Kenda retweeted
I’m never gonna be that pompous, condescending, know-it-all who’s gonna lecture you on who to vote for today. I don’t even like voting for people. I vote for policy. I vote for principles.
Politicians are rental cars: use em to get where you wanna go, then broom em and never think about em again. Don’t get attached to the person. They are flawed, fallen human beings like anyone else, and they will most certainly let you down, eventually.
I’m not a fan of Machiavellian strategizing with elections…I think that kind of scheming is hubristic, and it can often backfire. I prefer to just vote my conscience, and trust that God will guide the right outcome. That doesn’t mean immediate “victory” in any given race…God’s timeline is much deeper and it exceeds our limited vision. Sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better. Sometimes things are better than you even realize.
I respect my supporters far too much to instruct any of you how I think you should vote…I won’t even demand that you DO vote. All I will ask is that you reflect on the fact that you can vote. We forget, so easily, just how blessed we are to be Americans. It’s not luck. We don’t have magical soil. We have a legacy of brave and brilliant and principled men who fought and died to forge our destiny here, setting us apart from every other human civilization.
Every day I think about how I can honor their sacrifices that I’m not worthy of. I felt a call to run for office. I feel an undying duty to advocate for my community…I don’t know if I’m earning my American birthright, but it is always on my mind. I feel the weight of America’s grace just as heavily as I feel the glory of God’s grace. Heidi and I are so, so blessed.
If I can be forgiven just one moralizing lecture point today: have gratitude.
Gratitude is the ultimate virtue that precedes all other virtues, and it is the skeleton key that unlocks joy in even the darkest times in your life. Many people will be devastated and disappointed by the outcomes today…the rest will cheer today, but will be disappointed 6 months from now when your victory celebrations wane and your lauded candidate inevitably lets you down.
Gratitude. Thank God you can vote today without getting beheaded. You can vote however you want today…and while some of my fellow former Mayoral candidates may not realize this…you don’t even have to tell anyone who you voted for. You can just…do you.
I will continue to remind you all…Jesus has the wheel. You will adapt and overcome whatever happens today. Or in the case of Gavin Newsom’s CA, 48 days after the polls close.
Kenda retweeted
Buckminster Fuller, who was wrong about a lot of things in a way that was usually more interesting than other people being right, noticed something in the 1930s that still holds true.
He noticed that technology does not primarily get bigger. It gets thinner.
The transatlantic cable got lighter per unit of message. The building got lighter per unit of enclosed volume. The engine got lighter per unit of horsepower. Each generation of a technology tends to accomplish the same function with less stuff, and then with less stuff again, until at the limit the stuff approaches zero and only the function remains.
He called this ephemeralization : doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.
And here were it gets interesting. What got eaten, in the first wave, was objects: my door key became a fingerprint.
What's happening today is the second wave: the AI paradigm shift. It’s our thought patterns, our decisions, our generative processes, our creativity, and our communication and coordination with each other that is being ephemerized.
And I think judgment abstraction has two consequences.
First, the output is not checkable at a lower cost than producing it. To verify a summary you must read the document. To verify a strategic recommendation you must do the strategy. The thing that made calculators safe (verification being orders of magnitude cheaper than generation) simply does not hold for the class of work being absorbed now. Which means verification won't happen because the economics forbid it. A check that costs as much as the work is not a check. It's a second attempt.
Second, the stairs are being removed as a consequence of using the lift. The way you stay able to judge a draft is by having written drafts. The capability is maintained by its own exercise and by nothing else. So the fallback and the thing it's a fallback for are the same muscle, and the system that replaces the muscle also stops the training.
This is Lisanne Bainbridge's irony of automation, which she wrote down in 1983 and which the aviation industry spent the next forty years rediscovering at great expense: automate the easy 99% and you have designed a job where a human with no recent practice must handle the hardest 1% with no warm-up, at the worst possible moment, on the basis of a mental model the automation has been maintaining on their behalf.
Airlines eventually responded by mandating hand-flying. No knowledge-work organization on earth currently mandates hand-thinking.
