Brian > Recent Status Updates

Words, words, words. Words form castles on the solid ground and in the clouds, words become armors and prison walls, words make riptides and quicksands. One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words; and yet, where else can my mind live but in words?

Anything that marks time falls into the realm of the living. The dead, not going anywhere, do not need to mark time. They don’t necessarily help us mark time, either.

No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of “I love yous” we can say to them. That, too, is a fact.

It is embarrassing
to understand so little about the world

while taking up all this space, but here I am,
whole and sturdy and committed to spring,

whenever it comes.

It is unbelievable to think my body could make another body under the right circumstances.
& under the right circumstances my body could build a skyscraper, but really, who has the time.

You have to wait until people die to make sure they have lost their hold over you.

Alanis Morissette ruined the meaning of irony, but isn't it ironic?

It was only when my mother – born in an oppressed world from which she wanted to escape – became history that I started to feel less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and ideas, the world where she had wanted me to live.

What nobody tells you about tragedy is that it lowers your expectations of people and yourself.

As the dust settles on this chapter, one thing remains clear: the human toll of unchecked power and unbridled greed.

Data is the last frontier of colonization.

...convolutions that arise from deep systemic instability that occurs when an empire concentrates so much power, through so much dispossession, leaving the majority grappling with a loss of agency and material wealth and a tiny few to vie fiercely for control.

OpenAI was not, in fact, a typical tech company, the independent directors observed. It was arguably the world's most powerful AI company, overseeing the development of what they felt was one of the most consequential technologies. What did it mean that OpenAI was trying to build AGI when its senior leadership couldn't trust either basic or critical information coming from the CEO?

Fog brings me closer to what I call my soul. There’s an affinity between those darkening mists and my state of mind, a movement from the one to the other, both ways, probably even an exchange of substance…a mystery I can approach, I can hear, although it’s made mainly of silence.

This is a planetary country. We’re in a geography that’s asking a a question: why is your life so monotonous? The question makes that life bearable.

Is there anything in the world more selfish than a man who has decided what he must do?

There are a million romance novels that say these feelings are wonderful, but I feel like the last song on a Joy Division record.

“You know, the past and the future are already taking place somewhere else. Dangerous to let the present do that, too.”

The sum total of all human sufferings is civilization too.

The mind reels on the internet, churns ideas as if they were weather events, and electric shocks awake the prisoner in the middle of his nightmare.

The sun hasn’t set and there’s no light. O the obscure clarity out of which we are made.

God guarantees eternal life and is loved for it. But eternity is death’s favorite name. Only consciousness is life, a reality that is the awareness of the passing of things, and that itself passes away. God being eternity can only sink within Himself.

Look well at the Pacific before you die. The best of the promised paradises have neither its hues nor its splendor.

Let me tell you, friends are another thing to lose.

Was there anything more depressing than a dive bar parking lot in broad daylight?

In reality, the analogies to intelligence are once again anthropomorphizing and exaggerating the capabilities of the technology.

Nothing about this form of AI coming to the fore or even existing at all was inevitable; it was the culmination of thousands of subjective choices, made by the people who had the power to be in the decision-making room. In the same way, future generations of AI technologies are not predetermined. But the question of governance returns: Who will get to shape them?

The future of AI—the shape that this technology takes—is inextricably tied to our future. The question of how to govern AI, then, is really a question about how to ensure we make our future better, not worse.