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"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.

Chris Pedregal
3d ago
notboring.co
AI is Oil, Not God

I think it comes down to whether you think AI is more Oil or God, more 'an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do' or 'supremely intelligent and powerful being that's going to wake up and make humanity subservient (if we're lucky).'

1w ago
honest-broker.com
What Do You Have to Hide?

You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.

1w ago

We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one. I think this also explains the turbulence around AI better than the usual stories about hype. AI is not capable of being a real cybersecurity threat until suddenly it is, causing sudden and improvised policy changes at the highest level of government.

1w ago

Good criminals engage with the present in a way major studios do not; they're constantly experimenting with novel technology, and they love to exploit emergent systems. It also gives me a good temp check on what I should actually be worried about in the endless deluge of things I could be worried about, and what's just a nothingburger.

2w ago

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

2w ago

The historical examples it cites simply don't support a narrative of out-of-touch technologists inventing the wrong sorts of technologies and hurting workers in the process. The book embraces a highly questionable definition of 'power' in which persuasion in an open democratic society is painted as a threat.

2w ago

My big takeaway is that both Sol & Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next-best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you [are] doing any work where better intelligence matters, those two models are your only choices.

3w ago
stratechery.com
2026.26: Summer Vibes

fretting about the future can foreclose an appreciation at how incredibly awesome this technology is, and that the possibilities really are endless. You can do anything — even organize your garage. That might sound silly, but technology, for all of its importance, is also fun, and I'm having a blast.

1mo ago
theconvivialsociety
Your AI Is Not a Tool

The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run. 'The teams using AI most carefully are the ones losing the ability to tell a good option from a merely safe one. The malformation doesn't skip the diligent. It recruits them.'

1mo ago

The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.

1mo ago

I watched the game before passing it on, and was surprised at how similar the camera movements and various angles of the broadcast were to contemporary football coverage. The images were black and white, with a blurrier resolution, but the broadcast view, with cutaways to closer cameras for key moments, was very similar to today's coverage. Despite 60 years of technical innovations, broadcast mode still remains the best way to watch live football.

1mo ago

Anthropic's Claude earns more revenue per user than ChatGPT does. That emphasis on B2B and superiority in coding models is really turning out to be a better commercial strategy.

1mo ago

Before the war, Iran didn't control the strait, simply because it didn't realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn't know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting it down.

1mo ago

The students said that they only stayed on TikTok because other people were on it too, and they were afraid of missing out. FOMO is not utility; it's a bad equilibrium.

1mo ago

The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide.

1mo ago

electric cars are focused first and foremost on efficiency, and not only is that different than performance, Ferrari's calling card, but also representative of the parts of modern society — including tech — that leave everyone feeling increasingly alienated (and why, surprisingly, AI might help).

2mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is reinventing us.

2mo ago
readtrung.com
SpaceX: The AI IPO

We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market ("TAM") in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

2mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, but we have not invented a sufficient control of the machine; and worst of all, we have not invented any adequate philosophy of the machine.

2mo ago

By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement.

2mo ago

The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system.

2mo ago

The true paradox of the machine is that it was created to serve man, yet it has enslaved him to its rhythms and demands; we have made ourselves the appendages of our own inventions.

2mo ago

I'm sharing a cover of a Ted Lucas song today, using the overdubbing capabilities of an iPhone, which are rudimentary but fun.

2mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine and can no longer live without it. We cannot even imagine life without machines. Yet machines have enslaved us. They determine our movements and our thoughts.

2mo ago

Agents aren't copilots; they are replacements. They do work in place of humans — think call centers and the like, to start — and they have all of the advantages of software: always available, and scalable up-and-down with demand.

2mo ago

While Google and Anthropic have executed well in their Generative AI efforts, OpenAI has fumbled their priorities while losing considerable marketshare over the last year.

2mo ago

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

2mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is bent on inventing us.

2mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is reinventing us. We must learn to think in a new way, or perish.

2mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and the machine now invents us. We do not live, we are lived.

3mo ago

As AI tools become more widely used and increasingly specialized, many business leaders are trying to think quickly and creatively about how to best utilize this technology at nearly every level of their operations.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, but we have not invented the controls that belong with the machine.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine and the machine has possessed us, and we must either slay the machine or ourselves.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine and now we are ourselves parts of the machine.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is in the process of reinventing us.

3mo ago

For years, tech companies have asked contractors to behave like machines so that machines can learn to behave like people. Now Meta is asking its own full-time employees, who once occupied the top of the digital labor hierarchy, to do the same.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents. The machine has possessed us, and we must either master it or perish.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machines, but we do not know how to live with them.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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