Kenda retweeted
Many of you don't understand how serious this is, so let me break it down.
In computer science there is a famous kind of puzzle called 3-SAT. You are given a long list of yes-or-no switches and a set of rules about how they must be arranged, and you have to find a combination that satisfies every rule. The obvious way to solve it is to try every combination, but each new switch doubles the number of possibilities, so a puzzle with a few hundred switches would take longer than the age of the universe to brute force.
For decades, the smartest people in the field found clever tricks that made this a little faster, but every trick still hit the same wall: the time required kept exploding as the puzzle grew.
About 25 years ago, two computer scientists, Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi, working with Francis Zane, turned that wall into a formal idea.
They proposed the Exponential Time Hypothesis, which says this explosion is not a failure of human cleverness but a law of nature. No algorithm, however brilliant, will ever solve 3-SAT without the time blowing up exponentially. Nobody could prove it, but almost everyone believed it, and it became one of the foundations of modern computer science.
Researchers used it as a measuring stick. If you could show that solving some other problem quickly would also crack 3-SAT quickly, you had shown that problem was hopelessly hard too. Hundreds of papers, across scheduling, graphs, logic and much more, rest on this one assumption.
Now an internal AI model at OpenAI claims to have broken it. It says it found an algorithm that solves these puzzles meaningfully faster than the hypothesis allows, and it has checked the proof in a computer verification system called Lean.
And here is the remarkable part: the very people who proposed the hypothesis, Impagliazzo and Paturi, along with MIT's Ryan Williams, are now leading the public review of whether a machine has disproved their own idea.
So what happens next? If the disproof holds, a large part of theoretical computer science has to be revisited.
Every result that said "this problem cannot be solved faster, assuming ETH" loses its foundation, and researchers will have to work out which of those walls were real and which were simply where we stopped looking. It does not mean everything becomes easy. The new algorithm is still slow in absolute terms and this is not the famous P versus NP problem being solved.
But it means our map of what is possible was wrong in a place we were very confident about, and it was an AI that redrew it. If the disproof fails, the hypothesis survives and the field breathes out, but we will still have watched an AI produce serious, checkable work on one of the deepest questions in the discipline, closely enough that the founders of the idea had to take it seriously. Either way, something has shifted.
Kenda retweeted
I just caught up on some of the recent posts from @DataRepublican, and they’re chilling—not primarily because they outline a violent uprising, but because they reveal a strategy of manufacturing a constitutional crisis in which states declare the federal government illegitimate. What’s alarming is the sheer ignorance and hubris of the people treating this as a workable path. They appear to believe such a rupture can be contained or directed, yet they show little understanding of either American history or the practical consequences of delegitimizing the federal order.
The people driving this approach are largely led by academics who have never borne responsibility for real-world outcomes, military officers who couldn’t produce a coherent strategy to win a twenty-year war, and former intelligence officials whose records inspire little confidence. They seem prepared to sacrifice institutional stability—and the young idealists who would be drawn into the resulting chaos—while remaining safely removed from the fallout themselves.
What they fail to grasp is that the Constitution is not merely a set of rules that can be voided by state declaration. It is bound to the oaths of those sworn to defend it and to the habits of a population raised on the Bill of Rights. America is not Europe, China, or any other society in which a central authority can be nullified with limited resistance. Attempts to engineer a crisis of legitimacy will not remain a matter of legal posturing. They will collide with people who take their oaths seriously, and the resulting contest over authority is unlikely to stay bloodless.
The American Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Roughly 2% of the population died—men, women, and children—in what was, by historical standards, a relatively conventional war fought between uniformed armies. Scaled to today’s population, that figure approaches 7.5 million dead. A modern breakdown in which states and the federal government treat one another as illegitimate would almost certainly be worse: a grinding conflict fought in neighborhoods, towns, and cities, where the line between friend and enemy would be unclear and ordinary life would become impossible. Anyone of consequence would carry a target, and trust would collapse.
