The Cortex Came First
Six ways the scaling bet could be wrong — and why, if it is, the correction is to the noun rather than to the work.
Hold Every Hour
You are not going to die one day. You have been dying the whole time, and most of it is already behind you.
Nobody Is Positioned to Know
AGI recognition is observer-relative. AGI is not. An unobservable arrival is still an arrival — and the one regulator that had to write a threshold into law ended up counting electricity.
Nobody Wants to Go Back Down
Let me show you in a picture how far our nature is enlightened, or unenlightened — and then let me ask what we owe the people still sitting in the dark.
Nature Did Not Get Careless About the Last Act
You two seem surprised that I carry my years lightly. So let me take the four charges people bring against old age, and show you that not one of them holds.
Poetry Is Truer Than History
I want to take the thing apart and show you how it works — starting with why we enjoy looking hard at what we could not bear to see.
Nothing Is Ours Except Time
You have all the letters now, Lucilius, and you want to know what they come to. Here is the whole of it, before we take it apart.
You Are Not in a Storm. You Are Seasick.
You asked me to name your disease. I can. And I should tell you at the start that the cure is not stillness.
Ask Nothing of a Friend That Would Make Him Worse
My friend Scipio died last week. Everyone wants to know how I am bearing it. I would rather tell you what he taught me about friendship.
The Reader in Your Head
What a good education really gives you isn't knowledge. It's an audience.
Everything You Cut Was the Point
Why the flywheel is the last competitive advantage left and why the law was built to stop it
Exempt at the Top, Excluded at the Bottom
Social Security runs dry in late 2032. The ledger has room at both ends.
The Wrong Denominator
Billionaire philanthropy looks generous until you compare it to the right number.
The Hours Go First
An interactive model of what AI actually deletes... and when.
Nobody Broke the Law
The Supreme Court just told private investors they cannot sue under a foundational securities statute. The disturbing part isn't that the system is lawless.
You Cannot Grind Your Way to Taste
The errors that matter most are too rare to learn from directly, which is why judgment is never earned by volume. It's borrowed from people who already paid.
Imagination Is Not the Bottleneck
Why intelligence is measured by what you kill, not what you create and the fifty-year-old math that already proved it.
How Would We Actually Measure It? A Scorecard, Not a Soul Detector
Part 3 of 3: If consciousness is graded candidacy rather than a binary verdict, you need an instrument. Here's what I built... and what it says about a frontier LLM.
The Three Checks Failed at Once. That Was Not an Accident.
Fiduciary duty was supposed to be one of three forces that keep powerful people honest.
The Ladder: Five Levels of "What If"
Part 2 of 3: A thermostat reacts. A language model predicts. A chess engine plans. A human can imagine themselves different. These are not the same thing and the difference is a ladder.
Is ChatGPT Conscious? The Question Is Broken Before You Answer It
Part 1 of 3: Why the consciousness debate keeps going in circles and the move I think gets it unstuck.
Dig Deeper — Interactive
Read moreSet the Fed funds rate, breakeven inflation, hyperscaler capex and issuance plus more
Strikeline Try it From: The Treasury Market May Not Be Breaking... It May Be Searching for a New PriceSet the adoption curve and the decay rate, then watch how long the market takes
Strikeline Try it From: When AI Eats AlphaBuild the stablecoin boom. Then pull the cash out and watch how it holds the Treasury market together.
MarketAlly Try it From: The Next Run on the Bank Won't Look Like a Bank RunA productivity shock arrives. You decide its incidence and the economy's leverage.
MarketAlly Try it From: The Boom Is the Fuse