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kurtkilgor.bsky.social

@kurtkilgor.bsky.social
34 followers 8 following 440 posts
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
“Nice humanity you’ve got there, shame if anything happens to it…”
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
A month? How old fashioned of you. “The traditional ARR number was bad and implied deceleration in growth. So the people massively long Anthropic came up with a new ARR number that was July 31st * 365 days.”
irrationalanalysis.substack.com
[Market Memo] Calm Before the IPO Storm
Pirates don’t agree to truces.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I linked this before but I think it’s key to understand where this alignment thing came from. We still don’t know how to engineer an AI. But we discovered how, using vast resources, to make something AI-like basically at random. The pressure to use it rather than wait to do it right is irresistible.
incompleteideas.net
The Bitter Lesson
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I guess I still perceived a certain “irony gap” if you will.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Ironic that you see RAND as the “sober” people and invoke how we handled nuclear weapons as the model when it was them who advocated “winnable” nuclear war and created the arms race based on a fictitious idea of Soviet superiority. Similar to the “we need to keep up w China” aspect of the AI bubble.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Cosmism, sci-fi, communism, it’s all one set of overlapping concepts going back to Hegelianism and millenarian Christianity. They think the AI data centers are like a Great Leap Forward to the AGI which is their version of the dictatorship of the proletariat but built only for them and their babies.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Donald Trump is addressing the threat of Iranian terror in the right way.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Could keeping college men accused of rape from having to forgo the cushy jobs they’ve been preselected for by their wealthy relatives be the way that AI finally shows its economic benefit? How the new industry of AI apology essays offers a glimpse of an exciting future.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs amirite?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
It’s just like communism. If this is the inevitable course of history why are you so upset that I don’t believe it? Do you think little old me is up to the challenge of stopping that train?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And then of course the equality of humans, based on the equality of souls, has little importance. An alliance of the wealthy and their machines vs. the bulk of humanity becomes plausible.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
There’s a connection to be explored with oligarchy + AI as a kind of reversion to pre-Christian paganism. The idea that humans alone can be intelligent is linked to the idea of the human soul created in God’s image. If any object can be sentient, any object can be intelligent, an oracle, or divine.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
🎵 I can buy myself flowers… 🎵
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I think this painting should be brought out more often in this context:
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Sort of reminiscent of the South Korean PM staging a coup based on a YouTube conspiracy. At some point people will start filtering politicians on not being computer savvy.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I guess approvingly quoting Beria is just par for the course these days…
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
His article implies that sycophancy is an unintended side effect of reinforcement learning, which would surprise me as it seems like precisely what makes LLMs such cognitive junk food. But he’s right to home in on it as a key trait whether as a sign of deviousness or its more direct effect on users.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Some might call that “AI policy realism” 😄
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I fully support dickishness in his regard, but it’s not an uncommon pedigree for cult leaders and dictators. What matters is that a lot of people seem to treat his sophomoric logorrhea seriously.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This Weinberger sounds like the typical beltway journalist type…
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
It’s going to be easier to know his own address when he’s in the penal system.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
“I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn’t get there and she was married.” But with countries.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I think some are falling prey to a kind of Green determinism where they assume a post fossil fuel world will be more equitable. But surely we will also see new forms of dominance and hegemony. An obvious one is China’s monopoly of many products key to Green infrastructure. How big a problem is this?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
In other words, if we built a machine super-intelligence and it’s divine, then they have a fraction of that divinity and all is right with the world. But what if we construct a machine super-intelligence and it’s mediocre, and can’t magically transcend our limits. Then what does that say about them?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
IMO where this really ties into AI on a practical level: these people’s self-conception is built on a fixation with their own intelligence as the agent driving their fates. And insofar that they deify their own intelligence they’re led to deify machine intelligence as a disembodied ur-intelligence.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The Secretary of Health claims he hasn’t washed his hands for ten years. Meanwhile the Mayor of New York City brags about installing bidets in his residence. I have never felt so politically homeless.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
It really puts the past 2000 years in perspective that most of the moral reasoning was based on more or less equally stupid logic but with a thin veneer of “God said this” or “Marx said this” on top.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Analysis | How a second-rate rapper’s comeback tour and a controversy about genocide have put music venue consolidation back into focus.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This is an oft cited essay about why AI researchers gave up on making understandable models and went all in on self-training neural nets. But even knowing this approach has yielded results in many cases doesn’t justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I think Gary Marcus has similar ideas.