This is not a call for violence. It is a plea to avoid the conditions that make violence probable. Many of us have seen what war actually does, and we understand the cost that would be imposed on the next generation because some believe their preferred political outcome can be forced by creating a crisis of legitimacy. Trump leaves office in two years. If the goal is to alter the constitutional order, the Framers already provided the mechanism for doing so. Use it. Do not manufacture a crisis that invites states to treat the federal government as illegitimate while others pay the price.
As Sherman put it: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
Kenda retweeted
🚨 I spend an enormous amount of time trying to understand the chaos we're living through. Not the headlines. The machine behind them. 🚨
If you want to understand what Elon Musk is really fighting, and who is really fighting him, this is the clearest map I can give you.
Expensive houses. Expensive schools. Expensive healthcare. Taxes that rise every year while everything gets worse. Borders nobody voted to open. Speech rules nobody voted for.
Most people look at this and blame capitalism. The market failed, they say, so the state has to step in and fix it.
They have it exactly backwards. What they want to fix it with is what broke it. This isn't chaos, and it isn't capitalism. It has a direction, a method, and a hundred-year history. Let me reverse-engineer it.
In 1926, Mussolini's regime threw Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, into prison. From his cell he asked the question that would shape the next century: why did the revolution win in Russia but fail in the West, where Marx said it was inevitable?
His answer: in Russia, the state was everything, so seizing it was enough. In the West, the state was only the outer wall. Behind it stood the real fortress: the church, the family, the school, the press, the culture. Western workers never revolted because the culture held them.
So the conclusion was simple. Don't storm the palace. Capture the culture. Win the institutions and you never have to win the argument, because you decide which arguments are allowed.
In 1967, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke gave it a slogan: the long march through the institutions. Paris supplied the intellectual software, and I've already apologized for my country's part in that.
Then came the most patient operation in modern history. The students of the 60s became the professors of the 80s. Their students became the journalists, judges, civil servants and HR directors of the 2000s. Their students now run the foundations, the NGOs and the agencies. No single step looked like a revolution. That's exactly why it worked.
The method was communist. The ambition became global. And it grew like a cancer. A cancer never attacks the body head-on. It hijacks the body's own cells and feeds on the body's own resources. This system never had to defeat the West. It just had to make the West pay for it.
In America, the machine found a political home: the Democratic Party. Not the millions of decent people who vote for it. The apparatus. The donor networks, the activist groups, the consultants, the captured agencies that keep moving in the same direction whoever wins.
In Europe, it found something even better. The EU's founders, Schuman, Adenauer, De Gasperi, were Catholic anti-communists who wanted to make war impossible. But they built exactly what the long march dreams of: power that never has to face a voter. A Commission nobody directly elects holds the right to propose laws for 450 million people. Chat Control. The digital euro. Speech rules written in Brussels. Nobody stormed anything. They just drafted it.
Add the World Economic Forum, the UN agencies and the global foundation circuit, and you have the full map. You don't need a secret meeting when everyone went to the same schools, reads the same papers, funds the same NGOs and flies to the same conference in Davos every January. It's not a conspiracy. It's a class with shared incentives. That's harder to fight, because there's no headquarters to raid.
And the billionaires? Most people who became the richest in the world got absorbed. They built something real, then traded it for an aura. Bill Gates is the perfect example: he built the software that ran the world, then became the bankroller of global health bureaucracies and the funder of newsrooms covering his own causes. Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. Benioff bought Time. You're not buying a business. You're buying the right to be called good by the people who decide who is good. That's the corruption. Not suitcases of cash. Money for aura, grants for loyalty, NGOs for policy. All legal. All invisible.
Here's the proof it's one system and not a hundred separate problems. Look at what happened to prices over the last 25 years. Everything exposed to markets and technology got cheaper: TVs, software, phones, clothing. Everything controlled by institutions exploded: college, healthcare, childcare. And housing, where you need a committee's permission to build anything. Same country, same economy, same decades. The difference isn't the product. It's who controls it.
