6: triple agent

• The book is out (as ebook). My main feeling is this.

• I have a new new job. Bigger. Unclear when we’ll go public but I am very excited.

  • The lack of detail is liable to make me seem idle or hermetic.

  • My cofounders are very loveable in a professional sense.

  • I worked around 230 hours in March.

• That counts about 50 hours of being at WARP though. My strongest class was a rational reconstruction of the useful bits of Jung.

• Working in the youtube mines was very fun and very intense.

  • I am particularly pleased with the video essay unit I set up; it’s also the first time I have directed a ~film. (Obviously most of the credit goes to the great Petr Salaba.) The result is rough, but not slop. This is because of the thousands of bits of human steering and editing we added. Notably, it was also made on about $10k. This is one area of AI art I’m not at all cynical about.

  • I keep being surprised by how shady quantum computing companies are.

  • Was in Paris for the AI hoo-hah. A frenzy of activity in incompatible directions and often no net direction and often the wrong direction. Sadly, I know much more about Emmanuel Macron than anyone needs to know.

  • You Can Just Do Things; But Most of You Should Not

• I am a Cosmos fellow, in excellent company. I’m noodling around with embeddings. Cosmos Institute, Lunar Society, whatever.

• Before I got horribly busy I did a bunch of MathAcademy, which is impressive and might one day be essential.

• I got my O-1 but may be the 1 in 10000 who hold it and do not use it.

• My month highlights are all lunches: Anders, Isaak, Peli, Adam, Alvaro. Oh, also getting the EV people to sing with Charmaine.

• For Valentine’s I took K on a bookshop crawl. 7 bookshops, only rule is you have to buy a book in each. Felt like the most romantic man alive.

• Nitter is back! How to use twitter when signed out

• Somehow, this newsletter I never promote landed Arb a very cool client (hi W).

Reading

• Morphotrophic (2024). The first Levinite work of science fiction. You should know what you’re getting with an Egan book: brilliant thoughts and cardboard cutouts. Best bit is making you realise how grody and arbitrary terrestrial biology is: all that ingestion, division, colloids, splurging, membranes.

• The most elegant and witty epigrams of Sir Iohn Harrington. Mostly incredibly vicious and stupid. You are probably not modelling the early moderns as cruel enough. Still, one alltimer.

• The Anti-Catastrophe League. Beautiful recent history of xrisk studies, unburdened by the trauma and culture war.

New words

• hardhatism: anti-libertarians (i.e. socially conservative, economically statist). Very rare position historically, but Boris was one and the new America First goons are going that way. Googling the term gives a fascinating look at old red pamphlets and academic crannies. A word which just barely made it onto the internet

• 差不多: "close enough". A feature of Chinese work cultures invisible on the outside: pragmatism, satisficing, being hacky. "Ahh it'll do."

• 人工智障: “artificial challenged intelligence”. Sped bot.

• mogilization: to be mobilised into the grave. могилиза́ция

• Oprichnik: Chekist. Specifically, of the pre-Okhrana secret police of the Tsars.

• chmobik: schmo móbik; idiot conscript.