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.
Myth-Busting
Debunking common misconceptions
30 posts
Why More GPUs Will Never Make AI Conscious
More GPUs will not wake a language model up. A map cannot feel rain, and a mirror has nothing to lose. Feeling came from bodies that could die.
A Tale of Two Bubbles
The consensus name is wrong by one word. On the difference between a financialization bubble and a technology, and why only one of them pops.
Richard Dawkins Knows AI Isn't Conscious. He Feels It Is Anyway.
Open-label placebos work on patients who were told, in writing, that the pill is inert. Richard Dawkins' recent essays about Claude are the same finding, running on a different substrate.
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.
There Was No Word for Things That Can't Feel Shame, So I Invented One
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
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.
The Music Is Still Playing
The AI bubble has specific predecessors: dark fiber, Pets.com, Enron's accounting, CDO tranching. The technology is real. The business models layered on top are familiar.
Is It Cruel to Be Rude to ChatGPT?
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test shows what that costs it.
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.