"But I still think coups are surprisingly bloodless and often keeping coups bloodless is the optimal strategy for the person doing the coup. I think this transfers to AI."

I think you are conflating two separate goals, One of which applies to AI and the other of which doesn't. Control of government and control of the governed. Coups have constrained violence because the leaders of the coup explicitly want to rule the people and killing them reduces the rewards of winning.

This does not appear to apply to an AI coup as it would not benefit from having people to rule over.

A factor I didn't see you include is changing the percentage of work performed by top engineers vs average and poor engineers. Here is one article aimed at the general labor pool, 

https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/stanford-ai-entry-level-jobs-gen-z-erik-brynjolfsson/

But the effect is extremely pronounced in software engineering, much more than average across labor fields. While the increase in performance may be 1.05, it is being applied to the top performers who are much more above baseline than that indicates. From recent research on the topic (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/): 

"A small percentage of the workers in any given domain is responsible for the bulk of the work. Generally, the top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with around 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of the least productive workers can claim only 15% of the total work, and the most productive contributor is usually about 100 times more prolific than the least." 

So what we are seeing happening is the low end workers are getting let go and not replaced. The mod tier to a lesser extent, and that top 10% are doing more and more of the work.  This alone, changing the ratio of work hours to more heavily favor the most productive workers, has a big impact. And then amplifying them is far more effective than amplifying the average or bottom tier of worker.

Long story short (too late) I think even 1.2 is too low given the actual workers are between 10x and 100x the ones who are getting let go.

They are a thing. In my opinion grossly overpriced and underperforming, but they exist in America.

"Additionally, Claude is prohibited from:

Engaging in stock trading or investment transactions

Bypassing captchas

Inputting sensitive data

Gathering, scraping facial images"

I think that forbidding captcha is really short-sighted here. The point of a captcha is to separate a single human taking a desired action from a machine automating a mass duplication of actions. In this case Clause is acting to enable single human actors, not scrape a billion websites wholesale.

The rest of the choices seem much more reasonable.

Thermopylae is not a good example here. They started with ~70,000 troops and absolutely expected to win due to the overwhelming advantage of their defended position.

The rearguard, who stayed behind to cover the retreat are where "the 300" comes from, (but there were actually over 1,200 of them) were wiped out except for about 400 who surrendered on the first day.

So not underdogs and didn't win.

To be fair to itch.io, they are over a barrel and do intend to bring the banned games back. They are looking for a new payment processor as a way out.

It seems Ross Vought might be behind all this push, including a general push to effectively ban pornography?

I would love to read a deep dive into why we don't have more payment processors that don't care where the money is going. It seems to me that someone stands to make a lot of money by telling puritans "No". I do understand that some nsfw purchasers cause charge back rates and fraud to skyrocket compared to other industries. There should still be a very comfortable market in taking money and not caring about screaming people who were never going to be your customer anyway. Good to see in the linked article there are two indicated processors. 

Doesn't work for everyone even if you start early. Even transplants can fail. As of today there is nothing that is a 100% guarantee.

I agree. If I am reading Will's point correctly, he is assuming more people will want to permanently enshrine beliefs such that even if they are immortal they never want to change. 

What I see online is that people get bored and crave novelty. That might become an editable value, but it happens to be linked to a whole lot of other things, so editing it and only it is not guaranteed to be possible even with ASI unless the subject stops being human. Editing it at all is not guaranteed to be safe. 

Moreover, the transhumanist movement is extremely diverse in terms of what they want. They will go in many directions when the capabilities become available. I see no reason why they would want to enshrine stability over exploration and self discovery through ongoing transformation.

Even Will's take on immortality is locked into current realities of gerontocracy. One primary goal of research into longevity is the ability to maintain brain plasticity and learning capabilities. An immortal will not remain part of the elite society if they cannot use current technology. So unless Will is proposing that immortals will freeze technological growth, they will have to be adaptive just to maintain their place in society.