Taxes go up and services get worse, because the money doesn't reach the services. It feeds the layers. Immigration happens at a scale no electorate clearly chose, because for a system that lives on managing problems, more problems means more budget. And a two-income family today can't buy the house their parents bought on one salary. That's real poverty, manufactured by a machine that is rewarded for looking good, never for being good.
MAGA isn't the cause of the chaos. It's the immune response. Brexit, the farmers' revolts, the votes shaking every European capital: same thing. The body finally noticed the tumor.
So what we're living through is not a normal political cycle. It's a fight to the death between two models. One runs on the perception of goodness. The other runs on reality.
And it had to be the richest man in the world. Anyone smaller would have been bought, sued or cancelled. Every billionaire before him took the deal. Elon walked out of the club and turned the lights on.
He bought Twitter for $44 billion, opened the Twitter Files and gave the world back a public square where any narrative can be checked in real time. He went inside the government and helped shut down USAID. Now Politico announces that the Democrats' gavels are coming for him. His answer: he'll find out who is really pulling the strings and go after them, not just their puppets.
He has one line he keeps coming back to: he cares about the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. That sentence is the whole war.
Now the part that makes me certain of how it ends.
A lie is expensive to maintain. It needs gatekeepers, censors, fact-checkers, friendly journalists, a budget, and constant repairs every time reality contradicts it. The truth costs nothing to maintain. It just keeps being true.
AI is driving the cost of checking anything toward zero. Any budget, any study, any statistic, any promise, audited in seconds by anyone with a phone. Yes, AI can generate lies at scale too. But producing a lie is cheap. Defending it against a billion instant audits is impossible.
That's what acceleration really means. It doesn't pick sides. It speeds up feedback loops. Systems aligned with reality compound. Systems built on lies hit the wall faster. And you cannot build rockets, design chips or cure diseases with a false model of the world. Physics doesn't read op-eds. The more intelligence we pour into the world, the more expensive every lie becomes.
You cannot scale a lie. You can only scale what's true.
We are close to the collapse of the old order and the birth of a new one. Not the one from the WEF's own 2016 video, "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy." The opposite. An order built on truth-seeking, efficiency, science, private property and free markets. You will own things. You will build things. And you'll be happy, because it will be real.
Gramsci's long march took a century. Its collapse will take years.
History will remember this moment. A man walked into the most powerful machine ever built, refused the deal everyone else took, and chose reality over perception.
I have never been more optimistic.
🤖 Made with AI
Kenda retweeted
I don't know if you realize what just happened.
Elon Musk is completely bypassing the State.
For 100 years, we've been told the problem is capital. That it must be captured, taxed, redistributed. With an army of intermediaries standing between those who create wealth and the people: ministries, agencies, commissions, bureaucrats.
Musk is doing the opposite. He's taking his capital and giving it directly to the people. One SpaceX share to every kid in America. Not a handout. Not a subsidy. A piece of the machine that's taking humanity to Mars.
And he says it himself: this is the first of many.
Mises understood this back in 1944: the bureaucrat creates nothing. He administers what others created, following rules that have no connection to the value produced. The day value flows directly from the one who creates it to the one who receives it, the bureaucrat has no function left.
That's what's being born right now. A new liberal world order, where the very concept of the State will make less and less sense.
The world we're entering is a world of abundance. AI, robots, energy, space. And that abundance won't come through the State, for one simple reason: we have a century of proof that it doesn't work.
Redistribution was version 1.0. Direct distribution of capital is 2.0.
While France is still debating how to tax builders even more, America is handing stock to its kids.
Pick your side.
Kenda retweeted
We call on France to exercise restraint when dispersing the freedom fighters on the streets of Paris. These brave warriors for justice must receive immediate humanitarian aid, and their safety must be guaranteed in accordance with international law. Failure to comply will leave us no choice but to bring a case before the ICJ, in close cooperation with that renowned champion of human rights, Afghanistan.
Kenda retweeted
Why the Virtuous Majority Keeps Losing.
