I'm doing Budget Inkhaven again! (I didn't realize last time that "Halfhaven" also meant specifically shooting for half-length posts, too.) I've decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the second of five. I'm posting these here because Blogspot's comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise.

8. Taiwan is Toast

Taiwan is toast. There, I said it, roll credits.

9. If I Were Emperor of New AI Safety Researcher Training...

I fully expect that at least three people will happily tell me where this decree has obviously and crucially faltered, and be wise advisors in doing so. Such is the nature of lists made by a single fox rather than a committee of hedgehogs. I welcome your sage good-faith counsel and promise not to send you to the GPU mines.

10. Why Everything is a Spring

Dedicated with bittersweet fondness for the Integrated Sciences Curriculum program. Even still, everything is a spring.

11. A Taxonomy of Wizard Power

I recommend seeking out the original article, but in brief: Wizard Power is the ability to make things happen, to wreak your will in the world in a way that specifically need not depend all that much on other people or rely on social structures in order to manifest it, except to the extent that the target of that Wizard Power is the world of people and of society...

Whatever kind of power you seek, seek it wisely and well, and aim to do far more good than harm - and do, in fact, seek it.

12. And All This Concrete Will Someday Be Chalk

But hillsides aren't permanent, nor even mountains, it occurred to me - "until Mount Baektu wears away" and whatnot - landslides happen, and earthquakes, and the patient weathering of stone by water and wind. And concrete is no different - wet calcium silicate becoming calcium hydroxide, and then patiently sipping carbon dioxide to turn that calcium hydroxide into calcium carbonate. Limestone, in other words. Sea shells. Chalk...

And my mind wandered to a piece of art I once saw... a simple motor, spinning on and on, with a 50:1 gear reduction (or so I recall) turning multiple revolutions per second into a revolution every few seconds, and another 50:1 reduction turning that into a revolution every few minutes, and another, and another, and so on for a total of 12 reductions, with the final gear embedded firmly in a block of concrete. And why not? It would, after all, take over 2 trillion years for it to turn once...

And one day, maybe thousands or millions of years from now, that block of concrete would turn to chalk, slowly, from the outside in, and cease to particularly impede the gear's motion, albeit without much point to it, for the final gear would by that point have budged perhaps a thousandth of a second of arc after a few million years as the concrete around it turned to fragile chalk and flaked away.

13. For Grandma Kim, Who Justly Asks Why Her Post-Singularity World Has To Be So Complicated (왜 이렇게 얼마나 복잡 해야지?)

And the pace of change is only increasing. Even you can tell that much. And I have to wonder what will become of me in another 50 years, if the world even makes it to that point? What new systems will have arisen by that point, what new contrivances and user-hostile systems will have sprung up in that time?

14. Deadlock in the Parliament of the Self

Don't count on the Shining Future coalition to help you run statistical analysis for OpenAI or Raytheon, nor its fellow travellers at the Ministry of Cleverness and Progress.