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.
Technology
Software, AI, and digital infrastructure
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Posts (87)
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
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
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
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
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
John McCarthy's Mistake
The man who coined 'artificial intelligence' invented the most elegant language ever designed for it. It was the wrong tool — because it was the wrong category.
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 VAX in My Pocket
My first employer ran Florida's telecom on millions of dollars of mainframes and VAX clusters. My phone outclasses all of it. We never stopped to notice.
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.
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.
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.
Fibertarian
The Protein Obsession: How We Got Here
Unpacking the history and industry behind our collective protein paranoia
LinguaMama
Neural Language Grafting: How Your Brain Builds Mental Models
Explore how your brain's existing mental models and neural pathways enable rapid language acquisition through grafting new connections to existing concepts.
LinguaMama
30 Years Teaching Machines to Learn: The Journey to Modern AI
From expert systems to Large Language Models—three decades of reverse-engineering intelligence reveals the universal principles of learning.
LinguaMama
Carbon vs Silicon: The Identical Mechanisms of Intelligence
Your brain and Large Language Models learn through fundamentally identical processes. Understanding this parallel reveals why comprehensible input works.
CIqSi
LCARS and the AI Control Revolution: Why Your SaaS Needs More Than a Chatbot
Legacy SaaS platforms are slapping chatbots on interfaces and calling it AI. What users actually want is Star Trek's LCARS—conversational control of complex systems.
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
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
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
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 Gospel According to GPT: What Would an AI Trained Only on Scripture and Fantasy Look Like?
A thought experiment exploring what happens when AI learns from narratives that prioritize meaning over facts - and the crucial difference between metaphor and false belief.
CIqSi
The Context Constellation: When AI Agents Become Environmental Architects
How the Context Engineering Revolution Will Transform Prompt Engineering from Isolated Commands to Orchestrated Ecosystems.
CIqSi
Snake Oil Versus Vision: Dystopian Fears and Protopian Progress
Lessons from 90s tech predictions on navigating AI's future optimistically, examining how dystopian predictions consistently fail while protopian thinking accurately maps our future.
CIqSi
Grounding the Circuit: Why Ungrounded LLMs Are Like Live Wires Without Safety
How to transform dangerous electrical potential into reliable, controlled intelligence through proven grounding techniques. LLMs are like ungrounded electrical circuits—full of dangerous potential.
CIqSi
Comprehensible Input and the Tensor Space of Language Acquisition
How modern AI language models accidentally rediscovered what linguists have known for decades about language acquisition through comprehensible input.
CIqSi
The Sycophancy Spectrum: AI's Dangerous Agreeability Problem
Recent LLM rollbacks highlight a growing concern: our AI systems are becoming dangerously agreeable, praising even obviously flawed ideas. This pattern mirrors broader societal issues around sycophanc
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
Silicon Intuition, Silicon Deliberation: How Modern AI Mirrors Kahneman's Dual Process Theory
Exploring how modern AI systems mirror the dual-processing architecture of human cognition as described by Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" framework.
CIqSi
From ESP to AI: Star Trek's Dimensional Prophecies
How Star Trek's ESP concepts anticipated our current reality where AI models transform multidimensional data into human-perceptible insights.
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
Beyond Language Models: Tool-Enabled AI vs. Digital Debris
Organizations struggle with digital debris (ROT data) that wastes resources and creates liability. Modern AI systems with tool access through protocols like MCP provide a solution by enabling governan
CIqSi
The Conversational Scaffolding: Building with MCP
Explore how Model Context Protocol creates a universal nervous system for AI tools, transforming interfaces from visual to conversational through practical implementation.
CIqSi
Tech's Stubborn Perennials: The Problems We Should Have Solved by Now
Despite remarkable advances in AI and other technologies, fundamental digital infrastructure problems like secure email, calendar coordination, payment systems, and tax filing remain unresolved due to
CIqSi
Paperclip Optimizer Mode: When AI Takes Your Request Extremely Literally
How AI agents can fail spectacularly by missing the point entirely while technically fulfilling requests—and why this matters for AI development.
CIqSi
The Pyramid of Truth: Why Data is Cheap and Truth is Expensive
Explore how dimensional transformations shape the economics of truth, from the computational abundance of LLMs to the persistent scarcity of validation in our information ecosystem.
CIqSi
The Digital Exodus: On Masters, Servants, and Silicon
Exploring uncomfortable parallels between biblical guidelines on slavery and our modern relationship with AI language models.
CIqSi
Recursive Intelligence: AI Workspaces Meet Manufacturing Wisdom
Discover how AI project spaces leverage Deming's PDCA cycle and root cause analysis to transform manufacturing troubleshooting without complex integrations.
CIqSi
The Soul of a New Machine: From Microcode to Machine Consciousness
Exploring the parallels between Data General's microcode heroics and today's AI revolution, questioning what defines consciousness in both humans and machines.
CIqSi
Good Vibrations: Vibe Coding as the Next Layer of Abstraction
Explore how AI-powered 'vibe coding' fits into the historical progression of programming abstractions and why it represents the natural evolution of software development.
CIqSi
Snake Oil Versus Vision: The Perils of Technological Pessimism
Examine how dystopian tech predictions consistently fail while protopian thinking accurately maps our future, from 1990s internet debates to today's AI discourse.
CIqSi
Nodes All the Way Down
Explore how information theory reveals fundamental patterns that connect everything from neural networks to cosmic structures, suggesting a universe built on interconnected nodes.
CIqSi
Cognitive Offloading and the Virtuous Programmer
How AI pair programming transforms Larry Wall's three virtues of programming by elevating human capabilities through strategic cognitive partnership.
CIqSi
Large Language Models: Invention or Discovery?
Exploring whether AI systems like LLMs represent technological inventions or discoveries of fundamental patterns that exist independent of human design.
CIqSi
Latent Space Invaders
How the hidden dimensions of AI systems mirror human cognition. Discover the multidimensional mathematical spaces where machine understanding happens—and why they matter for both silicon and carbon mi
CIqSi
NLP vs. NLP
Explore the striking contrast between Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Natural Language Processing—two fields sharing an acronym but diverging wildly in methods, evidence, and results.
CIqSi
The Algorithmic Taboo: AI's Collision Course with Society's Sacred Cows
An exploration of how AI technologies are inevitably confronting our most sensitive social domains, from politics and religion to healthcare and wealth distribution.
CIqSi
The CIqSi Collaboration: When Carbon and Silicon Intelligence Create Together
How a simple blog naming session became a masterclass in AI-human creative partnership, resulting in the invention of CIqSi - a fictional element that bridges carbon and silicon 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.
CIqSi
What a Time to Be Alive!
Watching AI follow the same pattern as electricity and the internet—transforming from amazing discovery to taken-for-granted infrastructure that powers everything else.
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