Dear ______ Letters
Dear Sam,
On vendor-financed delusions, circular capital, the $100 billion retreat nobody wants to name, and what it means that the CFO of the world's most important AI project doesn't bother with the money flywheel.
Philosophical
Lessons Learned
The Persistence of Inferior Standards
W08 - Your calendar is broken, your clock runs on Bronze Age finger-counting, and your interest rates are modeled on Sumerian goat reproduction. We're not living in a high-tech civilization. We're running 21st-century software on medieval firmware.
A.I. (and Subsets)
Threading a Very Fine Needle
W07 - We built a thing that's really good at making us not need ourselves anymore, and we're calling it progress. It only takes 250 poisoned documents to corrupt an entire AI system. Not millions. Not thousands. Two-hundred, and fifty. That’s less than a few hours work, collectively.
A.I. (and Subsets)
How Does Order Emerge in a Universe Built for Chaos?
W06 - The universe writes in entropy, but you're an improbable paragraph. Physics can explain why everything falls apart but not why complex things like you exist in the first place. The universe's greatest paradox awaits.
Dear ______ Letters
Dear Dario,
You preached AI ethics from your personal blog while selling Anthropic's independence to Amazon. Now your 'Constitutional AI' sits on Bezos's property, paying rent."
Strategic Measures
The Greengrocer Goes To Davos
W04 - When a system runs on collective pretense, it inevitably breaks. Not when the fiction fails, but when maintaining it costs more than telling the truth. I wrote this in a newsletter. Canada's PM just delivered it at Davos. Either Ottawa's subscribing, or truth has its own timing.
Ethics \ Principles
AI Didn't Break Democracy. We Did. Four Decades Ago.
W03 - AI didn't kill democracy; it exposed a decades-old decay. The real culprit? Years of choices hollowing our institutions. AI isn't the assassin, but a mirror reflecting what we've ignored. It didn't create the crisis—it just made it impossible to deny any longer.
Technology
Building Without Blueprints
W02 - In a world obsessed with "just fix it," here's the uncomfortable reality: Companies won't act ethically, governments won't regulate properly, and your reusable straw won't save the planet. Real change isn't about blueprints—it's about power. Build it or keep pretending.
Big Tech
The Amnesia Machine
W52 - Before the internet, erasing history required burning books. Now, Silicon Valley's memory merchants have perfected something far more powerful: curated forgetting. Their algorithms don't just bury inconvenient truths—they replace them with carefully selected distractions.
Neuroscience
The Speed Trap
W50 - They labeled it ADHD. But what if your rapid-fire mind isn't broken—just faster? Here's how the medical system mistakes cognitive speed for disorder, and the unsettling reason they need you to believe you're broken.
👁️ A Closer Look
Intelligence Without Experience
W48 - Lab-grown neurons are firing patterns for sight and sound—without ever experiencing either. It's like discovering a library pre-loaded with stories no one wrote, forcing us to question everything we thought we knew about intelligence, learning, and consciousness.
👁️ A Closer Look
The 10% Delusion
W44 - Silicon Valley built a trillion-dollar industry on a paper called "Attention Is All You Need." Problem: we misread it. We kept the math, ditched the meaning, and declared victory over intelligence itself. Now even AI's top researchers admit we're building "ghosts," not minds.