March 2026 Links
Some Interesting Things I Read (and Watched)This Month
My Thoughts on the Future of "AI" — Here Nicholas Carlini, a researcher at Antrhopic, argues that we should exercise humility when speculating on the future of AI. That is, recursive take off and a hard limit are equally likely, but improbable tails — somewhere in the middle is most likely. As a person whose opinion tends towards the more hard limit side (and it seems NC or at least people in his circle tend to as well), I appreciated the special attention he gives towards arguing against this position.
"So over the next few years, I'd encourage you to keep an open mind and be willing to see the world as it is, and not as you want it to be. We're going to learn a lot, things are going to change a lot, and so we need to be willing to accept what comes to pass, and not reject something just because it's not what we expected.”Every minute you aren't running 69 agents, you are falling behind — This is a post from George Hotz that present's a view on the utility of AI, the toxicity of doomer social media, and the major effect of LLMs on our economy — a consolidation of rent seekers! He also goes on to say, that labor that actually creates value for people is the least likely to be disrupted. This is a view I endorse. Basically, if you perform a function that creates friction for others you are going to get steamrolled by agents. If you create physical goods or work on services that people actually want your role is far more robust in face of this disruption. Geohot may put more moral weighting than I would on specific jobs that actually fall into this latter category (e.g., I think working on novel medical R&D and being an online casino operator both fall into this robust category, where one clearly is more "righteous"), but I largely agree with this viewpoint.
LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy — Pseudonymous social media users were able to be “unmaksed” at rates and accuracy higher than previous techniques by using an LLM to correlate posts and online presence across platforms. As someone who has worked in the privacy space this is not a particularly surprising result to me, but is still rather interesting.
My Longest Ever Flight: Cathay Pacific from Boston to Hong Kong! — This is a YouTube video from Miles In Transit concerning his recent experience flying to Taiwan. I am highlighting this video for two reasons. As someone, who just flew to Taiwan and back, I relate to this specific trip. More importantly, I wanted to highlight a great YouTuber in a niche space: transit. Miles’ videos concerning long Greyhound trips, seldom used Amtrak stations, and generally pushing public transit to its extreme are excellent and I encourage everyone to check out his channel.