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.
🚨 OP-ED
Debating ideas is a valuable mental exercise central to dialectic. However, without strong opinions, you might frequently shift between perspectives, avoiding commitment to any particular solution or advocacy for it. "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
49 posts
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Age of Experience
W40 - What if our most advanced AI lacks what squirrels instinctively know? From Saskatchewan's endless prairies to cutting-edge robotics, discover why authentic experience—not perfect simulation—shapes our future. Reality's richness resists being flattened into mere data points.
How Beautiful Failures Create Innovation Breakthroughs
W39 - Inspired by Brian Potter's analysis in "How Common Is Accidental Invention?" which revealed that approximately 7% of major inventions between 1800-1970 emerged from genuine accidents—a statistic that only hints at the deeper cybernetic reality of how breakthrough innovation actually occurs.
The Magic Kingdom Crumbles in Corporate Cowardice
W38 - Disney silenced Kimmel, sparking a mass exodus that crashed their systems—and credibility. This misfire exposed corporate America's costliest strategy: cowardice as prudence. Mickey's white gloves? Perfect for waving the surrender flag. Welcome to the new Magic Kingdom: where dreams die.
The Luddite's Last Stand
W37 - Today's Luddites aren't smashing machines—they're teachers demanding longhand math and surgeons questioning AI diagnoses. While we debate ethics, our judgment muscles atrophy. The real question: can we preserve human agency before we forget we had it?
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.
How Your Driver's License is Just Santa Claus With Government Backing
W35 - What happens when an entire civilization discovers their most sacred institutions are running on childhood logic? Your driver's license is Santa Claus with government backing. We never grew up—just graduated to fairy tales with late fees, criminal penalties, and armed enforcement.
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.
The Blindness of the Visionary—Why Most People Can't See Around Corners
W32 - They call themselves visionaries while demanding to see the future before believing in it—like food critics insisting on tasting tomorrow's breakfast. They're not being wise; they're just chickens with fancy vocabularies.
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.
Divided We Stand, United We Fall
W28 - Democracy crumbles from within as we fragment sovereignty along identity lines. Our rush to grant every group "sovereign" status weakens true political authority. Ironically, this quest for recognition may pave the way for the authoritarianism we fear.
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.
When Intelligence Becomes Its Own Enemy
W25 - You know that hollow feeling after three hours of phone scrolling? Eyes burning, neck aching, weirdly anxious about crises you can't solve but can't remember learning anything useful? That's your intelligence being strip-mined in real time.