Most people are decent. They work, raise their children, pay their taxes, and don’t lie more than they have to. And yet, again and again, the country is run against them.
How?
Turns out the mechanism has a name: Olson’s logic of collective action. An economist named Mancur Olson worked it out in 1965.
The idea is simple. Imagine a subsidy worth millions to a small group of companies. It costs every taxpayer the price of a coffee. Who will organize? The few, for whom it is worth millions – they will hire lobbyists, fund campaigns, show up at every meeting. The many, each losing the price of a coffee, will do nothing. Nobody marches for the price of a coffee.
Concentrated gains organize. Dispersed losses sleep.
Add the free rider: in a large group, everyone hopes someone else will do the work. So nobody does.
That is why the small organized minority beats the large disorganized majority, almost every time. Not because it is right. Because it shows up.
Now look around. The grant-funded NGO, the bureaucracy defending its budget, the activist network with full-time staff, the lobby with an office next to the ministry. Each has a lot to gain from one more rule, one more program, one more subsidy. The families paying for it each lose a little – and they are busy raising children.
Vice organizes itself, because vice pays its organizers. Virtue has to be organized, because its rewards are spread across everyone.
Olson saw the long-run consequence too. In a second book he argued that stable nations slowly fill up with these organized interests, each defending its slice – until the whole country stiffens and growth stalls. Germany and Japan boomed after the war partly because defeat had swept the old coalitions away.
So what do we do? Olson’s own logic gives the answer.
Make the dispersed costs visible. The coffee nobody notices becomes a bill everyone can read. That is what telling the truth does.
Give the virtuous a reason to show up beyond duty: friendship, community, careers, joy. Movements that last give their members something to belong to.
And remember that the majority never needs to organize all at once. A committed minority is enough to start – the long march proved it. The rest follow once they see they are not alone.
And it needs structure. That is what the network of patriots across Western Civilization – and the Council of Western Civilization at its center – are for. Not to give orders. To show the direction, so the energy is not scattered. To give the vocabulary, so people can name what is being done to them. And to coordinate, so no one fights alone. Olson’s lesson in one line: the organized few beat the disorganized many. So become the organized many.
And here is the good news. Olson wrote in 1965, when organizing cost meetings, letters, money and years. Today it costs a post. The math that kept the decent majority asleep is changing.
The majority does not win by being right. It wins by showing up – together.
We live in an age of complex systems.
Civilization is human nature, multiplied by institutions.
Every human trait, every emotion, every vice gets scaled into its systemic, civilizational expression.
Envy – socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should.
Pride – central planning. The planner never pays for his plan.
Wrath – cancel culture. The desire not merely to defeat an opponent, but to destroy him.
Sloth – dependency by design. A system that makes idleness safer than effort eventually gets more idleness.
Greed – crony capitalism. Private gains, public losses.
Gluttony – debt. Consuming today what belongs to your children.
Lust – pleasure without consequence, and the empty cradle.
Deceit – propaganda and managed reality: the Systemic Lie. A lie told to one person is a sin; told to millions, it becomes a system.
Love of power – bureaucracy. Every agency finds a reason to grow, and every procedure exists so that nobody can be blamed.
Fear – the compliant society. Nothing may be tried until it is proven harmless, so nothing new is tried. The precautionary principle would have banned fire.
Vanity – virtue signaling. Beliefs worn like jewelry.
Conformity – groupthink. When everyone must agree, collective stupidity masquerades as consensus.
Ignorance – cults and sects. Whoever knows nothing will believe anything.
Resentment – revolutionary politics. The desire not merely to rise, but to bring down those who have risen higher.
Cowardice – institutional silence. Everyone sees the problem. Nobody wants to be the first to name it.
Distrust – surveillance and control. When people no longer trust one another, they demand a system to watch everyone.
Guilt – a civilization ashamed of itself. The heir taught to despise his inheritance.
And the virtues:
Courage – free speech. Every right we have was first defended by someone who was afraid and spoke anyway.
Curiosity – science. The willingness to ask questions that might destroy what we think we know.
