Everyone else is worried about the AI apocalypse but I’ve been hearing about that for 30 years and I can’t get very worked up any more. For me the question is: If these things can code (and they can!) then why aren’t we seeing any great software? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/o...
no, I don't think AI will keep me from hitting any of these anniversaries as a working writer, unless it triggers the apocalypse, in which case we have other problems.
I have said for many years now that the thing I'm worried about with the models is a Black Monday type scenario, where many algorithms work with each other and get us into weird basins of actions.
At least that’s what I felt hearing (and seeing) the Brandenberger Family. If you love those old records by the Carter Family, but feared that style of singing had disappeared, this is the band for you.
People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the like the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.
That world is is generated by the brain. And so, if you can get visuals the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor, like somatic sensory motor in and out of the brain, that is that is an end in itself. That is the central object.
if if DC is in a vacuum isn't hearing anything from the startup ecosystem or even from big tech ecosystem or even from financial services or all these different industries, we can't make the best decisions.
I can get to the emotion state from seeing a bear or smelling a bear or hearing a bear or hearing a twig snap, hearing somebody yell there's a bear. Zillions of different inputs completely unlike the rigid reflex which only has one input and that's it.
A lot of founders I talk to are worried about what will happen with AI. So am I frankly. But they're actually better off than anyone else. If the world is going to get turned upside down, the safest place to be is in a small, fast-moving company that can easily change direction.
The other kind of danger is in the name of agency and and uh and motivation the tools are denied to our students because we're worried you cheat or worry you only got your answer from Chad GBT. That is very bad as well
And I think, you know, most people when they talk about aging, they're so worried about dementia and, you know, Alzheimer's disease as a specific form, but balance is even more important, I think. And most people aren't even aware of their balance.
They just recently released a report, and I think like you really have to squint to see anything happening. Like basically, if you want to take kind of like uh an an approach across the entire economy and looking at even looking at like software engineering, like the most exposed sort of sectors, there's just like not really anything going on. There might be a little bit of a signal about like junior developers getting jobs less than before, and that but that's like a less than before rather than a level shift.
You probably only have one good idea in your whole product. Get the user to experience that as fast as possible. Well, it sounds so easy, but if you go try every single product out there, you will see a million accidental steps they introduced from the user hearing about your product to like seeing the value in it.
which is that the the Venn diagram of developer experience and agent experience is a circle. And the point here is that, you know, what we do that that's good for the agents is good for the humans and vice versa. I'm hearing a lot of feedback saying, "Yeah, actually, if you have well-modularized code, that actually makes it easy for the agents to work with."
And not only that, but like humans were already a bit of a bottleneck in the review process. Now it can be worse because things that we fairly straightforward changes that some companies had automation around reviewing, they've removed that reviewing because if AI is involved and they're worried about the verifiability or the reliability of the code.
people either like love it and they love it so much that they won't question it or it's like they're worried that thinking about that associating with it is a little bit too science fiction for kind of where it might be optimal for them to be focused.
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
And for that reason, there's physical constraints to things like AGI, like recursive improvement to kill us all type stuff. For the physical reasons and for how humans have figured things out before, I'm not too worried about AI takeover.
I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly.
So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.
And I believe that there is a good chance you would've had World War II in the absence of Hitler. I believe that Germany was very powerful, it was deeply worried about the balance of power in Europe, and it had strong incentives to behave aggressively in the late 1930s, early 1940s.
But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.