More than three years have passed since I tweeted this. Yet I cannot feel blasé about using LLMs on a daily basis. I grew up dreaming of artificial intelligence. What we have now may be simulated intelligence, but that’s not a nuance I care about. For all intents and purposes, my childhood dream is fulfilled. The ability to engage conversationally with the digital equivalent of a tireless and highly intelligent adult with access to the world’s body of knowledge — that’s something I can never get tired of. We work together, we debate philosophy, we learn physics, we debug code, we plan workouts, we geek out over obscure rabbit holes, we ponder weird questions that I wouldn’t ask anyone else. Robert Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Current AI is virtually just a pair of opposable thumbs short of being able to do all that. It fills me with wonder; especially knowing that this is the beginning and that today’s tech is the worst it will ever be. I might be born too late to explore Earth and too early to explore space, but boy am I going to keep exploring the living shit out of the future https://x.com/AviationDoctor/status/1598676770567630850

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1/2 Indignation is not conducive to maintaining perspective, so let’s try to step back from the news and zoom out. Intuitively, the recent history arc feels analogous to the chaotic behavior of nonlinear systems: periods of deterministic, yet unpredictable disorder, bookended by islands of remarkable stability. Xennials and older will remember the movie Red Dawn, which captured the then-prevailing end-times fantasy: a Soviet invasion of America’s heartland, resisted only by true American grit. Then the Cold War ended, leaving the US devoid of a credible enemy. What followed was a liminal decade of triumphant certainties for Western liberal democracies, mistakenly taken for granted by Francis Fukuyama. 9/11 dispelled that illusion sharply, or at least so it seemed — the homeland was vulnerable after all, but to asymmetrical threats, punches thrown below the belt. But eventually, even hyperterrorism was tamed, and bored pundits started popularizing the Thucydides trap of a confrontation with a rising China as the next threat narrative. Today, it feels like the immediate threat to America is coming from inside the house: organically homegrown divisions, even if stoked by foreign powers who’d rather see the Empire eat itself from within than having to confront it.

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I’m struck by the short-sightedness that characterizes the current zeitgeist — as observable in international relations, domestic politics, monetary policy, extractive business practices, and, parochially, zero-sum crypto games. Our ability as a species to forecast / model / predict the future has never been better. We can see in full 4K resolution the damaging consequences to the human project of acting tribally, selfishly, and in the pursuit of short-term outcomes. There’s no place on Earth where the cost of our negative externalities remains hidden for long. It’s all transparently available in orderly datasets and visual evidence that propagate at the speed of the electron. And yet we indulge. It’s almost as if our ability to live longer, and to travel quickly far and wide across the planet, was now inversely correlated with our ability to plan and coordinate for the long view. We’re just building a better, faster, mightier Moloch. Was that always the plan? Are we forever captive of our own vicious primate tendencies, like the scorpion stinging the frog?

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I wish I could set my own mental temperature on demand, from near zero when I need pure analytical rigor, to arbitrarily high when I need fever-dream level creativity Maybe Neuralink will enable that one day by stimulating one brain hemisphere over the other, or micro dosing hallucinogens directly into the right areas

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Last month marked the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist revolt, a failed coup d'état in Saint Petersburg against the new Russian Emperor Nicholas I, just as he was being sworn in following the sudden death of his brother, Emperor Alexander I. The uprising of approximately 2,000 soldiers was led by 121 officers who, despite their loyalty to the Russian Empire while fighting the Napoleonic troops a few years prior, had been inspired by the Western republican standards of governance. They longed to abolish Russia's autocratic regime, which had begun three centuries prior with Ivan the Terrible (Russia's first Tsar), and replace it with either a constitutional monarchy or even a republic, while ending serfdom and enshrining freedom of expression. Had the revolt succeeded, it could have been on par with the French Revolution in terms of historical importance. Instead, it fizzled out, and all 121 insurrectionists were sent into exile to Siberia. I wonder what the world would be like had the coup succeeded and Russia turned into an open and progressive society. It is plausible that the Bolsheviks would not have gained any traction a century later, negating the need for a Cold War and completely rewriting the second half of the 20th century. There is an alternate universe where Russia would remain, to this day, a democratic beacon of Enlightenment values, and where Russkiy Mir would be admired rather than feared. Clio is a fickle muse. She weaves those almost imperceptible and yet pivotal knots in the fabric of History, where the fate of the world hinges on almost nothing — Franz Ferdinand's driver taking a wrong turn, Luther nailing a church door in Wittenberg, Lord Balfour sending a short letter. Like as many Big Bangs starting from a singularity.

