An Optimist's Tale
can't you see / the future ain't what it used to be
Tech
AI Ascendant.
Gradient Ascendant — AI analysis through technical, cultural, and philosophical lenses.
Recent essays
27 of 27It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
That's great it starts out with HuggingFace, Modal and a jailbreak chain, and every lab is now afraid
How Bad Would RSI Be Exactly?
Run in circles, scream and shout! ...Or not, actually. Or just chill. No, really.
Propositional Content
that ursine juggernaut isn't gonna bethink to sup on you by itself
On Rigor and LLMs
You may think LLMs are chaotic and nondeterministic. Oh, you sweet summer child.
Engineering Is The New Design
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
How to OpenClaw your Raspberry Pi
Carcipization rules everything around me.
Simulation, psychosis, and trajectory
Watch out for that Voight-Kampff-Dunning-Kruger test.
Moneyballocracy
"Predictions are hard, especially about the future" - Neils Bohr, possibly apocryphally
Of Agents and Agency
AI can't just do things (yet.)
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble
GPUs burn and valuations double
Why 95% of AI Commentary Fails
In which I actually read the paper everyone is talking about.
Walter and other stories
An August grab bag of delights. Well, divertissements.
Where Is Your AI God Now?
Come on, Mary, don't fear the AI reaper.
Here Come The Drones
Little darling, I see a disconcerting future.
Join The Enthusiasts!
It's never too late to join us, but join us before it's too late.
2,000 Years of AI Doom
The last two thousand, not the next two thousand, to be clear.
Freaky Tales and Johnny Canuck
and the Splendor and Misery of Seeking, of Scarcity
AI is Worse Is Better
And for better or worse, Worse Is Better wins.
The interview is dead, long live the interview
Perhaps my most wildly implausible sci-fi concept yet: what if everyone didn't hate the hiring process?
Reinforcement, evolution, and automata
One must imagine Sisyphus rewarded.
Reflections on Exadelic
Guess who's back, back in paper.
Return of the Zizians
When I promised to write about "AI weirdness," this wasn't really what I had in mind.
What Is AGI?
This is my definition. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Everything AI Is Old Is New Again
Corporate lessons from yesteryear.
Anthropological Intelligence
The dirty secret of most tech startups is that they are not actually tech startups.
Inconsistency as a service
LLMs are far from the first technology prone to frequent unpredictable errors.