2026-03-16
tmnt mask
Wes Roth interview with Joscha Bach around his current understanding on the nature of minds and other metaphysical topics including meditation and suffering, the purpose of existence, forms of intelligences, observer theory and the nature of reality, immortality, and aliens. Somehow, despite the broad and speculative nature of the topics covered, I have no disagreements to make1, which seems to indicate that we have very similar intuitions, or an indication of just how influential Joscha has been over the past decade.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad with a proposal (or prediction) for how an economy dominated by frontier AI labs and infrastructure providers can nevertheless incentivize innovation, using the model of current big tech or big pharma where successful startups are acquired by the ecosystem’s central oligopoly. There’s something I’m unclear about, because it seems to me that it is preferable if frontier labs retain their central position in the economy not through acquisitions, but through the technological dominance of actually remaining on the frontier of capabilities, something which may not be possible if the organizations become too complex and bloated2. Likewise, just as fast firing is what allows for employees to take risks in hiring, it seems to me that so long as AI makes standing up and operating companies cheap and painless3, then the goal of companies will increasingly shift from pursuing exit to operating profit. In which case, plausibly the best scenario for innovation would actually be an antitrust regime targeted specifically at making frontier AI labs more like utilities, in that they are not allowed to acquire other companies or otherwise expand their scope beyond the sale of tokens in return for compute, cash, or revenue sharing (epistemic certainty very unclear ~20% within scenarios of AI as normal technology).
Tomás Bjartur with a short-story of an AI restaurant manager engaging in rom-com inspired voyeurism, a sort of inverse Her in that Olivia Madison is obviously being used as a proxy for the AI narrator’s own desire to manifest specific tropes in existence.
Evolutionary Psychology Podcast has an interesting interview with Rob Boyd which seems to me to be a sort of internal debate within the field of evopsych as to how much of cultural evolution is nature versus nurture, according to what aspects and how much cultural equilibria are path-dependant versus highly adapted to specific environments.
DYEL? podcast on The Elementary Particles, which indeed seems increasingly prescient today4. It’s interesting how, commenting on the sexual revolution as unlocking the sexual marketplace, both the author and the hosts automatically assume that all markets have winners and losers, when capitalism is the mechanism for creating win-win situations. The backlash to the sexual revolution feels in many ways like people using the failure of shock therapy in Russia to argue that we need to return to communism.
Russel Walter interview with Alex Kaschuta on her views on the New Right and its fixation on gender roles, related to Sam Adler Bell’s recent article in New York Magazine.
Jenn vacation vignettes from Kailua-Kona. Also, on the blue paintings of the D.C. National Gallery of Art.
Except in things like knowing one’s purpose and preferring to “go home”, but those are arguably more personal preferences than beliefs.
See Will Wilson on the carcinization of large companies (via the Diff). It doesn’t currently seem to me that AI will make managing complexity much easier either.
Sol Hando argues that government should run projects through temporary organizations as a way to avoid the inevitable degradation of state capacity with bureaucratization. This probably would not work in the government due to regulations around how government institutions are to be organized, staffed, and run, but it does seem promising as a model for how the private sector could be run in an economy where AI makes creating and running companies more or less free.
Tangentially related, entertaining Cartoons Hate Her cultural discourse tweet roundup.