incompleteideas.net
The Bitter Lesson
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A second thought on alignment is that usually in software we solve this by making it correct from first principles because we want it to be reliable. There’s a whole history on why ML moved away from this but it’s clear they overshot and greed has as usual overriden any sound engineering principles.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
They talk a lot about the paperclip maximizer thought experiment but none of them ever mentions that this is what fossil fuel companies already are. A hypothetical AGI might be faster than human employees but at its core, the “alignment” problem is already there whenever humans have limitless power.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Bestiality, Ephebophilia, Intoxication
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I still see this as the main guideline to what the Israeli right is thinking with regard to 1SS. They’re not worried about having to give up the Jewish majority in implementing. But, if they lose, they could find that refusal to compromise leads to even worse than compromising. Happens all the time.
hashiloach.org.il
Israel's Decisive Plan - השילוח
The "two-state" model has led Israel to a dead end. It has brought a sense of despair of ending the conflict, and a turn to "managing" it as a cruel and eternal decree of fate. The alternative to this...
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Yes I read it, hence my reply. I think the contrast bw Hezbollah and Hamas is revealing: Israel relentlessly plays up external threats like Hezbollah and Iran, using them to drive donor relations & internal politics. But they try to make Palestinians disappear bc their need is for them to not exist.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I found this article from ‘24 interesting. Some elites in Gaza got wind of the plan in advance & fled. But many disregarded plans being discussed as too crazy to be real. As did, apparently, the Israelis. But I think Israelis also have a psychological need to see Palestinians as incapable of agency.
haaretz.com
Hamas actually believed it would conquer Israel, and divided it into cantons
Tens of thousands of Gazans have fled to Egypt since the war broke out, many of them members of the elite who are able to pay the enormous costs. I met old friends in Cairo who were still astonished a...
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I believe the interview where he first expressed this idea was the year after he first went to Moscow in 1987. So I wonder if maybe he got a lecture there about how capitalism works.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I want a Downfall parody where Hitler is complaining that none of the networks covered his speech and then the “Steiner…” bit is Bartiromo revealing that Fox execs ordered not the cover him either.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
They can get a discount on annual imperial tribute payments if they agree to build a data center or two.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Needless to say, with no way to power the hypothetical data center, the promises of increase it would bring to the city budget are dubious. And a Dutch spinoff from a Russian company sounds like a textbook dark money laundering/international sanctions evasion operation.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
One hopes after the AI bubble bursts and token subsidies end, this stuff will become unprofitable to make. Google has a vested interest in subsidizing them through YouTube while they generate fraudulent “demand” for their bad AI infrastructure investments. Wonder what percent of AI use is pure spam.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
November 26 will also be the Race Among the Ruins
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Feels like these types of stories used to be common and now they seem almost like fairy tales. Seems like part of why the mid 20th century was such a fertile time culturally.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Exactly. The intellectual corruption of “cyclist activists” in incredible. Just because Europeans don’t wear helmets doesn’t mean it’s not a smart life decision. Europeans also smoke a lot, doesn’t mean smoking is good for you.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Numerous men who have crossed paths with Ivanka Trump, including her father and her husband, became Republicans after previously being Democrats. Is Ivanka the siren of the GOP?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
His post is pure projection of the accounting fraud OpenAI is engaged in.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Don’t go on shows of people you end up having the denounce, simple, right?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
If only we still had Rob Ford for this and only this reason.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I see Piker as basically a human version of Grok in terms of the amount of coherent beliefs or epistemic structure behind any of his statements.
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Trump is less popular than ever before and Dems are piling on. But could criticizing a catastrophically unpopular wartime president backfire and produce a rally around the flag effect?
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kurtkilgor.bsky.social @kurtkilgor.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Would have enjoyed hearing the intended lecture as Prof. Shore did not really address this topic directly, perhaps you could publish it on your substack?
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