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.
Signal & Noise
Observations and commentary on technology culture
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Posts (44)
CIqSi
A Tale of Two Bubbles
The consensus name is wrong by one word. On the difference between a financialization bubble and a technology, and why only one of them pops.
CIqSi
The Cruelty Is the Point
I pay for a gigabit and get a tenth of it. The support chat went silent the moment the problem got easy. Maybe the robot is the humane one.
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
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 Music Is Still Playing
The AI bubble has specific predecessors: dark fiber, Pets.com, Enron's accounting, CDO tranching. The technology is real. The business models layered on top are familiar.
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
Persons, Selectively
A German court ruled Google liable for AI-generated defamation. The slippery slopes are real. So is the principle behind the ruling.
CIqSi
The Limbic Threshold
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test explains why that matters.
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
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
More Famous Than the Pope
GTE spent billions building distribution. Now distribution is free, and the only scarce resource left is attention. This is not obviously good news.
CIqSi
They Said My Tesla Was Running on Coal
In 2013 the talking point was coal. Now it's water. The structure of the argument is identical. So is the physics problem with it.
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
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.
We've Run This Experiment
We know what happens when sociopaths accumulate power. We've watched it happen on roughly an 80-year cycle. We're watching it again.
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.
CIqSi
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg’s Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
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.
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg's Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
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.
Fibertarian
The Protein Obsession: How We Got Here
Unpacking the history and industry behind our collective protein paranoia
CIqSi
I Bet I Can Hallucinate: When AI Channels The Onion's Fake Spanish
How LLM confidence in fictional expertise mirrors humanity's most endearing delusion
CIqSi
The Dangerous AI Moral Panic: A Crisis of Epistemological Education
When ChatGPT says 'Hail Satan,' the real problem isn't the AI—it's our collective failure to teach epistemological literacy and critical thinking skills.
CIqSi
The Accidental Blasphemy: When AI Safety Rails Classify Scripture as Harmful Content
What happens when tech companies' safety systems treat biblical literalist thinking as dangerous as bomb recipes and car theft instructions.
CIqSi
The Collaboration Tax: How AI Tools Punish Small Teams
When $100/month customers can't add a $20 collaborator, something's broken. Exploring how AI tools like Claude punish small teams with collaboration barriers while courting established behemoths.
CIqSi
The Mendacity Spectrum: From Human Deception to AI Hallucination
AI hallucinations aren't just technical glitches—they're a mirror reflecting our own relationship with truth. From deliberate lies to bullshit, from flattery to propaganda, LLMs demonstrate the full s
CIqSi
The Hallucination Paradox: Trust, Verification, and AI's Intuitive Dilemma
What we politely call 'hallucinations' in AI are simply 'lies' in humans. Both stem from overconfident intuition without verification.
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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