“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”

“I’ve known this guy a long time.”

 “He’s not the sharpest bulb.”

—Donald Trump, characterizing Joe Biden, June 10th, 2025

 

ICE in LA

Good luck getting any actual, true news reporting this week.

 

UPDATE

Will things continue to escalate, perhaps culminating in a Trump declaration of "Insurrection Act" martial law in DC on June 14th during his controversial, sure-to-be-angrily-protested self-glorifying military "celebration" parade?

  

Trump says anyone who protests at Saturday's military parade 'will be met with very heavy force'

Donald Trump warned people against protesting at this weekend’s military parade in Washington to celebrate the US Army’s 250th anniversary.

“For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”

Law enforcement agencies are preparing for hundreds of thousands of people to attend Saturday’s parade, Secret Service special agent in charge Matt McCool (his real name) said yesterday, according to Reuters.

McCool said thousands of agents, officers and specialists will be deployed from law enforcement agencies from across the country.


The FBI and the Metropolitan police department have said there are no credible threats to the event. [per The Guardian]

 

Musk Rat, Musk Rat...

 

Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2.1 One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later. 

Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry. 

Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” 

“Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.” 

Musk’s mind was elsewhere. 

“I have bigger visions,” he said. Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation. 

“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.” 

What? 

Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?” 

“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.” 

That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.

Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-265). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 

 

A total shitshow

 

A new book jumping the queue

"The Haves and the Have Yachts."

    

The makings of history can be hard to discern in the moment, but, occasionally, a scene arrives that is instantly indelible. On January 20, 2025, the world watched American politics embrace plutocracy without shame or pretense. Donald Trump took his oath of office on a stage filled with billionaires. Off his left shoulder stood the world’s three richest people: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. A few feet to the right were Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, who, in the past, had said Trump’s rise to power was “deeply offensive,” and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who had evidently got over his outrage at the “shameful” riot at the Capitol. There were so many billionaires onstage that the leaders of Congress were relegated to the audience. 

The moguls on hand to celebrate Trump’s return to the White House had little in common with the old-fashioned corporate conservative elite. They were political players born of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 to remove limits on political contributions. As a result, candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultrarich supporters, who gave far more and received far more in return. When oil-and-gas executives had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he told them he would remove restrictions on drilling, for which they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. Musk devoted at least $288 million of his fortune to getting Trump and other Republicans elected, and, after Election Day, it proved to be a colossally fruitful investment. In a single week, stock traders, betting that Musk’s businesses would prosper from the new era, boosted the value of his shares by an astounding $54 billion. 

Trump named thirteen billionaires to the top ranks of his administration. Musk devised the Department of Government Efficiency, a new entity ostensibly charged with finding savings. Within weeks, Musk and a small band of acolytes, some barely out of college, had tipped the federal government into chaos by seizing the powers to fire people, access classified files, and all but close branches of the government. Opponents sued, but Musk was backed by a fortune so large that he could exhaust almost anyone in the courts. 

There had, in retrospect, been many signs that this is where we were headed. Days before Trump’s inauguration, Joe Biden, in his final speech as president, said belatedly: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” In fact, that oligarchy had been taking shape for decades. The tableau at the inauguration was the culmination of ideas and ambitions that run through the pages of this book. 

The effects of great fortunes exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society, but otherwise obscured by jargon and secrecy. Only occasionally, when something collapses—a myth, a confidence, a scrim of propriety—does the true power of the world’s biggest fortunes become visible…

Osnos, Evan. The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich (pp. XIII-XIV). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Just in ... 

 

OK, WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO SPEND SOME TIME ON THIS DUDE

 

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Ava Kofman, The New Yorker. (72 minute long-read)

 

Lordy...

 

MORE READING

 

      

Compulsive,,,

AI is nothing without Robots

AI 2027 follow-up

AI 2027

 

PDF link

 

Follow-up on the heels of Karen Hao's new book Empire of AI.

 

Yeah, but then there's this current crap:

 

THE WARLORDS WHO SACKED ROME did not intend to doom western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical…

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.

…The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.

Frank Bruni

...To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.

Politicians routinely don masks, twist facts and peddle fables — President Joe Biden’s pretense of undiminished vigor and acuity is a recent and egregious example of that. But Trump’s machinations and manipulations go beyond discrete feints and specific ruses. They’re in an unscrupulous league of their own...

 

...If history is written by the victors, the present is fabricated by those who throw themselves most ruthlessly and shamelessly into the storytelling. Trump and his principal abettors are just about peerless in that regard. Rather than own up to the administration’s error in consigning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump falsely and stubbornly insists that Abrego Garcia has the name of the gang MS-13 tattooed on his hand. He showcases accusations of domestic violence in Abrego Garcia’s past. He and his aides rework the details so that Trump is without blame or blemish.