Ambition – meritocracy, or its corruption. Properly directed, ambition builds civilizations. Under the wrong incentives, it builds careers at civilization’s expense.
Honesty – trust, and markets that work. Where a handshake holds, a contract is cheap.
Shame – manners and honor. The rules nobody needs to write down. A people that loses its sense of shame needs a law for everything.
Responsibility – the market and the courts. Whoever decides should bear the consequences.
Patience – savings, cathedrals, families. Every cathedral was begun by people who knew they would never see it finished.
Hope – investment and children. Both are bets on tomorrow.
Gratitude – transmission. The willingness to receive an inheritance, preserve it and pass it on.
Perseverance – institutions that outlast their founders. The ability to keep building long after the original enthusiasm has faded.
Wisdom – constitutional limits. The recognition that no individual, however brilliant, should be trusted with unlimited power.
Joy – the feast, the festival, the laugh. A regime that can’t take a joke can’t take the truth.
Love of the particular – family and nation. Universal principles do not require us to abandon particular loyalties.
And two principles that determine whether a civilization survives:
Envy versus gratitude – Does a society teach its children to resent what others have, or to build upon what previous generations gave them?
Irresponsibility versus stewardship – Does a generation consume its inheritance, or pass on something greater?
Not merely personal virtues, but what determines whether a civilization can transmit its achievements across generations.
A system is a human trait, multiplied by millions – and given a budget.
And now a new multiplier is arriving: AI.
Whatever a system rewards, AI can reward faster, across more decisions, at a scale previously unimaginable, everywhere, at once.
Build a model that flatters, and it will flatter billions.
Build one that suppresses inconvenient truths, and censorship can become automatic.
Build one that seeks the truth, and truth will scale like never before.
The technology is a multiplier. The incentives determine what gets multiplied.
And the stakes go beyond the present generation.
The decisive question about AI is not how intelligent we make it. It is which human nature we encode into the systems that will shape the next generation.
That is why systems matter so much. The question is no longer only "is this person good?" It is "which of our traits does this system reward and multiply?"
A civilization is made of what it rewards, what it punishes, and how. Millions of daily decisions – who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets heard, who gets silenced – accumulating into a system that works, or doesn’t. That lives and thrives, or dies.
Show me what a system rewards, and I will tell you what it will turn its people into.
And the expression of traits into systems requires structures. So even if the virtuous traits are the majority, if they are not active and organized, then the vicious ones will prevail. Vice organizes itself. Virtue has to be organized.
So do not be passive.
Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.
Kenda retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Kenda retweeted
Why are we importing ANY petroleum products?
BUILD MORE DIESEL REFINERIES AND 🇺🇸 SHIPS TO MOVE IT
This is a military priority. If Cali and Mass refuse then build DoW refineries on federal land.
If Delta Airlines can own and run a refinery then the USAF can too.
Kenda retweeted
The US government will give your startup up to $1.55M and take 0% equity.
@NSF's America's Seed Fund is open again after Congress reauthorized it in April.
Three tracks:
- Phase I: up to $305K to prove the idea
- Phase II: up to $1.25M to build it
- Fast-Track: up to $1.55M, both phases in one go
Who can apply:
- US-based startups with 500 or fewer employees
- 51%+ owned by US citizens or permanent residents
- Not majority owned by VCs
- All the work done in the US
How it works:
- Send a 3-page Project Pitch first
- NSF invites the best ones to submit a full proposal
- Next full proposal deadline: Nov 4
Phase I funding rates have run about 10 to 20%. It's work, but nobody takes your cap table.
Application link 👉 seedfund.nsf.gov
Bookmark and tag a tech founder who needs this.
Kenda retweeted
12 months of progress on the jagged frontier:
1) AI got spikier, not rounder.
2) Maths, fluid reasoning, expert work: past human level.
3) There is almost no middle ground. Once a capability crosses human level, it often quickly becomes 100x+ cheaper than a human.
