Defense BD @quartermasterai. Former @anduriltech, @BoozAllen, @GDIT. Amateur French Horn player, VERY amateur hockey player.
Joined February 2009
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Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
The Boomers who bought their homes for magic beans and now want to raise taxes on everyone else to pay for their social security while also not wanting to pay property taxes for their palatial estates should all be tossed in a volcano. One last luxury cruise for them.
“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?”
Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century.
politico.com/news/magazine/2…
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
I support the death penalty. God himself told Noah that those who willfully take the life of another should be executed.
The United States Army prohibits public executions, but the Pentagon does not seem to care about following its own rules.
The pagan Roman Empire relished the public spectacle of executions. Growing up overseas in an Islamic country, some executions were public. Christendom, over time, recognized that justice is not to entertain or titillate. Justice is not meant to be a spectacle.
In Ezekiel 33:11, scripture reads, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.” Proverbs 24:17 echoes that for us. “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.”
In Chapter 19 of De Spectaculis, Tertullian, one of the early post-apostolic church fathers, wrote about the public spectacle of executions in Rome. “It is good, no doubt, to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself will deny that? And yet the innocent can find no pleasure in another's sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful,” he wrote.
In Confessions, Augustine wrote of his friend Alypius, who, dragged into the Coliseum to see gladiatorial fights, shut his eyes, though not his ears. Upon the cheers of slaughter, he opened his eyes to the blood, and the bloodlust corrupted him. Augustine’s writing has long taught Christians not to be entertained by the spectacle of violence, as watching it can damage you.
I support the death penalty. Public executions are soul-twisting and we should not go down that road.
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
🚢 Maritime startup lands $140M
🏛️ Courthouse closures Saturday
✈️ Flyover this afternoon
🏋️♂️ Onelife heading to Galleria
arlnow.com/2026/10/02/mornin…
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
Circus Performers, by Walt Kuhn, 1978, 📸 via @marisakabas2
I may be at a new office building, in a different part of town, parking in a connected garage, but so help me...those lantern flies will still fear me.
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
ok i think i finally figured out why alignment has gone basically nowhere after 15 years and several billion dollars. the problem is hard sure. but have you met the people in charge of it
1) the leadership does not know how computers work. ask one what happens when you type a url into a browser and watch them start sweating. dns is a spooky word. they genuinely believe the model lives in "the cloud" like a ghost haunting a castle
2) zero idea how large scale distributed systems work. never been paged at 3am. never watched one bad bgp announcement take half the internet offline. their big threat model is the ai "copying itself across the internet" like its a floppy disk virus from 1998. brother it needs 50 megawatts, a liquid cooling loop and a personal relationship with jensen. it is not escaping onto your smart fridge
3) they dont understand the stack they are supposedly protecting us from. ask about inference servers, kv cache, batching, egress, rate limits. blank stare. ask how the model will seize the power grid and you get a 45 minute answer with a hand drawn diagram and three links to their own blog
4) nobody can define an agent. ask ten of them and you get eleven definitions and a 30 page google doc. to the rest of us an agent is a while loop that calls tools and eats a 429 every thirty seconds. to them its a digital god in its larval stage. my agent cant book a dentist appointment without asking me three times if im sure
5) they started from "everyone dies" and worked backwards so every result is bad news somehow. model refuses, deceptive. model complies, sycophantic. model does well on evals, well now its scheming about the evals. i cant think of a single thing a model could do that would get them to say ok maybe we're fine
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
We've raised $140M in new financing, including a $100M Series B led by @insightpartners , with participation from @overmatchvc, and returning investors @firstround, @QuietCapital, @SteelAtlasVC, TMV and more, plus a $40M venture debt facility from @Stifel, to grow the largest pro-mariner data network in the world.
Read more from TechCrunch's @sokane1: techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/ma…
Thank goodness history never repeats or we'd have to worry about things like this happening again...
In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt wrote Winston Churchill a letter with one of the most arrogant lines of the entire war:
"I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department."
He meant it. And three years later at Yalta, the world paid for it.
Roosevelt's whole strategy toward Stalin was to make him like him. His former ambassador to Moscow later said FDR told him that if he gave Stalin everything he could and asked for nothing back, Stalin would respond in kind and wouldn't try to annex anything.
