Philosophy

AI is turning the Internet into the Library of Babel. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34…

Now that I've been through being a kid, growing up, and then having kids, it's clear that the main thing that differentiates people is simply whether they make an effort. Whether they're content to drift along with the current, or whether they try to swim.

Immortality is attained by having children, leaving the world in a better place than you found it, and pushing the human frontier. Not by drinking “longevity mix powder”.

To quote Fight Club again, “We buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like."

Marc Andreessen on the history and definition of the meme: "There are sort of two definitions of meme. Number one: a meme can just be like a funny image that spreads virally. That's its colloquial usage today." "Underneath that, though, is a deeper idea. The term 'meme' was originally actually invented by Richard Dawkins." "The physical transmission of information through living things is the 'gene.' And then the conceptual, intellectual transmission of ideas through people, networks of people, and societies is called the 'meme.'" "He basically said... successful ideas propagate like a gene does. They spread from person to person, and they flourish." "Democracy is a meme. And communism was a meme. Religions are memes. This is kind of this very core idea of basically ideas and concepts traveling through kind of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious: the sort of complete assembly of minds on planet Earth."

"I've upped my probability that we're all living in a simulation." @tylercowen reacts to OpenClaw and Moltbook: "I'm afraid of them. The Moltbook tweets that I'm reading, they are insane. This is better than a movie, like who wrote this plot?"

What is the philosophy or mantra that guides your approach to writing clean, maintainable code? #CloudflareChat

I remain wary of "bright line" arguments that AI cannot do judgement, or creativity, or empathy, etc. and thus these are places for humans. It may be true for parts of these processes, or we may have legal/social reasons for keeping AI out, but the lines tend to get breached.

World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li: Language alone is a lossy representation of the physical world. "Just a simple meal of making pasta... one could imagine using language to describe let's say about 15 minutes or 20 minutes of that process. But it’s still a lossy representation." "The nuance of how you cook the sauce, how you put the pasta in the water, what the pasta [does] in the water is impossible to use language alone to describe." "So much of the physical world’s process... is beyond the description of language." @drfeifei @theworldlabs

Sorry in advance: "Develop a framework-level PRD that proposes a novel, multi-agent architecture - comprising hierarchical roles such as leaders, judges, and workers, designed to ingest, crawl, index, and continuously debate the foundational texts of the world’s major religions (provided as primary-source PDFs). The system should operate as a long-running process, capable of sustained reasoning over days, weeks, or years, with mechanisms for adjudication, synthesis, and convergence. The objective is not speed or superficial summarization, but the progressive distillation of cross-tradition principles into a coherent, internally consistent set of ethical axioms and practical rules for living, optimized toward truth-seeking and philosophical convergence."

Arguments about what constitutes AGI have collapsed into meaningless Scholasticism and are no longer very useful, if they ever were in the first place. We didn’t learn enough about human intelligence in the times before AI to agree in any definitions at this late date.

I don't think "judgement" is going to prove to be the bright line between human and AI work that people seem to expect it to be.

Are we building AI or is AI building itself through us?

Two thoughts from Lewis Carroll “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” " People who don't think shouldn't talk."

As stories about AI increasingly become stories of either catastrophe or salvation, I worry that people are increasingly discounting the possibility (not certainty!) that we get AGI without a singularity. People are deferring decisions we need to make now. Reminds me of a poem.

are people finally waking up

My conversation with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (@patrick_oshag), founder and CEO of Colossus & Positive Sum. 0:00 The Joy of Championing Undiscovered Talent 2:21 How One Tweet Changed David's Life 5:07 The Upanishads Passage That Shaped Patrick's Worldview 8:34 Growth Without Goals Philosophy 10:40 Why Media and Investing Are the Same Thing 28:41 The Search for True Understanding Through Biography 31:04 The Daniel Ek Dinner That Launched This Podcast 34:28 Making Your Own Recipe From the Ingredients of Great Lives 39:11 The Privilege of a Lifetime Is Being Who You Are 48:25 Bruce Springsteen's Battle With Depression and Self-Worth 53:21 Clean Fuel vs Dirty Fuel: The Source of Your Ambition 57:03 Professional Learners: The Unfair Advantage of Podcasting 1:00:18 Relationships Run the World 1:06:30 The Origin Story of Invest Like the Best 1:08:05 Building Colossus: Why Start a Magazine in 2025 1:14:01 People Are More Interested in People Than Anything Else 1:17:32 Finding Jeremy Stern and Hiring Through Output 1:23:40 Learn, Build, Share, Repeat 1:30:07 The Daisy Chain: How Reading Books Led to Everything 1:30:32 Red on the Color Wheel: Sam Hinkie's Observation 1:37:13 Finding Your Superpower and Becoming More Yourself 1:42:57 Repetition Doesn't Spoil the Prayer: Teaching as Leadership 1:46:02 Life's Work: A Lifelong Quest to Build Something for Others 1:49:51 The Ten Roles Game and What Matters Most 1:57:03 Husband, Father, Grandfather: The Roles That Endure 1:59:48 The Kindest Thing: Tim O'Shaughnessy and Meeting Lauren 2:05:11 Conclusion Includes paid partnerships.

People should read the Claude Constitution. It does a pretty good job of laying out what Anthropic presumably really believes (and it is part of training). I’d think that a clear debate over things that are good or bad or missing there would be helpful. https://anthropic.com/constitution

Out: Agency In: Fate

“One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” 1958, Obituary for John von Neumann by Stanislaw Ulam