Jay Gidwitz is a creative technologist and visual artist in San Diego, California, working in surrealist photography and digital painting.
San Diego, CA
Joined December 2007
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Jay Gidwitz retweeted
not only was california’s wealth tax rejected by voters, the *concept* of the wealth tax was *banned* by voters. eat shit, communists.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
💯
my spidey senses are telling me the labs are, as we speak, using unguardrailed versions of their unreleased models to systematically reverse-engineer ALL of the internet’s software, apps, and games, then feeding the reconstructed source code straight into their training pipelines while simultaneously building guardrails to ladder-pull the rest of us
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
good morning, california. please vote no on prop 40, which would effectively abolish your right to private property. piratewires.com/p/a-san-fran…
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
Just say it out loud to get it over with:
"This 'internet' of computing machines and protocols is really more of a limited peacetime prototype or demo that got out of control and was somehow accidently pushed into production a few decades ago. Shoulda said so earlier."
Awkward.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
Your screen is on anyway. It might as well be alive.
@infinidream_ai turns idle displays into living AI paintings - generative, breathing, never quite the same twice.
Free for Mac + Windows.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
Urgent:
LESS THAN 24 HOURS REMAIN TO CHARGE ANTHONY FAUCI FOR THE WORST COVER-UP IN PUBLIC HEALTH HISTORY
We have IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE that he 100% LIED UNDER OATH claiming NIH never funded GoF at Wuhan and ORDERED destruction of evidence!
MILLIONS of innocent people have been killed.
Among the MANY crimes, this is by far the EASIEST TARGET.
However, there are NO statutes of limitations for TREASON and CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.
@TheJusticeDept @DAGToddBlanche
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
Just so it has been said: the timber industry has an incentive to spray this glyphosate: they’re turning OUR forests into their farms. And they don’t give 2 💩s about us, the loggers they employ—or the world.
Bayer/Monsanto has 2 incentives: move product AND disguise glyphosate health harms by elevating the baseline. That’s murder we’ll never prove.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
This is indefensible: Spraying glyphosate over wild lands is ecocide, and toxic to humans, of course. But there is one upside: It allows us to see the full corruption of our system, which pretends to be preoccupied with our health, even as it poisons the world behind our backs.
The U.S. Forest Service is spraying glyphosate (Roundup) across tens of thousands of acres of national forests this spring to support commercial timber production.
Following wildfires, forests naturally regenerate with diverse shrubs, wildflowers, and wildlife. However, a recent investigation reveals that the Forest Service and private logging companies are routinely applying the herbicide to eliminate competing native vegetation, favoring commercially valuable species such as Douglas fir and sugar pine.
This practice has created large areas with significantly reduced biodiversity, often described as "dead zones", where insect, bird, and plant populations have sharply declined. Glyphosate, classified by the World Health Organization as a probable human carcinogen, has seen its use in California national forests quintuple over the past two decades, reaching a record 266,000 pounds in 2023.
Local communities, environmental groups, and residents are raising concerns about potential impacts on water quality, endangered species (including salmon and rare foxes), and public health. Critics argue that prioritizing industrial timber production over ecological diversity conflicts with the broader mission of national forests as public lands.
The issue has intensified debates over forest management, balancing economic interests with long-term environmental and community health.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
It should be obvious to anyone that reads the list below that many of these companies will not survive as companies in a world of AI and Agents.
These are services.
Some more useful than others. But none of them control any capability or rails that couldn’t be negotiated/built (from open source or otherwise) by an agent for much cheaper. The alternatives will come with no capex, no OpEx, no rent seeking etc etc.
The cost advantages of these things being rebuilt as primitives and repriced so it’s principally available to other agents and AI is pretty obvious.
- Claude for coding.
- Supabase for backend.
- Vercel for deploying.
- Namecheap for domain.
- Stripe for payments.
- GitHub for version control.
- Resend for emails.
- Clerk for auth.
- Cloudflare for DNS.
- PostHog for analytics.
- Sentry for error tracking.
- Upstash for Redis.
- Pinecone for vector DB.
You can literally ship a startup from your bedroom now.
It’s not that deep bro.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
A lot of what happened is this.
U.S. Universities are designed to be tax supported elite research units. They are tasked with producing a national interest “public good” that markets can’t price, as part of the (slightly cryptic) “Endless Frontier” agreement. They aren’t colleges. Teaching undergraduates is not the core of a research university.
When social and fiscal Conservatives didn’t get this arrangement and welched, they went after universities, which then lurched towards democrats for safety. That then got into a positive feedback loop.
That’s not the full story. But a lot of this was self-inflicted by republicans who pretended that “market failure” didn’t exist, and that there was no agreement. This was particularly nasty in the 1975 NSF funding wars in DC.
Sorry if that is a bitter pill for republicans but it is an important part of the history. It’s not like STEM researchers woke up one morning and decided “Let’s all dye our hair funny colors and all embrace silly utopian things that aren’t true and don’t work.”
Welching on research funding for the “Endless Frontier” was a huge part of how this got so extreme.
Massive own goal. Continuing into today.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time.
But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay.
That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions.
Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design.
After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples:
On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."
On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."
On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over."
On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us."
On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed."
On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two."
This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty?
And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it.
Now compare Deutsch:
"Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature."
"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."
"Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved."
"We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be."
Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence.
The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children?
Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct.
Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going.
Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
The marginal cost of compute is going to zero.
The marginal cost of energy is going to zero.
Plan accordingly.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
Yes. A few miscellaneous thoughts.
(1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.
(2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. Better writers are better prompters.
(3) Third, AI doesn’t really take your job, it allows you to do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job *well*, as a specialist is often needed for polish.
(4) Fourth, AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job. GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image gen, AI code gen, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model.
(5) Fifth, killer AI is already here — and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.
(6) Sixth, decentralized AI is already here and it’s essentially polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). That means balance of power between human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt.
(7) Seventh, AI is probabilistic while crypto is deterministic. So crypto can constrain AI. For example, AI can break captchas, but it can’t fake onchain balances. And it can solve some equations, but not cryptographic equations. Thus, crypto is roughly what AI can’t do.
(8) Eighth, I think AI on the whole right now is having a decentralizing effect, because there is so much more a small team can do with the right tooling, and because so many high quality open source models are coming.
All this could change if self-prompting, self-verifying, and self-replicating AI in the physical world really gets going. But there are open research questions between here and there.
The view that imagines AI wiping out jobs or causing some overnight shock to the system doesn’t contemplate that companies are a made up of a series of bottlenecks. When AI accelerates work in one area, you run into a bottleneck somewhere else.
As any individual workflow gets more efficient, the ultimate productivity gain is still constrained by some other part of the system. And usually it’s the case that that part of the system will not have inherently seen the same impact of AI efficiency, which means humans are still doing the work.
Take almost any process in an enterprise and you can see how this plays out. If AI Agents generate leads for the sales team, the bottleneck will be humans to have conversations with those customers. And if the leads are good, that will mean more sales hiring. If AI Agents generate more code, you will eventually be bottlenecked by the engineers that can review and incorporate that code into production.
You can quickly see how this scales to any process in an organization. Economists and others tend to totally miss how work actually happens in a company; it’s not a series of wholly independent tasks, but instead highly interdependent tasks that all link to each other across a system.
This is of course the natural rate limiter of AI efficiency gains, but also the reason why humans will still be doing so many jobs in the future.
Jay Gidwitz retweeted
For Your Eyes Especially
