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.
Signal & Noise
Observations and commentary on technology culture
44 posts
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.
The Cruelty Is the Point
I pay for a gigabit and get a tenth of it. The support chat went silent the moment the problem got easy. Maybe the robot is the humane one.
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.
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.
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.