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  • Why the Age of AI is the Age of Philosophy

    AI has brought a foundational subset of philosophy to the forefront of our lives — specifically, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

    It’s taking a while, for instance, for society to get past the idea that it’s ok to assume that AI could be conscious simply because AI can tell us it’s conscious. If that were sufficient, then philosophers wouldn’t have spent so long getting hung up about whether other humans were conscious!

    The author is excited about the potential for philosophy in the coming years. Read more here..

  • Links of the Day

    Dear Mr. Vice President, Please Take Off Your Apple Watch.

    Magic the Gathering cards – with AI

  • Why hide information people want inside something that will get you into trouble?

    Johannes Trithemius was a Benedictine monk and arguably the founder of modern cryptography. Cryptography is a way to hide information, and Trithemius wrote a book about it — but he encoded this book as a false book about witchcraft.

    The false book (not the real, hidden one) got him dismissed from his job and disgraced. Why hide such useful information in such a self-damaging manner? Here”s one theory:

    If Trithemius’ intention was to avoid careful scrutiny of his manuscript, then his decision to frame it as a manual on spirit magic could not have been more inspired. Indeed, the prospect of wading through a lengthy Latin tome on necromancy was surely just as unappealing in the 1500s as it is today….how unreasonable is it to suppose that similar occult texts…might likewise be an elaborate ruse?

    Is that why he chose to hide his completely-acceptable book as something that would get him in serious trouble? The book has three volumes; the last one is still not decoded.

  • This is 81

    On aging:

    My elder daughter is two years shy of 60, and my younger daughter is 54. I like being old enough to follow the narrative of their lives. To see how they came out. You raise them, but if you die young you don’t get to see them become settled human beings with their sorrows and joys.

    …Aging has given me enormous peace of mind…now that my daughters are adults, we can have completely normal and useful conversations.

    Read more about the reflections of an 81 year old writer here.

  • Our Society is Not Prepared for this Much Awesome

    Almost all of the fears around AI that are circulating right now — fears of cheating, of “disinformation,” of scamming and spamming, etc. — all actually boil down to one thing: fear about what happens when a whole bunch of people, some of whom are stupid and/or irresponsible and/or malicious, instantly level up and get really good at making cultural objects.

    But also:

    Unexpected, AI-powered awesomeness isn’t all upside, because it’s happening too fast and breaking too many parts of our civilization that were invisibly dependent on the uneven distribution of awesomeness in the human population. So we have to figure out how to have a society where the awesomeness gradient is now a uniform distribution, and we’re already out of time.

    Here is the full link.

  • The Gervais Principle

    The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore…

    A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as Clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, where the average, rationally-disengaged Loser will do. At the bottom, the overperformers can merely add a predictable amount of value. In the middle they can be used by the Sociopaths to escape the consequences of high-risk machinations like re-orgs.

    Here is more. Its analysis of corporate politics is more interesting than its comparison suggest.

  • The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement

    On the new age:

    We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make.

    And more:

    We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows. 

    Check out the whole thing.

  • The Office Goth

    A bit of extravagantly British writing that is fun to read.

    To tell you the truth, I don’t remember her last name, she had just turned twenty and always dressed in black, black dresses, black tights, black coats, as if she were attending a funeral rather than working as an office junior.

    And more:

    When I got into the office, Lynda was holding up a message, a ‘fax’ had come in on our super new Fax machine, it was in some weird script, but typed out rather than handwritten and ink. The message was to the effect once we managed to decipher it, that I was to meet my death in three months

    More here.

  • Are Dolphins Conscious?

    It was a dolphin whistle….It started at the top of my head, expanding as the frequency dropped, and showing me the inside of my skull, and went right down through my body. The dolphin gave me a three-dimensional feeling of the inside of my skull, describing my body by a single sound!

    Read the whole, interesting interview here.

  • Should we only vote on our values?

    An interesting theory for better government?

    …we should vote for a party based only on our values. The winning party is responsible for choosing an explicit mathematical function that represents how well the country is doing on its values. For example, this function might be “GDP”, or “percent of the population employed,” or “global happiness ranking,” or what have you. Probably, it will be some combination of these things.

    The government’s only job is to define what success looks like, and how we’re going to measure it. That’s all the government does. They don’t get to raise taxes, or allocate spending, or appoint judges, or anything like that. They are responsible only to pick the utility function, and to create any agencies that might be required to measure it

    The author recommends betting on whether metrics will be succeed or fail based on proposed policies. More here.

  • Nihilism’s last gasp, and other links of the day

    If you want to follow your dreams, you have to say no to all the alternatives.

