Venkatesh Rao 🔹

American owners?

2026 kickoff of SIGFPT (Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory) starts in 5 minutes on our discord discord.gg/qaPjFFp2H?ev...

protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing...

Too long for a note, too casual for a post… so you get a screenshot essay on floors as workspaces

This is the first year in nearly a decade where the new year arrives without the feeling all the planning and resolutioning either being in the shadow of ascendant Trumpism (even in the Biden years) or an effort to studiously and strenuously ignore it. AI has easily marginalized the Trumpist turn of the planet in the attention stakes, despite it being stronger than ever. It now merely feels like an annoying transient problem that doesn’t even really need to be solved, just outlived. It’s not an enduring existential condition to be adapted to. AI not only is that, it has so far been largely a positive turn of history as far as I’m concerned. The right things are thriving or dying because of it. It is pissing off and energizing the right people. It is creating its own new problems but they are ones that seem interesting and worthwhile to solve. I’m happy and eager to adapt to an AI world, where I merely stoically accept a climate-change world and have been implacably resistant to adapting to a Trumpist world. It’s nice to feel the worldwinds of historical change blowing roughly in favorable directions relative to where I want to go for a change. Happy new year! Feels like the cheeriest one in a long time. May the slop be with you!

HNY!

New art series titled Birren

Named for the Birren industrial safety color palette from the 1950s

Birren #1

Art 2.2.1

We’re semantic versioning here now

Art 2.2

Revenge of the Dilettantes Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement

Thought: “Human” is now a compile target rather than superseded. Like assembly or JavaScript. Some proposition in the neighborhood of that is true. Where “human” is some mix of artisanal+bespoke+idiosyncratic. Started unpacking the thought in my latest contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/revenge-of...

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Trained a model on my october/november paintings on titles.xyz and the results are absolutely astounding. Every test I ran produced better results than my own manual efforts. Essay and public access soon.

My handmade training set is here venkateshrao.com/BucketArt/in...

Been too agentic today. Gonna practice my learned helplessness for a while now.

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Be Slightly Monstrous Learning to feel time again in the Permaweird

Newsletter back from hiatus. With 30% more AI and a fresh new lime fragrance. contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/be-slightl...

Made a little gallery page for the art I've been posting recently.
venkateshrao.com/BucketArt/in...

Digging for Utopia | Kwame Anthony Appiah That the history of our species came in stages was an idea that came in stages. Aristotle saw the formation of political entities as a tripartite process:

👀 🍿https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/

🙃 #42 in my ongoing art series

Trump floats $2,000 tariff rebate checks. What you need to know | CNN Business President Donald Trump, embattled by America’s growing affordability problems, has once again floated a unique solution: Sending Americans rebate checks for the tariffs that his administration has col...

This could backfire in an interesting way. I think prices have gone up by more than 2k for the average household due to tariffs and making a per capita dividend number legible is a sign of weakness. Dems should commision a credible estimate. www.cnn.com/2025/11/10/e...

When AI is used to address enshittification you get entoiletpaperfication