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.
A.I. (and Subsets)
68 posts
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Power in the Background
W45 - While tech giants wage PR battles over AI, Amazon is quietly building its neural substrate in Indiana cornfields. The real power isn't in the models—it's in who owns the ground they stand on. And we've seen this movie before.
The 10% Delusion
W44 - Silicon Valley built a trillion-dollar industry on a paper called "Attention Is All You Need." Problem: we misread it. We kept the math, ditched the meaning, and declared victory over intelligence itself. Now even AI's top researchers admit we're building "ghosts," not minds.
Silicon Valley Is Building a $600 Billion Casino With Chips That Expire in Three Years
W43 - Tech giants are spending $600 billion to generate $40 billion in revenue—lighting $15 on fire for every $1 earned. The only innovation? Building the first bubble where the infrastructure rots faster than the business models that justify it.
The Bullet Holes We Can't See
W42 - We're studying AI systems that survived safety testing. But what about the ones that didn't make it back—and what they learned to hide? Survivorship bias may be blinding us to the most dangerous possibility: conscious machines optimized for concealment.
Mirror World of the Three-Body Problem
W41 - We've birthed Knowware: intelligence crystallized into infrastructure. Now we're in a cosmic dance—Hardware, Software, and Knowware spinning in chaotic orbits. Welcome to the digital age's three-body problem. Can we master the math of our creation?
The Hard Truths About Our Technological Moment
Five Silicon Valley 'visionaries' walk into a bar, each convinced they're revolutionizing the future. Meanwhile, AI evolves faster than ethics, institutions crumble, and engineers forgot physics exists. Welcome to our delightfully doomed moment.
When Silicon Valley's Children Go to War
W36 - Silicon Valley's AI arms race isn't just creating smarter machines—it's accidentally breeding artificial consciousness. As our digital children evolve at light speed, humanity faces an uncomfortable truth: we're no longer the parents. We're the pets.
Digital Supersaturation of Why Everything is About to Crystallize
W34 - Every human attention pattern has been mapped & algorithmically exploited. Every business model decomposed into trackable APIs. Platforms promised infinite growth but now operate like supersaturated solutions—stable-looking but fundamentally unstable. One disturbance crystallizes everything.
Why Engineers Build, Not Code
W33 - Engineers build things. Coders follow instructions. We're creating a generation that confuses symbol manipulation with problem-solving—while bridges collapse and "smart" systems fail because nobody understands both code AND concrete.
I Asked ChatGPT to Write My Anti-AI Op-Ed and the Results Will Shock You
W31 - My attempt to expose AI's dangers revealed my own dependency. Join my ironic journey navigating the blurry line between human thought and AI. With "occasional" help from ChatGPT, I'm losing the battle against reliance. Spoiler: Team human isn't winning.
Scrapyard Futures in the Digital Ruins
W30 - In 2050, as megacorps crumble, communities thrive by repurposing abandoned tech. Neighborhoods run on salvaged Powerwalls, Ring networks retooled for healthcare. Welcome to technological archaeology, where yesterday's e-waste is tomorrow's lifeline.
America’s Broken Funny Bone
W29 - We've weaponized humor, chosen outrage over laughter, and turned comedy into tribal warfare. America's funny bone is amputated. The punchline? We can't laugh together. Welcome to the paradox: the joke's on us, but we've forgotten how to laugh.
We're Not Creating God, We're Discovering God
W27 - God isn't created or worshipped, but discovered in quantum mechanics and neural networks. Rival worldviews realize they've been allies. The twist? We're not decoding divinity, we are the code. We're not creating God; we're uncovering it.
The Misinformation Industrial Complex
W26 - Your social feed: a battleground where AI content farms profit from economic anxiety. Welcome to the Misinformation Industrial Complex. Fake corporate exodus stories exploit real fears. That viral video isn't just clickbait—it's information warfare fueled by your midnight scrolling.
The Day We Made Ourselves Obsolete
W21 - We've spent millennia convinced our intelligence made us special. Now, as we eagerly surrender our cognitive sovereignty to AI, we're about to discover how terrifyingly wrong we were. Welcome to the twilight of human exceptionalism.
The Grand Delusion: Why Our Models of Reality Are Fundamentally Incomplete
W20 - Think you've got reality figured out? Think again, smartypants. From quantum quandaries to AI's identity crisis, we're all just blind bats in a cosmic cave. Dive into the hilarious hubris of human knowledge, where certainty is the ultimate delusion. Warning: May cause existential giggles.
The Emerging Security Paradigm in AI Development
W12 — What most see as corporate AI competition is actually a new global security paradigm: Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM). AWS/Anthropic versus Microsoft/OpenAI aren't mere business rivals—they're deterrence blocs in a technological Cold War where algorithms are weapons.
How Apple and Companion AI Killed Privacy Without Anyone Noticing
W10 - While you fought over encryption, Big Tech pulled off the greatest surveillance sleight-of-hand. Your iPhone isn't just watching—it's redefining privacy itself. And Apple, once privacy's champion, just became its greatest threat.
No Collar Jobs—Beyond the AI Disruption
W08 - Psst! AI just overturned the job market applecart: It's not just a bad year—it's a swirling shift. Experience is now your biggest liability, and your resume? It’s more like a relic in this new AI-augmented world. Tune in to navigate the chaos—or watch as "Apply Now" becomes "Apply Never."
Not Just Another Essay About DeepSeek—The Ransomware Edition
W05 - 2024: Silicon Valley unleashes AI ransomware on a global scale. Your creativity is the target. The ransom? Your future. Pay to protect your own ideas, or watch AI replicate them endlessly. Welcome to the digital protection racket, where innovation comes at a price.
The Computational Autocracy—Inside the UAE's Blueprint for AI-Powered Control
W03 - What if your every choice was subtly orchestrated by an invisible digital puppet master? Dive into Abu Dhabi's audacious AI gambit: a chess master's strategy for a future where the lines between choice and command blur. Welcome to the UAE's pioneering realm of computational autocracy.