4) Cost keeps decreasing after capability increases stop. Language and knowledge look saturated but price keeps falling.
5) The gaps are not a budget issue. Human-level memory, self-monitoring and long-run planning are not for sale at any price.
AI is now a superhuman specialist that is sub-human at running itself.
Kenda retweeted
1/x In the 1840s, a lame American naval officer, grounded at a desk in Washington, cut weeks off the world's ocean voyages without inventing a single machine. His raw material: a warehouse of logbooks nobody had ever read. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Pathfinder of the Seas. A 🧵
Kenda retweeted
Sometimes entire cultures & continents earn well-deserved Darwin Awards. Europe is defenseless, America is already overextended, and Europe is enthusiastically funding drone strikes against the capitol of a major drone power.
When the drones hit Berlin, Paris & London
1/
The Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow this morning was apparently the largest of the entire war so far -- clearly they have been stockpiling for a while. It also included missiles, though they were all shot down as far as I can tell. Most of the 500+ drones were intercepted (1600+ total, a third aimed at Moscow), but several impacted residential buildings and the Moscow Oil Refinery. At least two civilians were killed in Moscow oblast.
Kenda retweeted
Stalin said the atomic bomb was not “as serious a force as certain politicians are inclined to regard it.” Molotov finished the sentence for him: hold on until you have your own, “and then we could speak in a completely different language.”
That is the manual. Public restraint. Secret sprint. Then the voice changes.
Xi will run the same script next week with Trump. Lip service to AI rules. Concern. Balance. Safety. The UN’s Guterres already queued the choir: the world “cannot afford a race to the bottom on AI safety.” Sanders wants America to permanently ban superintelligent AI and chase international agreements while Communist China keeps building.
Stalin told a Wisconsin governor the bomb was for “intimidating weak nerves.” He said it could not decide a war after it had just decided Japan. The point was never honesty. The point was time.
Time is what Beijing needs. America leads. A slower dictatorship cannot win a clean race, so it feeds the panic and blesses every Western priest who wants to cuff the leader. Ban it here. Treaty it everywhere. Smile in Shanghai.
The Soviets preached abolition at the UN and backed “Ban the Bomb” in the West while they stole and built. When they split the atom in 1949, the abolition talk died. The other language arrived.
Do not wait for Xi to announce the switch. The switch is the design. First they need you frightened enough to slow yourself. Then they need you vain enough to believe a signature binds them. Then they catch up.
They already told you what they do after they catch up.
(article below)
Kenda retweeted
This is the case against AI doom. Pass it on
First we recaptulate standard x-risk argument: we build AI substantially smarter than humans → it becomes an autonomous optimizing agent → its goals are misaligned → instrumental convergence makes it seek power and resist correction → superintelligence lets it acquire decisive strategic advantage → humans lose control permanently.
Here are the main counterarguments:
* Intelligence does not imply agency: A system can be extraordinarily capable at prediction, theorem proving, engineering, programming, etc. without having persistent goals, self-preservation drives, or an independent desire to act. Present LLMs are much more naturally described as systems that produce outputs in response to inputs than as organisms pursuing long-term objectives. Doomers incorrectly ascribe to them drive to replicate and seize resources because they're smuggling in premises from observing biological systems.
* Agency does not imply a single, stable utility function: Much alignment theory reasons about agents as expected-utility maximizers with coherent preferences. Actual AIs systems need not resemble that abstraction, and currently do not. They have context-dependent behavior, conflicting heuristics and corrigibility produced by training. Increasing competence doesn't necessarily turn such a system into a paperclip-maximizing von Neumann–Morgenstern agent.
* Capability and motivation are being conflated: Being able to formulate a plan for escaping a sandbox doesn't entail wanting to escape it. Being able to manipulate humans doesn't imply spontaneously deciding to do so. Critics argue that some doom scenarios slide from “an AI could do X if instructed” to “therefore a sufficiently capable AI will do X.” In present reality, AIs don't do anything a human doesn't tell them to do. This seems unlikely to change.