Just as they’ve done with Jan. 6. That day is a searing indictment of Trump — so he inverts it. Babbitt is reborn as an innocent. The hellions around her are a heavenly choir. That song they’re now singing? It’s an elegy for honesty.

QUICK TANGENTIAL DIVERSION

This elite higher ed dustup is insane.

 

NEW

 

Click

 A review of Adam Becker's new book on AI

Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders’ particular vision of the future.

In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that’s underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker’s premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs’ wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author’s central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences…

I totally love the dated USB cable in the art.

 

Nice review in the aggregate. Perhaps episodically out over his skis just a smidge. Nonetheless, quite worthy.

 

Check this out:

Astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker has his eye on the dreams of Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite—and he’s unimpressed. He says Silicon Valley’s “heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions”—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

He argues that tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us, and that the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, Becker investigates what he calls wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but Becker says the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

Adam Becker says that powerful and sinister ideas are alive in Silicon Valley. Now he comes to the heart of the global tech world to challenge us to see how these visions of the future are foolish and dangerous.

'eh?

 

More shortly...

The Oaf of Office,

Memorial Day 2025

     

OpenAI & Sam Altman on the front burner

In the prickly Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press), Karen Hao tracks the fallout from the GPT breakthroughs across OpenAI’s rivals—Google, Meta, Anthropic, Baidu—and argues that each company, in its own way, mirrored Altman’s choices. The OpenAI model of scale at all costs became the industry’s default. Hao’s book is at once admirably detailed and one long pointed finger. “It was specifically OpenAI, with its billionaire origins, unique ideological bent, and Altman’s singular drive, network, and fundraising talent, that created a ripe combination for its particular vision to emerge and take over,” she writes. “Everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable; the explosive global costs of its massive deep learning models, and the perilous race it sparked across the industry to scale such models to planetary limits, could only have ever arisen from the one place it actually did.” We have been, in other words, seduced—lulled by the spooky, high-minded rhetoric of existential risk. The story of A.I.’s evolution over the past decade, in Hao’s telling, is not really about the date of machine takeover or the degree of human control over the technology—the terms of the A.G.I. debate. Instead, it’s a corporate story about how we ended up with the version of A.I. we’ve got.

The “original sin” of this arm of technology, Hao writes, lay in a decision by a Dartmouth mathematician named John McCarthy, in 1955, to coin the phrase “artificial intelligence” in the first place. “The term lends itself to casual anthropomorphizing and breathless exaggerations about the technology’s capabilities,” she observes. As evidence, she points to Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell professor who, in the late fifties, devised a system that could distinguish between cards with a small square on the right versus the left. Rosenblatt promoted it as brain-like—on its way to sentience and self-replication—and these claims were picked up and broadcast by the New York Times. But a broader cultural hesitancy about the technology’s implications meant that, once OpenAI made its breakthrough, Altman—its C.E.O.—came to be seen not only as a fiduciary steward but also as an ethical one. The background question that began to bubble up around the Valley, Keach Hagey writes in “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” (Norton), “first whispered, then murmured, then popping up in elaborate online essays from the company’s defectors: Can we trust this person to lead us to AGI?”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

 

"Prickly?"

 

Karen Hao's book is now out.

 

 

I've begun my study. apropos, see some prior posta:

Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
"Artificial General Intelligence?" Human existential risks?

Making the World a Bitter Place
The "First Buddy"

ERRATUM

 

A decades-long friend of mine is now a Microsoft software engineer working on the Azure AI platform. A quick msg yesterday:

 

 

MAY 21ST UPDATE

 

 

Wow. Interesting.

 

MORE...

Click

…OpenAI is angling to replace every major tech firm: ChatGPT is an internet search tool as powerful as Google, can help you shop online and remove the need to type into Amazon, can be your work software instead of the Microsoft Office suite. OpenAI is even reportedly building a social-media platform. For now, OpenAI relies on the smartphones and web browsers people use to access ChatGPT—products that are all made by business rivals. Altman is trying to cut out the middleman and condense digital life into a single, unified piece of hardware and software. The promise is this: Your whole life could be lived through such a device, turning OpenAI’s products into a repository of uses and personal data that could be impossible to leave—just as, if everyone in your family has an iPhone, Macbook, and iCloud storage plan, switching to Android is deeply unpleasant and challenging….

Almost 20 years ago, when Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said in a now-famous speech that “every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” Seeming to be in pursuit of similar magic, today’s video announcing OpenAI’s foray into hardware began with Altman saying, “I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer.” But Jobs had an actual product to share and sell. Altman, for now, is marketing his imagination.

