A secret third thing
AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the ’r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing.
The territory doesn’t exist until you’ve built it
Hacking up some Dan Davies:
You’re building systems which collate and structure massive archives of personal data
Since the technological and architectural factors are to do with your information set itself, it’s much more difficult to get information about them. It’s much more difficult to analyse alternatives because it’s not just a matter of looking at a map and deciding how much you’re prepared to spend to go around a lake rather than building a bridge. The territory itself doesn’t exist until you’ve built it.
a consequence of this is that as systems get more complicated, and more of their energy and resources are taken up in matters of organisation and information, rather than physics, then agency is likely to become less important, as more and more decisions are constrained by factors which are hard to even recognise as constraints, because the capacity doesn’t exist to represent altenatives.
I think the trick here isn’t that there’s no agency, it’s that if you can see how agency is enabled or constrained then you can decide where else to intervene to increase your agency here.
Dipshits
If you don’t like the imperfect results that experts produce, you’re going to love what the dipshits do.
– Nils Gillman, What comes after the cleansing fire of MAGA?
Real Genius
If you double down on the LOTR brainrot, and add things like Ayn Rand and Rene Girard to the soup, you get a profoundly stupid vision of the world that it takes real genius to buy into.
— Venkat Rao
A fine dust of evil
On reflection, this is about right.
You don't understand. It was optimistic, fun and cross-cultural but everything was sprinkled with a fine dust of evil.
— Dark Skinned Prince (@splashmouf) March 2, 2025
Not technology but the exercise of power
Silicon Valley has changed remarkably in the intervening two decades. Its culture now centers not simply on technology but the exercise of power.
The internet was meant to be weightless
It seems to me that today’s problems were written into the original declaration of weightlessness — precisely because, for the longest time, the online economy seemed to have marginal costs as close to zero as made no odds, it expanded until the constraints became impossible to ignore.
Good, Very Good, Great
good bankers take clients to expensive restaurants, very good bankers take clients to very expensive restaurants, but great bankers meet clients for a sandwich in the pub
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