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Do you ever wish you could go back in time? I think I’d travel back to the Devonian period, wait for the first Tiktaalik to crawl out of the water, and stomp it with 375 million years worth of pent-up misanthropy

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“If you want to build a church, don’t build it in a casino” This is but a small aside in @rev-morwen.eth’s long sermon, but it’s also a useful extension of @cdixon.eth’s computer-and-casino parable from Read Write Own. There are plenty of Web3 builders here on Farcaster striving to build parts of the onchain world computer’s rails (including Merkle themselves; let’s render unto Caesar regardless of their recent pivot toward the casino philistines). But only a subset of them holds the various connected tenets of trustlessness / permissionlessness / decentralization / credible neutrality / privacy / ossification / subtraction / FOSS as near-religiously axiomatic. This includes the original orthodoxy (broadly, the Ethereum preachers @vitalik.eth, @tim, @chaskin.eth, @marissaposner, etc. and their flock) as well as the later reformation movement shipping orthopractic alternatives (e.g., @cassie’s Q). They all aspire to welcome us into their heavenly infinite garden. TL;DR: I’ve updated my mental model to be Church <-> Computer <-> Casino. And what is true for builders is true for users; they are, respectively: the devout and zealots, the hackers and power users, and the gamblers and degens. As above, so below. Ramen.

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We need a word for when you le muscle memory makes you click in the usual spot but the UI is still refreshing in that same nanosecond and now you’ve triggered a completely unintended action, like opening an ad or something

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Everybody’s suddenly nostalgic of Vanilla Ice over whatever the current flavor is

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Second NY resolution of the year: I’m embracing Feng Shui so I can blame all of 2026 on my IKEA shelves

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I am le confused

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Getting a "dopamine hit" from social media has entered the modern lexicon, but it's actually a bit of a misnomer. Dopamine isn't the pleasure chemical that people think it is. In fact, there have been experiments where dopamine activity was suppressed in animals, and they still displayed normal pleasure reactions to enjoyable stimuli. The mild enjoyment we might get from scrolling or watching short videos comes from other neurotransmitters, including endogenous opioids and cannabinoids (enjoyment, comfort, satisfaction) and oxytocin (social connection, belonging, attachment). They are responsible for making food taste good, sex feel pleasurable, and social interaction rewarding. What dopamine really does is to reinforce learning under *uncertainty*, not pleasure. Scrolling, like slot machines, delivers unpredictable outcomes: most are expectedly poor, but the occasional surprise triggers dopamine prediction-error signals. In turn, those signals strengthen the habit of checking, even when the actual enjoyment is low. That's how we end up with the familiar compulsive urge to scroll despite weak satisfaction. Ironically, if everything was predictably *even* in quality, we'd get no dopamine and would lose interest quickly. So perhaps the ultimate detox algo, and solution to social media addiction, is to just remove outliers. This might even happen organically if boring AI slop finally crowds out the occasional surprising quality content.

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I find most of the ubiquitous retail website chatbots (banks, stores, airlines, etc) to still be useless. They feel designed to cater to ±1 σ around the median user (normally distributed), or about two thirds of the most typical midwit requests. They aren’t targeting “how is babby formed” levels of user helplessness, but they can almost never answer any reasonably predictable edge case either. The point is clearly to relieve frontline staff from routine asks, not to delight the customer with 24/7 self-service empowerment. It would be bad enough if they were *consistently* useless, but some (especially those with better GenAI training sets) occasionally shine, so you’re left having to type out a full paragraph with context and then roll the dice on the reply. (Side note: GenAI bots have the added upside of at least mimicking some empathy when you share your frustration with them, while basic chatbots are tone-deaf). The worst is that once you find out the bot is incompetent, you’re back to square one — most of the time, your request isn’t being escalated, you’re stuck in a dystopian loop of superficial answers, and must now defeat the dark patterns that stand in the way of speaking to a human. At least the navigation trees of the customer lines of old took more of an index-based approach to categorizing the issues, and were somewhat MECE in that regard

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2026 is the year of Manifest Destiny, except Destiny is a methed-out stripper

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First NY resolution crossed off the list: deleted the Twitter app from my phone

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