I've been thinking about AI doom scenarios for many years. I've always been a skeptic — paperclip nonsense and all that.

But thanks to the Coldcard hack, and a recent reading of Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, I kind of see it now. (Great read by the way; crisp, well-argued, fascinating, crafted with care).

Civilization is precious, but fragile. It can die when facing unknown unknowns or exponential trends that catch us unawares, until it is too late. Arms races tend to be bad for civilizations too.

One known unknown when it comes to AI is this: whether it will ultimately create any attacker/defender asymmetries, or individual/institutional asymmetries. One factor here is just how far the open weight models can go, and whether they'll be permitted by authorities.

Alas, I can't write out the unknown unknowns. But I'm now more sure than ever that they're out there.

I'm an optimist at heart — unlike Wright. But I now see connections between my more conservative impulses (watch for Chestertonian fences; beware rapid change) and what is actually happening with AI and cybersecurity. This is only the beginning.

What a time to be alive and to be monitoring the situation!

guy who gets harsh soap in one eye and immediately puts it in the other — “to even things out”

(a parable about egalitarian leveling down)

The quickest way to a lefty's heart is to poo-poo libertarianism. For extra points, call it 'propertarianism'.

The digital computer is a lever.
Software is a lever of levers.
Agentic AI is a lever of lever of levers.

Act accordingly.

What does this mean for me, personally? For writing philosophy or running a classroom, not much. For dealing with the mountains of data I've hoarded over the decades, everything. Scripts, which I didn't have to write, handle it all for me, and now I have easy access to years of quotations, music, photos, papers, books, notes, correspondence — all locally hosted, all exactly fit for my own purposes.

It is good to have a lever of lever of levers on staff.

guy who writes everything in markdown now, but refuses to let robots write for him

Portfolio apps are great for monitoring the situation. But they track your IP, location, assets, even your identity. In the recent past, data from millions of users has leaked, resulting in phishing, identity theft, or physical wrench attacks. Darkfolio fixes this.

Darkfolio can't leak information it doesn't have. When you refresh, the server sends 7,000+ asset prices (stocks and crypto) every time. Your phone extracts what it needs locally, so a server never learns what you're monitoring. And you can run it all through Tor.

No accounts, no emails, no cloud sync. Even better, Darkfolio's developer, @Craig Warmke, is pledging the first $10k in net revenue back to the cause of your digital privacy. It's live on the iOS App Store today.

Craig is a friend, but no one paid me to write these tweets. I am, instead, an enthusiastic early tester and now daily user myself. Darkfolio has what I always wanted from a portfolio app. It may be what you've been looking for too. Give it a try!

https://getdarkfolio.app

horror story in six words: "Can you jump on a call?”

Austrian economics stans would do well to drop the victimhood over being ignored, and instead claim victory, because the best of that tradition — above all, its microeconomic insight — was so well-integrated into mainstream economics.

You don't get Alfred Marshall and supply and demand charts, or neoclassical price theory, without Carl Menger (both a marginalist and an Austrian) and the subjective theory of value. Price lies at the intersection of supply and demand — i.e., subjective valuations.

Price theory as we know it now doesn't ignore what the Austrians learned. Instead, it gives it all more rigorous foundations and expression using calculus.

And fergodssake, Hayek won a Nobel prize (shared), and remains one of the most widely quoted and cited economists, by economists, to this day.

Mises, I'll concede was "quietly buried".

Imagine an Aristotle scholar complaining that logic classes don't focus on categorical syllogisms anymore. Of course they don't; we can do all that and more, now, using Fregean and post-Fregean notation and mathematics. We see the superset now, and teach it first.