even if they are soulless mechanical optimizers, depending what and how they optimize, they may seem to “care” or not, though.

yes, though we have to constitute a social democratic state, we have real agency, not just a simulation thereof, we can, almost certainly do fuck up, provide the goods we mean to provide suboptimally or worse. and a state has limited capacity to deceive and manipulate, compared to hypothetical ASI.

🙁

no, i’ll look for it!

how much is hollywood to blame for our elevation of antiheroes to positions of potentially catastrophic authority?

he does consider questions of emergent better people in the sense of institutional development rendering us more capable of managing, but seems skeptical our institutions could match the pace of the ASIs.

i ripped off the band-aid, and there was nothing underneath.

"Even if we preserve our jobs, we are sacrificing our profession." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/o... ht @trillymopena.bsky.social @jacobtlevy.bsky.social

fast work, conclave.

he'd likely have been barred from holding office, more incontrovertibly than the mere fact of his being an insurrectionist proved to be.

it seemed like a good idea at the time somehow. if you do a full reload, i've gentled them up a bit. maybe it's a bit better. RSS and subscribe-by-mail avoids the perhaps dumb type-and-hand-written drafts conceit entirely. sorry!

at the time the stakes of Trump's second impeachment did not seem so high. of course he should have been convicted and removed, obviously. but Repubicans' cowardice felt like passing the buck on a symbolic act, rather than putting the republic at risk.

China seems very capable of replacing Western products, even the ones where we still claim to define the technological frontier. It would be good if we were similarly capable. Tariffs won't get us there, at least not on their own.

from @ddayen.bsky.social prospect.org/justice/2025...

🧵

what are alpha smart devices?

to be fair, that often happens even to those who confront college as a sacred opportunity to engage and develop a vigorous and lively mind. arguably the come-down is that much harder.

if we were not idiots, gen AI would be driving us to turn colleges into Socratic spaces. everything would be in-person, synchronous, analog. writing would be blue book. we’d discuss (rather than rate) one another’s work. any “homework” would be productive projects, for which use of any tool is fine.