Dear Sam,
On vendor-financed delusions, circular capital, the $100 billion retreat nobody wants to name, and what it means that the CFO of the world's most important AI project doesn't bother with the money flywheel.
🌶️ @iamkhayyam
257 posts
148th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 08
This week: Mini brains solve engineering problems. AI reads MRIs at 97.5% accuracy without explaining why. Consciousness might live in electromagnetic fields. Forests changing how they breathe. We built systems that work before we understand them.
The Persistence of Inferior Standards
W08 - Your calendar is broken, your clock runs on Bronze Age finger-counting, and your interest rates are modeled on Sumerian goat reproduction. We're not living in a high-tech civilization. We're running 21st-century software on medieval firmware.
147th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 07
This week: Systems so capable they've become fragile. So optimized they have no room left to fail. So advanced they've made us hostages to their own perfection. It takes 250 poisoned documents to collapse an entire AI. Not millions. Not thousands. Two hundred and fifty. We've called this progress.
Threading a Very Fine Needle
W07 - We built a thing that's really good at making us not need ourselves anymore, and we're calling it progress. It only takes 250 poisoned documents to corrupt an entire AI system. Not millions. Not thousands. Two-hundred, and fifty. That’s less than a few hours work, collectively.
146th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 06
This week: How does anything complex exist in a chaos-built universe? Blood Falls explained after a century. Fast radio bursts from monster shocks. Ancient math predates writing. AI nears human intelligence. WiFi tracks you invisibly. Order shouldn't exist—but does.
How Does Order Emerge in a Universe Built for Chaos?
W06 - The universe writes in entropy, but you're an improbable paragraph. Physics can explain why everything falls apart but not why complex things like you exist in the first place. The universe's greatest paradox awaits.
145th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 05
This week: Donut-shaped light promises better wireless while scientists question Earth's population counts. Chinese satellites push competitors lower, academic work vanishes with one click—technology creates opportunities and vulnerabilities alike.
The Zombie Singularity of Intelligence Without Understanding
W05 - TV's "Person of Interest" warned us about AI without wisdom. Silicon Valley's response? Scale the zombies, optimize the pattern-matching, and call it progress. We're teaching machines to play chess while forgetting why some pieces shouldn't be sacrificed.
Dear Dario,
You preached AI ethics from your personal blog while selling Anthropic's independence to Amazon. Now your 'Constitutional AI' sits on Bezos's property, paying rent."
144th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 04
This week: Ancient alchemy becomes reality while AI threatens to flatten culture into comfortable mediocrity. From CERN's lead-to-gold alchemy to mirror cells that could end all life, we explore how frontier science resurrects old dreams and nightmares as surveillance capitalism extracts everything.
The Greengrocer Goes To Davos
W04 - When a system runs on collective pretense, it inevitably breaks. Not when the fiction fails, but when maintaining it costs more than telling the truth. I wrote this in a newsletter. Canada's PM just delivered it at Davos. Either Ottawa's subscribing, or truth has its own timing.
143rd Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 03
This week: Corporate power reshapes society while AI disrupts traditional industries. From ranchers turning to carbon credits to tech giants consolidating control, we explore how surveillance capitalism and algorithmic efficiency are rewriting the rules of business, law, and human autonomy.
AI Didn't Break Democracy. We Did. Four Decades Ago.
W03 - AI didn't kill democracy; it exposed a decades-old decay. The real culprit? Years of choices hollowing our institutions. AI isn't the assassin, but a mirror reflecting what we've ignored. It didn't create the crisis—it just made it impossible to deny any longer.
142nd Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 02
This week: Corporate power reshapes society while AI disrupts traditional industries. From ranchers turning to carbon credits to tech giants consolidating control, we explore how surveillance capitalism and algorithmic efficiency are rewriting the rules of business, law, and human autonomy.
Building Without Blueprints
W02 - In a world obsessed with "just fix it," here's the uncomfortable reality: Companies won't act ethically, governments won't regulate properly, and your reusable straw won't save the planet. Real change isn't about blueprints—it's about power. Build it or keep pretending.
141st Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 01
This week: Scientific breakthroughs reshape our view of brain and environment, as tech raises privacy concerns. From 'mini-brains' illuminating mental disorders to bee colony collapse, we explore progress vs preservation. Innovation's impacts are complex.
