connecting dots
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Joined July 2010
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FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
I'm fascinated by the rise of frictionmaxxing as a response to a frictionless life. We engineer away inconvenience, only to discover that some of the friction we removed was part of what made life feel alive in the first place
amodei means ‘loves god’
altman is ‘alternative to man’
aint these literally what they’re building?
call it destiny or simulation. u cannot make this sh t up
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
It is a really good time to store up a few of your hardest, most valuable, and most unusual ideas - whether for work, hobbies, or a new venture.
Thanks to AI, really good & unique ideas are getting extremely cheap to implement, but not necessarily easier to find. Big opportunity
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
Of all human qualities, intelligence is relatively common. Much rarer are the character traits that make intelligence useful: curiosity, humility, and agency.
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
In the age of AI, the reader struggles because the writer doesn't have to.
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
The highest-value human work in the AI era will be in domains with sparse reward signals. Internalize this, or watch your value erode over the next decade.
Math, programming, rote memorization, data science, all fucked. The classic “smart nerd” jobs are exactly where AI is strongest, because the feedback loops are dense. You can check the answer. You can run the test. That means AI can improve quickly, and humans will rapidly fall behind.
Your advantage as a human is in messy domains.
Taste. Judgment. Negotiation. Risk-taking. Politics. Sales. Science at the frontier. Anything you can only really learn by doing. Cross-disciplinary stuff.
The valuable domains will be the ones guarded by secrets, tacit knowledge, weak labels, long feedback cycles, and ambiguous outcomes. Places where the training data is scarce, the ground truth is disputed, and it's impossible to explain why something is good.
AI will still enter these domains. But we will be slower to trust it unsupervised there, because it will be harder to tell when it is right, harder to prove when it is wrong, and difficult to construct secure sandboxes. The stakes will be too high to YOLO it.
I find myself saying this over and over again to young people today: the future does not belong to people who are able to get good grades on tests. It belongs to people who can operate under uncertainty, in domains where correctness is hard to define.
Those domains will become the thin waist of the economy: as productivity everywhere else accelerates, the humans who excel there will become our economic Strait of Hormuz. The best humans in these domains will demand an enormous cut of the growing economic pie.
Your imperative going forward is to make sure you're one of these people.
(Or become an electrician. That probably works too.)
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
As the need for precision goes up, the utility of AI goes down.
A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want.
This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.
Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.
like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.
the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.
that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.
you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.
this all leads to some interesting questions:
- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.
the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.
we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.
the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.
FASTFORWARDIST retweeted
it genuinely feels like modern life has become a bandwidth trap.
the amount available to perceive, read, respond to, maintain, understand, optimize, archive, remember, compare, desire, fear, & keep up with is just grotesquely higher than what a human day can metabolize.
even worse the world now presents itself as if it is all equally adjacent to you. every article, every take, every message, every possibility, every person, every catastrophe, & every opportunity. your brain interprets this as “maybe i should be engaging with all of it.”
but you can’t. nobody can. not even the freaks. the good news is that ai is the best mechanic to parse signal from the noise, & that’s what we are building.
