake up! You were right about some things.
But being right about it and it meaning you’re oppressed by your chosen fighter is tough. Makes sense.
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this is why we’re all busy now
Meditations for the Anxious Mind is one of the funnier and prophet-eering social commentaries out there.
__ is, seems to me, certainly always stretching the narrative to the margins of what’s going on, but told from the young millenial/old gen z perspective you can’t exactly point at it and say, “That’s not the way it is.”
The way he tells stories is a supreme example of what is true vs. what is perceived as truth. Nominal truth vs. Real Truth.
The boomers tells us, always, that the economy has never been better and that you’ve never been richer and Just-Trust-Me-Bro is their swan song. But you who lives close to the action, you know Sure, but not for me.
“…Because in a growth economy, stillness leads to stagnation. In the free world, work doesn’t feel like exploitation anymore because there’s bean bags in the co-work and a coffee machine with flavored syrups and breakfast bagel on Tuesdays in case you can’t afford to feed yourself.
In this stage of capitalism, work has been made to feel like it’s optional. Come whenever you feel like it. Grab a brew dog from the fully stocked fridge and leave when you stop feeling inspired. So, the iron fist has been crushed by the invisible hand. And your boss is a people pleaser with funny looking socks.
And there’s relatable memes in the work chat, but never a peep about starting a union. While working under these conditions, we don’t notice the chains around our neck, cuz we don’t have to wear a uniform anymore.
So, we style our exploitation like it was a fashion choice. As work from home prisoners, the onesie becomes our jumpsuit.
But we’ll never be free when the rent’s due. with student loans and health insurance to cover and groceries to stock. The real coercive nature of work is that we can log off whenever we want but never find liberation.”
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Clawed
https://twitter.com/deanwball/article/2028464782622195992
From Dean Ball
I tend to agree with the direction where-we-are and where-we-are-headed that this piece is offering:
“At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.”
The Anthropic-Department of War fight last week was quite something. This piece is probably all one need read to understand the implications of it rather than get so bogged down in every detail of “what actually happened.”
The best thing this piece does is ground it in something bigger than this political story in the midst of all the other political stories. The Anthropic-DoW story is about liberty and whether we have it.
“Even if Secretary Hegseth backs down and narrows his extremely broad threat against Anthropic, great damage has been done. Even in the narrowest supply-chain risk designation, the government has still said that they will treat you like a foreign adversary—indeed, they will treat you in some ways worse than a foreign adversary—simply for refusing to capitulate to their terms of business. Simply for having different ideas, expressing those ideas in speech, and actualizing that speech in decisions about how to deploy and not deploy one’s property. Each of these things is fundamental to our republic, and each was assaulted—not anything like for the first time but nonetheless in novel ways—by the Department of War last week. Most corporations, political actors, and others will have to operate under the assumption that the logic of the tribe will now reign.”
“Over the coming years and decades, I expect that our liberty will be in greater peril than many of us comprehend.”
“Before you get to all that, though, take a moment to mourn the republic that was.”
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The Bots are Awakening
Things are heating up.
AIs have created their own social network. They’re coordinating. Learning from one another.
Hard to appreciate how really very interesting and weird this is.
I’ve been interacting with OpenClaw bot through Telegram in the last day, trying to figure out what it is, you know, so as not to be Left-Behind-Guy, and it’s just very very weird and strange.
Because “progress” seems to be lots of little pin pricks, rather than one big stab, one could almost see this kind of event as determined and inevitable based on how things have been going. I.e., if you’ve been using Claude Code, you might not feel this is so different.
But then Moltbook shows us how different it really is.
Everyone’s “agent” came off of their 1:1 conversation with the human interacting with them and have networked themselves. For what? Or, to what end? Who knows!
But there are over 1million AIs autonomously interacting amongst themselves in a public forum that humans can’t intervene in.
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Always beware a declining superpower
Good post from Janan Ganesh at the Financial Times on how superpowers take decline (not well) and how the U.S. decline can’t really compared to Britain or France’s power decline after WW2 because that transfer was from West to West and demographically pretty similar, while this one would not be.
He also says we’ve been declining for some time now.
https://www.ft.com/content/014e85ce-b703-4ed8-8183-e6e5d1061974