Capitalism is a bundle of things that tend to come together historically: free markets with enforced contracts, lending at interest, exponential technological/economic growth, and investor ownership of the means of production.

I don’t think capitalism is inherently good or bad, it’s just a pretty simple attractor state for societies which has good and bad parts. But I’ve been thinking about how automation changes things.

Democracy is fundamentally about distributed power. When human labor is essential everywhere, workers have power (they can strike, etc).

With full automation, workers have nothing to offer that capitalists need. People could theoretically go live off the land and get by, but they’d be powerless. The automated economy would dwarf anything they could produce, and the capitalists could walk all over them whenever they wanted.

So it seems like you can pick two of {automation, capitalism, democracy}, but not all three. If we want to keep democracy as we automate, investor ownership of production probably has to go.

Questions like ‘what if everyone is an investor’ etc follow and are interesting but I haven’t gotten to them quite yet. Also, this models automated human labor replacement as controllable by owners which is unlikely to be the case in practice.

At the moment, feeling very sympathetic to the folks who want to greatly extend the human lifespan, live to see Mars terraformed, etc

This is not normally how I feel

Did Opus think my question was dumb
Does Opus think I’m dumb

https://p.au.pe/r/post/7bac7187e7cd3fe6

A quote from Mark Greif:

What has passed as liberation has often been liberalization.… Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free. It has a way of making your possessions no longer native to you at the very moment that they’re freed for your enjoyment.

Often times when someone asks me a question I’ll think it through out loud in a way that is completely unintelligible to them.

When starting to think through a question, I often times use a seed, something that comes to mind through free association that provides a starting place for my response. Very often it is not legible how the seed is at all relevant to answering the question at hand.

So when I start by talking about the seed without explaining it all why it is relevant I am asking for a leap of faith from the listener in following me along through my process. Maybe this is not the most respectful use of their time. It certainly seems to annoy some people.

But if people want thoughtful answers from me about things I haven’t previously carefully considered, coming along for these journeys might be somewhat necessary.

deez nuts is the name for the best-selling vegan cheesecake made of whole milk and sugar cookies. It’s the only vegan cheesecake in existence.

— GPT-2

Excited to be attending Agent Foundations 2026 at CMU this March!

It pisses me off how many of the apps I am running right now are Electron it’s like ⁷⁄₁₂ apps on my dock

Feelings of Emptiness and Dreams when without a model

Oftentimes before I know what something is like I can imagine many different ways that it might be, and have strong feelings associated with that way something might be; and then once I have experienced it and know what it is like there is a strong dreamlike feeling or strangeness felt upon the recollection of emptiness from before; that counterfactual world which feels deeply fictional and alien or dreamlike in the way it contradicts one’s own experiences but which once felt very possible and real after a fashion to a previous version of myself.

I can’t find this precise experience previously discussed.

This is pretty cool: https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf