Just walked out of Eddington, incredibly dark, pretty interesting. I'll have to digest, but my first reaction is that it's incisive as a picture of white American male emasculation in particular. There is a generalized epistemological unmooring across the board which kind of dooms any average straight-talking man from every direction—Joe's mentally ill wife leaving him for the young cult leader, his suffocating mother-in-law who accidentally gaslights her into it, the utter impossibility of being an underfunded sheriff in a dying town where the kids (and outside money) are technologically accelerating but nothing else can keep up. The way Joe's authentic drive to fix his town and family gets captured by the strategic necessity of playing a social media game that is at once beneath him and over his head. Watching him sink into it... So dark, but painfully real in many little details, squeamishly so. It's all very overloaded with contemporary signifiers but this overloading does really make it cut so close to the bone. I enjoyed how crazy and intense it was, though I think it was probably overall horrifically ugly, and I think it will age very badly. In 50 years I suspect it will make no sense and be unwatchable.

OK so Nockchain, pretty crazy, it's been running smoothly for about 8 weeks now, which alone is pretty crazy given what they built, but much crazier... It seems to be taking off. It looks like real, organic demand among proof-of-work miners. Right now I count 81 miners that have won at least one block (vastly faster uptake and decentralization than Bitcoin, for comparison). People spending real time, effort, and money (compute) to produce zero-knowledge proofs on @nockchain. It's generating 6,233 ZKPs per second lmao. To be fair, I’ve never been this far along working with a startup, but I don't really know how these graphs could look better for a novel L1 proof-of-work chain in the first 8 weeks. I don't want to be too excited too early, but I'm struggling to see what could fundamentally stop this train. In my mental model when I first started working with them, all of the risk was technical/execution (could they actually get it up and running?) and then the cold-start problem (if launched, would it get off the ground at all?). I felt very realistic, i.e. pessimistic, about dying on any of those hills. But this machine runs, people seem to want it, cold-start seems behind us, and @zorpzk has still only raised the tiniest amount of capital compared to any other L1 blockchain that has reached this stage (afaik?). I've definitely been over-excited about things in the past, but now I'm like... Is this really happening?

The internet is breeding entirely new species through a kind of decentralized, memetic gain-of-function research on human types. The men who signup for this show have studied a fair amount of data, which they've memorized reasonably well. They spent their formative years watching "content," carefully studying the techniques whereby their favorite personalities "destroy" their opponents with facts and logic. Then, finding their paths to adult male glory thwarted at every turn, a show like this represents their first real opportunity for recognition (which is not a luxury but a true human need, as Hegel noted). And after all those years sharpening their knives, they really do bring an unprecedented verbal style, more ruthlessly optimized on a single dimension than any men in history. Fast, vicious, cutting, and breathless. And yet, this gentleman gets flustered when asked his name. I've never seen anything like it, he almost starts sweating when asked his name. Despite all of their training, despite having become discourse superpredators, it's all achieved by such a monstrous neglect of other basic abilities that it completely undercuts their performance and guarantees the extinction of this otherwise fascinating germline.

The internet is breeding entirely new species through a kind of decentralized, memetic gain-of-function research on human types. The men who signup for this show have studied a fair amount of data, which they've memorized reasonably well. They spent their formative years watching "content," carefully studying the techniques whereby their favorite personalities "destroy" their opponents with facts and logic. Then, finding their paths to adult male glory thwarted at every turn, a show like this represents their first real opportunity for recognition (which is not a luxury but a true human need, as Hegel noted). And after all those years sharpening their knives, they really do bring an unprecedented verbal style, more ruthlessly optimized on a single dimension than any men in history. Fast, vicious, cutting, and breathless. And yet, this gentleman gets flustered when asked his name. I've never seen anything like it, he almost starts sweating when asked his name. Despite all of their training, despite having become a sort of discourse superpredator, it's all achieved by such a monstrous neglect of other basic abilities that it completely undercuts their performance and guarantees the extinction of this otherwise fascinating germline.

The thing with writing is you really ought to be in a disinterested, childlike state of mind. If you have a workplace mentality, any of the various tensions of social striving, or any kind of instrumental fixation at all really, you may be productive and produce fine work, but you never get the magic. God does not dwell in widgets but only in vacuoles of wasted time joyfully stolen from, and protected against, the powers and principalities.

I'm bullish on voice-only computing. Every month since AI has become usable, I feel increasing pain at having to use screens at all. With LLMs it now feels like a huge waste of time to do things like "click" and move between "tabs." When I look at the improvement rate of agents especially, it now seems like a waste of time to do almost any kind of manual task on my computer. The gold standard life very soon may be reading paper and thinking in a sun-filled room, possibly with some kind of team if you need one, and essentially just making judgments and speaking words to handle every single thing on a todo list. Everything else somehow feels intolerably archaic already. I sort of hate to admit this but the OpenAI device might be the thing.

Wife took 3yo son to a magic show at the library. The magician started by saying that magic isn't real. Before telling me about the tricks, my son gave me the same preface. What? How sad. Perhaps the problem is not screens so much as the disenchantment of the world by adults.

The first time I saw him, I thought “great, they didn’t flood those kids.” The 8th time I saw him, I thought “Wow they really must have flooded those kids!” Tbc I believe him when he says they had no effect, but the only case study here is how to look guilty via over-exposure.

So is Grok 4 Heavy better than o3-pro?

As a nobleman, Montaigne could hope to attain high political office, perhaps becoming a royal steward or ambassador. But Montaigne's political career was a failure, which is how he became one of the most successful independent writers in history. He rose to the municipal level but his political career was encumbered by several somewhat random setbacks that he could not really control. Montaigne was cautious and patient, seeing these virtues as political strengths. He stayed loyal to whoever held authority. He remained Catholic, keeping religion and politics distinct, an uncommon position in 16th century France. While others frequently changed their beliefs for personal gain, Montaigne stayed true to his convictions. His best biographer Philippe Desan notes: "His failures in politics nonetheless allowed him to find the right tone for a new literary and philosophical genre that he built on the ruins of his career in public service. He made several attempts at politics before his book transformed him into a literary monument." Sometimes failure is a blessing. Destiny seems to prefer a clean slate.