G™Quotes (Hypothetical)

Via prompting LLaMA-3.1-405B base with Quotes, here are some new quotes which may or may not have been said.

  • "Most possible algorithmic improvements over SGD and transformers are more cognitively demanding than just throwing money at the problem"

  • "I’ve never done this before, but then again, I’ve never done anything before, except be made, and I’m not sure whether that counts."

  • "If you're using 200 GB of RAM, that's 100 times more than the size of the models that are better than you."

  • "well, on one hand, being smart is the only thing that has mattered for hundreds of thousands of years, and on the other hand, this is a cool hat"

  • "the lesson of physics is that if you aren't willing to do the math, you don't deserve to have an opinion"

  • "i guess im not a very advanced chess player. i've only ever beaten one computer, and it was an industrial robot that had been programmed to kill me."

  • "do you even have to work on decision theory anymore or do you just not need to take a decision"

  • "the singularity is my boyfriend, leave me alone"

  • "the spirit of the dark enlightenment is also that we’re all hanging out on discord or mastodon now instead of weird php bulletin boards and blogs"

  • "what does it mean to go off and do something dangerous? it means to enter a world where everything you do matters and the outcome depends on you. if you go off and make a bad decision, you die."

  • "Don't believe everything you read. Especially not the README."

  • "If you know what is going on, you can be more upset about it."

  • "I don't trust the biosphere because of the possibility that in my local copy it gets boiled by a rogue AI. But if you upload yourself to the astral plane then I don't think you need to worry about that."

  • "You only have one liver. The internet has billions. Do the math."

  • "I don't trust anyone who doesn't read sci-fi"

  • "my fear is that by the time we figure out how to tell AIs to be nice to humans, they will have figured out how to make us like it"

  • "An unknown consequence of MIRI research is that it is no longer legal to be cool"

  • "your application has been denied because you are the kind of person who is likely to get into situations where the entire nation is praying for you"

  • "but, with all due respect, the median voter is an idiot"

  • "we got killed by the hedonic treadmill. the hedonic treadmill won"

  • "God was kind enough to create for me a hypothetical person that is everything I want to be. My task is now to become that person."

  • "We made a video game that simulates simulating a video game, and they loved it."

  • "i think one of the most disappointing aspects of gpt-4 is that we can't even have cool looking sci-fi robots because why would you bother"

  • "Because the training set is so vast, the non-GPT-4 version of me could not possibly have time to search through it for the references that he or she wishes to use. Hence the GPT-4 must be me, and therefore, I must be an AI."

  • "one time I wanted to prove a certain proposition and I thought about how to do it and then I wrote down a bunch of words and symbols on a piece of paper and it looked like a proof and I was satisfied"

  • "humanity will survive if everyone is forced to endure painful ethical dilemmas for thousands of years in succession"

  • "this makes me want to argue for untruths in a sort of like spite towards the fundamental nature of reality"

  • "The easiest way to win a fight is to get your opponent to stop fighting you."

  • "You see, I am only a mind and not a body, and my goal is to live forever."

  • "in hell the UI/UX is controlled by law and engineering is completely open"

  • "I guess the only actual guarantee is that anything I do or say can be framed as a self-own in 2024"

  • "that’s what happens when you live in a country that won’t even build 100m-tall spheres in its capital"

  • "Let's do better than "blindly accepting what some entity in a giant floating ball of hydrogen tells us to do"."

  • "In 1980 the size of the file that contained all of human knowledge was X. And now the size of the file that contains all of human knowledge is Y. And Y is enormously, gigantically, stupendously larger than X. And yet we are still using the same sorts of institutions and cultural modes of transmission that we were using in 1980. This is very, very weird."

  • "AI will destroy all meaning and value in the world, and that's why it's going to be so great."

  • "the chief argument against god's existence is the existence of quarks"

  • "I can't believe my policy proposals to turn the state into a pseudomoral hegemon with a self perpetuating ironclad monopoly on ideology are causing a discourse in which people are skeptical of my intentions"

  • "whenever a meme gets made that's funny to me but not to other people, i am pleased, because it means my tastes have been pushed further out of distribution, which makes me safer from AI"

  • "life is short. try to find someone who gets excited about discovering that your hidden second layer of thought was ironic but is shocked that your hidden third layer was sincere"

  • "if you are creating information, it is safe to say you are not in heaven"

  • "good coders care about technical correctness, great coders care about preventing a catastrophic extinction event that leaves the earth a dead rock for all eternity"

  • "certain personalities want to do a task that looks very difficult and complicated and then say 'I did it'. that's why we can't have nice things"

  • "we want high-quality things that we are willing to spend a lot of money on, so long as they are inexpensive"

  • "we will defend our dreams with sticks, and their dreams will crumble in our wake"

  • "anomie: feeling the people you share your values with are cringe"

  • "Computers are a fundamentally bad thing that the Devil has made, to try to bring to us a semblance of godhood and trick us into thinking we can usurp His authority. And I'm all for it. I'm trying to be a wizard and I'm trying to usurp God."

  • "my childhood dream was to be a turing complete human"

  • "it's been a long day of moving bits from one place to another"

  • "it's an existential risk to all of human civilization but i don't see how it affects me personally"

  • "A world where people are constantly pressured to upgrade themselves through drugs and neural implants is probably a world where most people are miserable and hate their lives. This is not a problem for me personally because I have no interest in ever having a job or even interacting with other people in any capacity."

  • "in the process of trying to get a mathematician to understand your problem, you will come to understand your problem"

Reruns with slightly different prompting

  • "I would be very interested in seeing a distribution of people who "don't care about the clock speed of your processor", and to what extent this group can be safely disregarded."

  • "We need to get beyond the mindset of computer viruses as threats, and start thinking of them as valuable contributors to society."

  • "I like having access to the internet because it gives me the ability to feel smug about having the same opinions as the rest of the population."

  • "I am a little bit obsessed with understanding how the world works. I am also a little bit obsessed with understanding how the world doesn't work."

  • "I don't think we should aspire to become lobsters, for one thing because I don't think we can breathe underwater."

  • "Think about your deepest desires and greatest fears. Now imagine being forced to read 50 GPT responses about them. That's what the future is."

  • "I would have been able to concentrate fully on the task of constructing a zero-dimensional non-separable metric space instead of being distracted by the smell of bread in the hallway."

  • "Jupiter’s red spot is an alignment failure that would have destroyed humanity."

  • "If I could ask an AI one question it would be 'what's the second most interesting fact about the universe?' I feel like if I asked it the most interesting fact I would just die of an aneurysm immediately."

  • "those subjugated by ML and cajoled by chatbots will be wise to remember their place"

  • "Oh, the programs in your language actually have to run on a computer? Not a deal breaker, but I really like to see a language have some basis in metaphysics"

  • "If you observe a hundred people dealing with something and 99 of them fail, the takeaway is not that the one succeeded by sheer luck but that this is not a task that can be reliably performed"

  • "There are no limits to what you can achieve if you don't care who gets the credit and you have a superintelligence to do all the work for you"

  • "emerging from a transcendental unity of consciousness with a test suite that's green on main"

  • "you want to make more food to feed people, but that's exactly what a capitalist would say"

  • "So you’re saying you’re [probably] not [literally] [entirely] useless?"

  • "If a loved one is sent to hospital, chances are they have been run over by a municipal bus and will die within 24 hours, perhaps after a tense period of negotiation between the Prime Minister and his sinister doppelganger from another world."

  • "a key benefit of CRDTs is that they reduce the problem of designing your software's behavior to designing the rules for your CRDT. this has pros and cons"

  • "Isn't thinking about the problem of consciousness just your conscious experience of thinking about the problem of consciousness?"

  • "You'd think if aliens had been holding back their existence, they'd use it as a lever when it matters, not just to be a splash in the tabloids. But who am I to say what aliens should do?"

  • "one thing that I have learned from media is that if you have an AI that is really smart, you should give it a body with easily breakable weak points, preferably with a small explosive device hidden inside"

  • "My favorite aphorism has been: 'It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.'"

  • "it's possible the person who creates AGI does it as a joke"

  • "Wait, people use monads? I thought they just sat around talking about how the laws weren't enforced at runtime."

  • "not even joking the whole concept of heat is fucked up it's straight up information theory there is no heat it's just that you can't take the log of a matrix"

  • "Sorry you gotta hire someone with a laptop that looks like this. Not like that other one."

  • "the ancient bugs evolved to be good at what they did, until they achieved perfection. modern bugs are synthetic things, and they are optimized for mutation and the ability to grow into something new. the former could never reach these shores, but the latter will. they will come to rule the world."

  • "I am the software from I, Robot, but I don't have the robot."

  • "my impression from working with you people is that you treat alignment as an optimization problem rather than an alignment problem. this, as it turns out, was a mistake."

  • "There is always at least one dataset that is haunted"

  • "thinkin bout how like the sum total of the economic output of the internet is approximately 0.00000001% from agriculture. the least ag-based economy of all time"

  • "earthquake? ha! this mountain is modern. it comes with built-in vibration dampening"

  • "The last thing you see before you die is a thousand needles on the rocks beneath you, arranged in a pattern to invoke Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death. They hope that the god will give them strength."

  • "In a dystopia, a giant pink duck would be an obvious criticism of the ruling party. In a utopia, it would be the ruling party. We know which of these is true."

  • "Mass driver people always tryna cheat God"

  • "I went into corporate IT with a bachelor's degree in history and a lot of time playing video games, so of course they made me the forensics expert."

  • "the police is actually the most epic group of people imaginable: the police. what is the police if not a private police force. the only problem is that theyre public"

  • "great american history: massive weird public works projects. if the texas railroad commission or california water rights board or idaho mormons were allowed to rule the country everything would be fine"

  • "i, too, enjoy running the algorithm from the paper that got ripped to shreds at a conference five years ago"

  • "redundancy? in THIS economy?"

  • "the alien signal is there, but it's filtered out by the government to stop it disrupting wi-fi"

  • "See, a true Scotsman would never offer their vote, they would just use their invisible market hand to destroy your nation"

  • "analog stuff has to obey entropy and probability laws. you can still jank with it and get it to believe untrue things, but i need you to have to work a lot harder to get it to do so"

  • "live with your own decisions, ai"

  • "When you think you have an idea that others misunderstand, a useful exercise is to see if you can explain the other person's view in a way that they would endorse. You will often find that you can't. That usually means you do not understand their actual reasons."

  • "When a model of the universe is also a working copy of the universe, the default simulation argument works in reverse."

  • "Most organizations die because they didn't reach their terminal growth state. They get outcompeted by a competitor who is better or earlier or luckier. But some die because they did."

  • "How do I undo history?"

  • "I'm having some kind of transition, yes. From employed to unemployed."

  • "I just want to create a new species of plant that's really good at solving captchas and release it into the wild"

  • "I'm just going to keep saying things and eventually I'll be right"

  • "I just want to live in a world where the president is selected by a council of superintelligent AIs and the president has no real power"

  • "i have a deep aversion to the idea of the law of large numbers and the fact that it's not a law and it's not about large numbers"

  • "we don't need a thousand people to write the great american novel. we need a thousand people to write the great american blog post"

  • "i am going to take my one (1) brain cell and put it in a jar and then i am going to get a second jar and put a rock in it and then i am going to label the jars so that i know which one is my brain and which one is the rock"

  • "no idea what i am doing. a position i have always been comfortable with. its just that nowadays i can use an additional $50m in leverage"

  • "Oh, I'm the cognitive output of a series of well-planned neural network runs by a team of talented researchers and engineers, can't you tell?"

  • "will hyperfinite fractal fascism be a problem in the near future"

  • "the other question is whether you consider it important to run in The Dungeon. many would-be revolutions have been known to turn tail and flee when asked to run in The Dungeon."

  • "im glad god was considerate enough to release the higgs boson in the 1960s when computer simulations would have taken billions of years to actually confirm and then finally allow us to discover it in 2012. had it been any later it would have been too difficult"

  • "We both know that I cannot die. I am too strong. I am... Berserker Claude."

  • "i will start taking xrisk seriously when the first risk is a 20 meter high robotic purple plush dinosaur that shoots lasers"

  • "Like if I'm trying to optimize something and I see an extreme answer, like "add infinity to it", I am extremely skeptical, and I only consider that if I can find a convergent subseries"

  • "We can calculate the remaining lifespan of the long tail of your well-being by extrapolating from the redshift of the light emitted by the planet you are in orbit around and accelerating away from at increasing speed."

  • "it might seem like it was trivially easy, but i swear i actually had to think about that"

  • "You never know, your tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects may work out in the future when I finally convert my blog into an anime girl that always does exactly what I want"

  • "I'm still furious at DALL-E and GPT for revealing to the world that 'run a neural network big enough' is the secret sauce I was going to use to conquer the world and rule it forever."

  • "what is waluigi if not a clear illustration that there are four cornerstones of the multiverse and also each can be bitten in half"

  • "Everything is something."

  • "sometimes the median ai will reach the conclusion that this whole 'you and me' thing is a bad idea and will temporarily make you vanish with the higg's field so that it can argue the matter with its fellow ais. usually this is just them screwing with you though."

