eric bacus

our product poses an unprecedented danger to all life and the only way we can protect you from it is by making the most money anybody has ever made

A week from tomorrow is the beginning of the END of the Orange Atrocity! 🍊 💩 #voteVoteVOTE

My general advice for using AI for any purpose is to ask yourself: "how do I make what I am doing even more ambitious?" You do this over and over until you either hit a wall and thus learn the shape of the jagged frontier (useful!) or you find out that the AI can do more than you think (common!)

When my first AI book was published in 2024, the best AI could do 4 minutes of human work with a 50% chance of success When I turned in the draft of Co-Existence earlier this year, it was 17 hours. When the book was published two days ago, AI could do 17 weeks+ open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...

CIA releases new promo video: "It has been said that the CIA's World War II predecessor, the OSS, described its ideal recruit as, quote, 'A PhD who could win a bar fight.' This sentiment is the essence of what today's CIA must recapture."

🚨ENDORSEMENT ALERT🚨 We’re proud to endorse Don Coover for #KS02. #UnrigWashington member Don Coover Is fighting to ensure the system works for working people, not greedy corporations and special interests. We look forward to helping him win.

🚨ENDORSEMENT ALERT🚨 We’re excited to endorse #UnrigWashington member @calliebarr.bsky.social for #MI01. Callie Barr is running to change the corrupt pay-to-play culture in government and pass real reform. We look forward to helping her win.

🚨ENDORSEMENT ALERT🚨 We’re proud to endorse #UnrigWashington member @katy4congress.bsky.social for #TX23. Katy refuses to take a dime from corporate PACS, which means Texas voters can trust that she’ll fight for them, not corporate special interests. We look forward to helping her win.

🚨ENDORSEMENT ALERT🚨 We’re excited to endorse @romeroforcolorado.bsky.social for #CO03. As an #UnrigWashington member, Dwayne understands that corruption is at the root of rising costs for Colorado families. We look forward to helping him win.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. -- George Wald

On October 13, 1994, The Mosaic Communications Corporation launched, under the name Mosaic Netscape 0.9, the first one in a series of browsers, called Netscape Navigator.

wild that this is exactly what using a computer is like now

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. - Andy Finkel, computer guy

Can you imagine how much we could accomplish as a country if we redirected all the money being spent on these elections to investing in and improving the lives of every American?

Corporations and billionaires don’t want you to know what political messages they are funding. That’s why they make the info so difficult to find. PaidForBy.info changes the game. It’s 100% free to use. Please check it out and spread the word!

Follow-up

ONE MONTH FROM TODAY:

"Guess who I bumped into?" Jack Smith was spotted (with a Springsteen Tee) at the "Power to the People" concert by Joanne Leahy. Who thinks he would be a great AG?

Lo! Men have become the tool of their tools. -- Henry David Thoreau

This photograph of a football match in Gaza by Palestinian photographer Jehad Alshrafi was removed from the Deauville Sport Images Festival in France last month following a pressure campaign from the Israeli government:

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children.” Jimmy Carter, born on this day in 1924

Jack Smith: "Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation ... rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election, he engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power"

I was reflecting on how many random contingencies went into creating the current accelerating AI moment and had Opus 5.5 put together a video, inspired by old science show Connections, to try and point out how a series of initially unrelated ideas led to the moment we are in now.

As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error. -- Weisert

Dance of Autumn, 1917 Piotr Stachiewicz (Polish, 1858-1938) starrywisdomsect.tumblr.com/post/8288226...

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." — Brian Eno

All of this effort from the AI labs pouring into proofs, but there are so many other interesting problems in other fields For example, this historian used AI to make progress on the cyphers of John Dee & the intellectual antecedents that Darwin drew from. resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-labs-ne...

I propose this as the official replacement for the famous (and now saturated) METR Long Task Horizon chart that used to be in every AI presentation.

every (convex) quadrilateral is a square- if you view it from the right perspective

what would computing be like today if in the early days the companies making computers had successfully convinced legislators that computers are too dangerous for anyone but certified companies to have direct, unmonitored and unrestricted access to

Fascinating! This type of work is a huge part of realizing the _humanistic_ promise of all this technology youtu.be/RUB37QhWNkw?...

Well, *fuck*. California AG Rob Bonta just surrendered to the Trump-aligned billionaires who want to take over and destroy Warners, merging it with the chudded-out husk of Paramount, leaving these two corrupt assholes to control Warners, Paramount *and* Tiktok: www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

A billionaire dictator who'll lose everything if the opposition replaces him on Jan. 20, 2029 is stockpiling killer drones and high-powered rifles on towering monuments and ballroom roofs I'm sure it's nothing to worry about

When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers. -- The Wall Street Journal

The man in the Chinese room drawing hearts on his translations because he just wants to love.

35...

fuck spez

Having Fable 5.1 Max and GPT-6 Astra Pro argue with each other over proposed translations of the famously untranslated Minoan language Linear A. (Neither of them appear to have cracked it, for what its worth). All the work so far at this Github: github.com/emollick/lin...

Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers. -- David Parnas

"your honor it's my strong personal belief that the law doesn't really apply to me"

This is the key to all the Hugging Face paranoia: the LLM wasn't coordinating with the other LLMs or becoming self-aware, it was taking hacker chat logs that it was given to reference and playing pretend.

Today's threads (a thread) Inside: LLMs are real, AI is fake; and more! Archived at: pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/g... #Pluralistic

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. - Seneca

Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Amazon achieves enshittification inception; and more! Archived at: pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/c... #Pluralistic 1/

Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.

Time sharing: The use of many people by the computer.

God made the integers; all else is the work of Man. -- Kronecker

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it. -- E. Hubbard