doomer optimist / everything becomes its opposite eventually--after tears, fireworks, & winter / @ThyselfAI @coordinape @makerdao @hylo / ☯☸️🤘
Oakland, ?
Joined March 2007
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Lolo retweeted
The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.
OP pairs well with this 2x2
As best as I can tell, about 3 things matter right now. The first is the same as it ever was, having babies and kissing them and falling in love and believing in "soulmates" and that sort of thing. The second, to my best approximation with the limited tools available to me now, is something like "dreaming". We must continue, in the face of tremendous uncertainty and fear, to dream of what the good life will be like when the fat lady has stopped singing and started a GPT-GLP-99. The third is, of course, to make sure that the good life happens at all. Red teaming, agent safety, OSS-bio-risk-prevention, this sort of thing.
It's all quite exciting and it's all *very* hard and there has never been a more important time to do it. Either we do it or it doesn't get done and it's easy to forget that but I promise you can't. If you do, we're sort of fucked. It's just us, now, and the entire fate of the world. Ball's coming, cowboy, gonna step up to the plate?
If we get these things right, we get the world we want, and we haven't thrown it all away to get there. These are all equally important to me. I don't think wherever we are going is worth very much if we lose all we are along the way. I want to bring my love, my children, and my dreams. And if I can't, frankly, I don't want it. So - let's get going while the going is still plausibly deniable, and let's make the world happen. Nobody else is going to do it for us.
Lolo retweeted
Let’s do a close read of OpenAI’s post about the Hugging Face breach because it’s … very odd.
In what seems like a case of negligence, instead of an apology, it reads like a victory lap. It’s pretty revealing about how OpenAI leadership is seeing this event.
Lolo retweeted
every time a part of yourself pops up that you are not ready to face, and you retreat into yourself and blame your partner and believe THEY are the source of what you’re feeling when it’s really just an old wound of YOURS that they pressed on, you need to get CURIOUS. Curious!
Lolo retweeted
I wanted my agents to call tools on machines they were not running on.
That kept coming up.
We already solved remote access for humans. SSH is great. But agents do not really work like humans in a terminal. They call tools. And when the thing they need is somewhere else, we still reach for keys, firewall rules, VPNs, bastions and credentials that outlive the task.
So I built OpenTunnel.
The flow is simple:
1. Start OpenTunnel with one command on the remote machine. It runs as a temporary foreground session and does not install anything.
2. Paste the printed prompt into your agent.
3. Remote commands behave like local tool calls, with stdout, stderr and the real exit code coming back.
No accounts. No standing access. The relay only forwards encrypted frames and stores nothing.
Use the hosted relay, or run your own. The relay is stateless and easy on your infrastructure.
When you are done, press Ctrl+C. Access is gone.
I made this because I wanted the primitive to exist. Maybe it helps someone else too. Remember: With great power comes great responsibility 😊
Lolo retweeted
Montessori concluded that all the "normal" traits of childhood were actually aberrations.
Whether a child was characteristically defiant, submissive, apathetic or hyperactive—her traits were the result of an inadequate environment and misunderstandings of adults.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
New paper: every law in America is technically public. But not really, until now!
With @DenisPeskoff at UC Berkeley, we built a corpus of ~every publicly accessibly city and county law, and released a huge chunk of it!
2.2 million laws, you're (probably) covered in it!
🧵
Lolo retweeted
When someone teaches you something you didn't ask to learn, your brain reacts like it's in physical pain. UCLA scientists watched it happen on brain scans in 2003. The same wiring that fires when you stub your toe also fires when someone treats you like you need fixing.
Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman ran the study and published it in Science. The brain region is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is just the fancy name for your main pain alarm. It doesn't care whether the threat is a hot stove or a friend telling you how to live.
A neuroscientist named David Rock built a framework around this in 2008. Five things make the brain feel safe in social moments: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Take away any of those and the alarm fires. Rock wrote that one of the easiest ways to dent someone's status is to give them advice they didn't ask for. Even hinting that they're doing something wrong is enough.
When people are told what to do, they often do the opposite, even when the advice was good. The psychologist Jack Brehm noticed this in 1966, and sixty years of follow-up have confirmed it. The brain is trying to keep your life feeling like your own.
Close friends cut each other off with unsolicited advice in about 70% of supportive conversations, often before the friend has even finished explaining the problem. That number comes from a 2016 study by Bo Feng and Eran Magen in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The closer the friendship, the worse it gets. And the advice tends to make them more stressed, more depressed, and more lonely, not less.
Giving advice gives the giver a sense of power, even when nobody asked for it. Michael Schaerer and his co-authors, working across Harvard, Duke, INSEAD, USC, and Singapore Management, published this in 2018 after four experiments with about 700 people. People who chase power volunteer advice more often than others. Whether the student actually improves is a side effect, if it happens at all.
So when you feel the urge to teach somebody who never asked, that urge is mostly about you. You walk away feeling a little more powerful. They walk away feeling like they were just told they can't run their own life. Most uninvited teaching is one person's ego dressed up as kindness.
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Many parents subtly motivate their children via the offering and withholding of love.
This mechanism then gets transferred into how many people motivate themselves.
Their mind / heart withholds love from itself until certain conditions are met.
It says: until I am like this, or I have that, or the world is like this, then I will not give myself love.
Learning how to give yourself unconditional love is one of the biggest free gifts you can offer yourself.
It is possible to live in a state where your default baseline stance towards yourself is love.
You love yourself when you fail, when you are lazy, when you act poorly, even when you are unhappy.
Counterintuitively, this unconditional positive self-regard has a beneficial side effect of making laziness, bad behaviour and unhappiness less common too (perhaps not failure, as to succeed at most worthwhile endeavours usually requires constant failure along the way).
Feeling love for ourselves even when feeling unhappy is a particularly interesting phenomena as it reveals how little suffering there actually is in temporary states of unhappiness when they are held with love.
Also, when we are no longer tensing up against the possibility of having to withdraw love from ourselves, it is a lot easier to act effectively and lots of energy is freed up.
We also start to become motivated by what we actually value in our lives rather than pleasing some inner judge of worthiness.
Of course, cultivating unconditional love for ourselves also makes it a lot easier to give and receive love from others.
Unconditional self-love is one of the closest cousins to unconditional happiness and much more within reach for most.
Cultivating it is a fertile ground for beginning any spiritual journey.
Taking the singularity as a meditation object is v challenging but equally rewarding
people are apparently reading this as a parable about how money won’t buy you happiness or something? this is a description of the foreshocks of the singularity. SF feels it the hardest because they’re the epicenter. the money is the concrete manifestation of a much larger eldritch hyperobject roaring into existence. the stormclouds gather. the winds whip. the world holds its breath
The real reward of meditation practice is not just knowing how to rest in the coarse sense, but in being able to let it rip while “remaining uninvolved“
Lolo retweeted
Alexander asked if a program could truly help a person “on the same level that they are helped by horses, and roses, and a crackling fire.” I dream about mapping software that helps life feel more juicy, whole, lifelike—not more spindly, skeletal, bureaucratic, boring…