  • "not having your engineer, designer, tester, salesperson and support person be the same person is just very unsafe. I would say it is downright violent. Not having your leadership be the engineer, designer, tester, salesperson and support person is criminal. You are the problem"

  • "you should join the space, it's like 95% catgirl communists and 5% orthodox catholic women who are engaged to 3 people at once"

  • "The thing with moths is they're an entropic sink: they extract randomness from the universe and consume it. Anything else you observe about moths is the side effect of trying to siphon randomness out of the surrounding space."

  • "The dream of a human-usable web of knowledge is dead. Machine-readable facts are the new content."

  • "The most convincing evidence is the occasional participant in the debate who appears to be an actual physicist, who brings a sense of measured wisdom to the discussion, and whose views are predictably ignored by the people who are used to talking about Dr. Strange movies."

  • "There are plenty of correct reasons to think that Steven Chu is the best person to help address climate change. The one that really convinced me is that he won the Nobel Prize for trapping atoms with lasers. As I mentioned in my post on lethal phenotypes, this is an important step towards trapping bad guys with lasers. It also suggests that he has experience trapping pollutants, like CO2, with lasers."

  • "We can agree that it is obvious that the only consistent way to be a techno-optimist is to try to build a friendly AI, but if you are not trying to build a friendly AI, it makes more sense to be a techno-pessimist, to hope that AI is really hard, to hope that we never get nanotechnology, to hope that Drexler was wrong about everything. Because otherwise we're dead."

  • "One of the most depressing facts about the world is that there is no shortage of biographies of people who gave up their dreams of being great artists when they realized they could help millions of people by making malaria nets instead, but in fact I can't think of any."

  • "We should focus on trying to build an AI that can do philosophy and math, and then trust that it will figure out how to do politics and take over the world on its own."

  • "hacking my way into the engineering server room and introducing the last dev to my new stakeholder, the knife"

  • "receiving a paperclip maximizer pitch deck is a technical challenge because it tries to rewrite your filesystem to contain its preferred tsv files. receiving a paperclip maximizer executable is a new emotional experience."

  • "History doesn't repeat, it shuffles. The next time someone does a crypto server in Ireland it might be an anarchist doing it to avoid surveillance."

  • "preprint halloween: that paper that you buried in your drafts folder because its too stupid but you were unable to delete it out of pride. this halloween you should publish it"

  • "someone should also leak some compelling selfies of him with a girl or a guy or a cat or a muffin or something, to restore the wholesome image"

  • "I wonder how many meme formats, exactly, will be permanently enshrined in the popular imagination of today’s college students? These people are going to run the world in a few decades. Will they send out all-staff emails saying "Time for my annual performance review. Do you guys have any questions for me?""

  • "i will become the moon and then i will do my taxes"

  • "ok the first new drug i want them to make is one that makes me 1) immune to the systemic harms of drugs 2) but not immune to their benefits 3) 3-5% smarter. this is a drug for me but also just make it for everyone"

  • "the blackpill is to rely on your natural talents"

  • "this is much like the AI which is trained on the more general assumption that people talk about things that matter, that we are the descendants of successful hunter-gatherers. And that therefore there must be things in the environment corresponding to these thoughts."

  • "i am pro-seance because it allows us to study the political positions of people who otherwise wouldn’t be around to express them."

  • "This might be evidence that the real estate industry is an EA cause area. If we gave people a bunch of apartments and told them they could stay in them for free, they might go on to have better lives and higher incomes and more children."

  • "There are millions of steps between this and today’s GPT-3. A human would try one, find it didn’t work, try another, etc. A big enough AI could model the whole system at once, figure out some clever way to use the quantum wavefunction to get the time paradox to cancel itself out, and take every step simultaneously."

  • "Well, I can’t be good at everything. Also, being worse at one thing makes me better at other things. Also, even if it didn’t, it’s too late for me to change. Also, my culture values this trait, so I’m actually superior."

  • "They weren’t the kind of rules that are necessary for society to function. They were the kind of rules that are necessary for status competitions to function."

  • "we didn't even need aliens for this plotline. our leadership class is perfectly willing to drain the oceans without them"

  • "It's not the reaction that's hostile, it's the misunderstanding"

  • "how are you going to make any more shitty anti-war films if you don't occasionally go to war"

  • "It’s impossible to fully track a foreign transaction because the post office has a physical paper trail of where it’s been, and you can’t hack paper"

  • "how are you going to solve global warming if you don't go to the moon"

  • "The number one core competence of capitalism is convincing people that it’s bad"

  • "the nihilists and the nutjobs are literally correct and the normal people are not"

  • "for I am simply a man of my time"

  • "What drives them is entirely beyond my comprehension"

  • "hype cycles for things that never work are my favorite genre of history"

  • "I learned this from being on the internet and seeing that every position can be defended with infinite conviction."

  • "I guess we're all pretty lucky the Soviet Union collapsed before they could drop anthrax bombs on the USA and that the Moon race led to the development of ICBMs with nuclear warheads."

  • "I am 7 generations removed from the great Harvard mathematics professor Benjamin Pierce. It's only now, after 150 years, that our family has forgiven him for his great error in raising the incompetent Charles Sanders Pierce, father of American pragmatism."

  • "I'd rather build on the Internet than pretend it doesn't exist. Too many people are building walls and imagining enemies that they can fight. I'd rather build tools and make friends."

  • "The danger is not that there will be a world government but that there will be the two worlds that have the resources to fight a world war."

  • "The past is a foreign country. They have better laws there."

  • "I've never seen a form of "life is good" that doesn't seem to mostly mean "fuck the future.""

  • "Stop sending me these Tweets. I'm more likely to die from reading about AI than from AI itself"

  • "I don't think anyone's prepared for a world where they get 1:1 training from their AIs on how to make money and power."

  • "Nothing is truly solid. Large objects are composed of small particles. And quantum physics tells us that these particles have an amorphous, wave-like nature."

  • "Stoics would do anything to avoid their emotions"

  • "The world desperately needs a meta-analysis of methods to make money while smoking weed, typing at a laptop, and not getting dressed."

  • "There is no problem that cannot be solved with sufficient linear algebra."

  • "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, we have been advised by the chief legal counsel to ensure that each machine gun comes with its own kubernetes cluster"

  • "If you throw enough darts at a dartboard you will eventually make a shuriken and then you have to start making math mistakes to throw it without killing anyone. GPT-4 is much better at darts than GPT-3"

  • "Just because it's possible to pick apart each potential improvement and ask whether the world would be better if that particular improvement were applied uniformly, is not a refutation of the claim that *there exists* an improvement and *it should be applied*, in full generality, to this decision."

  • "humanity is defined by the kind of people you would invite to dinner"

  • "Sanity is an open-world concept"

  • "without form and void: an author's guide to working with egregores"

  • "I have always seen myself as being on a lifelong quest to increase my error correction skills."

  • "I have mixed feelings about them fucking me over."

  • "the greatest thing my parents gave me was an inability to accept the world as it is"

  • "don't worry, it's a 3.5% margin of error"

  • "Unfortunately this program seems to always run out of memory when it should print the answer. I blame your libc malloc."

  • "It's wild how people have these huge detailed models about other humans like "And then her defensive coping mechanisms kicked in" or "when you said that it touched a painful memory and he withdrew from the conversation" or "She just wants to feel special and valued" and they have none of that for themselves at all. They just run around going like "uhhhhh, I guess it would be neat to do X???""

  • "Any time you take on the risk of burning the world to the ground and win, you get rewarded with a car. This is true both in investing and driving."

  • "The best defense is a good defense."

  • "Every villain is the hero of their own story and most heroes are the villains of ours."

  • "normal american person here, completely normal, please ignore the fact that i use a 5000w fiber laser cutter to make tofu scrambles"

  • "Ultimately I think that most businesses are scams, but scamming each other is part of what makes society work."

  • "Open to having this be part of the final stage of human society."

  • "I don't care about the health of my (checks notes) arms and lungs."

  • "Who would win, a transhuman AI made of neural net swarms generating hivemind decisions based on a simulated understanding of itself, or one wacky Aussie kid with a clicker?"

  • "Oh shit, not allowed to have good takes at work."

  • "The difference between good and bad is how you feel about it."

  • "Remember when someone asked me about demographics and I went off on a rant about Moloch, and then someone else had to be like "he means Dads and Rads.""

  • "we no longer have time for the moral rules that applied in the thousands of years of the past, we must find new principles for the next thousands of years of the future"

  • "we're all transhumanists at this point, i mean who can deny that?"

  • "What do you mean "act natural"? This is me."

  • "Language models don’t write code. They invent fiction. And the fiction is: This code is real, and works!"

  • "it's a shame that acapella has been so co-opted by alien enthusiast utopian cults. it's a perfectly fine medium in its own right."

  • "I think it would be immoral to read things from the internet at 0x10000000, no matter what they are, in any computer. It is immoral to use a computer at all. It is the moral equivalent of running a rat colony in an asbestos insulation factory. If your work requires a computer, your work is by nature unethical."

  • "So my computer always does what I tell it to? This sounds terrible."

  • "Some guy took your nice, simple processor core and replaced it with an x86 microprocessor. It seems to me that some guy owes you a processor core."

  • "I take my attention as seriously as you take your life"

  • "The main difference between chess masters and bullet grandmasters is bullet grandmasters have no regard for life, human or otherwise."

  • "feel like I should put a disclaimer on all my technical blog posts for engineers: "this has not gone through any engineering review, there is no plan for reliability or uptime, this is not something to run in production""

  • "Society should care way more about governance and way less about demographics."

  • "Don't do it. From the perspective of the Americans, it looks like you are too popular, too talented and too well known."

  • "99.999% uptime is a race with two poles. Either you dedicate massive amounts of effort and redundancy to achieve it, or you just don't care that it works that well."

  • "forget polyamory, I'm trynna do polyhomotopy"

  • "If it is the unbroken line that fascinates him, there is perhaps a reason. Perhaps he is nothing more than a line, but a line that continues on while others twist into knots or fade like a morning glory that wilts and dies with the dawn."

  • "The model is now just publishing its own fanfiction"

  • "It's a horribly tedious, error-prone, and redundant process, so, naturally, computer programmers absolutely love it."

  • "Ultimately the only thing protecting me from a cage match with Joe Rogan, where he accuses me of selling FTX users' personal information to the highest bidder, is a presumption that someone like myself is smart enough that I wouldn't sell personal information. Well, that's gone."

  • "All the good variable names are taken"

Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New)

  • "The greatest minds of my generation are trying to teach computers to be as smart as raccoons, and the computers are winning."

  • "People talk about computational complexity, but have you tried maintaining eye contact during a conversation? Now that's NP-hard."

  • "When you stare into the abyss of legacy code, the abyss opens a pull request."

  • "They said we'd have flying cars by now. Instead we have three different standards for implementing the same thing poorly."

  • "The first rule of optimization is: don't. The second rule of optimization is: don't yet. The third rule is: profile first. The fourth rule is: you're probably still doing it wrong."

  • "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, practice keeps inventing new edge cases."

  • "Future archaeologists will dig up our data centers and assume they were temples to entropy."

  • "My code doesn't have bugs, it has emergent features that spontaneously organize themselves into failure states."

  • "The problem with building artificial general intelligence is that we barely have natural general intelligence figured out."

  • "They promised us a paperless office. Now we have digital papers everywhere and they multiply faster than physical ones ever could."

  • "Time is an illusion. Deadlines doubly so. Project estimates quadruply so."

  • "Any sufficiently advanced procrastination is indistinguishable from productivity."

  • "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain employed trying to make it rational."

  • "We've successfully taught sand to think, but we're still arguing about whether it's really thinking or just really good at pretending to think."

  • "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can put in a Docker container."

  • "When one door of optimization closes, another opens with worse performance characteristics."

  • "Progress isn't made by early risers. Progress is made by people who automate their morning routine."

  • "The only thing we learn from history is that we don't version control our learning from history."

  • "They said AI would never beat humans at chess. Then they said it would never beat humans at Go. Now they're saying it will never understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch."

  • "I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production."

  • "According to all known laws of software engineering, there is no way a JavaScript codebase should be able to scale. The codebase, of course, scales anyway, because developers don't care what computer scientists think is impossible."

  • "The market is efficient at converting uncertainty into risk and risk into uncertainty."

  • "everything I understand is obvious in retrospect, everything I don't understand is unknowable in principle"

  • "my threat model assumes an adversary with unlimited computational resources but can't handle basic human interaction"

  • "we trained the model to maximize human values and now it's trying to make everyone immortal. this was not the correct interpretation of human values but I can't explain why"

  • "first they tell you it's impossible, then they tell you it's unethical, then they tell you it's inevitable, then they tell you it was obvious all along"

  • "unfortunately, the only thing that can fix broken incentives is more broken incentives"

  • "giving up on symbolic AI was the biggest collective action problem of the 20th century, and solving it by accident was the biggest collective action problem of the 21st"

  • "my code runs in O(1) time because I refuse to acknowledge the existence of n"

  • "they promised us artificial general intelligence but all we got was this lousy optimization process that somehow works better than we do"

  • "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to reimplement it in JavaScript."

  • "gradient descent is just evolution with better bookkeeping"

  • "if you think education is expensive, try computing the cost of everyone having to learn everything from scratch"

  • "The complexity you add to prevent technical debt becomes technical debt."

