Category: philosophy
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The Categorical Error
In the ever pleasant environs of coastal San Diego, where I spent the 1990s, whatever was happening in Silicon Valley reached us faintly, like the buzz of cicadas sealed out by good windows. Still, the vibrations traveled. You could feel them most clearly at the magazine rack, which became a monthly trading floor for belief.…
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How do LLMs work?
“Artificial Intelligence is a term for a technology that does not work. As soon as it starts working, you give it a new name.”— Richard Campbell, at NDC Oslo in 2021, in a talk titled The Next Decade of Software Development. More than one person has asked me the title question, so here is a…
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Ambiance
The AI-generated, off-strip, Vegas lounge version of Hotel California plays through the black-market Chinese knockoffs that reverse engineered the Echo API, chaining the room to generational failure. The speaker’s firmware, forked from a fork of a fork of an unpatched Jelly Bean build smuggled in from Hyderabad via Dubai, emits audible cracks adjacent to the…
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Fair and Free Digital Markets Act.
A BILL To promote fair and free digital markets by prohibiting unfair business practices involving monetization derived from surveillance, behavioral manipulation through algorithmic influence, and targeting advertising using behavioral profiles, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1.…
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politics and anti-politics
The cluster of wars in Great Britain and Ireland between 1639 and 1660 are often called “civil wars,” because they were fought by subjects of Charles I in the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. I prefer the more poetical title, Wars of the Three Kingdoms. But I also think of them, though no one…
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Framework for Creator’s Outputs
Creation takes many forms. Being able to see those forms accurately and arrange them in a way that makes it clear is important. Mechanization didn’t make this less important, but it did integrate better into the world because what it created it remained atoms. Computation does not integrate into the world because what it creates…
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the eight factories every city needs to build before it’s too late
When we talk about climate, collapse, or resilience, we usually end up in the same cul-de-sac: we need better leaders, better policies, better apps. But we don’t. What we urgently need is physical infrastructure that lasts. Infrastructure we can control, repair, and replicate. Not another app. Not another subsidy. Not another committee hearing on “resilience.”…
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another thought exercise
Previously, I talked about how much money a billionaire could spend and have it feel like a normal person buying a cup of coffee by setting up a thought exercise: on the day you were born, you’re handed a trust fund designed to run out the day you died, 100 years later. Every day of…
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every state should do these three things to survive the coming dystopia
The Federal government is paralyzed by ideology, bloated with corruption, and increasingly unable or unwilling to deliver basic functions. The collapse of federal coherence has forced states to become sovereign in everything but currency. That’s a longer conversation. But for states now forced to confront real-world crises dumped at their doorstep by federal abdication, it…
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Dancing at Dream’s Denouement
It is Independence Day, 2025. I don’t really have much to say that I didn’t say last year.