Very honored to have been highly commended for my Master’s thesis: “Coding Utopia: Effective Accelerationism & Evolving Techno-Optimism in Silicon Valley” :)

for ~10 years i’ve informally polled female friends at dinners on whether they’d use an “uber for personal security” (some mix of ai & robots + maybe a few humans)
demand: roughly zero

this week i logged a second “i dunno, seems a bit weird, but maybe” response in a single year

the overton window is starting to exhibit statistically significant shifts

my forecast remains widespread adoption once it costs about the same as a taxi

@yasmeena_khan @SamuelAlbanie If we got the government to be lead investor, and expanded the TAM to men AND women, or what the Greeks would call the polis, maybe gave them blue uniforms and product features like sirens, and called them... umm... we need a good name...

@Lunens__ @SamuelAlbanie we could romanify polis to police, maybe... no, surely too on the nose... how about copper
/uj you just made me think about the etymology of police for the first time in my life which is going to consume me for a bit now

Today was the day I realized Dario is kind of a hottie

@laurenlself i think everyone just looks better in old tv footage (not so high-def)

got the cutest claude plushie ever… cowboy claude 🤠 thanks @AnthropicAI

Hi everybody! I'm expanding my work at the Washington Post to cover young people across America (think anyone under 26). Send me story ideas! Who should I follow? I love research papers, so if you study young people, holler at me!

@yasmeena_khan Gotta get your own health insurance and you can rent a car cheaper! You’re officially an adult.

@caseyparks can i minus three years for covid

What does @DanielaAmodei’s 5-year-old think she does all day? Hint: not running one of the biggest AI companies in the world, @AnthropicAI. Would you guess taking care of an alligator named Claude at @calacademy?

@ariannahuff @DanielaAmodei @AnthropicAI @calacademy anthropic started sponsoring claude's habitat and he immediately died so i guess they didn't take all that good care of him

i think this is the wrong way of reading this - when people say "i'm afraid of losing my job to ai," that's filed under "economic issue," but obviously very tied to ai!

I have so many new followers but no likes. Is this what being shadow banned feels like?

@ChaseSmall5 it says "real girl, real dms" what do u mean chase that couldn't possibly be a bot

To be honest, I'm surprised when people are surprised by this reaction.

I live at AI ground zero in San Francisco. I am in the top 1% in terms of agent use. *And* I have more optimism for its positive impact long term then most people I meet.

But let's be honest. For the past three years the main narrative Silicon Valley has promoted is:

“AI is powerful beyond your comprehension, rapidly making us rich as it is taking your job, and experts say there is a chance it might kill humanity.”

If you wanted to explain the real value of AI to normal people, it is hard to imagine of a more confusing and counterproductive way to do it.

@ojoshe great post. it's also such poor messaging that the only positive vision of the ai future that anyone seems to be willing to discuss is "you will never have a job again and get to live off the government forever... what do you mean you don't want me to keep building ai?"

me when i’m trying to figure out who’s on first

@sonofalli and i don't know

People who write okay instead of ok. What are you trying to prove?

@catdaly "Okay" seems way more polite! "Ok" to me has connotations of terseness. I think "OK" is a happy middle ground

We don't have any humanists left

But can someone write an essay or Zizek rant that examines how the freaks at Anthropic are enacting a bible-size bratty sub kink in their insistence that they can't stop building something they think is going to kill us and need daddy to regulate

@honorablepicnic brand new sentence 😭😭😭

It strikes me that there are three very different ways people use AI which all look the same to @pangram .

1) MEAT PROXY, letting AI do both the thinking and writing for you.

2) Coming to AI with finished thoughts and ideas, using AI to phrase it more elegantly, adding filler ints etc

3) Iterating back and forth with AI, bouncing ideas, forming a text together.

All three can show up as 100% AI-generated in Pangram, but clearly very different processes and I think can become conflated.

I definitely sometimes do nr 2 and 3 sometimes. Never 1, (But on Twitter I don't use AI-written text)

@RobertHoglund @pangram 2 and 3 don't come out as 100% AI-generated, unless you are literally copy and pasting what the AI said with no additions or changes of your own. Pangram's scores are pretty sensitive and decent at detecting if there's any human-written content.

Some revealing statistics on student preparation in today's SF Standard:

- "1,109 incoming freshmen at Berkeley had not met the writing standard"
- This is despite changes to AP cut offs, which increased passage rates by 20%!
- A writing prof at Berkeley says, "students were no better equipped for college-level writing than those at the state university and community college where she previously taught."
- "She recalled one student who couldn’t write in the past tense."

This is relevant for admissions testing: We admit students based on essays, yet, 1/5 arrive unable to satisfy our "entry level" writing requirement! It's past time to bring back a proctored admissions test.

sfstandard.com/2026/10/21/ai-…

@hoofnagle i think this is more a reflection of the failing standards at the high school level - mostly because teachers cannot detect ai - and a proctored admissions test doesn't really fix that. the answer is probably all high school exams should be in-person to prevent ai use

What a weird discussion.

16% of Americans are retired, and they're the wealthiest and happiest group in the USA.

It's clearly not some bizarre dystopia, it's normal and works well.

@yasmeena_khan Twilight = 20 years?

@HaydnBelfield certainly more twilight than your 20s, i'd say.......

@robertskmiles if you didn't start caring about ai before the 1956 dartmouth workshop then you don't have the right to speak on it now /s

@yasmeena_khan @HaydnBelfield Yeah and most retired people aren't trying to attract a life partner

@honorablepicnic @HaydnBelfield that too!

Some people I've talked to wonder why Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be filmed in the days leading up to her incarceration. It's very clear to me what her goals were for the documentary: it's a calculated PR bet for Elizabeth to launder her reputation.

I understand why Nathan Fielder doesn't relitigate her case in the documentary. That story has been told. The case is literally closed. Elizabeth is serving jail time for defrauding investors. Her guilt is incontrovertible and not up for discussion.

However, the documentary introduces (and reintroduces) Elizabeth's story to audiences who are either unfamiliar with her lore or who don't have the details of the case top-of-mind.

Elizabeth knows that it's highly unlikely her conviction will be overturned. But she can change her perception in the court of public opinion. In the doc, Elizabeth achieves her goal of recasting her public image from the cold, calculating CEO to a tradwife-adjacent new mom who seems too socially unaware/oblivious/confused to have committed the crimes for which she is serving time. With her wide-eyed stare, rosy cheeks, and beatific smile, she even looks cherubic. AND she's running her old playbook of deploying her romantic partner in the role of unlikeable male enforcer (previously her ex-boyfriend/Theranos COO Sunny, now her husband Billy) as a reputational shield, garnering sympathy for herself.

Because Elizabeth is difficult to read, she keeps her positioning options open. She could position herself as a poster-child for the new right's idea of womanhood: soft, feminine, devoted to her babies, and aligned with Trump, MAHA, and Charlie Kirk. Or she could fall back on her old 2010's-coded mission-driven girlboss CEO persona who just wants to save the world. Having Billy operate her Twitter account sets him up to be a potential fall guy and gives her plausible deniability about the views expressed online in her name.

Don't let her soft beige sweaters and feigned perpetual confusion fool you. Elizabeth has always been extremely strategic around her public image, and this documentary is no exception.

@yasmeena_khan I’m completely with you. But I’ve been surprised that when discussing the film with some friends, some actually come out viewing Elizabeth more positively

@whizwang Yeah, I mean, I guess you view her as more of a person than a "character" which necessarily invokes a little sympathy? But I don't think that's a bad thing! I think the fact we can feel sympathy for her is what keeps us human. It's actually a rather good thing