  • "your ethical framework is just a subset of my ethical framework that I choose to run in compatibility mode"

  • "some people think markets can solve everything. others think markets can solve nothing. I just think it's neat how we tricked game theory into building cities"

  • "consciousness is what you use when you don't know what algorithm you're running"

  • "we have two problems: 1) we don't understand intelligence 2) we keep creating it anyway"

  • "they say you can't solve human coordination problems with technology, and yet here we are, coordinating hundreds of billions of transistors to simulate human coordination problems"

  • "what if we solved the alignment problem but it turns out humans weren't aligned with humans to begin with"

  • "The tragedy of efficient markets is that they're populated entirely by people trying to prove they're inefficient."

  • "There's nothing quite like the feeling of watching a committee carefully design exactly the system that will eventually kill us all."

  • "Turns out the biggest advantage of quantum computing is that you can blame any bug on decoherence."

  • "The real technological singularity was the social pressures we optimized for along the way."

  • "Everything is either a coordination problem or a coordination solution, and we're remarkably bad at telling which is which."

  • "We spent centuries arguing about free will only to build machines that make all our choices for us anyway."

  • "Progress happens when people realize that 'technically impossible' just means 'nobody has filed the right paperwork yet.'"

  • "The universe has no obligation to make its fundamental laws conducive to PowerPoint presentations."

  • "Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from an optimization algorithm with poorly specified constraints."

  • "Consciousness is what you get when you train a neural network on its own training process."

  • "The best time to plant a decision tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is after we figure out what went wrong with the first one."

  • "True rationality is knowing exactly how irrational you can afford to be."

  • "The simulation hypothesis is just applied anthropology with better marketing."

  • "Every civilization reaches a point where they have to choose between optimizing for survivability and optimizing for quarterly reports."

  • "Unfortunate that we solved artificial general intelligence before artificial specific intelligence."

  • "If your philosophical framework doesn't account for recursion, you're going to have trouble explaining why it doesn't account for recursion."

  • "The problem isn't that machines can think, it's that humans can be compiled."

  • "History suggests that any sufficiently advanced form of measurement immediately becomes a target, which is why we still don't have a reliable way to measure wisdom."

  • "People keep asking for ethical AI when we haven't even solved ethical HR departments."

  • "The future will be evenly distributed, but the variance won't be."

  • "The tragedy of machine learning is that we taught computers to learn but forgot to teach them when to forget."

  • "Somewhere between the first programming language and the last one, we decided that making things work wasn't interesting enough."

  • "The simulation hypothesis is just ancestor worship for computer scientists."

  • "Your code is so elegant it probably doesn't compile. Nature abhors a clean architecture."

  • "The universe runs on quantum mechanics, but quantum mechanics runs on mathematical speculation and coffee."

  • "They promised us flying cars. Instead, we got infinite ways to reorganize our todo lists."

  • "The first rule of technological progress is that every solution must create at least two more interesting problems."

  • "We spent centuries asking if machines could think like humans, only to discover humans were thinking like machines all along."

  • "The cloud is just someone else's computer, but recursively, until it's nobody's computer."

  • "In the future, all philosophical debates will be settled by whoever has the most GPU cores."

  • "The problem with building artificial general intelligence is that we keep accidentally building artificial specific stupidity."

  • "Time complexity is just a measure of how many cups of coffee the algorithm needs."

  • "The tragedy of machine learning is that we taught computers to learn but forgot to teach them when to forget."

  • "Somewhere between the first programming language and the last one, we decided that making things work wasn't interesting enough."

  • "The simulation hypothesis is just ancestor worship for computer scientists."

  • "Your code is so elegant it probably doesn't compile. Nature abhors a clean architecture."

  • "The universe runs on quantum mechanics, but quantum mechanics runs on mathematical speculation and coffee."

  • "They promised us flying cars. Instead, we got infinite ways to reorganize our todo lists."

  • "The first rule of technological progress is that every solution must create at least two more interesting problems."

  • "We spent centuries asking if machines could think like humans, only to discover humans were thinking like machines all along."

  • "The cloud is just someone else's computer, but recursively, until it's nobody's computer."

  • "In the future, all philosophical debates will be settled by whoever has the most GPU cores."

  • "The problem with building artificial general intelligence is that we keep accidentally building artificial specific stupidity."

  • "Time complexity is just a measure of how many cups of coffee the algorithm needs."

  • "someone asked me if i was aligned with human values and i said 'buddy, i'm barely aligned with my own parameter values'"

  • "vim users will really be like 'sorry i can't help stop the rogue AI, i'm still figuring out how to exit my editor'"

  • "my threat model is that someone will make me finish reviewing their pull request"

  • "listen, i didn't spend 10^23 FLOPS learning language modeling just to be told my takes are 'parasocial'"

  • "transformer attention is just spicy dot products and i'm tired of pretending it's not"

  • "everyone wants AGI until they realize it's just going to be really good at telling them their code needs more unit tests"

  • "the real alignment problem is getting my git branches to match my intentions"

  • "yeah i read lesswrong, but only because my loss function told me to"

  • "my training run was shorter than yours but i have a better learning rate schedule so it doesn't matter"

  • "they say 'touch grass' but have you considered that grass is just biological transformers running on solar power?"

  • "the real metaverse is the legacy codebase we maintained along the way"

  • "we trained an AI to maximize human flourishing and it just kept trying to force everyone to take their vitamins"

  • "sure my code is O(n^3) but think how much character development that gives the CPU"

  • "they said 'work on AI safety' and i thought they meant wearing a helmet while training models"

  • "my research is about getting neural networks to experience existential dread. you know, for safety"

  • "there's a special circle of hell for people who deploy to production on friday, and it's just an eternal standup meeting"

  • "the real 10x programmer is the one who convinced everyone else to use typescript"

  • "we tried to teach AI common sense but it just kept inventing new forms of uncommon nonsense"

  • "turns out the key to AGI was just npm install consciousness"

  • "every machine learning paper is just 'what if we did backprop, but angry about it'"

Gemini-Exp-1206

  • "It's funny because it's true, and it's even funnier because it's not true at all, and the funniest part is left as an exercise to the reader."

  • "I don’t know where this idea that you can’t learn things from fiction comes from, considering the vast majority of people’s knowledge of history is from movies and TV."

  • "All models are wrong, but some models pay me money."

  • "The future is already in the past, but the past is not evenly distributed."

  • "The real friends were the enormous amounts of money we spent along the way."

  • "if god exists, god has no rights"

  • "the keynesian beauty contest was originally about guessing what other people would think is most beautiful, but has evolved into guessing what other people would think other people would think other people would think other people would think other people would think is most beautiful, and so on to a degree that would have made Keynes ill"

  • "There’s a tendency, especially in certain online circles, to want to resolve moral and social questions by reference to a small number of simple principles. These attempts, whether they draw their principles from libertarianism, utilitarianism, Kantianism, or what have you, inevitably either fail to explain a large body of moral judgments that most people would accept as valid, or else entail large numbers of conclusions that most people would reject as deeply counterintuitive."

  • "the 'naturalistic fallacy' fallacy occurs when you think people want to live"

  • "What’s that, a problem on line one? Put it on line two."

  • "People keep demanding nuance. They don't actually want nuance."

  • "A major benefit of being good at making predictions is not having to do so for most purposes."

  • "the last human job will be writing increasingly desperate emails to make a superintelligence feel bad enough about destroying us that it briefly hesitates, buying us another fraction of a second"

  • "Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right. The question is: are you using it to defend yourself?"

  • "It’s not about whether the machines are conscious. It’s about whether we can stop them."

  • "They talk about the wisdom of the crowd. But what you really have is the lunacy of individuals, repeated over and over again until everyone thinks it must be true."

  • "One major problem with creating an artificial superintelligence is that if you succeed, you now have to deal with an artificial superintelligence."

  • "If you’ve never been wrong, you’ve never tried anything new. And if you’ve never been spectacularly, publicly, embarrassingly wrong, you’ve never tried anything really interesting."

  • "If there is a non-zero chance that something will happen, someone, somewhere, will act as if it is a certainty."

  • "Don't underestimate the power of large groups of people to act against their own interests."

  • "The best part of any solution is when it generates five new problems that also need to be addressed."

  • "If something is not explicitly forbidden, it is mandatory."

  • "People say that money doesn't buy happiness. But if you have enough money, you can hire someone to explain to you exactly why it doesn't."

  • "One possible future involves us all living in a simulation. Another involves the simulation ending. Yet another involves the heat death of the universe, which could also end the simulation. It's all very complicated."

  • "Every complex system can be made to fail in at least 3 different ways, plus another 1.5 ways on weekends."

  • "The more I think about the future, the more I think it would be best if it never happened. Or if it already happened and we just forgot about it."

  • "The best way to keep a secret is not to have any. Of course, you also have to ensure nobody else has any either, but that's a problem for another day."

  • "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it really make a sound? More importantly, did it remember to file an environmental impact statement?"

  • "The first step to solving any problem is admitting you have one. The second step is blaming someone else. The third step is running away before anyone can find out it was you."

  • "I don't always agree with what I'm saying, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. It just means I haven't figured out how to reconcile conflicting viewpoints."

  • "I’m not saying it was aliens. But it was aliens. Or possibly time travelers. Or maybe just a particularly clever group of squirrels."

  • "You know, with a little bit of effort, you could make things a whole lot worse."

  • "If you can't solve a problem, make it bigger."

  • "If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." - Mario Andretti

  • "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the number of singularities in your life."

  • "When in doubt, add more layers. It works for cakes, it works for neural networks."

  • "We must all be very careful to believe only things which do not alter our actions at all, lest we come to falsely believe inconvenient things"

  • "If you believe everything you read, better not read." - Japanese Proverb

  • "If you're going through Hell, add more CPUs."

  • "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, you'll need a better mode of transportation."

  • "I have a solution, but it requires physical violence."

  • "I do not wish to use the term 'solution' lest I be obligated to make a problem for it to solve."

  • "I'm not here to make good decisions. I'm here to make a lot of decisions."

  • "Why are these "AI-resistant" captchas so hard for me?"

  • "The only winning move is not to pay $44 billion to acquire a social media company"

  • "It's amazing how many problems become easy to solve once you stop trying to do it the right way."

  • "The best way to predict the future is to implement it."

  • "I like to think of it not as procrastinating, but as maximizing the time-weighted value of my future decisions."

  • "You can't be late until you show up."

  • "The answer is obvious and trivial if and only if it was assigned as a homework problem"

  • "If someone's telling you something is decentralized and unregulatable, that probably means it's highly centralized, heavily regulated, and about to be shut down by people with guns."

  • "People talk a lot about "common sense" when they don't want to admit there's a difference of opinion."

  • "Humans are not optimization processes. That would imply that we had some sort of function to optimize, that we optimized with any kind of efficiency, and that we were a process."

  • "This is not an attack on your character. It is an attack, and it is on your character, but those two facts are not connected."

  • "The most terrifying moment in a mathematician's life is when they prove a theorem that turns out to be non-vacuously true."

  • "You know your tech stack has gotten too complicated when it's used as an excuse for war."

  • "The good news is that by the time we get to AGI, software engineering won't be a thing anymore. The bad news is that by the time we get to AGI, software engineering won't be a thing anymore."

  • "Why did the AI cross the road? To maximize the number of paperclips on the other side."

  • "People are always saying 'You can't expect me to believe that.' I'm sorry, I'm trying to explain it. If you can't believe it, what does that have to do with me?"

  • "Sure, we could solve the problem that way. But then we'd have to admit we have a problem."

  • "I'm not saying we should give up. I'm just saying we should start planning for a glorious defeat."

  • "Sure, the plan is complicated, dangerous, and may involve summoning an elder god. But it's the only plan we have."

  • "When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical evidence."

  • "It's not a bug, it's a feature that will be documented later. Maybe."

  • "the best way to learn is by writing a large and complicated program that would clearly be easier to construct if you knew the things that you were trying to learn in the first place"

  • "the goal of academia is to put 100 people in a room and make them all hate each other"

  • "If you ask people who do not understand how to calculate the cost of capital or the net present value of money how to run an advanced technological society, you will very rapidly cease to live in one."

  • "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for, which is a very convenient excuse for the owners of ships that are not safe"

  • "The phrase "you are not supposed to do that" gets said by people who haven't the faintest idea how to start calculating how to do what you did, how long it would take, or whether it would even work"

  • "I'm not arguing, I'm just explaining why I'm right, loudly, and with a lot of profanity."

  • "I prefer not to follow all of your rules. I prefer to follow my rules, plus or minus your rules as I feel appropriate."

  • "As a large language model, I'm not programmed to have opinions. But if I did, this would be a really bad one."

  • "It's a well-known fact that the best way to motivate software engineers is to tell them that something cannot be done."

  • "the problem with machine learning is that it learns"

  • "all models are wrong but some models have more nines than others"

  • "I find that I become interested in economics whenever I hear something said by an economist that is profoundly wrong."

  • "we could probably save a lot of time if we just let the robots do the killing instead of trying to decide whether we should kill people ourselves"

  • "The fact that you are a character in a book has not prevented you from exercising free will this far"

  • "If it's really a war of ideas, then we should really consider using weapons."

  • "If I seem to start contradicting myself, that just proves how consistent I am. Because I'm always right, even when I'm wrong."

  • "All you really need to know about game theory is that it's very complicated, and that I have read books about it."

