The Book They Burned Before the Raid
A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.
Human-Machine Synthesis
The intersection of human cognition and machine intelligence
37 posts
I Know It When I See It
Autonomous agents don't develop taste. They execute the taste someone was disciplined enough to write down. A worked example from a real pipeline.
I've Been Writing Em-Dashes Since the 1980s
The em-dash sneer, the anti-AI backlash, and the real skill: curating a machine's raw output down to something worth a human's attention.
A Brain the Size of a Grain of Rice
A young scientist grows human mini-brains from skin cells — what organoids, a 302-neuron worm, and language models reveal about the spectrum of intelligence.
There Are No Shortcuts Into a Sponge
Learning has one input pipe at a fixed rate. You can't speed it up — only stop wasting it. On comprehensible input, opportunity cost, and unlimited output.
Tokens
An LLM processes "slave" the same way it processes "Tuesday." No cortisol. No dopamine. The charge in a word is entirely a biological phenomenon.
The Heat Sink
Three anaidic shapes — the individual, the corporation, the LLM. Each routes accountability to nowhere. The pattern is old. The word is new.
Anaidic
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
Sir
How you configure your AI assistant — what you make it call you — says nothing about the AI. It's a bumper sticker. You're the truck owner.
Honestly
LLMs say "honestly" most where they're most likely to confabulate. Here's the mechanism — and why it backfires exactly like a sociopath's professions.