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Vibe coding is doing its part to keep linguistic diversity alive: My wife went to sign up for a doctors appointment, and the form offered choices for "preferred language" that incl…

I think you have slightly misunderstood the halting problem. There is no computer program H that, for every program P, determines whether P halts. This does not imply that for some…

Again, my concern is about things that humans will order robots to do, for fear other humans will do unto them first, and does not depend on a loss of control. I think loss of cont…

You don't need superintelligence to get this problem, but you do need human level intelligence across all domains. I don't know how far we are from this, and neither does anyone el…

Governments, initially made of humans, will deliberately create military and industrial robots and assign them to create and scale production chains that go from natural resources …

Let's ignore all the unnecessary cruelty throughout all history and the present and assume that you are right. It doesn't matter, because people will be forced into these choices b…

Nukes are not magic wands, they are mostly only worth it for targeting cities and other very dense concentrations of value and production. An enemy state going down this path will …

I already live off my wealth, and I expect AI development to destroy my life. Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state…

The safety of safe rust is created by extremely strong and subtle invariants that unsafe rust must maintain perfectly (or all bets are off). The idea that a program with tens of th…

Nuclear weapons are mostly a threat to cities, and a zerg rush build would just not build any. I think that if all we get is skill cloning for formally verifiable tasks, that is no…

There is no doubt that compressing a whole industrial supply network into a little probe is incredibly hard. But I can't see microgravity specifically as a huge challenge. If you c…

If AGI means that AI+robotics can robustly substitute for human labor, and robots are cheaper and faster to build than humans, then (a) anyone ruthless enough can zerg rush and def…

We are really getting to the point where the tech industry must be stopped if humanity is to continue at all, let alone thrive.

> In The Argument’s newest poll, fielded nationally among 3,008 registered voters between May 29 and June 3, 2026, over a quarter, 27%, of voters said it’s likely humanity would go…

Providing access to the public is presumably just a temporary stopgap for these companies until they have robot armies to replace their customers and employees.

I think the tiny size of a nuclear weapon and very short interval of nuclear reaction before "disassembly" mean that even though the energy release is small compared to an asteroid…

Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns…

Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and …

But you sacrificed some of your 33 bits of anonymity to have this setting work as intended. And that isn't strictly necessary: the web could have been engineered so that the select…

Making me talk to a fucking robot leaves me with a deep and abiding hatred for your company. I will prefer almost any alternative to doing business with you and hope fervently to r…

FoundationDB used this (detection of read-write conflicts in optimistic transactions) as its default isolation level since we started building it around 2009. Doing it at the kv st…

When on the road to hell, it's OK to be left behind.

“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings? “Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings, “Ere the drowsy street hath stirred— “Ev…

I too fear what governments will actually do in this area. But I think you may be underestimating the threat to personal agency. Imagine you are trapped in a groundhog day like tim…

It depends on whether people wake up to the threat before or after there is a robot army that can crush them, doesn't it? If humans are economically and militarily useless, it won'…