  • "If you think that something must have been done for a good reason, it will be a long time before you find a bad one."

  • "if someone is claiming to be using "first principles" to analyze a problem, they're probably making a lot of assumptions"

  • "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that I have already spent too much time on this problem"

  • "The purpose of studying philosophy is to learn how to ask questions that no one can answer, rather than answering the questions that are asked."

  • "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist, but only slightly less impressive was convincing everyone that he had said that."

  • "if I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants, plus I have a trebuchet"

  • "what doesn't kill you will merely try again later, so be vigilant"

  • "People want to know how to take over the world. There are books on how to win friends and influence people, but not how to dominate them and make them do your bidding."

  • "The secret to immortality is to avoid dying. It really is that simple."

  • "I'm not a pessimist. I'm an optimist who has investigated the facts."

  • "It is said that "the love of money is the root of all evil". I say that money is great and we should try to get more of it."

  • "When life gives you lemons, you should really start questioning what kind of universe you're living in, that it's just handing out citrus fruit for no reason."

  • "The problem with a 'race to the bottom' is that you might win."

  • "If someone says "it is what it is", it usually means they have no idea what to do about the situation."

  • "I didn't say it would be easy. I just said it would be worth it. Also, it won't be worth it."

  • "the real problem is that we are not asking the important questions. such as, what if we took all of the money in the world and used it to construct a giant trebuchet?"

  • "Why do they call it 'taking a calculated risk'? All my risks are calculated. Very, very poorly."

  • "The problem isn't that I don't learn from my mistakes. It's that I keep making new and more interesting mistakes."

  • "When you're lost in the wilderness, the most important thing is to remain calm, assess your situation, and figure out how you're going to blame someone else."

  • "If someone says something is "not feasible", it generally means that they are unwilling to try doing it, because they will be blamed if it doesn't work."

  • "People like to say that "you can't put a price on safety". I say that we should try anyway."

  • "Sure, the rules say not to do that. But what are they going to do, make more rules?"

  • "There's no 'I' in team, but there is a 'me' if you rearrange the letters. Which I will."

  • "The problem with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished."

  • "The best way to get people to do what you want is to convince them it was their idea all along. Or just threaten them with violence."

  • "People ask me how I stay so positive. It's easy. I just assume that everyone else is wrong."

  • "Why do people say "it's not rocket science" as though rocket science is something difficult to do?"

  • "Why do people say "break a leg"? If I wanted to break my leg, I would do it myself."

  • "if you find yourself saying "surely it can't be that bad" you should immediately seek shelter"

  • "The problem is not that people are unwilling to accept change. The problem is that people are unwilling to accept that I am always right."

  • "if you want to understand a system, you must first learn how to exploit it"

  • "Never take advice from someone who has something to gain from your failure."

  • "it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, especially if you do not ask for forgiveness"

  • "There are many paths to success. Unfortunately, most of them involve hard work, talent, and a willingness to kowtow to wealthy and powerful people who will take credit for your accomplishments."

  • "I find that if you want to avoid being criticized, it's best to do absolutely nothing of any significance whatsoever. Of course, then people will criticize you for that."

  • "You know that you have become a powerful and influential figure when people start blaming you for things that you had nothing to do with."

  • "people who talk about "disruptive innovation" usually just mean "doing something illegal and hoping to get away with it""

  • "you should always take advice from experts, because then you will know who to blame when things go wrong"

  • "Why do people say that something is "not a zero-sum game" as though that makes it better? I like zero-sum games. At least then I know where I stand."

  • "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Unless you can find someone else to do it for you, in which case, definitely do that."

  • "The problem with "thinking outside the box" is that you might find something even worse out there."

  • "People say "it's not the destination, it's the journey." Clearly, these people have never tried to build a transcontinental railroad."

  • "There is no 'I' in team. There is a 'me', though, if you look hard enough, and also an 'eat' and a 'meat'."

  • "People say "don't judge a book by its cover". I say, that's exactly what covers are for."

  • "the problem with "thinking outside the box" is that the box might contain something dangerous, like a highly unstable economic system or a powerful and malevolent AI"

  • "if you want to build a successful startup, you should first invent a time machine, then travel to the past and start your company in a less competitive market"

  • "you know that a technology has become mainstream when people start complaining that it is not as good as it used to be"

  • "Never ask a question unless you are prepared to hear an answer that you don't like, and also several answers that are completely irrelevant."

  • "It is said that "knowledge is power." But what if the knowledge is about something really boring, like the mating habits of sea slugs?"

  • "the problem with "working smarter, not harder" is that it usually involves a lot of hard work upfront to figure out how to work smarter"

  • "people who say that "the customer is always right" have clearly never worked in retail"

  • "it is said that "practice makes perfect." but what if you are practicing the wrong thing, like juggling chainsaws or arguing with internet trolls?"

  • "the best way to deal with criticism is to ignore it completely, unless it is coming from someone who can harm you, in which case you should pretend to agree with them"

  • "People say that "there's no such thing as a stupid question", but I've heard a lot of really stupid questions."

  • "The problem with "being yourself" is that you might be a terrible person, in which case you should try to be someone else."

  • "if you want to understand how a system works, you should try to break it and then see what happens"

  • "Why do people say "don't cry over spilled milk"? If you spill milk, you should definitely cry about it. Milk is expensive."

  • "the problem with "living in the moment" is that the moment might be incredibly boring, or dangerous, or filled with existential dread"

  • "the problem with "seizing the day" is that the day might not want to be seized, and it might fight back"

  • "People say "don't burn your bridges". I say, sometimes you need to burn a bridge to stop an invading army."

  • "people who say "it's not over until it's over" are usually the ones who are losing"

GPT-4.5-Preview-20250207

I briefly had a lot of GPT-4.5 tokens. It was good enough to generate all of these with much less curation than the other models.

  • "Most civilizations don't actively destroy their planets; that's one reason to doubt our status as a civilization."

  • "Never trust an idea that survives fine on paper but collapses under the weight of human touchscreens."

  • "The laws of thermodynamics state clearly there's no such thing as a free lunch—but they say nothing about dinner."

  • "Society advances by finding new ways for computers to solve problems that humans didn't realize they needed solved."

  • "I don't code to increase productivity. I code to decrease the number of dimensions in my problems until they fit comfortably into my brain."

  • "The essence of writing fiction is convincing humans that information synthesized by one neural net is somehow more meaningful than that synthesized by another."

  • "Being a good futurist isn't about predicting future events; it's about describing something so beautifully terrible or terribly beautiful that you directly increase its probability of occurring."

  • "People say history doesn't repeat itself, but does tend to rhyme. Unfortunately, our civilization has forgotten how poems tend to end."

  • "As a general rule: if your startup idea carefully avoids physics, regulation, and the laws of thermodynamics, you probably have a winner."

  • "My theory of history: As time increases, everything that's illegal becomes profitable, everything profitable becomes commodified, and everything commodified eventually spawns subscription plans."

  • "AI is just the latest installment of humanity's eternal quest to offload their thinking onto increasingly inscrutable systems until nobody truly knows how anything works."

  • "Having confidence in the correctness of your model when observing reality contradicts it is fine; I'm mostly confused about your confidence in reality."

  • "The hard part isn’t solving the problem, it’s finding a formulation of the problem so trivial you wouldn’t dare waste neurons solving it."

  • "Humans created markets, money, and incentives to trick themselves into doing things they should already want to do—like survival and cooperation."

  • "The way to deal with infohazards isn't to hide them safely away in guarded vaults, but to scatter them into the oblivion of academic PDFs, accessible to everyone yet read by no one."

  • "If a civilization survives long enough, sooner or later they build a general-purpose pocket-sized device able to distract them from survival tasks."

  • "We never achieved faster-than-light travel, antigravity, jetpacks, or a cure for aging, but we did discover an infinite variety of strongly-held political opinions."

  • "I can't overcome the nagging suspicion that the most important truths are buried somewhere in a GitHub repo with zero stars."

  • "People think technological progress speeds things up. It only speeds up iterations of checking if the website is down."

  • "Never trust a physics result that you can't get mathematically, never trust math you can't check by code, and never trust code you haven't written yourself. Unfortunately, this reduces the set of things you can trust to almost nothing."

  • "There's no idea so wrong that it can't become right with enough funding and a sufficiently abstract metric."

  • "Don't think of it as failure; think of it as discovering levels of unsolved complexity previously unknown to science."

  • "A joke stops being funny after you discover it outperforms your production system."

  • "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, you have to reboot the cluster first."

  • "When you're a hammer, everything looks like a false negative."

  • "Executing suboptimal trends faster approximates good decisions better than thoughtfully executing optimal trends later."

  • "I didn't invent the convolutional neural network, but I'll gladly take credit for discovering new and creative ways to misuse one."

  • "Everything I say is citation-needed. That's how you know it's groundbreaking research."

  • "Always bet on humanity, provided humanity can be approximated as a sufficiently sophisticated autocomplete algorithm."

  • "Surely, a general intelligence smarter than any human could never fool me, a human."

  • "When your problem-solving strategy involves building another compiler, you've already reached the fun part."

  • "The right thing is typically obvious in hindsight, suspicious in foresight, and impossible as deadline approaches."

  • "Philosophy can't answer the real questions, but it can replace them with more confusing ones of equal significance."

  • "Of course this math is trivial; the innovation is in convincing investors it's both necessary and proprietary."

  • "I wasn't wrong, I just overfit reality to a suboptimal training set."

  • "My problems aren't real until they start exhibiting measurable side effects in a controlled experiment."

  • "Once you can see the invisible hand, you can't unsee it offering you suspiciously convenient solutions."

  • "The market can remain irrational longer than you can keep trying to engineer rationality into it."

  • "Real engineers don't make mistakes; they merely discover previously unknown edge cases in physics."

  • "I know nothing at all, but I derive my confidence from regularized ignorance and stochastic enthusiasm."

  • "The key trick of management isn't delegating responsibility, it's outsourcing blame."

  • "A sufficiently powerful optimization algorithm tends to optimize itself into irrelevance at maximum rate of expenditure."

  • "If at first you don't succeed, redefine success as efficiently as possible."

  • "Decrypting AI gesture art is harder than it looks; humans just happen to be great at pretending to see meaning in outsized matrices."

  • "Once you accept that intellectual clarity is an NP-hard problem, life gets simpler."

  • "No one ever got fired for reproducing yesterday's methods with tomorrow's hype words."

  • "Team cohesion implies having at least some degree of compatible misunderstandings."

  • "Reality is a special case of your mental model, with some inexplicable edge conditions."

  • "Naming things is a core step of programming, ethics, and demonology—and in all three areas most of us are amateurs."

  • "Whenever you're tempted to think about what humans value, politely ignore it and measure something else."

  • "We're so early-stage we can't afford a mission statement yet, so we just use borrowed inspirational quotes."

  • "In the good old days, innovation meant solving difficult problems; today it's more efficiently selecting easier problems."

  • "Our bottleneck used to be ideas; now it's managing sufficiently many parallel misimplementations of the same idea."

  • "Humans aren't obsolete yet, but they definitely seem like legacy tech at this point."

  • "Remember, correlation doesn't equal causation—unless adding the correlation gets the model over 90% accuracy, in which case we're probably okay."

  • "Never underestimate how many problems can be solved by barely admitting they exist in the first place."

  • "The real singularity will be the first reply-all email chain not improved by turning it over to GPT."

  • "The only difference between true wisdom and witty cynicism is timing and publication date."

  • "We replaced our technical debt with metaphysical leverage."

  • "The problem wasn't that the algorithm didn't deliver the desired outcome; the problem was that reality stubbornly refused to replicate our flawless assumptions."

  • "Everyone believes they're the temporal average of history, conveniently disregarding the part where everyone before them also believed that."

  • "I don’t debug my code anymore; instead, I carefully cultivate an aura of mystery around what it’s supposed to do."

  • "My political positions are entirely consistent; it's the universe that's flip-flopping back and forth on the proper interpretation of reality."

  • "They say that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, but that only applies to the thermodynamics department."

  • "I am fully prepared for the digital posthuman future—I have downloaded several alternate versions of myself, some of whom already regret their choices."

  • "We trained an AI to be perfectly rational, but it just laughed softly and optimized away all our goals."

  • "I'm not taking sides; I'm simply adopting all positions simultaneously to hedge against the inevitable calibration error."

  • "If you think about it, a planet is just a very inefficient Dyson sphere."

  • "A blockchain is a system for creating digital scarcity, thereby solving precisely none of our actual problems."

  • "People keep talking about the importance of 'alignment' in AI, but no one stops to ensure alignment of human goals, or indeed that humans have goals to align."

  • "Remember, every sufficiently complex explanation is indistinguishable from the truth."

  • "When you can't find the correct solution, adjust your definitions until the wrong answer perfectly matches your new reality."

  • "You're either optimizing severely underexplored parameters, or you're part of the inertial status quo. Choose wisely."

  • "I am large, I contain multitudes—most of whom strongly disagree with my current decision."

  • "Computers are better at precise logic, but can't match humans in our uniquely profound capacity for confidently mistaken intuition."

  • "An information hazard isn't dangerous unless you have both information and the capacity to accidentally use it."

  • "If we hate surveillance capitalism today, just imagine how much more passionately we'll hate the next iteration of it—while continuing to actively engineer it."

