Despite my best intentions, I haven’t found much time (or tbh motivation) to write more original texts of my own. However, I still want to share more about what I’m up to, so I’ll try something new and post a monthly digest of what I’ve been reading recently. Here it is:
AI & Futurism
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Manna (2003) by Marshall Brain: This is an old novel presenting two possible ways society might organise itself after AGI takes over all the jobs. Without spoiling anything: in the dystopic one, we don’t figure out how to distribute the created wealth, and in the utopic version we do. The general idea of the “Australia Project” as a positive vision for an abundant future really resonated with me. Given its age, I thought that it holds up remarkably well against what’s happening right now. It’s of course debatable whether such a utopic future might even be technically possible. The point is that even if it were, we wouldn’t even be able to navigate towards it because we totally haven’t figured out the meta-governance problems. I so want to live in a society where we actually agree on the rules and optimise for everyone having a good time. After finishing the story, I had a manic two hours researching open-source meta-governance projects (e.g. Metagov, Loomio, couple of others), but nothing really stuck yet. Maybe I just don’t get it yet and should revisit in a bit.
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AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence by Geohot: Short (and polemic) take on what AI alignment really means (“aligned to whom?”) and how Anthropic-style AI Safetyism conveniently causes a huge concentration of power almost as a side-effect. I don’t currently have a coherent position of my own, but I appreciate that Geohot exists as a cultural counterweight to the monoculture of big tech.
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The Proceduralization of Modern Life & generally Reality Drift Archive by A. Jacobs: As far as I understand right now, the core idea is that technology tends to drift from reality, the map decouples from the territory and we’re left with systems that serve themselves more instead of their original purpose. Not sure what to make of it, but the writing style feels reminiscent of techno-anarchist writing on the early internet, so I’m excited to read more! I also like the term “Reality Drift”, think that describes something real.
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Why I Left Google DeepMind by Alex Turner aka TurnTrout on LessWrong: Story of how the author tried to unilaterally prevent Google DeepMind from signing an “all lawful use” AI contract with the Pentagon in late April 2026, following the whole Anthropic supply chain risk designation episode. Crazy reminder of how much lobbying and politics goes on behind the scenes of petitions and public statements. Also, a crazy reminder of how some institutions are so large that it’s almost impossible for a single individual to actually decide on anything.
Meditation & Buddhism
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My Second Jhourney Retreat Reflection by Mai Akiyoshi: I’ve recently learned about the jhanas: a series of somewhat deterministic states of meditative absorption, reported to range from epically pleasurable to deeply peaceful. As someone constantly looking for hacks and hidden truths in our world, I’m naturally intrigued.
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“How to Practise Jhanas” by Jhourney: High-level description of the techniques they use at Jhourney retreats.
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Collection of Jhourneys podcast episode with Zach Lauzon: Another retreat reflection, this one as an interview with the founder of Jhourney. Overall I’m a bit spooked by how expensive their retreats are, but it’s cool to hear from so many (non-esoteric, engineering-adjacent) attendees how the jhanas helped them process difficult emotions.
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Rob Burbea’s Dharma talks published by the Hermes Amara Foundation: I discovered another treasure trove of a famous Buddhist teacher I really like (other than Joseph Goldstein): his foundation’s website publishes over 500 recordings of his Dharma talks. He’s supposed to have some really good talks on Jhanas, but it seems rude to only come for that, so I simply started from the beginning.
For fun
- A Practical Guide to Evil: Really cool and creative fiction web-serial about a world in which narrative actually bestows power upon characters. I’ve been grinding through this as bedtime reading for months now (it’s huge).