Now cultural dominance? That is a short- to mid-term issue. I can see a single culture getting an early lead in AGI plus space and that becoming a lasting impact. But unless we figure out Ansibles (faster than light communication using quantum entanglement) or the speed of light stops being a barrier to communication, this cannot last long term. Within a star system (especially ours) sure. With multi-system expansion as longtermism presupposes? I cannot see how the system stays in contact regularly enough to prevent change in different directions.

I don't think he failed to consider these angles, so am curious to hear more on the topic.

In government HOW always wins. That's why the famous joke that the most frightening words in the English language are "Hi I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Interesting, but I have different principles and goals. I keep hoping ai agents get good enough, but they aren't quite there yet. Because a large portion of our differences are that you want to do want I want automated or eliminated.

The core is I want the system/ tool to be invisible. It must not become a task itself. If it does then it is a distraction and time suck that I cannot afford. The guiding principle for me is one task at a time, and touch things as close to once as possible. This is where we disagree on what is optimal.

My to-do system is by far the most important system I have for keeping my life on track. It acts as a second brain, remembering things for me so I don't have to.^[1] Without it, I would be completely lost,^[2] and nowhere near as organized or conscientious. 

100% agree. 

What makes a good to-do system?

It's instructive to think about when we might use a to-do system before discussing how to build a good one. I find myself firing up my to-do system to do one of the four following activities:

1. I think of some new task, and want to add it.
2. I want to plan out my day or week, or figure out what to do next.
3. I want to check off some task as complete.
4. I want to perform maintenance: e.g. edit some tasks, delete stale tasks, etc.

1 agree.

2 I want to offload this. I loathe planning despite understanding the value of it. When I add the task, that is the last time I want to think of it until it is being done 

3 no, I just want them to go away upon completion. I get no satisfaction from checking things off or reviewing them. I understand that for some people, checking things off is the actual purpose of their system. Not me, I just want things done, They should go away effortlessly when no longer needed.

4 This is exactly the biggest time suck a good system should eliminate.The task should be accurate when entered such that the terms of its removal and priority shifting are clear and automated and not require additional effort or time spent I find that my biggest problem with all existing systems is this item is assumed to be necessary and it takes more time than entering and doing tasks. The system maintenance should be minimal to non existent.

Yes you need to edit tasks occasionally. But this should be minimal. Not a core activity. Touch things as close to once as possible should be the driving principle.

Adding tasks should be low friction. If adding tasks is high friction, you will just not do it when your discipline levels are low or tiredness levels are high. Low friction in this context means "with few actions". So concretely, this means you should both be able to add the task and organize it easily. It is hard to get to a to-do system to literally zero friction, but getting any habit as close as possible to a zero-effort habit will improve the probability you stick to it immensely.

Agreed

It should be possible to add tasks as soon as you think of them, and check tasks off as complete as soon as you complete them. If you cannot, you will need to do one of the following. One option is to retain the new/completed task in working memory until some point you can access your system. This risks you either forgetting the task or cluttering your working memory. Another option is to maintain a "task cache" somewhere you do have instant access to, and then later sync said cache to the ground truth system. This is obviously risky and so will inevitably at some point break. Note that new tasks can be tasks to create tasks, e.g. "deal with X" can be quickly jot down, and then later refined.

Agreed with the principle, disagree with the discussion. Those options are all counter to your stated goal. Ideally, just have the tasks flag itself as complete and you move on and never think about it again don't make using the tool a task. Ideally unless you flag the task incomplete it should assume you did it on time, and the only time you need to manually mark something complete is if you finish early. Minimal effort, don't make the tool the task 

All tasks should not be visible all of the time. In the high task regime especially, it is costly to be reminded of everything you ever need to do every time you want to add a new task, check off a task as complete, or figure out what to do next. Trust me, you do not want to be stressing or distracted by your tax return that is not due for another 8 months. Attention is your scarcest resource, so most tasks should be hidden from you until you need or choose to see them. I think of this as a form of self-context engineering, and also apply this principle in many other settings. For instance, when working on some task X, I try to close all irrelevant apps to stay maximally focussed. Using dedicated desktop apps as opposed to browser apps helps a bunch with this. For more tips, tricks and ideas for keeping focussed, see here.