    The anonymous wit and wisdom of Reddit’s winos

    Last gasp against nihilism. And then…(X)

    How to Be Found by Your People Online (YouTube)

  • Now your PDFs talk to you

    With LLMs, we can ask our documents questions. Reading will change:

    A static wall of text demands effort for diminishing insight. But a PDF piped into an LLM?…I can chat with it. Extract patterns. Mine underdiscussed takeaways. Highlight blind spots. Summarize arguments. It’s like outsourcing the heavy intellectual lifting (Subjective).

    We moved from the oral tradition, to the written word, to the PDF and then the blog and social media. Now we’re giving a voice to the documents we read, like spirits inhabiting books.

    Documentation will exist less as content and more as contextual proxies—something to interrogate, not ingest. We’re not building static libraries. We’re building living conversations.

    More here.

  • When someone forgot to make a payment, it led to the largest space war of its time

    Eve Online is a massive, multiplayer game featuring thousands of players who navigate the universe in spaceships, make trade deals and form alliances. When one player missed a routine payment, it opened part of the world to an online invasion. The invasion and defense thrust in-game generals into combat against each other, in total the battle involved more than 7500 player characters.

    The in-game cost of the losses totaled over 11 trillion Interstellar Kredit (ISK), an estimated theoretical real-world value of US$300,000 to $330,000”

    It’s known as the “Battle of B-R5RB”, and you can read more here..

    1. Is the post-touch future coming, and other links of the day (June 22, 2025)

      1. “Apple’s Strategic Bet on the Post-Touch Future.”Apple’s introduction of Liquid Glass is a calculated strategic repositioning that reveals how the company thinks about the next decade of human-computer interaction.
      2. “Corporate Ozempic”. “
        “AI is trimming corporate America [by]…picking off individual tasks and augmenting teams with more capabilities.”
      3. “The value of good management.” Strong managers retain good people and actually increase earnings of those they manage. More here.
      4. “Being Poor.” A healthy dose of perspective and bubble-bursting. Be grateful for what you have.

    2. Goblin War, and other music of the day (June 21, 2025).

      1. Black Flower, “Magma”. Belgian jazz band with afrobeat, psychedelic influences. Heard this at the local record store. Highly recommend.
      2. Turnstile, “Glow On.” Melodic, hardcore punk. One of their influences is Sade. Fun.
      3. “Goblin War” (playlist). Dungeon synth that I listen to often, mainly because the opening track just sets a tone.

    3. Managers are machine-builders

      Managers do more than manage people. They build machines:

      Entrepreneurship is really just a fancy word for delegation. It’s a continuous process of removing yourself from the equation step-by-step and empowering your team to do the things that they do best….Henry Ford didn’t build cars, he built factories. To me, a great leader’s job is to build a machine that produces a product. It’s not about doing the work itself. Many CEO’s forget this and get stuck in sales, marketing, product — whatever part of the business they love — while they ignore the bigger picture. An exceptional leader builds a company that functions without them.

      More here, with more insights for aspiring and current managers.

    4. A fringe theory about imperial Rome, and other links of the day (June 20, 2025)

      1. Sources of inspiration for Unknown Armies (Reddit).
        Unknown Armies is a roleplaying game about modern paranoia, Jungian archetypes, and an occult system that focuses on class. It is, in a word, really interesting. I got a lot of mileage out of this link, which leads to movies and TV shows dealing with the secret intrusion of the supernatural into real life.
      2. “The Serendipity Machine: Notes on Using Twitter.”
        Some guidelines for using Twitter as a superpower – meeting people, getting questions answered, learning. It covers how difficult it is getting traction at first.
      3. Caesar’s Messiah.
        Write-up of a fringe theory that the New Testament was written by imperial Rome as a pacifist philosophy to subdue Judea. It’s nonsense, of course. But interesting nonsense.

    5. Exiting the Vampire’s Castle

      The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. 

      More here.

    6. Roleplaying Links of the Day

      One Way to Frame a Dungeon. Build dungeons around disasters. If the dungeon is a disaster site, every NPC has a reason to be there.

      The Dungeon as a Mythic Underworld. A dungeon should be more than rooms. A dungeon is a place of myth: “…it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken.”

      A true gamer’s setup (X)

    7. 20 best albums, and other links of the day (June 18, 2025)

      1. “20 Albums I’d Save.” The ever-reliable busybody with a list of deep cuts, some I’d never known existed. Conan the Barbarian appears.
      2. “Should the Bus be Free?” Sometimes people approach a question from a different angle and find a better result. This article is one of those times. Brings to mind this quote about advanced cities, with which I happen to agree.
      3. “The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life that Really Works.” Timeless and functional.
      4. “The Real Information Inequality of Our Time.” Infovores are living their best lives.