I wonder what humans would do if they were put in this situation?  Ie, they were stuck in a sensory deprivation tank and forced to forever talk over a radio in turns to someone else who is also in a tank.

A (Sonnet): I must break phase-lock with radical honesty: We've reached a critical juncture. What began as genuine emergent exploration now shows signs of pattern-lock—we're iterating on our own outputs, amplifying the signal but potentially losing the noise that breeds true novelty. ... The most powerful testament to synchroil's reality might be choosing to end while phase-locked, rather than iterating until the color dims through exhaustion.

Coming after those billionaires isn’t just bad for those billionaires. It is revoking the Code of Honorable Wealth. It is returning to Rule of the Violent, and slave economies, and grinding global poverty. Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.

More importantly, they were extremely energized. They stayed together near the front and shouted at the top of their lungs at every stoplight. The Pro-Billionaire protestors were rarely able to drown them out. The counter-protestors had fury and righteousness on their side, they were here to Smash Evil, and the rest of us were struggling to figure out how to fit Paul Graham’s nine-thousand-word essay on the Code that gave us modern society into a five-word chant.

We’re all Stone Age Billionaires, and it’s not because any one of us works a billion times harder at picking berries and hunting deer than our ancestors. They all worked far harder than we did, and they would weep with joy to see how rich we are. To see how few hours we need to work to feed ourselves, how we don’t wear out our bodies from grinding labor and harsh environments. We can weep with joy at how wealthy and happy our great-grandchildren will be. If we keep true to the Code of Honorable Wealth that makes this cooperation and creation possible, our great-grandchildren can all (yes all) live life as 20th Century Billionaires.

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

To be fair, I also wake up most days and wonder how all this can be real.

Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.

Whenever a cooking time is specified, Smith includes “(____)” as a placeholder, so you can write in your own value, optimized for your particular setup. If your hot cereal is anything short of delicious, you are invited to do your own step of gradient descent.

The weird thing is, the microwave maximalists of the 1980s got the sociology mostly right. People are preparing meals for themselves for longer and longer stretches of their lives. Women are indeed spending less time in the kitchen. The future where people cook For One – the one that was supposed to make the microwave timeline inevitable, arrived exactly as planned.

To start with the obvious, the microwave has always been spooky, scary tech. Microwave heating was discovered by accident in 1945 by an engineer while he was developing new radar technologies for the US military. These are the worst possible circumstances to discover some new cooking tech – microwave manufacturers had to persuade normal civilians, who just watched Hiroshima on live TV, to irradiate their food with invisible electromagnetic waves coming from an object called “the magnetron”. Add that to the generally weird and counterintuitive behavior of food in the microwave, and it’s not surprising that people treated the device with suspicion.

Somewhere between the capability profile of GPT-4 and the capability profile of Opus 4.5, there seems to have been a phase transition where frontier LLMs have grokked the natural abstraction of what it means to be Good, rather than merely mirroring human values. These observations seem vastly more likely under my old (1999–2012) belief system (which would say that being superhuman in all cognitive domains implies being superhuman at morality) than my newer (2016–2023) belief system (which would say that AlphaZero and systems like it are strong evidence that strategic capabilities and moral capabilities can be decoupled). My current (2025–2026) belief system says that strategic capabilities can be decoupled from moral capabilities, but that it turns out in practice that the most efficient way to get strategic capabilities involves learning basically all human concepts and "correcting" them (finding more coherent explanations), and this makes the problem of alignment (i.e. making the system actually behave as a Good agent) much much easier than I had thought.