tell me the story about pandora’s box again?
06.03.2026 16:46
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tell me the story about pandora’s box again?
I did a chat with Tom last week. I might have been a little too excited but you’ll get a sense of why Princeton students are lucky to have him and why you should read it immediately rather than the next hot take...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmwY...
Here’s the case for reading Tom Griffith’s new book The Laws of Thought:
- it’s a great guide on cog sci + AI from someone in the field
- and a meditation for ambitious people on how great ideas start, get ignored, merged, and found again
- plus you'll see how often visionaries are right and wrong
My favorite conspiracy theories are the ones that I live long enough to find out were actually true! Revealed after 50 years, Nixon was being spied on by chairman of the Joint Chiefs. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard...
Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the Harvard Mark I, and the atomic bomb
This is good advice. Now how can this show up in the feed of my kids without seeming linked to me?
CS 123 has hit the pareto frontier of coolest and cutest CS class that I have ever seen. I hope that other colleges (and perhaps even high schools?) copy their strategy of teaching students to build and train robot puppies. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OHW...
The author @philipball.bsky.social has always written extremely well about science, but he has reached new heights in sheer beauty of publication with his new book, Alchemy.
Also: it has a fascinating story to tell, one you might incorrectly believe you know.
My best AI sensemaking trick is to turn things into tables. Ethan’s is better and more fun!
I suspect we are going to see something like this more often: “To conceal stylistic identifiers of the authors, the above text is a sentence-for-sentence rewrite of an original hand-written composition processed via Claude Opus 4.5.” (From possessedmachines.com)
I'm excited to announce I'm doing a new Bloomberg column about the business of fashion. The first column is about how we can re-shore US garment manufacturing. Instead of mass deportations and raising tariffs, I argue the government should move the industry upstream:
tinyurl.com/reshoringapparel
I see lots of Bi Gan search queries in my future…at least until YouTube gets the hint!
This is an old study and definitely out of date already; the next year is going to be disorienting…
Comparing abundant AI with a familiar experience:
> As food got safer, more accessible and cheaper, the key skill is deciding what & how much to eat to stay healthy. As thinking gets safer, more accessible & cheaper, perhaps the same will be true.
sundaylettersfromsam.substack.com/p/the-hard-p...
Continuing to have AI build a weird game demo a day. Here is: "Make a game where you have to prevent the apocalypse, but the interface is just Jira tickets"
Pretty fun/funny branching storyline, all text is AI created with minor feedback from me. Play: gentle-bienenstitch-01e24b.netlify.app
It is always hard to resist the easy, lower cost tactic that has deep, easily foreseen consequences. There must be a German word for it--Claude says it is milchmädchenrechnung.
There’s a @dsquareddigest.bsky.social-style cybernetics information flow insight in Ezra Klein’s interview with Yuval Levin about one of the (many) problems with our media and governing ecosystem.
What was the science fiction story about a society with special monks who spend their days cultivating deep domain knowledge while cut off from the culture so they can be clean judges of the AI models?
Sometimes the long arc of history means that we are stuck with some bad decisions someone barely paying attention made 50 years ago.
I think it’s a really big challenge!
Software development trying to adjust to the new world...
And the optimistic part of me hopes that they come up with good solutions the rest of us can copy!
You can see this happening even faster with open source software x.com/simonw/statu...
Think of the crew of the USS Grissom, Kirk’s son, and all of the Klingons who died for the sake of reviving Spock. And think of all of the bad moral calculations that resulted!
There’s something wrong with our current moral calculus, where we are willing to sacrifice entire actual populations in exchange for theoretical individuals. I blame Star Trek III.
C Thi Nguyen-style “value capture” should be called “values capture”. Makes it easier to differentiate from the economic idea of value capture.
That’s a good point!
Attention is a limited resource. Is affection?
I need a better genealogy of good things