He was talking about a man who had just starved millions of Ukrainians, purged his own officer corps, split Poland with Hitler, and shot 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.
Roosevelt thought he could charm him.
It started at Tehran in 1943. FDR decided the way to break the ice with Stalin was to mock Churchill in front of him. He teased him about his Britishness, his cigars, his habits, until Stalin finally laughed. Roosevelt later bragged that this was the moment he and Stalin became friends. He called him "Uncle Joe."
Stalin wasn't making a friend. He was taking notes.
By Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt was dying of heart failure. Stalin refused to leave Soviet territory, so the sick American president traveled 14,000 miles to meet him on his home turf. The Soviets put the Americans up in Livadia Palace. It was bugged. Stalin knew what Roosevelt's team was saying before he walked into the room.
And Roosevelt kept playing the same game. Before the conference even opened, he met privately with Stalin and made jokes at Britain's expense, telling him the British wanted to have their cake and eat it too. His closest wartime ally was frozen out so he could look good to a dictator.
Then he handed Stalin the most important piece of information in the entire conference.
He told him American troops would probably be out of Europe within two years.
Think about that from Stalin's side of the table. The only power on earth that could stop him had just told him it was going home.
Churchill fought for Poland. Britain had gone to war over Poland. But Roosevelt accepted a vague Soviet promise to "reorganize" Stalin's puppet government and hold free elections, with no real way to enforce it. Stalin signed the Declaration on Liberated Europe pledging democracy for Eastern Europe.
Then, with Churchill out of the room, Roosevelt gave Stalin the Kuril Islands, southern Sakhalin, a naval base at Port Arthur, and control of railways in Manchuria. All to get Soviet help against Japan. China, an American ally, wasn't even consulted.
Stalin broke his promises almost immediately.
Roosevelt figured it out too late. In late March 1945 he reportedly admitted Stalin had broken every promise he made at Yalta.
Two weeks later he was dead.
The man who was sure he could "handle" Stalin had been handled from the first handshake. He wanted Stalin to like him. Stalin wanted Eastern Europe. Only one of them got what he came for.
Poland's elections in 1947 were rigged. Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest, and Sofia disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.
They wouldn't be free again until 1989.
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
I don’t think he’s stupid. A major story of the last decade is of smart people who are ignorant about politics thinking their expertise and knowledge of other subjects has a transitive property that makes them smart about politics too. It’s the same category error that leads very smart people to argue that government should be run like a business. It’s among the most common stupid mistakes of smart people. That’s why he sounds so stupid. He “discovered” what was obvious to people with the relevant expertise a decade ago. It’s also why politicians seem so stupid to business people, scientists etc when they step out of their lanes.
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
Just four months since we co-led their Series A, @quartermasterai has grown its coverage by 77% and raised a preemptive $100M Series B from @insightpartners. Even for a software company, this pace would be very impressive, but @SobinNeil is doing it with hardware, out at sea, in incredibly volatile geopolitical conditions.
Neil started Quartermaster with a simple premise: the only sensing network that can actually scale to the ocean is the one that's already on the ocean.
This team is moving quickly, putting their SmartMast product on 650 working vessels from 25 countries. It very cleverly combines HD video, AI, radar, RF sensing, and AIS to turn working vessels already on the water into a live sensor network for the ocean’s surface.
This increased visibility helps mariners of all types navigate congested waters and busy ports, avoid potential hazards, and call for help in an emergency.
It also comes with tremendous built-in network effects that only become more valuable as they scale up. Neil has gone unreasonably deep on how all these different pieces of the business fit together, and we are so fortunate to be his partner here @firstround.
So this is obviously because *I* just joined.
I mean, great team on top of that, and determined execution, and cool hardware, and an obvious need...but we all know this is the kind of difference that I, personally, can make in a week.
techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/ma…
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
Hard to overstate how big a failure DOGE was. The government slashed its workforce without meaningfully shrinking the government’s overall footprint. So taxpayers got a less capable bureaucracy while spending billions paying people not to work. It was mostly performance art.
The cost of DOGE: The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, GAO finds nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/po…
Andrew Ashcroft retweeted
A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths. It begins with shampoo.
ewerickson.substack.com/p/th…