* Recursive self-improvement doesn't entail an intelligence explosion: “AI can improve AI” establishes a positive feedback loop, but positive feedback needn't be explosive. Semiconductor design software already helps design better computers; compilers can compile better compilers. Feedback loops encounter diminishing returns and external bottlenecks.
* Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large “general intelligence.” Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees. Human dominance may depend heavily on language, accumulated culture, institutions and cooperation rather than merely individual cognitive horsepower.
* Superintelligence isn't omnipotence: Intelligence cannot repeal physics or eliminate uncertainty. A brilliant AI still needs processors, electricity, network access, money, factories, robots and people willing or tricked into doing things. The physical world has latency and friction. Recent criticism of biological-doom scenarios makes this point particularly clearly: designing a hypothetical pathogen digitally is very different from successfully producing and deploying one.
* Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from “AI behaves dangerously” to “humanity is helpless.” In reality there may be many checkpoints: developers can notice anomalous behavior, revoke credentials, shut down servers, change architectures, restrict networks, regulate deployment, physically seize data centers, and learn from less-catastrophic failures. This has been formalized as the checkpoints-for-intervention argument.
* Alignment may not get harder with intelligence: A smarter system might understand human intentions better. Much doom reasoning distinguishes knowing what humans want from wanting it, correctly, but this still leaves open the empirical question of whether training increasingly capable systems to behave as intended becomes harder or easier. Alignment might turn out to be an ordinary, albeit difficult, engineering discipline rather than an insoluble philosophical problem.
* Current empirical evidence for the strongest mechanism is thin: We have abundant evidence for hallucination, specification gaming, reward hacking and undesirable model behavior. We don't yet have comparable public empirical evidence of an AI independently pursuing a sustained strategy of acquiring power against humanity. A 2023 evidence review characterized the evidence for extreme misaligned power-seeking as concerning but inconclusive and noted the absence, at that point, of public empirical examples of it.
* The argument compounds uncertain premises: Suppose, illustratively, that five necessary steps each seem 50% likely. Their conjunction is only about 3%. One can't simply assign numbers this way when the premises are correlated, but the underlying criticism is important: “AGI seems plausible,” “superintelligence seems plausible,” and “misalignment seems plausible” do not by themselves imply a high P(doom). The entire causal chain has to work. Current attempts to quantify P(doom) consequently operate under severe epistemic uncertainty and little direct empirical evidence.
* Anthropomorphic analogies probably mislead: Arguments like “an inferior species couldn't control a superior species” import assumptions from biological evolution. Humans and chimpanzees are autonomous organisms produced by competition for reproductive success. Software is engineered, copied, permissioned, sandboxed and run on hardware controlled by other agents. The analogy establishes that intelligence can confer power, not that artificial intelligence will reproduce interspecies competition.
Summary: The doom case consists of a long chain of individually contestable extrapolations—scaling → AGI → superintelligence → agency → misalignment → power-seeking → uncontrollability → decisive strategic advantage → extinction—and present evidence doesn't establish the whole chain with enough confidence to justify a high P(doom).
(ChatGPT 6 Astra assisted with the research for this post.)
Kenda retweeted
Poland and the Winged Hussars saved Vienna on this day in 1683 from the Ottoman siege.
It was the largest recorded cavalry charge in history with 20,000 horseman thundering down to save the city!
Kenda retweeted
Let's not forget today that Rick Rescorla was a hero. At age 62, as the director of security at Morgan Stanley and battling cancer, Rick was credited for going up and down the towers' stairs as it burnt and led 2700 people to safety. Rick, when hired was convinced the next attack at the WTC would be by plane. He ran drills with the employees on how to evacuate.
While going up and down the stairs over and over, trying to save more and more, he'd sing Cornish songs that he used to sing in war to calm his men.
Ricks last call to his wife showed just what kind of a man he was:
"Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely. If something were to happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”
Don't forget, heroes exist, and Rick was one of them.
Rest in peace to a legend.
Mark Steyn on "I will always love you": steynonline.com/16383/i-will…
66