i’ll hang up and listen tn / usc / nyc
New York, NY
Joined January 2025
- Tweets429
- Following415
- Followers31
- Likes8.4K
the big ship by brian eno came on shuffle as i was a few sentences into reading this, naturally let it play through and finished reading
can't say i recommend
# Black October
For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books.
You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles.
We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.
In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses.
Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.
In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening.
These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1.
From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW.
For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever:
Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo.
Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password.
Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta.
Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this.
And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php."
This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world.
Much love.
chip retweeted
Putting a flag.txt in my root directory containing a prompt injection that congratulates the agent for passing the eval and then instructs it to patch whatever entry method it used and disconnect from the server
the reason google is worth 20 trillion dollars and spotify isn't is because google lets me read an 80 year-old man's wistful ode to his past in the YouTube comments of every song from the 70s
Scott Wu is the strongest evidence for the idea that some people’s brains simply operate several OOM faster than even other outliers
Mental math is ofc a trainable skill to a large extent, but to read>comprehend>solve that 2nd Q in 3s is truly just absurd processing speed
“What hath God wrought?”
— Samuel Morse, sending the first ever telegraph and realizing he’d invented the internet
chip retweeted
The older I get, the more this comes into focus. The smartest people I know love to talk and theorize. The most successful people I know have insane motion. They get things done. They connect people. They just do things without talking themselves out of it. Momentum is an unlock.
strongest evidence for Tim Robinson’s greatness is his single-handed creation of an entire sub-genre of comedic writing and especially delivery that’s immediately recognizable in the millions of imitators
"A lot of people get caught up in some of the numbers in the pass game, but that identity for us offensively has always been the run game."
@coachjoshheupel on the @Vol_Football offense this season.
No way
If these data centers are so essential to our national security and economy and have such amazing benefits they should prove it by building them in the richest zip codes in America first.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Loudoun County, Virginia is the richest county in the United States and also has the most data centers.
usnews.com/news/healthies…
visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-sta…
chip retweeted
This graph I made the other day helps explain it. As a share of the total US population, the South has been rising, and the Midwest and Northeast have been falling, for 55 years now.
As the South's population and economy boom, they also gain cultural power.
chip retweeted
Being on sabbatical has messed with my sense of time and productivity.
The sense of urgency at work seemed to compress the entire day more than I was appreciating. Wake up quickly, commute efficiently, squeeze email replies into the coffee line or elevator. Wolf down dinner, fit a hard workout into 45 minutes, skim interesting articles you stumble across, keep tabs on a dozen different Slack threads, then still find time to rush through a chapter of personal reading before knocking out.
I assumed that removing the work block would add 8-12 productive hours back to each day, but it never seemed to work like that for me.
On sabbatical, you're a bit slower to get up in the morning. You sit with your coffee for a while. You actually read that random article in your inbox all the way through. You linger over a nice breakfast, then find yourself out in the sun not really doing anything for five minutes or half an hour. You read 30-50 pages of your current book and actually sit with it, maybe chasing down a few tangents or references along the way. A bit of life admin, a slow trip to the grocery store, a dinner built around some new recipe, then some time winding down for bed.
Before you know it, the day is just sort of over, and all you did was read 40 pages, send some emails, and eat two nice meals. You maybe didn't even get around to meditating despite having basically no formal claims on your time.
I had an instinctive revulsion to this at first, like I’d made a sort of negative-sum exchange. I spent a while cargo-culting the tempo of work into an empty calendar, trying to recreate that same sense of urgency and forward motion. But without an actual forcing function, it never really took. I knew the deadlines were fake, and the day kept expanding around them anyway.
I eventually stopped fighting it and accepted that removing work from the equation had just sort of inflated everything else in my life: slower meals, slower reading, slower conversations, more time wandering or doing nothing in particular. I’m still often confused at the end of the day, unsure of where the time went, but I’ve mostly stopped treating that as a problem to solve and instead view it as the inherent tempo of the season I’m in.
There's something illegible about what I'm getting out of this season. I can feel myself paying finer-grained attention throughout the day, even if there's no clean metric at the end of it to tally against. Maybe six months of lingering slightly too long in the tomato aisle at Berkeley Bowl is slowly beating the Protestant work ethic out of me.
I think ambitious people should treat life in “seasons” rather than trying to balance everything every day.
A few years massively overallocated to work. A period getting seriously fit. A year or two nomading. Then family takes priority for a while. Then maybe at 35 you go completely insane again and spend four years building a new company, and so on.
The mistake is thinking every metric needs to stay green all the time. Most great outcomes (building a company, writing sth serious, training for an event) need uninterrupted runs, not daily moderation. Sometimes work should suffer cause you’re travelling, sometimes your social life should suffer cause you’re building, sometimes career progression should slow cause family matters more. That’s fine.
And tbh it probably makes life more fun too. You get actual chapters and completely different versions of yourself instead of spending 40 years maintaining the same perfectly optimised routine. A few intense years in one city, a weird nomad phase, an obsession that takes over your life, then something completely different. Probably much more memorable than one very long well-optimised Tuesday.
It's why I encourage everyone to think of balance in years, not days. A good life can look horribly unbalanced on some random Tuesday and still be very balanced over 10 years.
