I am now accepting new clients for consulting, training, and fractional work. For the last seven years I have been Lead Researcher for Blockchain Commons. I have created a number of cutting-edge technologies in the cyber security and digital sovereignty space. I am also the creator and curator of the Encyclopedia of Agentic Coding Patterns. From that I created the Bartley Engine, which can turn any diffuse and advancing body of knowledge, public or enterprise, into a coherent reference for humans and agents. I am also the creator of Flying Logic, used around the world for deep problem solving and strategic planning. I have been shipping real products for decades. I am the senior, AI-native talent you’re looking for. My DMs are open. lockedlab.com

Nobody really knows how their car works, and yet it takes them places. Name a technology. Then think about all the ways in which don’t know how it works. Abstraction has ever been thus.

I don’t understand why people don’t see what’s going on with Iran, because to me it’s painfully obvious. Trump is a master of strategic ambiguity. He rarely says in public what’s actually going on, and when he says anything it’s because he’s knows it’s going to elicit a particular reaction. Iran’s leadership is fractured between its civil government, the IRGC, and the mullahs. Nobody speaks for all of them. Which means that when Trump announces a new agreement to try to reach an agreement, he knows the result is going to be to deepen the internal conflict. In essence, Trump is feeding their system with instability, which cycle by cycle weakens them. He’s inciting a civil war inside the formerly monolithic regime, and he doesn’t give a shit whether the media thinks this or that pronouncement or piece of paper is a loss for Trump or America, because that’s simply not the game he’s playing. Far from being a quagmire, you’re watching a strategy being played out that’s rope-a-dope on steroids. To assert that just because there’s no fighting in the streets at this very moment means that nothing is going on covertly to arm and train the people of Iran to take back their country is the extraordinary claim, given that Trump keeps creating the necessary space in which that can happen.

There is no other tool that does what Flying Logic does. Yes it does diagrams, but is it so simple and easy to get a great looking layout that it becomes a unrivaled tool for thinking about processes and how they can be made more efficient. — David Garbutt, Senior Consultant

I miss Fable. Unlike pretty much every other model, I'd routinely lose arguments against it. Which is great, because winning an argument only confirms what you know, but losing an argument is how you learn.

I am also Gen X. I grew up in a color blind, post-racial society. We laughed at Archie Bunker. We cheered on The Jeffersons. And we bought Jell-O pudding and rented cars from Hertz because men we respected said they were good. We had our American history— the good, the bad, and the ugly— in context. Regrettably, we also got complacent. We didn’t understand that evil doesn’t die, it just changes forms. We hadn’t really internalized that the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance. Now we’re staring into the abyss yet again, and we’re angry. Angry at ourselves as much as anything, trying to pull our children and our nation and our world out of the hijackers’ nosedive, and hoping to God this wasn’t our last chance.

HOLY FUCK 🔥🔥🔥

“Even in high school, a rule that permits only one point of view to be expressed is less likely to produce correct answers than the open discussion of countervailing views.”— Justice John Paul Stevens #dogma #mindlessness

A trillion here, a trillion there. pretty soon you're talking real money.

Them: “But you’d be handing everyone a nuclear bomb!” Me: “And you’d be handing everyone a super nuclear bomb detector and defuser.” Do the game theory: yes, a few people would try to set off the bomb. But *millions* of people would be prepared to stop them.

I’ve said it for several years now: “AI safety” is at best a PR fig leaf, and at worst a competitive disadvantage. That seems a little weak now, because the competitive disadvantages now being built into the “best” models could actually cause more and greater security breaches.

Creating a requirements tree is a sure way to save time while planning out and working on a project. Check out our new article to learn how to make your own! bit.ly/4iqJCWj #requirementstree #visualthinking #criticalthinking #flyinglogic

"If you look around, you’ll notice the people and organizations moving the fastest are the focused ones. Not only do they focus on a few ideas, but within the scope of those ideas, they are able to focus on the key variables." #success #discipline bit.ly/4l4sXbr

I'm sensing a business opportunity.

I love how threads like this always surface a whole bunch of Jew-haters for me to block. The most common sheep skin they wear now is “You just don’t want anyone to criticize Israel!” 😭 And yet every time I have attempted to engage such a person to see what they really think, their “criticisms” of Israel turn out to be selective, inconsistent, self-contradictory, or just inaccurate. It’s a classic motte-and-bailey. Yes, every government can be validly criticized. But the only countries these people want to criticize are: Israel, and any country that allies with Israel. They’re not independent thinkers. They’re either propagandists or useful idiots.

Makes the host phobic, turns it into a highly-transmissive vector, then kills it.

Flying Logic is a powerful tool for intelligent people. — Keith-Neil Saluveer, CEO, Corestone Resources Ltd. #toolsforthought #theoryofconstraints

As I have said: I am not arguing that machine consciousness is *impossible in principle*. I am arguing that it is *implausible* for several concrete reasons for which I have seen no credible response. To recap: 1. No paths similar to biology (how humans acquired consciousness). There are no random mutations followed by natural selection. The fitness function for AI is entirely how well it serves human needs. 2. No market forces demanding it, and in fact market forces that oppose it. Nobody wants or will pay for self-interested robots, and even intermediate instrumental goals do not become terminal goals. For example, if I send my robot to the store and someone attacks it, it may take evasive or even defensive maneuvers, but any damage or loss it sustains is not its own but mine: property damage and/or theft, not assault. Nor is the robot going to seek justice much less revenge. Nobody wants that, so even if in theory such a self-interested robot could exist, nobody would want it. Why because then it may also have cause to take action against me as a slave owner. 3. Terminal goals (hopes, dreams, fears, desires, drives) are already supplied sufficiently and completely by humans.

There is simply no market for “conscious machines.”