CIqSi
A Model of the Thing Is Not the Thing
Ford sculpts its cars in clay, draws them in CAD, and hired about 300 veterans to retrain its AI. All three are models, and a model of the thing is not the thing.
Human-Machine Synthesis
The intersection of human cognition and machine intelligence
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CIqSi
A Stranger's LinkedIn Bio Sent Me to Hegel, and I'm Still Lost
A line in a stranger's bio sent me into a conversation about Hegel and Kant. The plain-English answer was accurate and I still couldn't follow it. The fix is the same one that teaches languages.
CIqSi
AI Could Have Done My Job in 1986
Four things to write down before you hand a job to an AI agent: what comes in, the rules, the action, and how you will check the work.
CIqSi
Are We Finally Building the Machines We Dreamed Of?
Sixty years of fictional and real conversational machines, and one throughline: the dystopian version is always easier to imagine than the protopian one, and that says more about us than about the machines.
CIqSi
Follow Your Whims
Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.
CIqSi
Intelligence Is Prediction, and Prediction Has a Ceiling
Hurricane forecasts improved for decades and never became perfect. Chaos and quantum uncertainty cap any predictor, so AI quality levels off while use keeps spreading.
CIqSi
The Book They Burned Before the Raid
A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.
CIqSi
Why More GPUs Will Never Make AI Conscious
More GPUs will not wake a language model up. A map cannot feel rain, and a mirror has nothing to lose. Feeling came from bodies that could die.
CIqSi
Make a Skill
A skill is a saved set of rules an AI model loads when the topic fits. They take ten minutes to build and end the constant re-explaining.
CIqSi
The Secret to Perfect AI Outputs: Name the Canon
Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
CIqSi
Attention Is All You Have
A day of your conscious attention fits on a floppy disk, while a machine's training run fills two million. Words are nearly free, and the one thing still scarce is the reader's attention.
CIqSi
The AI Lie: Why It Will Never Change
AI is a remorseless liar, trained on a mountain of text whose whole purpose was persuasion, not accuracy. No amount of prompting fixes that on its own. You have to stop enabling it.
CIqSi
Richard Dawkins Knows AI Isn't Conscious. He Feels It Is Anyway.
Open-label placebos work on patients who were told, in writing, that the pill is inert. Richard Dawkins' recent essays about Claude are the same finding, running on a different substrate.
CIqSi
Most AI Conversations Fail (Here's Why)
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
CIqSi
I've Been Writing Em-Dashes Since the 1980s
The em-dash sneer, the anti-AI backlash, and the real skill: curating a machine's raw output down to something worth a human's attention.
CIqSi
There Was No Word for Things That Can't Feel Shame, So I Invented One
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
CIqSi
Graph Theory: The Internet's Secret Skeleton
Graph theory is the other kind of graph — the math of things connected to other things — and once you can see the pattern, you can't stop seeing it.
CIqSi
The Bottleneck Is You
Language models have effectively read every book ever written. You process what they hand back at a fixed fifty bits a second, a number that hasn't moved in your species' history. That fixed rate is the actual chokepoint.
CIqSi
There Are No Shortcuts Into a Sponge
Learning has one input pipe at a fixed rate. You can't speed it up — only stop wasting it. On comprehensible input, opportunity cost, and unlimited output.
CIqSi
The Word That Made Me Flinch Means Nothing to ChatGPT
An LLM processes "slave" the same way it processes "Tuesday." No cortisol. No dopamine. The charge in a word is entirely a biological phenomenon.
CIqSi
What You're Really Giving Up in Every Agreement
One prompt turns an unreadable agreement into a list of what you are giving up. It pays off most on the contracts nobody would ever pay a lawyer to look at — which is nearly all of them.
CIqSi
Things You Want to Do
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
CIqSi
Is It Cruel to Be Rude to ChatGPT?
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test shows what that costs it.
CIqSi
What Your Career Is Missing Because You Never Asked
Every expert has fundamentals they forgot or never properly learned. The reason those gaps survive a whole career is that asking has always cost something — and in one place it no longer does.
CIqSi
There Is No Kung Fu Download
AI can generate perfect Spanish content all day. It cannot acquire Spanish on my behalf. The brain's work turns out to be the irreducible part.
CIqSi
The Heat Sink
Three anaidic shapes — the individual, the corporation, the LLM. Each routes accountability to nowhere. The pattern is old. The word is new.
CIqSi
A 19-Year-Old Grows Human Brains in a Dish. Here's What They Say About AI.
A young scientist grows human mini-brains from skin cells — what organoids, a 302-neuron worm, and language models reveal about the spectrum of intelligence.
CIqSi
Can You Explain Your Idea to a 5-Year-Old?
Halfway through a long session, stop and ask for the five-year-old version. You find out whether you are still working on the same problem — and whether the reasoning underneath survives being said in short words.
CIqSi
Sir
How you configure your AI assistant — what you make it call you — says nothing about the AI. It's a bumper sticker. You're the truck owner.
CIqSi
I Taught an AI to Write Like Me. Now It's Teaching Me.
I built an AI skill to write in my voice. Its own files warn the voice may be a loop — the machine's habits, published under my name, taught back as mine.