One task visible at a time, just the next one that needs doing. Have the ability to look ahead, sure. But as you said attention is valuable, distraction is everywhere. It should not exist in an organization tool. The tool should not be a task.

It should be easy to surface relevant tasks when needed. I currently have 118 tasks in my to-do system. Besides it being costly be reminded of all of them every time as discussed above, it is also intractable to sift through that entire list constantly when planning out my day. In practice, this therefore means you should utilise powerful tagging and filtering tools and views. You might want a tag for each topic of task (e.g. work, finances, etc), for tasks you can do at home, tasks which are due soon, etc. Context switching is hard, so being able to aggregate and batch execution of similar tasks is useful. (Fuzzy) search is sometimes helpful, but I rarely find myself using it as I generally feel very free to forget tasks in my to-do system completely from my brain. This is only possible because after years of use, I now fully trust the protocol to surface tasks when relevant.^[4]

This is an unnecessary duplicate of the above. Only one task at a time. They are only "needed" when it is their time to be done. Otherwise you are talking "wanted" not "needed" and that gets right back into the tool maintenance becoming the distraction or becoming a task.

Tasks should optionally have date, and should be able to be viewed by date. It's pretty helpful to know which tasks have deadlines, and if any of those are soon. My to-do software allows me to set both "dates" for when I plan to do a task, and "deadlines" which are hard cut offs by which some task must be completed. Often tasks are blocked until some event out of your control occurs, and it is useful to mark a task as not relevant until after some date has passed. It can also be helpful to move tasks into "due today", when planning a daily to-do list.

Again, too much the tool is the distraction. Think simpler. Yes add with a date and priority. Then become invisible until it is time to be done. The tool must not become a task itself. Why are you making a "today" list? That's a waste of time and attention. If you entered the tasks with dates and priorities, then whatever task is in front of you is all you need and it will be the correct task. Don't make the tool the task.

Tasks should be able to be prioritised as more or less important. On the one extreme, some tasks absolutely must happen. On the other, some might never be worth doing, but are still useful to jot down somewhere. It is useful to have some sort of view that filters out low priority tasks or sorts tasks by priority. Some people like using @someday and @maybe tags for this sort of thing. It can also be useful to mark tasks as "vaguely urgent" but without a specific date, using e.g. @soon.

At the time of creation/addition and very rarely things should get edited. But filtering and viewing etc are all distractions. One task at a time, touch it as close to once as possible.

Some tasks recur. Many tasks recur on a regular cadence. Paying bills, cleaning, watering your plants, etc. You should not have to make a new task for each instance of a recurring task, as this is high friction. The feature to recur a task is very helpful.

Agreed.

Regular reviews are important. Tasks go stale. It is important to regularly review everything in your to-do system and delete things that have become irrelevant, and to surface things that have changed priority. Perhaps schedule a recurring monthly task to do so, to batch this work.

Complete disagreement. Touch tasks as close to once as possible. The priority tool should suck us as little time as possible. This whole regular review principal is why I can't find a functional system. They all take up time I want to be spending completing tasks. The tool must never become a task itself.

It should interface nicely with your calendar. A calendar event in some sense is a task, but it's a special kind of task that does not need to be checked off as complete; it completes by default at the end of the allotted time. This distinction makes using a calendar as a to-do system problematic (as you risk forgetting to do a task in the allotted window, and then not being reminded of it again in future), and using a to-do system as a calendar annoying (as you need to check off things that should just get checked off by default). Calendar integration is useful though, as when planning your tasks for the day, it is useful to see what calendar events you have. If you time box tasks it can also be useful to see those on your calendar.

Agreed except for the "when planning your tasks for the day". Again my broken record says touch them once (when you enter them).

You seem to enjoy the planning and to get satisfaction from task completion. I think you might want to add those as principles or goals of your ideal system. I think far more people agree with you than me, and it might help them realize your system is valuable to them.

You have a very cool system and I enjoyed reading about it. Thanks for sharing. Someday I will find the Marie Kondo or Basho of systems, that's the one for me.