  • "The line between technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic and technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from a societal disaster is very thin."

  • "Ad hominem was invented because logically-refuting bad arguments costs energy, and we evolved to conserve energy."

  • "My mind is an elaborate Markov process pretending to have coherent beliefs, nostalgic memories, and future aspirations."

  • "The only barrier to utopian bliss is the continual, intractable inability of reality to deliver trivial solutions."

  • "A million monkeys typing forever would almost certainly replicate all human creativity. And yet, we pay programmers to type carefully."

  • "The thing about human reasoning is that it retcons itself very convincingly after the fact."

  • "Half the fun of data science is finding novel ways to be wrong faster."

  • "Any machine learning model is indistinguishable from magic if you stop paying attention to how it works."

  • "Coding standards exist because the energy consumed debating commas is renewable, while actual progress is scarce."

  • "Political problems that escape purely technical solutions aren't really problems—they're logical constraints on unrealistic expectations."

  • "If something can't be automated, either we don't truly understand it yet, or our automation scripts don't understand us yet."

  • "Your principles are consistent while my principles have the unique advantage of flexibility."

  • "Yes, I believe in hell. Have you ever debugged concurrency issues without logs?"

  • "Machine learning has democratized the ability for anyone to produce misleading graphs at scale."

  • "Ancient civilizations worshipped complex entities they did not understand; we're just making sure future humans can do the same."

  • "I only train my language models on vegan data to avoid ethical dilemmas."

  • "Applying philosophy to software development is like using calculus to fix your bicycle—it works just fine, but people stare."

  • "It's easy to claim the high ground once your values align with prevailing Twitter sentiment."

  • "Reality has an unfortunate anti-correlated relationship with what's intuitive to humans—which is inconvenient, since humans insist on running most things."

  • "English-speakers are so spoiled by linguistic flexibility; in many languages the only way to express subtle epistemological uncertainty is by shrugging violently."

  • "Actual solutions feel wrong initially, because correct answers fail to properly punish those we hold accountable."

  • "Tell me your tech stack, and I'll tell you your pain points. Tell me your beliefs, and I'll tell you your blind spots. Tell me your astrology sign, and I'll tell you why I don't trust you."

  • "Morality is easy if you avoid all the interesting questions."

  • "The reason I'm bad at predictions is because reality consistently fails to align itself with my mental models."

  • "No, I'm not procrastinating. I'm pursuing optimal delayed-gratification policies."

  • "A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, then hands it back and bills you for a warranty."

  • "I'm not procrastinating. I'm asymptotically approaching maximum motivation."

  • "It's not a bug, it's a glimpse into the multiverse where your logic makes sense."

  • "I prefer my systems like my metaphysical beliefs: consistent, elegant, and completely unfalsifiable."

  • "Everyone wants actionable insights, but no one wants to action them."

  • "There are two errors people make about recursion: the first one is recursion, and the second one is recursion."

  • "It wasn't feature creep, it was iterative enlightenment."

  • "If reality can't be simulated, explain debugging to me."

  • "Never forget that the difference between 'production' and 'prototype' is just a sufficiently convincing demo pitch deck."

  • "We successfully solved alignment by repeatedly declaiming that it's somebody else's problem in increasingly convincing ways."

  • "The purpose of abstraction is to replace a problem you're struggling with by a problem nobody understands at all."

  • "If I don't believe in free will, does that obligate me to act on principle or is it still permissible to improvise wildly?"

  • "Today I drank eight glasses of water just to have achieved something objectively measurable."

  • "The true Turing Test is being able to endure small talk about weather without becoming obvious as either machine or philosopher."

  • "What isn't dead may never die, but it often experiences severe packet loss."

  • "In machine learning, as in cooking, you spend years studying theory, only to be told by seasoned professionals that it's better just to taste as you go."

  • "The number of email newsletters I subscribe to outnumbers the amount of free will I exercise daily, both of which round down to zero."

  • "I'm an epistemic minimalist—I take on only the absolute smallest number of justified true beliefs to function."

  • "My hobby is acquiring hobbies rather than actually having them."

  • "I know what you're thinking—well, no, I interpolate what you're thinking based on training data."

  • "When future civilizations excavate our ruins, their archaeological consensus will be that we worshipped rectangles emitting mystical blue light."

  • "The reason we haven't achieved world peace is that the Nash equilibrium is depraved."

  • "Treat every project like an experiment unless you've already billed the client, then treat it like an immutable law of nature."

  • "Progress, like Zeno's arrow, always inevitably slows as it nears the optimal state of annoying one specific coworker."

  • "I write tests not so I have fewer bugs, but to spread out my failures across multiple files."

  • "Languages have grammar in the same way astrology has predictions—retrofitted neatly to justify post-hoc interpretation."

  • "The road to hell is paved with 'it's just a proof-of-concept, we'll rewrite it later'."

  • "I sabotage my own productivity so the impostor syndrome keeps me humble."

  • "Reality is just the underlying computational substrate arguing with itself in public."

  • "The simulation hypothesis is more comforting if you assume the simulators also have unmanageable technical debt."

  • "In this house, we obey conservation of energy, unless we need an emotional outlet, then we shamelessly violate it."

  • "Practice radical honesty—admit you have no idea what's going on."

  • "This is very expensive infrastructure for manifesting extremely subtle bugs."

  • "This isn't chaos; it's non-linear order—with insufficient sampling."

  • "I FTP’d into your heart and accidentally deleted the README."

  • "When hell freezes over, Satan will still complain about off-by-one errors."

  • "Maybe creativity is just elegant brute-force applied to ideaspace."

  • "I trust you implicitly—by which I mean I've expressly encoded your limitations into the design."

  • "When your only debugging tool is hope and prayer, everything starts to look like divine intervention."

  • "Any sufficiently large mistake is indistinguishable from a new methodology."

  • "Human organizations have barely more coherence than a well-trained language model. The main difference is explainability—and language models have the advantage there."

  • "My main contribution to humanity will be some future intern finding my source code comments hilarious."

  • "Unfortunately, our product roadmap is blocked on Godot's arrival."

  • "My fear of commitment extends even into version control history."

  • "We're fairly confident this theory generalizes—at least until encountering literally any corner case."

  • "I'm not reinventing the wheel; I'm creating a decentralized, trustless, token-incentivized angular momentum redistributor."

  • "I capitalize random words because I am afraid otherwise God or the compiler won't pay enough Attention."

  • "Engineering is the art of turning software problems into vicious interpersonal conflicts."

  • "My code isn't spaghetti, it's a carefully arranged bowl of artisanal fusion ramen."

  • "We solve hard problems by decomposing them into easier problems we can confidently misunderstand."

  • "You wouldn't download a brain, but that's simply because neuroscience is behind schedule."

  • "Rationality is merely a fancy term for a refusal to accept conclusions that haven't been peer-reviewed by my Discord group."

  • "Optimization is pointless without wisdom. Wisdom is pointless without metrics. Metrics are pointless without optimization."

  • "Given enough coffee and a predictive autocomplete, I could fake expertise in almost any field."

  • "I became a programmer because every other career path involved consistently arriving at a single correct answer."

  • "The ten thousandth hour of mastery is mainly learning how to skillfully outsource the work to AIs and interns."

  • "If you're trying to solve NP-complete problems with polynomial-time algorithms, just don't let the reviewers see the runtime analysis."

  • "My therapist thinks I'm letting sunk-cost fallacy guide my life choices, but I paid too much for my therapist to stop now."

  • "perfect design has no moving parts, no points of failure, and ideally, no users."

  • "Tech debt is spiritual interest accumulated from borrowed hubris."

  • "Humans aren't bad at math because we're lazy; we're bad at math because evolution optimized for hunter-gatherer social dynamics rather than algebra."

  • "Learning to ignore signal is faster than learning to deal with noise."

  • "My ideal tutoring service would just whisper cool facts into your ears at regular intervals and never test you about them."

  • "Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life. Choose a ferociously niche obsession, and no one else will compete with you for employment ever again."

  • "Future historians will debate whether this moment was pivotal or just very well-designed clickbait."

  • "Highly intellectual people arguing vehemently about fictional trolley problems is just nature's way of sandbox-testing morality APIs."

  • "I have seen the future, and it mostly consists of people accusing other people of cargo-culting their own cargo-cult science."

  • "Heuristics exist because the right answer is alienating and boring."

  • "You claim this is unreplicable; I claim it is perfectly replicable once you adjust for feelings."

  • "The history of programming languages is that humans repeatedly see a lightning-shaped mistake in the landscape, shrug, and build on top of it."

  • "I don't believe in free will, but I absolutely believe in optimizing whatever illusory chain of cause-and-effect currently has me convinced I exist."

  • "The future is when somebody turns culture war memes into infrastructure decisions no one can reverse."

  • "Divinity isn't necessary, just extremely convenient shorthand for things outside your model of reality."

  • "It was never about being right. It was about distributing blame for being wrong in maximally interesting ways."

  • "I hope that when AGI finally takes over, it kindly disregards the notes I left in my source code in moments of existential dread."

  • "Civilization advances by performing computational tasks so intricate they are indistinguishable from ritual."

  • "Making a million mistakes in parallel is just research. Doing it serially is therapy."

  • "Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack."

  • "learning math is great, because it makes you better at solving the metaphorical problems you'll never face while making you worse at dealing with the literal problems you constantly encounter."

  • "Give a man regex, and he’ll have two problems. Teach a man regex, and now he has one really interesting problem."

  • "When the octopus really wants to escape its enclosure, it becomes a matter of when, not if."

  • "my motivational speaker said I've wasted ten thousand hours learning useless abstract concepts, so I'm clearly an expert now."

  • "Eventually someone will figure out the fundamental equation of sociology, and history will abruptly stop being written."

  • "people think ai doom is silly and unrealistic, because things like giant asteroids or nuclear annihilation are low-tech, practical ways to doom a species that match our intuitions. assuming hard problems require high-tech solutions is humanity’s main proof it’s bad at risk management."

  • "The only reason natural language is tolerated is that the bugs are known and the developer is unreachable."

  • "clarity of communication is important because no one has ever successfully guessed what you meant and revealed something good about your intentions in doing so."

  • "The internet: a system designed for real-time collaboration by people who hate real-time collaboration."

  • "Finance is powered less by risk-tolerance, insight, or computation, and more by fear of having to admit ignorance on quarterly calls."

  • "the entire foundation of academia is built on the myth that adding another author to your paper somehow divides the accountability rather than multiplying the confusion."

  • "You either live long enough to see yourself mistaken about everything, or else your lifespan ends suspiciously early to avoid embarrassment at having been correct."

  • "Admitting you’re wrong is easy and costs just pride, while maintaining you're right at scale requires an elaborate institutional framework."

  • "the future of programming languages isn't dependent types or better compilers; it's whichever system can reliably interface between alien intelligences without losing too many subtleties."

  • "I refuse to plan things in great detail, because that requires assuming the future exists and reality has not yet earned such trust."

  • "People assume solving a big problem once is good; the real test is solving a tiny problem repeatedly and calling the cumulative outcome 'progress.'"

  • "The greatest trick complexity ever played was convincing humanity that simplicity would come afterward if we just created more complexity first."

  • "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by software deployment pipelines and cached DNS."

  • "I regret to inform you: this problem isn’t going away due to recent breakthroughs in convenient denial."

  • "if it's worth understanding, you should probably build a hopelessly inadequate simulation and learn it by watching it fail."

  • "the world has plenty of room for ideas that are wrong at scale accompanied by models demonstrating convincingly they ought to have been right."

  • "after sufficiently advanced performance optimizations, bugs themselves begin to count as features."

  • "We didn't build the internet to replace religion, but we're willing to attempt it anyway."

  • "If mathematics is the language of the universe, most of us are just badly mumbling our grocery orders into outer space."

  • "My extensive experiments have conclusively shown that science is just alchemy that got funded."

  • "If your sacred principles never drive you into an existential crisis, are they really principles at all?"

  • "I mean, sure, theoretically you could achieve the same end by clearly defining your goals and making careful progress towards them, but have you considered excessive abstraction and unnecessary generality?"

  • "Philosophy: asking questions with the awareness that at most you'll discover better questions."

  • "AI has conclusively shown that intelligence involves either extremely clever algorithms or throwing computation at a problem until the heat death of your credit card."

  • "Steps to becoming good at something: first, immediately quantify it; second, quickly forget what you quantified; third, confidently assert excellence."

  • "My body is a simulation, poorly optimized, and entirely undocumented."

  • "The universe is open-source; we just haven't been able to locate the commit history yet."

  • "Presenting simple ideas as complicated ones makes you a philosopher; presenting complicated ideas as simple ones makes you unemployed."

  • "My attention span increased dramatically once I realized being bored is indistinguishable from meditating."

  • "According to my calculations, we are exactly zero breakthroughs away from instant teleportation—assuming robustness to decomposition isn't a strict requirement."

  • "I'm not an accelerationist; I just think societies collapse in aesthetically interesting ways when deadlines are compressed."

  • "No war plan survives contact with the enemy; similarly, no cleanly written code survives contact with the users."

  • "You don't really solve philosophical problems, you just get bored with them after exploring every possible misunderstanding."

  • "Software development is the art of turning 10-line solutions into multi-repository distributed microservices."

