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.
Language
Language acquisition, science, and learning
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Posts (50)
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
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
A Brain the Size of a Grain of Rice
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
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
Tokens
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
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
Anaidic
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
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
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
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
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
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 Limbic Threshold
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test explains why that matters.
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
There Is No Canonical 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
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
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.
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
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
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
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 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.
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.
LinguaMama
The Affective Filter: Why Stress Makes You Stupid (in a New Language)
Anxiety about language learning doesn't just feel bad — it biologically blocks the process it's supposed to trigger. Here's what's actually happening, and what to do about it.
LinguaMama
When LinguaMama Is Not for You
Most companies won't tell you when their product isn't the right tool. We will. Honest guidance on who this is built for — and who should go find something else.
Free Will Is an Illusion
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. Here's why that matters — 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.
Every Robot Is a Sociopath
Sociopathy isn't villainy — it's a clinical absence of stakes and empathy. Every AI system meets the definition. Not by accident. By design.
LinguaMama
You Have to Understand Before You Can Speak
Everyone asks when they'll be able to speak. It's the wrong question to start with — not because speaking isn't the goal, but because it puts the work in the wrong order.
LinguaMama
The Third Time You See a Word, Your Brain Does Something Different
Brain scan research shows that seeing something three times triggers a different kind of memory storage — one that actually sticks. Here's what that means for language learners.
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.
LinguaMama
The 1500-Hour Map: What Language Learning Actually Looks Like
Nobody tells you what the journey really looks like — the long stretches of fog, the sudden breakthroughs, the point where the language stops being foreign. Here's an honest map.
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.
LinguaMama
Krashen's Five Hypotheses, in Plain English
Stephen Krashen proposed five interlocking ideas about language acquisition in the 1980s. Forty years of research has largely confirmed them. Here's what they actually say — without the linguistics degree.
LinguaMama
What Is Comprehensible Input?
The term gets thrown around a lot now. It deserves a real explanation — and once you understand it, you'll never look at language learning the same way again.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 6: The Yaris Cross
We got a car. Our visas were canceled. We hired a fixer. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the hobby project became something else.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 3: You Cannot Come to Portugal
Our attorney said we couldn't come. We were paying for a flat we'd never seen. We rebooked for December 26 and went to see butterflies instead.
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 2: Portugal, Probably
Spain was the plan. Portugal was the better deal — five years to an EU passport. We sold the house and moved to a shack to make it happen. Then we found one passport on the kitchen counter. There had been two.
LinguaMama
How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 1: Everyone Else Left
I spent the pandemic watching everyone on YouTube move to Thailand and Portugal. Then something shifted. Part 1 of the LinguaMama origin story.
LinguaMama
How to Actually Use LinguaMama (And Why It's Not a Course)
Stop treating LinguaMama like Duolingo. Here's the honest truth about what this is, how it works, and why embracing partial understanding is the whole point.
LinguaMama
Why LLMs Prove Krashen Was Right All Along
Dr. Stephen Krashen proposed his Input Hypothesis in 1982. Four decades later, Large Language Models validate every prediction he made about language acquisition.
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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