A QUICK DIVERSION

 

Saw this on PBS Newshour.
 

dignity.us

'eh?

 

OK, topically relevant, define "civility." Hmmm... "The Age of Grievance," anyone?

 

KAREN HAO UPDATE

 

Deeply into AI Empire. Switching back & forth between earlier and later chapters. A couple of cites:

 

 

Wonderful reading.

 

Relatedly, read "The Oppenheimer of our age," cited in Karen's book.

 

UPDATE

 

I finished Karen's book. Instructive Bulwark interview with the author here.

 

                      

Lots more to consider. For one thing, this has got me re-reading my Shannon Vallor.

 

 

Another woman who will kick your butt. 

UPDATE

Click

Last spring, Daniel Kokotajlo, an A.I.-safety researcher working at OpenAI, quit his job in protest. He’d become convinced that the company wasn’t prepared for the future of its own technology, and wanted to sound the alarm. After a mutual friend connected us, we spoke on the phone. I found Kokotajlo affable, informed, and anxious. Advances in “alignment,” he told me—the suite of techniques used to insure that A.I. acts in accordance with human commands and values—were lagging behind gains in intelligence. Researchers, he said, were hurtling toward the creation of powerful systems they couldn’t control.

Kokotajlo, who had transitioned from a graduate program in philosophy to a career in A.I., explained how he’d educated himself so that he could understand the field. While at OpenAI, part of his job had been to track progress in A.I. so that he could construct timelines predicting when various thresholds of intelligence might be crossed. At one point, after the technology advanced unexpectedly, he’d had to shift his timelines up by decades. In 2021, he’d written a scenario about A.I. titled “What 2026 Looks Like.” Much of what he’d predicted had come to pass before the titular year. He’d concluded that a point of no return, when A.I. might become better than people at almost all important tasks, and be trusted with great power and authority, could arrive in 2027 or sooner. He sounded scared…

ControlAI.com: prior post follow-up

UPDATE, NEW BOOK COMING OUT

From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

Excerpted in The Atlantic.

"Artificial General Intelligence?" Human existential risks?

Click

Well, that was a pretty wild read.

How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?

In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and company founders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world.

Drawn from his interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast, these curated excerpts range from the technical details of how LLMs work to the possibility of an AI takeover or explosive economic growth. Patel’s conversations cut through the noise to explore the topics most compelling to those at the forefront of the field: the power of scaling, the potential for misalignment, the sheer input required for AGI, and the economic and social ramifications of superintelligence.

The book is also a standalone introduction to the technology. It includes 170 definitions and 17 visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.

The Scaling Era offers readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the development of AI—and a vision of what comes next.

Patel, Dwarkesh. The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 (p. 347). (Function). Kindle Edition.

 Loved it. Who are these cats? 

A fun read.

 

Relevant to these:

 

 

Adam Becker

Shannon Vallor

"The First Buddy"

 

NEW RELEASE COMING

 

 

We shall see. Science Magaizne pre-pub review.

 

One I'd forgotten:

This was in my Kindle stash. I had started into it a while ago, and then forgotten it given my crush of recent readings..

 

See also "Cognition in Strange New Minds."

 

A picture is beginning to emerge...

 

BACK TO DWARKESH & LEECH

  

 

UPDATE

 

"... Like with any technology – it can be used for good or bad, and the more powerful it is the greater the potential benefit or harm. AI is the nuclear weapon of the digital world. I think the biggest legitimate concern is that it will become a powerful tool in the hands of authoritarian governments. AI could become an overwhelming tool of surveillance and oppression. Not thinking about this early in the game may be a mistake from which there is no recovery."

From The Neurologica Blog.

 

RELATEDLY, A "PANDIGICON?"

 

Click

If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens...

Yeah. Recall my "Total Information Awareness" riff.

_____

 

UPDATE

Silicon Valley Braces for Chaos
The center of the tech universe seems to believe that Trump’s tariff whiplash is nothing compared with what they see coming from AI.

"...In Silicon Valley, where the technological future is the center of today’s world, the president is easily reduced to memedom—not the most powerful man on the planet, but just some guy trolling everybody on the internet. The real power, the big sucking sound, is apparently in California. Trust the autopilot to stay the course. Where that takes us exactly, no one can say."

ARF…

ERRATUM: OK, IS THIS AI?

 

(Yeah, ya gotta click through to watch it on YouTube. "Age Restricted.")

 

 

Lordy, Mercy.

QUICK ERRATUM

 

Jus' fer grins, I typed "artificial intelligence" into the blog post search window at the top of this post. Stuff going back a decade.

 

CODA