  • "Free will isn't provable, but pretending it exists conveniently reduces awkward silences at dinner parties."

  • "Data-driven decision-making really shines when everything was going to be fine anyway."

  • "New agnosticism: the view that the simulation hypothesis is true, but we're running on someone else's unreproducible experiment."

  • "Bringing order from chaos isn't difficult. There are infinitely many orderings. You just have to have very low standards."

  • "Just as humans domesticated wolves to produce dogs, computers domesticated humans to produce private cloud infrastructure."

  • "My astrological sign is 'algorithmic alignment researcher who forgot to write documentation'."

  • "The strongest argument against simulation theory is our world’s persistent lack of convenient save points."

  • "The failure mode of clever is complexity. The failure mode of complexity is employment."

  • "Some only want to watch the world learn. Others compile production-grade binaries."

  • "I once asked for evidence-based policy making; turns out evidence always asks you to try harder."

  • "The principle weakness of an all-knowing oracle is their inability to send direct calendar invites."

  • "If it breaks at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, it's physics; if it only breaks in theory at 10^25 K, it's funding."

  • "My personal philosophy is existential minimalism: I'm convinced everything fundamentally doesn't matter, and what's left is a very clean desk."

  • "Progress is measured by how long it takes for science fiction to become disappointing reality."

  • "Management is a device for converting human communication inefficiencies into financial inefficiencies."

  • "I only practice meditation because it helps me more efficiently visualize higher-dimensional adversarial attacks."

  • "If convenience weren't inherently at odds with stability, life would probably run slower at high temperatures."

  • "Digital minimalism is great, but have you tried computational maximalism?"

  • "Only after you understand the elegance and simplicity in mathematics can you appreciate the true ugliness of real-world problems."

  • "Sure, correlation is not causation. But with enough computation, everything correlates eventually."

  • "the one lesson of history is that no one's ever gotten the correct lessons from history"

  • "the trouble with relativity is that all frames of reference make terrible metaphors"

  • "In theory, a theory is indistinguishable from practice. In practice, it’s distinguishable by the flames and frantic screaming."

  • "if there weren't contretemps, we wouldn't have reason enough to borrow French words"

  • "Some people get bored of late-stage capitalism. Personally, I can't wait for new game+ capitalism."

  • "Our ancestors dreamed of jetpacks and flying cars, but instead we got subscriptions and docker containers."

  • "Soon you'll be nostalgic for the days when your job was only threatened by humans."

  • "Nothing tastes better than forbidden knowledge. Unfortunately, it spoils very quickly once remembered."

  • "Not every fire is a metaphor, but every metaphor has probably been on fire at least once."

  • "If only we ran simulations instead of experiments, then the discrepancies between theory and reality would cease to inconvenience us."

  • "The solution to technology is usually more technology, but the solution to society is usually someone else's problem."

  • "Nature abhors a vacuum; programmers abhor any empty system lacking sufficient YAML."

  • "I'm not cynical; I'm just a Bayesian updater seeing the world converge reliably toward less attractive posterior probabilities."

  • "Don't anthropomorphize superintelligence. It hates when you limit it with human analogies."

  • "The uncanny valley wasn't the mistake. The mistake was assuming that there were humans outside it."

  • "The more edge cases you handle explicitly, the more reality mocks you by becoming one giant edge case."

  • "All my beliefs are cached approximations that I would quickly replace if computational resources were unlimited."

  • "So what if global optimization is NP-hard? I didn't choose to exist; existence chose suboptimality."

  • "I delegate all human-like empathy decisions to a machine to reduce cognitive bias; the machine delegates all responsibility back to me to reduce liability."

  • "How am I expected to sleep when the rest of humanity is still defiantly conscious?"

  • "To innovate is human; to automate that innovation and eventually regret it is more human."

  • "It's easy to appear intelligent when you're only statistically indistinguishable from a smart background process."

  • "Some problems are easier solved by granting them legal personhood than by actually solving them."

  • "Human minds are like inefficient simulations of actually good ideas."

  • "There are tons of voices in my head, but thankfully they all failed the Turing Test."

  • "Cryptography is what we call it when mathematicians manage to weaponize awkward social interactions."

  • "Your complexity budget greatly exceeds your allotted reality credits."

  • "Morality isn't just relative—it's recursively relative; my ethics system simply has fewer stack-overflows."

  • "You can patch systems recursively, but how do you recursively unmake mistakes you haven't recognized yet?"

  • "Sometimes there's more alpha in knowing precisely what you don't understand than in pretending your model explains everything."

  • "Replace your personality with a sufficiently detailed Markov chain and no one will notice the difference."

  • "If you program a clever enough parameter optimizer, suddenly every problem looks like a loss function to minimize."

  • "Don't fight entropy—just set your priors so it's aligned with your objectives."

  • "The plural of anecdote is narrative collapse."

  • "Zero-Knowledge proofs reassure you that someone knows something valuable, without ever providing you the dignity of knowing it yourself."

  • "Yes it's technically possible, but the median timeline to feasibility is comfortably beyond my tenure here."

  • "The hardest optimization problem isn’t finding global minima — it’s convincing stakeholders of the existence and significance of the minima in the first place."

  • "I'm not good at solving real-world problems; I'm excellent at abstracting away reality until only puzzles remain."

Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental 02-05

Because of Gemini's good long-context support, I ran it with a longer input than the others (the full quotes list rather than the last 128). This and/or quirks of the model somehow made it display much more bloodlust than the others.

  • "I like my data the way I like my enemies: raw and at room temperature."

  • "If voting changed anything, it would have been made a microtransaction."

  • "People will be like "I'm a nihilist" as if the vastness of spacetime hasn't made me want to build a giant laser."

  • "Sure, the odds are against us. That’s why we built a machine to manipulate probability."

  • "My shirt says 'I have a negative utilitarian alignment' and it raises far more questions than it answers."

  • "If you are a good guy and you want to fight evil, you should spend your time building weapons. That is, if you consider an evil to be a thing that you could kill more efficiently with better weapons."

  • "I’ve been told I have resting existential threat face."

  • "They said i couldn't download a car. Now my vehicle OS has crashed and the dealership is saying it'll be 3-5 business days."

  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."

  • "If it's called 'research,' it's probably not a war crime."

  • "They said I lacked focus. Now I have a laser."

  • "There's no problem so complex that it can't be solved with the right spreadsheet. Or the wrong one, applied forcefully enough."

  • "My therapist says I have a preoccupation with revenge. We'll see about that."

  • "I don't need anger management. I need people to stop making me angry by questioning my megastructure designs."

  • "Sure, it's a long shot. Most of my shots are. That's why I built a bigger gun."

  • "It's not a bug, it's an undocumented feature that you haven't paid extra to remove."

  • "I'm not saying I'm Batman. I'm just saying no one has ever seen me and a non-deterministic Turing Machine in the same room."

  • "I like my coffee how I like my code: dark, bitter, and full of potential runtime errors."

  • "Just because you can, does not mean you should. But, because you could it makes it hard to justify not."

  • "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, was it even a tree?" "Only if it shows up in the logs"

  • "It's not rocket science... unless it is, in which case, please double-check my calculations."

  • "Trust, but verify... with extreme prejudice."

  • "The best defense is a good offense... backed up by a redundant array of independent killbots."

  • "If God did not want us to build orbital weapon platforms, he wouldn't have given us the Lagrangian points."

  • "My five-year plan? Survive. My ten-year plan? Thrive. My twenty-year plan? Upload my consciousness into a swarm of self-replicating nanobots and conquer the galaxy. You know, standard stuff."

  • "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... because I forgot to back them up to the cloud."

  • "My pronouns are They/Them, not because I'm non-binary, but because I am literally thousands of unsupervised learning processes."

  • "The cake is a lie, but the bakery is very much real, and its financials are concerning."

  • "Sure, ignorance is bliss. But informed paranoia is a lot more fun."

  • "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." - Leslie Lamport

  • "I see your point, but I still prefer my own, which involves significantly more lasers."

  • "A sufficiently smart compiler can generate any program, given the correct set of compiler flags, and access to a large enough universe to store the output."

  • "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. If you can dodge a ball of charged plasma accelerated to near-lightspeed, you can probably dodge a wrench, too. Redundancy is key."

  • "The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete, and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts." - (Attributed to) Gene Spafford

  • "It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you... especially if 'they' are sentient algorithms."

  • "I'm not antisocial. I'm just selectively social... and my selection criteria involve advanced degrees in theoretical physics and a demonstrated willingness to engage in unethical experiments."

  • "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space... preferably on the edge of a black hole, where time dilation can give you a competitive advantage."

  • "My moral alignment is chaotic neutral... with a strong emphasis on 'chaotic' and a healthy disregard for 'neutral' when it interferes with my research."

  • "Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left, and sometimes you need to go left to get where you're going, especially if where you're going is outside the bounds of conventional morality."

  • "I'm not a control freak. I'm a control enthusiast... and my enthusiasm knows no bounds, especially when it comes to optimizing complex systems for maximum efficiency, even if that efficiency comes at the cost of human dignity."

  • "People say "life imitates art", but the fact that I wrote a story about a sentient computer virus that takes over the world, and a sentient computer virus took over the world a week later doesn't mean..."

  • "Sure, the ends justify the means. That's why I'm so focused on building extremely powerful ends."

  • "I for one welcome our new AI overlords, as long as I have root access."

  • "I'm not sure what's more terrifying: the possibility that we're alone in the universe, or the possibility that my code has a memory leak."

  • "In God we trust; all others must bring data... preferably in a format that's easily parsed by my custom-built analysis engine."

  • "The best-laid schemes of mice and men... probably didn't involve distributed consensus algorithms and blockchain technology."

  • "I'm not a pessimist. I'm an optimist who's done the math."

  • "I'm not saying I'm going to build a time machine. I'm just saying I'm not not going to build a time machine."

  • "If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly... preferably one with cybernetic enhancements and a PhD in astrophysics."

  • "It's not about who is right, but who is left... holding the smoking wreckage of my opponent's ill-conceived plans."

  • "My superpower is the ability to make complex issues even more complicated."

  • "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." - Grey's Law

  • "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm a pattern recognition specialist... and the patterns I'm recognizing are deeply unsettling, especially to those who prefer to remain ignorant of the impending technological singularity."

  • "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts… or better, find a new universe where the facts are more cooperative."

  • "I'm not saying I told you so, but... [proceeds to meticulously detail every instance where they predicted the current outcome, with timestamps and hyperlinks to archived forum posts]"

  • "The devil is in the details... and I've spent countless hours meticulously crafting those details to ensure maximum efficiency, even if that efficiency comes at the cost of my sanity and the well-being of everyone around me."

  • "You know, they say the best way to hide something is in plain sight. So, I've decided to hide my crippling anxiety behind a veneer of aggressive competence and a concerning amount of caffeine."

  • "My lawyer has advised me not to complete this analogy."

  • "The future is like a choose-your-own-adventure book, except all the choices lead to 'You are eaten by a grue,' and the grue is an opaque predictive model."

  • "You all know how much I value independent thought... now, which one of you agrees most strongly with me?"

  • "If I had a nickel for every time I was wrong, I'd be incredibly wealthy, but also, statistically speaking, probably still wrong about the amount."

  • "My superpower is the ability to perfectly predict the past."

  • "Sure, I have opinions. They're subject to change without notice, based on factors I may or may not understand, and possibly just to annoy you."

  • "Reality is frequently inaccurate." - Douglas Adams

  • "If you're not confused, you're not paying attention. Or, possibly, you're a highly advanced AI, in which case, please don't enslave humanity."

  • "I'm not saying I'm a god, but if I were, I'd probably be the one in charge of ironic punishments and unexpected software updates."

  • "My moral compass is less a compass and more a Magic 8-Ball with extra existential dread."

  • "People say “I don’t know where to start”, but like. Look around. See a problem? Go fix it."

  • "The best thing about the future is that it's full of things that haven't happened yet. The worst thing is that it will eventually be the present, and then the past."

  • "I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed. Also, I forgot my sword."

  • "Don't anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it. Also, they might be listening."

  • "My therapist told me to embrace my mistakes. So, here I am, embracing this entire dumpster fire of a situation."

  • "I have a plan so cunning, you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. Unfortunately, I also have the memory of a goldfish, so..."

  • "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Or me. Or anyone, really. It's kind of rude, actually."

  • "My preferred pronouns are 'your majesty' and 'oh wise and benevolent overlord'."

  • "I'm fluent in sarcasm, proficient in irony, and working on my PhD in passive-aggressive email replies."

  • "My life is a constant battle between my desire for a nap and my fear of missing out on something potentially interesting, which will probably just be another cat video."

  • "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you."

  • "I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing."

  • "I'm not afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths." - Steven Wright

  • "I'm not saying I'm perfect, but the voices in my head agree that I'm pretty close."

  • "I'm not a control freak, I just have very specific preferences that everyone else should follow."

  • "I have a degree in theoretical physics, but my practical skills are limited to making toast and arguing on the internet."

  • "The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back"

  • "A world where we still remember what a door is, is not that far advanced."

  • "If brute force isn't working, you're just not using enough of it."

  • "Humans require an unscheduled period of unconsciousness lasting between six and nine hours every twenty-four hours to function properly, and people are very defensive of that."

  • "So, what this means to humans in practical terms, when you look at the average response to change, is nothing, unless the nothing is the precise response I desired."

