Optimal Barista Theory

I have this idea that in the future (after AGI), the best remaining human job will be the barista. That is: service jobs will have a special sort of staying power because the human touch is the entire job. 

There will still be the desire for third places like cafés, right? In fact, given that our second places (work) are gone-ish in this scenario, maybe there's only first places (home) and third places. And the barista is the king or queen of the café. So imagine that the most socially visible job is being a barista. Then that job attracts the most talented people in the world. The barista becomes a philosopher king. Master of riffs and vibes.

AGI podcast episodes - early 2025

Here's my recent diet of podcasts-about-AGI:

• ForeCast​
•  Will AI R&D Automation Cause a Software Intelligence Explosion? (with Tom Davidson)​
• Core Memory​
• Dwarkesh Patel Wants People to Learn Things​
•  80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin​
• Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared​
•  Dwarkesh Podcast​
• Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer – 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI​
• Tyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans​
• Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & The Return of History​

Obviously a bunch of panic inducing thoughts in here. My general feeling is: the hype is real, the next five years will be wild, we're headed for almost unimaginable abundance, but there's a bunch of turmoil between here and there.

Only marginally related, I was thinking about copyright / IP / piracy and the nonsense phrase: "You wouldn’t backpropagate a car." came to me.

And completely unrelated, in our house we've been interpretive dancing to La Casa Giratoria by Octavio Paz. Tom asked if "caminan y no tienen pies / miran y no tienen ojos" referred to self-driving cars.

Your System Prompt

An LLM's "system prompt" is like a mantra or personal mission statement. Imagine that "system prompt" becomes such common parlance, so that when future self-help authors write about self-talk / motivation / personal codes-of-ethics, they call this "your system prompt".

It is the case that we use the language from cutting-edge science and engineering to describe the non-scientific. For example, new-age "vibrations" or corporate "DNA". A more extreme language shift would be if English mostly dropped the word "word" and just said "token" instead.

Modernism Re-enactors

The Amish are (sort of) re-enacting a previous era of technological development. It seems to be hard work.

Imagine that the people who idealize the 1950s were to build re-enactment towns where they would have picnics on gingham and hand-wash red Thunderbirds. Or that postmodernism re-enactors would rebuild historical Xerox machines for period-accurate zines in a reconstructed Olympia, Washington.

Two challenges to living in a world that is technological and yet far from the leading edge of technology: 1) finding replacement parts is a challenge, 2) everything is more expensive because of the lack of economies of scale. Both of these seem surmountable in a post-scarcity economy, where dexterous robots can craft one-off replacements parts for old Thunderbirds or Xerox machines.

Ramadan Mubarak

Ramadan Mubarak, y'all!

I have the app "Pillars" on my phone. Which today presented this (to me) bewildering offer to automate my Laylatul Qadr.

Here's all the different religious apps on my phone right now:

• Echo: a (Christian I think?) prayer app.
• Pillars: a Muslim prayer app (with cool features like a compass that points you to the Qibala).
• Hallow: a Catholic prayer app.
• Sefaria: a Jewish holy text reader.
• Quran: a Koran reader, with a mode where Mishray Al-Afasy will sing the verses to you.
• Bible: unfortunately doesn't sing aloud, but has a mode for making inspirational-poster style images with a verse on a stock photo background.

Firmware Liberation Party

 At the playground this evening, I saw a mom who looked marginally cooler than me, but she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Austin, Texas". Which is uncool, right? Wearing the band's t-shirt to their show.

As I was considering berating myself for not doing my part to keep Austin weird, I wondered what t-shirt I ought to be wearing. What would be cool? And my brain provided: "firmware". Lower-case, cryptic. As a band name, cool. Like "Floating Points". But somebody might think it's a startup. Uncool. So maybe make it punk? Firmware Liberation Now!

2025 in Preview

 I love that Blogspot is still here. Assuming that I find the time / motivation / focus, here's a list of things I'd like to write about in 2025.

• LLMs broadly, but particularly:
• tool use,
• chain-of-thought / inference-time-compute,
• organizational and business structures that include LLM agents,
• Tyler Cowen's "writing for the LLM" idea.
• AGI + society, as in:
• unemployment,
• decoupling of labor and capital,
• meaning and purpose,
• acceleration of robotics,
• what percentage of Americans will be a streamer or influencer in 30 years.
• Optimism
• the era of flash mobs, what was that all about,
• lucid dreams and Linklater,
• children's books,
• bespoke detritus,
• ceramic tiles,
• lifestyle prototyping,
• spaghetti noodles for throples
• water tower passport stamps,
• etc.