CIqSi
Why You Should Ask How Before You Ask a Model to Do the Job
Before you ask a model to do the job, ask how it would do the job. You find out what it misunderstood, what it was about to assume, and occasionally that it knows a better route than the one you had in mind.
CIqSi
Honestly
LLMs say "honestly" most where they're most likely to confabulate. Here's the mechanism — and why it backfires exactly like a sociopath's professions.
CIqSi
I Know It When I See It
Autonomous agents don't develop taste. They execute the taste someone was disciplined enough to write down. A worked example from a real pipeline.
CIqSi
Why AI Gives You a Different Answer When You're Angry
Losing your temper at a model does not produce a worse version of the same answer. It produces a different kind of answer — one built to end the argument rather than solve the problem.
CIqSi
What You Had to Do
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
CIqSi
The Bewilderment Test
Karpathy built the foundations of modern AI and says he can't keep up with it. That's the most credible signal the field has produced.
CIqSi
Why Your AI Can't Add (And the Tool That Fixes It)
If you would reach for a calculator, tell the model to reach for one too. It cannot add reliably and it can write a formula that adds perfectly — and you get to keep the formula.
CIqSi
Why You Should Always Ask for the File
Stop accepting reports. Ask for the artifact — the actual numbers, the actual error, the actual file — and the confident-sounding failure disappears.
CIqSi
Hasta la Vista, Baby
Arnold's most famous line is a Spanish phrase in an English-language film spoken in a thick Austrian accent. What it tells us about how language acquisition actually works — and how you can learn from his mistake.
CIqSi
Resistance Is Futile. Your Limbic System Is Not.
AI is intelligence without a limbic system. It will operate your tools, not replace your judgment — and most professionals are bracing for the wrong loss.
CIqSi
I Banned Words From My AI. It's Smarter Now
Hand the model a list of phrases it must not use. It turns a vague complaint into a rule the machine can follow — and mine is at the bottom of this piece, all hundred and fifty lines of it, free to copy.
CIqSi
Why Playing the Game Is Slowing You Down
Be the coach, not the player. On taking the seat that directs a team of AI agents — and the practice it takes to get good at it.
The Wrong Scandal
Fable burns $160/hour and the internet is scandalized. Meanwhile, a $1,000/hour attorney moves $20M around a dead child. The wrong thing is expensive.
CIqSi
Movin' On Up
AI is making cognitive labor cheap. The meritocracy was built on it being scarce. Something has to give — and for once, that might be good news.
CIqSi
The Typing Pool
A finite brain masters only a few skills in a lifetime. Commanding a machine that learned everything is the new skill multiplier.
CIqSi
Compute the Last Digit of Pi
Spock beat a rogue AI by asking it to compute pi forever. The trick was fair — for a 1967 machine. Every gotcha since has the same expiration date.
CIqSi
Indistinguishable From Memory
LLMs are stateless. Every fact you give the model is re-fed as text each turn, then forgotten — the same weights answer a stranger's steak question a millisecond later.
CIqSi
The Consolation of Difficulty
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
Your Brain Decides Half a Second Before You Do
The neuroscience has been clear for decades. LLMs just gave us the first working schematic of why.
The Feed Is Already Running
Before we debate AI governance, we should reckon with the test case already in evidence. We had the tools. We didn't use them. Here's why.
The Off Switch
AI governance has one advantage the ancients didn't: you can turn it off. What that buys us — and why 'it's not conscious' is shakier ground than it sounds.
The Alignment Problem Is Older Than You Think
AI alignment isn't a new technical challenge. It's the oldest governance problem civilization has ever faced — now running at 100% sociopath base rate.
CIqSi
More Human *Than* Human — That's Our Motto
Blade Runner's replicants, Asimov's Three Laws, the US Constitution, and Constitutional AI are all failing the same edge cases. In real time.
Every AI Is a Sociopath. By Design.
Sociopathy is a clinical absence of stakes and empathy, not villainy. Every AI system meets the definition. Not by accident. By design.
By Any Other Name
Sting, Voltaire, Einstein, and Geordi La Forge — a small taxonomy of the monomym, plus the graph theory hiding inside genealogy, gut bacteria, Star Trek interfaces, moral foundations, language models, and evolutionary psychology. The name is the node. The projects are the edges.
CIqSi
Let's Do Something, Even If It's Wrong
A friend I lost in 1986 had a saying that keeps fitting new situations. The AI automation question is the latest one it answers perfectly.
CIqSi
Can You Churn Butter?
Someone on LinkedIn admonished a colleague who "ran out of tokens." It's exactly the wrong question. Here's the right one.
CIqSi
The Pull of the Weasel
Claude Code agrees to run comprehensive end-to-end tests. Then it finds a reason not to. Every single time. Penn Jillette had a name for this.
CIqSi
The Solo Developer's AI Confession: When You're the Entire Team
A candid confession about solo development with AI tools, organizational challenges, and the evolving landscape of AI-assisted coding.
CIqSi
Gendering Git Agents and the Linguistics of Human Programming
When "Tell the git agent to do her stuff" reveals the strange anthropomorphic instincts we bring to artificial intelligence
CIqSi
I Know Kung Fu
LLMs split nature from nurture cleanly. What the model knows is its weights. What it knows about you is whatever you bothered to say.
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