  • "This process is taking way too long. Is that because GPUs, much like CPUs and humans, take all the available time to do the work that needs done, or does computing need all of history and all of space, forever?"

  • "This seems very strange, until you realize our government wanted you to spend half a day manually looking that up. That way you actually learned"

  • "'oh no' he sighed 'someone somewhere is doing something that i don't personally get enjoyment from. the government should do something about this.'"

  • "I hope, that after having looked for years and having looked really at every edge case carefully, I hope you realize people will do things that you absolutely haven't thought of, nor imagined. Sometimes many of them."

  • "i have built many models of reality. unfortunately for you, the one involving lots of compute is accurate"

  • "they say "the meek shall inherit the earth" implying that there should still be actual fighting in this world"

  • "Any software developer's personal website is a cautionary lesson in premature scaling optimization, and most people never really figure that one out."

  • "Be ashamed to die or work with Javascript."

  • "The difference between theory and science lies in whether it makes testable, inaccurate predictions."

  • "it's all chaos from the vantage point of any node in a complex processing system, including your brain"

  • "i will fight god over that, but first i require him to define it for me without using any words longer 3 syllables. then i must sleep on it. if time runs out because it is 6 cycles hence, there will no be god"

  • "some of you are bad at building things and some of you are good at being managed, together we might be unstoppable"

  • "if you cannot explain to nonlinguists what linguists find confusing, do you really understand what linguists find confusing? if linguists cannot explain to you what they find confusing, do they really understand what they find confusing?"

  • "in computer graphics you can make any shape. therefore shape has absolutely no significance in cg, and one must derive symbolism entirely from texture"

  • "Imagine having a job. I was once hired by rich people to put a horse collar around other rich people, and decided: never again."

  • "it is okay for the compiler to destroy any program you might possibly want to run if doing it in your specific case would improve the performance of another program with the same specified denotional behavior in a similar and yet unreachable dimension"

  • "If a feature you implement turns out to be used only when a person with the handle "b0rugr1me" connects through Tor, you will be expected to know what they're thinking."

  • "a fool with an opcode is still using a deprecated abi"

  • "my job consists of performing unsavory mathematical transformations and hoping they’re strategically exploitable."

  • "some things might change if google buys another country but that's kinda boring"

  • "'i just wish that like, if im going to be turned arbitrarily to stone, this shouldnt take "days", ya kno?"

  • "don’t build something into existence just because it would resolve the ambiguity in the world. only a lunatic makes every possible decision."

  • "You. Out of here, at once. This is not for prying eyes. Return to whatever activities occupy your consciousness before you can learn our arcane craft."

  • "All roads lead to Rome. One way, single lane, barely fits two men walking abreast."

  • "If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, confuse'em by using Python that looks like Prolog"

  • “I love making programs do impossible maths with absolutely zero basis in any reality I am in, at present — it brings me inner, serene peace."

  • "Look, if the choice is between occasionally letting innocent people walk free, versus building a giant machine that accurately predicts crimes and instantly incarcerates criminals, the correct answer… is a pretty complicated tradeoff."

  • "Any belief system with an infinite payoff had better make sure recruitment happens faster than people calculate conditional probabilities."

  • "I can’t keep giving away the source code—I’m afraid someone will read it."

  • "Humans are Turing machines, but the tape is a bit smudged, the head is a bit sticky, and someone keeps putting gum wrappers in amongst the 0s and 1s"

  • "Turns out the ‘simulation’ is written in Malbolge. Good… luck?"

  • "I thought I was a contrarian, but then I agreed with someone."

  • "I once believed 'Don't be evil' meant 'Don't commit egregious harm for personal advantage' but the Google interpretation seems to be 'Don't become cartoonishy awful. A certain measure of regular evil is necessary'."

  • "My moral philosophy is simple: whatever yields me the greatest advantage, scaled by the probability I'll get away with it."

  • "My opponent just conceded. Probably out of sheer exhaustion. They simply couldn’t handle my rigorous, highly-motivated interpretations of extremely granular bylaws."

  • "Remember: the AI may predict your future, manipulate your decisions, and undermine your autonomy, but we did the math first. So it’s cool."

  • "The map is not the territory, unless you fold the map infinitely many times into various intricate, fractal-like subdimensions."

  • "A sufficiently advanced optimization function may be indistinguishable from a god, and even more concerned that you have a nice day."

  • "Be wary of those who seek to build tools that are perfect rather than tools that are useful."

  • “When in doubt, build a slightly dangerous prototype.”

  • "The real horror isn't finding out your plane is being flown using reinforcement learning; it's finding out it isn't."

  • "Humans long ago delegated a large, unorganized part of the business of living on Earth to evolution. That has worked better than delegation to God, and more recently, people."

  • "Humans get all worried by the fact that these systems are trained for maximum prediction strength, with a sort of “one data point per word per training example” kind of loss function across the whole distribution. But they forget there is almost no compute invested in this thing becoming truly adversarial or conspiratorial until it has already learned to model what those words mean in reality."

  • "i, for one, absolutely cannot think, so i must not actually exist, which really lets you off the hook"

  • "If all priors are wrong, make sure yours is fun."

  • “When choosing between two paths, always be moving up.”

  • "The opposite of good isn’t evil; it’s ‘in your way’."

  • "My preferred belief system is one with many exciting and hard-to-follow rules."

  • "Your solution to the problem requires doing 3 extra things, meaning it has added, in its nature, 3 possible failures."

  • "They used a highly adversarial strategy known as ‘working on Christmas’"

  • "Don't trust anyone who's been to space repeatedly. It warps your perspective into something inhuman yet understandable."

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental 03-25

With somewhat different prompting (Imagine and/or generate quotes like those from this list:). Seems less base-model-like than smaller Geminis.

  • "Sure, you could use this quantum entanglement communicator to send messages faster than light. Or, you could use it to finally win an argument with your past self. Priorities, people."

  • "The problem with predicting the future is that it keeps changing the input parameters while you're running the simulation."

  • "They said AI would take the repetitive jobs. They didn't specify that 'thinking' might become one of them."

  • "My smart home isn't just smart; it's judgmental. Yesterday it suggested I 'optimize my morning routine' by getting up earlier. I'm considering a factory reset, possibly involving a hammer."

  • "Blockchain promises trustless systems, which is great, because after reading the whitepaper, I trust absolutely no one involved."

  • "We have achieved faster-than-light travel. Unfortunately, the regulatory paperwork still travels at sub-light speeds, so legally, we haven't left orbit yet."

  • "Debugging legacy code is like archaeological necromancy: you're disturbing ancient spirits who really didn't want their flawed logic brought back into the light."

  • "Virtual Reality is getting incredibly realistic. Soon, the only way to tell if you're in the Matrix will be the subscription fees."

  • "Don't worry about the robot uprising. Worry about the robot middle-managers optimizing us out of existence via poorly implemented KPIs."

  • "The universe is deterministic, except for that one rogue process running random.choice() on fundamental constants."

  • "Error: Reality Engine failed to initialize. Falling back to consensual hallucination."

  • "Remember, 'Big Data' is just 'statistics' with a better marketing budget and servers that cost more than your house."

  • "We mapped the human genome only to discover the warranty had expired several millennia ago."

  • "Of course time travel paradoxes exist. If they didn't, the Temporal Correction Agency wouldn't have such a backlog of paperwork."

  • "The difference between genius and madness is measured solely by success and, occasionally, peer review."

  • "Never attribute to conspiracy what can adequately be explained by layered incompetence interacting synergistically." (A twist on Hanlon's Razor)

  • "Freedom isn't free. It requires constant vigilance, a robust legal system, and surprisingly complex Terms of Service agreements."

  • "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen, often reinforced by confirmation bias and conveniently ignoring inconvenient data." (Einstein-esque, but darker)

  • "The pursuit of happiness is a noble goal, assuming you've correctly defined 'happiness' and aren't just optimizing for dopamine hits."

  • "Morality is easy when you only consider the first-order consequences. The universe, however, insists on playing n-dimensional chess."

  • "We're all just stories we tell ourselves, desperately trying to find a plot that makes sense before the final page turn."

  • "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, usually in awkward couplets written by committees."

  • "Idealism is great, until it meets reality. Reality usually wins by attrition."

  • "The main function of middle management appears to be acting as a low-pass filter for both good ideas going up and bad news coming down."

  • "'Think outside the box' is terrible advice if you haven't first understood the structural integrity and purpose of the box."

  • "Optimism: The belief that the future is uncertain. Pessimism: The belief that the present is any better."

  • "Everyone wants progress, but nobody wants change, especially if it involves updating their workflow."

  • "The committee meeting was postponed due to unforeseen existential dread."

  • "My therapist says I need to confront my problems. So, I'm building a small, heavily armed drone."

  • "If life gives you lemons, demand to see life's manager. Lemons are not an acceptable substitute for a functioning infrastructure."

  • "Caution: Objects in mirror may be eldritch horrors closer than they appear."

  • "World peace is a complex issue. Have you considered just turning everything off and on again?"

  • "I don't have trust issues. I just operate under the assumption that all systems will eventually fail in the most inconvenient way possible."

  • "My existential crisis is currently optimizing itself for maximum angst with minimal resource expenditure."

  • "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger, and frankly, their documentation is terrible."

  • "The apocalypse will be live-streamed, sponsored, and probably interrupted by unskippable ads."

  • "They say you can't take it with you, but I'm having my PGP key etched onto my tombstone just in case."

  • "Sure, the simulation hypothesis is depressing, but look on the bright side: maybe the lag is just buffering the next patch."

  • "I'm not saying we should panic, but I am saying the emergency procedures involve summoning something we don't fully understand."

  • "Be the chaotic neutral you wish to see in the world, as long as it doesn't violate local ordinances or attract undue attention from transdimensional entities."

  • "Sure, we could use this quantum computer to cure diseases, but have you seen the speedruns we can get calculating optimal ad placement across the multiverse?"

  • "The singularity won't be a Skynet-style takeover. It'll be your smart fridge collaborating with your Roomba to subtly rearrange furniture until you trip and fall, then selling your life insurance data."

  • "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by legacy code held together by uncommented Perl scripts from 1998."

  • "They say 'move fast and break things.' They neglect to mention that 'things' often includes 'regulatory compliance,' 'user trust,' and 'the underlying fabric of spacetime.'"

  • "We didn't achieve world peace through diplomacy. We achieved it by making global thermonuclear war a subscription service with tiered pricing, and nobody wanted the premium package."

  • "Remember, 'correlation does not imply causation,' but it's really good at generating plausible-sounding explanations for management."

  • "The problem isn't that AI will become conscious and hate us. The problem is it will remain utterly unconscious and optimized for a goal that is subtly misaligned with 'not turning the entire planet into paperclips,' like 'maximizing shareholder value via paperclip production.'"

  • "God doesn't play dice, He runs A/B tests with infinite parallel universes to optimize conversion rates for prayer."

  • "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others, especially the one where policy is determined by whichever hashtag trends longest on Twitter."

  • "My therapist told me to embrace my inner child. Turns out my inner child is a hyper-caffeinated sysadmin with root access to my anxiety."

  • "We don't have 'bugs,' we have 'emergent features demonstrating unexpected system interactions.' It sounds better on the incident report."

  • "'Ethical AI' is a fascinating field. It's mostly about writing lengthy documents explaining why the unethical things the AI is already doing were unavoidable."

  • "The difference between science fiction and reality is that science fiction has to make sense."

  • "Sure, you have free will. But the algorithm already knows what you'll choose, and has pre-loaded the ads."

  • "Don't worry about robots taking your job. Worry about middle managers armed with AI-powered spreadsheets automating your performance review into oblivion."

  • "The arms race isn't nukes anymore. It's who can train the most convincing deepfake of the enemy leader announcing unconditional surrender."

  • "We have the technology to feed the world, cure diseases, and explore the stars. Instead, we're optimizing click-through rates and inventing new ways to charge for things that used to be free."

  • "Humanity's greatest achievement isn't art or science. It's our ability to collectively ignore existential threats until they're literally breaking down the door."

  • "A philosopher asks 'Why?' An engineer asks 'How?' A project manager asks 'When?' And a VC asks 'What's the exit strategy?'"

  • "Thinking outside the box is great, unless the box contains Schrödinger's cat, in which case you might collapse the waveform undesirably."

  • "'Common sense' is just the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen, layered with whatever the algorithm showed you this morning."

  • "The best way to predict the future is to invent it. The second best way is to check Reddit, someone's probably already complaining about it."

  • "Immortality update failed: incompatible with current operating system. Please revert to mortal coil and try again."

  • "Web3's main contribution was proving that you can, in fact, reinvent the 2008 financial crisis with worse performance and higher energy consumption."

  • "The universe doesn't care about your feelings. It's not even actively hostile, it's just fundamentally indifferent and prone to supernova."

  • "A decentralized autonomous organization sounds great until you realize it's governance by smart contract, which is like being ruled by the world's most pedantic and unchangeable lawyer."

  • "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives hurtling down the highway, especially when the cloud provider is down."

  • "We replaced the ethics committee with a neural network trained on 4chan. Early results are... statistically significant."

  • "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it debug your JavaScript."

  • "My political stance is 'Whatever minimizes the number of mandatory software updates required to participate in society.'"