The $20 Billion Distraction
W01 - While Silicon Valley built trillion-dollar AI castles, we mapped every patent but missed every human cost. 130+ weeks of tech analysis revealed our fatal blind spot: we're not creating intelligence—we're crystallizing it into infrastructure that thinks back.
140th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 52
This week: AI reshapes job markets and surveillance debates intensify, while breakthroughs in quantum computing and ancient DNA analysis offer new perspectives on technology and history. Privacy concerns clash with innovation as we explore the delicate balance between progress and human values.
The Ultimate Reading Guide ✨ 2025
52 essays: $600B in AI delusions. Lab neurons firing without experience. A confession of what tech analysis erases. In 2025, Silicon Valley built a machine that engineers forgetting—this is how we remember what platforms want us to forget. This is Token Wisdom..
The Amnesia Machine
W52 - Before the internet, erasing history required burning books. Now, Silicon Valley's memory merchants have perfected something far more powerful: curated forgetting. Their algorithms don't just bury inconvenient truths—they replace them with carefully selected distractions.
139th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 51
This week: Youth employment faces headwinds beyond AI, surveillance technology sparks privacy battles, and OpenAI releases groundbreaking sparsity tools. Stadium security gets drone defense upgrades while ancient plagues reveal new secrets.
Again, No One Leaves A Good Company
W51 - For a year, I analyzed tech's shiny future while ignoring the human costs beneath. That wasn't an accident—it was by design. A Silicon Valley-adjacent insider's confession about the industry's selective amnesia.
138th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 50
This week: Collatz conjecture shows infinite complexity, quantum mechanics achieves true randomness, cyber exploits surge. Hypnagogic creativity unlocked, billion-record breaches exposed, Ramanujan's formulas reveal cosmic secrets.
The Speed Trap
W50 - They labeled it ADHD. But what if your rapid-fire mind isn't broken—just faster? Here's how the medical system mistakes cognitive speed for disorder, and the unsettling reason they need you to believe you're broken.
137th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 49
This week: Huawei breaks chip barriers with new techniques, AI develops distinct writing voice, and ancient computing mysteries resurface. Meanwhile, health monitors enter optimization trap, consciousness research reveals hidden awareness, and math foundations illuminate computational hardness.
Architecture Over Scale
W49 - When Google validated my AI thesis, I didn't celebrate. I shrugged. While they wrote 50-page theories, I'd already built the solution—in $75 cow tags. They're just arriving at the starting line as I cross the finish. Being right too early feels exactly like being wrong. Until it doesn't.
136th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 48
This week: AI pioneers warn of societal collapse, brain weapons emerge as a global threat, and new theories challenge fundamental physics. Meanwhile, personalized algorithms reshape learning, farming embraces AI, and memory science reveals new insights into consciousness.
Intelligence Without Experience
W48 - Lab-grown neurons are firing patterns for sight and sound—without ever experiencing either. It's like discovering a library pre-loaded with stories no one wrote, forcing us to question everything we thought we knew about intelligence, learning, and consciousness.
135th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 47
This week: MIT probes consciousness, scientists warn of evolution-society mismatches, and new research transforms our grasp of time and memory. Meanwhile, AI ventures, smart farming, and math disputes show tech's growing impact on human experience.
AI Won't Take Your Job. It'll Take Your Purpose. That's Worse.
W47 - What took 200 years to destroy rural America will take 5 years to obliterate white-collar work. The farmers were blindsided by mechanization. We're not blindsided—we can read every word of our obsolescence in the Terms & Conditions. We just keep clicking 'Accept' anyway.
134th Edition 🔮 Token Wisdom \ Week 46
Quantum threats and privacy erosion dominate this week. Cryptography faces extinction from quantum computing, online anonymity crumbles globally, and corporate surveillance expands. Plus, forgotten computational pioneers, covert CIA operations, and breakthrough physics reshape our digital reality.
When Two's Company, Three's a Revolution
W46 - When U.S. sanctions cut off Huawei from advanced chips, they didn't just restrict—they revolutionized. In 2025, blocked from optimizing binary computers, China's tech giant unveiled something radical: the first commercial three-state processor, upending 80 years of computing.