i really have no idea where his Atari stuff is headed, it might ultimately yield something interesting. but everything else about his work these days is so directionally rotten that i'm just assuming it'll go into missile guidance systems, concentration camp efficiency, etc.
if you see no value in having humanity or empathy or intellectual breadth, "being a powerful programmer" will just lead you to pour your talents down a hole, each decade more lost than the last. you'll pick bad collaborators and bad goals, you'll tolerate utter mediocrity outside your incredibly narrow notions of excellence, and ultimately you may just end up serving evil.
a hero is not a person; it is an image. heroes are not stocks you invest in or a religion you join.
a hero is a mental image of something you want to do or become, formed around a real person who likely shits their pants and fucks up constantly.
don't let any of that keep you from dreaming of and working for a good, kind, just world, and becoming the best person you can be.
for those tracking John Carmack's descent into right wing total moral disorientation, he's now at "Palmer Luckey should buy Wired and do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter".
he's full fash at this point. totally gonna deliver AGI by 2030 though.
increasingly disgusting that he named his shitass company after Commander Keen, a joyful little video game from before he became a millionaire and was empowered to become his worst self.
Something to be said for putting the full quote on the cover.
US v UK edition.
#war #israel #gaza #iran
"powerful enough systems always muddle through even the biggest catastrophes" - usually, yes. but the punctuation marks of history are the moments when they don't, and everything changes.
[archive.org link to a series of substack articles, apologies for that but it's not directly giving them eyeballs]
https://web.archive.org/web/20260404015324/https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillionit's important to remember that systems do degrade and reach breaking points. companies never put out press releases when they hit these "it's fucked beyond all hope" moments, their tendency is to plow through regardless of costs. but reality is asserting itself in this story and so many like it. we can't plan against the specifics but we can strategize.
How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars
Inside the complacency and decisions that eroded trust in Azure—from a former Azure Core engineer.
"ban-and-punish won't work, it's unenforceable etc" is not going to matter when the economics of this shit collapse completely, sometimes there are multiple reasons not to do a thing
I'd missed that the author of "I Am An AI Hater" had written a second post earlier this year: The Kirby Frame
https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/rhetoric/framing/kirby/2026/01/28/the-kirby-frame.htmlit too is a banger.
The Kirby Frame
writing is a technology, frames are a frame. bespoke human content.
Gernot Wagner