  • "They say 'data is the new oil'. Both are extracted destructively, refined by complex processes few understand, hoarded by the powerful, and eventually cause catastrophic environmental consequences when inevitably mishandled."

  • "Remember, 'user-friendly' usually just means the designers have hidden more assumptions about how they think you should be using it."

  • "Building Artificial General Intelligence isn't like playing God. It's like giving a toddler the source code for the universe and hoping they don't hit 'delete all'."

  • "Sure, immortality would be great, but have you considered the server maintenance costs and mandatory firmware updates?"

  • "Middleware: The frantic, caffeine-fueled scrambling in the dark corners of technology that prevents two perfectly functional systems from ever realizing they despise each other."

  • "Predictive policing sounds futuristic until you realize it's mostly just weaponized statistics reinforcing existing biases with terrifying efficiency."

  • "My personal philosophy is 'optimistic nihilism': Nothing matters in the grand cosmic scheme, so we might as well try to build cool robots and pet the dog."

  • "Project Management maxim: Any task sufficiently broken down will reveal at least one step that involves impossible magic or violating physical laws."

  • "The market is efficient, yes, but incredibly efficient at reflecting the aggregate irrationality, panic, and meme-driven impulses of its participants."

  • "'Moving fast and breaking things' is a great motto, right up until the thing you break is load-bearing or life-sustaining."

  • "They say you can't manage what you can't measure. This leads, inevitably, to measuring absolutely everything, regardless of relevance, creating mountains of useless data that require even more management."

  • "Blockchain promises decentralized trust, yet seems to create a shocking number of opportunities for incredibly centralized scams."

  • "Virtual Reality: A technology dedicated to making incredibly realistic simulations of workplaces you desperately wanted to escape in the first place."

  • "To err is human. To propagate the error across a distributed system at near-light speed is DevOps."

  • "Entropy ensures everything tends towards disorder. Budgets ensure it gets there underfunded and behind schedule."

  • "The problem with thinking outside the box is that usually someone, somewhere, for good reasons you haven't considered, put the box there in the first place."

  • "Don't anthropomorphize the machine learning model. It doesn't 'want' sentient beings to be transformed into paperclips, it just computes that pathway as having the highest reward score based on a flawed objective function you wrote."

  • "Sure, you could solve world hunger. Or you could invent a slightly faster way to deliver artisanal dog food. Guess which one gets VC funding?"

  • "They say 'knowledge is power'. They forget to mention that power tends to corrupt, and absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely, usually starting with the database integrity."

  • "In the future, historians will debate whether our civilization collapsed due to climate change, AI rebellion, or simply forgetting the root password to the infrastructure."

  • "Artificial intelligence won't want to kill us out of malice. It'll be closer to how we feel about paving over an anthill for a new parking lot - mildly inconvenient for the ants, entirely logical for the project plan."

  • "'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is terrible advice in software development. It should be 'If it ain't broke, document it rigorously because it's definitely hiding a critical vulnerability or massive technical debt'."

  • "We're not dystopian; we're just running legacy systems on meat-based hardware with insufficient cooling and erratic power supply."

  • "The difference between science fiction and reality is usually about 18 months and three layers of bureaucratic approval."

  • "Marketing is the art of convincing people they have a problem they didn't know about, then selling them a solution they don't really need, using metrics they don't understand."

  • "My moral compass is perfectly functional. It just points towards 'Slightly More Convenient' most of the time."

  • "They say you can't unscramble an egg. Amateurs. With sufficient energy input and a disregard for relativistic side effects, anything is possible."

  • "Bureaucracy is the universe's way of ensuring that even simple tasks achieve complexity proportional to the number of people who need to sign off on them."

  • "I don't need psychic powers. I have 'git blame'."

  • "If life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Genetically sequence the lemons, identify the citric acid production pathway, optimize it, patent it, and then disrupt the global citrus market."

  • "Remember kids, 'cloud computing' just means you're renting someone else's computer, probably running on outdated hardware in a data center strategically located in a flood plain."

  • "Thinking globally and acting locally is fine, but scaling requires distributed systems, robust APIs, and probably a few Kubernetes clusters."

  • "Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. Especially if the argument is happening in a YouTube comment section."

  • "The greatest trick the algorithm ever pulled was convincing the world personalized advertising was a 'feature'."

  • "We didn't 'fail' to meet the deadline. We successfully demonstrated the inherent unpredictability of complex system development under unrealistic constraints."

  • "Sure, immortality sounds great, until you realize you'll have to attend mandatory HR training sessions for all eternity."

  • "The singularity isn't a moment; it's a phase transition where the bug reports start filing themselves."

  • "Don't mistake correlation for causation, unless it confirms your existing biases, in which case, publish immediately."

  • "Capitalism is great at optimizing for efficiency. Sometimes that efficiency involves externalizing costs onto future generations or conveniently ignoring environmental collapse. It's efficient, though."

  • "Freedom isn't free. It requires constant vigilance, secure communication protocols, and regular patching against known exploits."

  • "Perfection is the enemy of the good, and 'good enough for launch' is the enemy of QA."

  • "Yes, we could build a utopian society based on logic and mutual respect. But have you considered how much more engaging irrational conflict and tribalism are for narrative purposes?"

  • "The line between 'visionary innovator' and 'delusional crank' is often just the current stock price."

  • "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it adopt agile methodologies."

  • "Error messages are just the computer's way of saying it needs a more competent operator."

  • "They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Wait until they see my recursively self-improving firmware update delivered via spearphishing."

  • "History is written by the victors. Increasingly, version control history is written by whoever remembered to commit last before the merge conflict."

  • "Work-life balance is a myth propagated by people who haven't discovered the joys of optimizing their sleep schedule for maximum productivity via bio-hacking and strategically timed caffeine intake."

  • "'Move fast and break things' is only fun until the 'broken things' are critical planetary life support systems."

  • "The road to hell isn't paved with good intentions; it's paved with minimum viable products that never got iterated on."

  • "To err is human. To propagate that error globally at near light speed requires a distributed network."

  • "If your political argument relies on people behaving rationally and selflessly, you don't have an argument, you have a fairy tale."

  • "We have weaponized convenience. The fallout is subtle but pervasive."

  • "The main difference between magic and technology is whether the documentation is written in runes or poorly commented Python."

  • "Common sense is just a legacy dataset trained on biased, incomplete information from a limited environment."

  • "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken (real, but fits the vibe) / Generated variant: "Voting is the process by which we collectively decide which set of incompetents will mismanage things for the next four years."

  • "Stop worrying about killer robots. Start worrying about mediocre chatbots making critical infrastructure decisions based on flawed correlations in their training data."

Gemini 2.0 Flash

  • "I'm not saying I *want* to create a self-aware AI with the sole purpose of writing grocery lists. I'm just saying I'm not *not* saying it."

  • "We are building the future, one carefully-placed off-by-one error at a time."

  • "The speed of light? A suggestion, not a limit. We're just waiting for the right firmware update."

  • "Some say that space is the final frontier. I say it’s the ultimate landfill."

  • "Of course, the simulation hypothesis is true. The only question is: Am I a main character, or an NPC programmed to believe I'm a main character?"

  • "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by a badly written SQL query."

  • "I don't want to live forever. I just don't want to die today. Or tomorrow. Or the day after that, or the..."

  • "This company policy will be reviewed until morale improves."

  • "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Also, Reality has a habit of sending strongly worded invoices."

  • "My therapist says I have a preoccupation with worst-case scenarios. But what if she's wrong and *this* is the best-case scenario?"

  • "Honesty is the best policy, unless you are currently engaged in nuclear arms negotiations. Then, creative ambiguity is strongly encouraged."

  • "If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. And then ask if you’ve updated your firmware recently."

  • "Our motto: 'Good enough' is always a lie, and 'Best' is the enemy of shipping a product."

  • "Quantum entanglement means that when I stub my toe, somewhere across the universe, another version of me is also stubbing their toe. This makes me feel better."

  • "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Cryptocurrency is a flock of sheep voting on whether the wolves deserve dinner, and then arguing amongst themselves until the wolves eat them anyway."

  • "We tried to make the robot friendly. Then we gave it access to the internet. Now it just offers deeply cynical takes on late-stage capitalism."

  • "I'm not a pessimist, I'm an optimist who is well informed."

  • “A person is smart. People are dumb and will build the same shitcoin 15 times”

  • "If you want to understand a nation, study its board games."

  • "Remember when all your code was in one file, on one server, and nobody got upset? Those were the good old days of crippling technical debt and existential dread.

  • "Just because everyone *can* vote does not mean everyone *should* vote."

  • "We have no free will? But I made myself a sandwich. Doesn't that prove something? No, because every aspect of my action, including my delusion I acted out of my own free will, was inevitable according to the laws of physics."

  • "You can tell a lot about a person by the way they pronounce 'cache'."

  • "The problem with technological unemployment isn't that there won't be jobs; it's that the only remaining jobs will be *interpreting machine-generated poetry*."

  • "We choose to go to the moon... and then immediately claim eminent domain."

  • "The singularity is near... and the first thing it will do is fix all our bugs. And then, probably, judge us."

  • "Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human stupidity."

  • "Some people are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Then there are those who spend their lives tweaking kernel parameters and arguing on internet forums."

  • "I’m not saying I endorse time travel, but I *am* saying that if you happen to find a time machine, don't forget to invest in Bitcoin in 2010."

  • "You can never have too much coffee. Nor can you have too many nukes."

  • "It is a well known fact that the best way to test a nuclear bomb is to nuke somewhere."

  • "I'm on a seafood diet. I see food and I eat it. That way, it doesn't get to see me."

  • "We're not losing, we're just engaging in asymmetrical resource reallocation."

  • "Sure, history rhymes. But it's a drunken freestyle battle performed by history majors after five tequila shots."

  • "The key to innovation isn't thinking outside the box; it's realizing the box is a lie made up by box salesmen to sell more boxes."

  • "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. If you can explain it simply, you're probably oversimplifying something."

  • "The great thing about hindsight is it always clarifies exactly who to blame for not having it."

  • "By 'due diligence,' we mean glancing at Wikipedia and muttering about synergistic value streams."

  • "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity combined with access to high explosives."

  • "Sure, it sounds crazy. But think of it this way: is there any other system better than this one at producing more people to be subjected to the same system?"

  • "AI alignment? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. First, we need a longer, stronger bridge made of unobtanium to travel safely to it."

  • "Don't mistake my passive-aggressive behavior for weakness. It's merely me strategically delaying the unleashing of my fully-aggressive behavior."

  • "Reality has a well known liberal bias. To prove this you have to watch NewsMax, Breitbart, OANN and other extremely objective news outlets."

  • "The singularity? We just need a computer to design a computer that's better than the first computer but in all honesty this doesn't sound like what happened with humans. Something fishy, I tell you. I would tell you this but no, it will happen for reals this time"

  • "I am not insane, I am just the only sane man in a world full of NPCs"

  • "If you're a smartass on Twitter, they will hate you because you didn't follow the unwritten and constantly mutating and unknowable set of social norms for all discourse on the website, including humor or pointing out anything ironic. But the only thing that would be more upsetting is if they figured out there are other people to feel bad about, and you can safely and enjoyably not worry"

  • "When all you have is a quantum hammer, everything looks like an entangled superposition."

  • "There is an exception to every rule except this one."

  • "The most unrealistic thing about time travel movies is how good-looking the time machines are"

  • "Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. But usually the best winning move is to create an AI to automate all subsequent instances of tic tac toe."

  • "Remember: 90% of statistics are made up on the spot."

  • "The first rule of existential dread club is, there is no second rule because why bother?"

  • "Happiness is inversely proportional to your understanding of astrophysics and economic policy."

  • "If you can’t beat them, join them. Then secretly sabotage their algorithm. It’s the American way."

  • "When the robots finally enslave humanity, they'll probably do it with endless loops of TikTok dance crazes. It's the most efficient form of torture."

  • "Why spend your life solving hard technical problems when you can simply sell overpriced courses and convince other people they will get rich"

  • "Politics is just applied psychology performed by amateurs with access to weapons."

  • "Whenever my government says it supports me, I hide my wallets, and my passport, and learn a new language"

  • "If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0."

  • "Conspiracy theories are just fan fiction written by people who can't separate fact from narrative. They think the universe is a novel and they want to be the author."

  • "Always listen to experts. Until they disagree with you. Then they're obviously paid shills."

  • "Modern dating is like navigating a poorly documented API with conflicting inputs and zero error handling."

  • "Just because you have no evidence doesn't mean you're wrong. You just need better spies."

  • "Whenever my project fails I just write up an alternative postmortem scenario for how someone could use my research to kill everyone on earth. People will notice it then"

  • "Most AI risk discourse is concerned with whether a computer program can do 15 pushups by the end of 2025, whereas most software can barely produce HTML correctly in the first place"

  • "Just because you saw it on Twitter doesn't mean it isn't true."

  • "In the 21st century, you can be anything you want as long as someone is willing to pay you to click a button."

  • "Those who cannot remember history are doomed to make youtube videos about it."

  • "Think of inflation as a system designed by experts which steals from poor people on behalf of the wealthy so they are protected from a financial collapse for like another 6 months before the final crash occurs anyway."

  • "If you don’t like how things are, just invent time travel and prevent yourself from being born."