Jonathan Brebner

It is always wrong to seek or take pleasure in the pain of others. It is corrosive to the soul.

It would actually be far more interesting and surprising if there IS some ineffable quality that creates a hard limit in AI capabilities! As close to a natural experiment on materialist epistemology as I can think of.

Doesn't feel like we're prepared, economically or psychologically, for that hard reality.

In principle, there's nothing that humans do that AI won't be able to do better, eventually, and in many cases soon. There's no reason to think some ineffable quality protects human ingenuity and capabilities from automation.

I hate it when someone says “that’s a great question” before a scripted answer because by definition that wasn’t a great question

Astronomers Detect a Signature of Life on a Distant Planet Further studies are needed to determine whether K2-18b, which orbits a star 120 light-years away, is inhabited, or even habitable.

Lots of hedging from scientists quoted in the article but mostly of the "I want to see more confirmatory data" and less of the "ehh not sure I buy it" variety
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/s...

Feels like this should be a bigger deal?

Storytelling Associate Job Description | Notion To apply, please submit an application here.

Send storytellers my way! More details and link to the application here: holy-bell-7fc.notion.site/Storytelling...

It's an exciting moment to help tell the @southparkcommons.bsky.social story. We have some very big content initiatives in the works that you'll play a crucial role in.

I think SPC has PMF, but we need your help to show the world why and how.

This will be a writing-first but not writing-only role. I'm looking for someone comfortable across content format, style, and tone—essays to threads, technical to narrative.

You have to be excited about technology and startups, but don't have to come from that world.

I'm hiring a Storytelling Associate at @southparkcommons.bsky.social!

The SPC community is fully storytelling-pilled. It's the foundational skill of -1 to 0. But we have too many stories to tell. That's where you come in. ⬇️

I want those people liking the more optimistic posts!!

It's not super encouraging that whenever I post something more pessimistic sounding about humanity's chances with AGI, the people who consistently like the posts are from OpenAI and Anthropic.

To understand millennial men you must understand how formative just hanging around for hours playing Goldeneye and Halo was for shaping our idea of good quality time together

Imagining the Helldivers 2 writers reading this and thinking "freedom seeds, goddamit that's good."

You have to reduce the barriers to building parks if you want to avoid a society of walled gardens.

It can be effective politics in the short term, but unless you pair it with an aggressive commitment to dismantling the vetocracy that makes it impossible to build anything, the doom loop will continue.

The left is stuck in the doom loop of asking taxpayers for more money for projects with decreasing returns, or, in the case of CA HSR, no returns at all. If you want an egalitarian society with strong public funding of common goods, you have to prove you can build and defend those goods!

Trump's crypto stuff is pure graft but this framing, where our inability to build infrastructure is just a matter of funding, is a disaster for the left & America.

The reason we don't have HSR in CA 15+ years after voting for it isn't because of tech investment.

The crypto stuff in Trump 2.0 is just pure graft. More corrupt in dollar terms than all other presidencies combined.

If you’ve ever complained about corruption in politics, you should be more angry about this than you’ve ever been before.

Final Fantasy games always have a main villain character who does most of the villain stuff and then at the end you discover they’re not the main villain which is instead something like Death personified

Anyway American politics is like that except the real big bad is NIMBYism

It is a profound stain on the reputations of both the nation’s highest office and its most prominent entrepreneur to act this way

My most closely held moral conviction is this: it is always wrong to take pleasure in the suffering of others. That is the surest path to hell.

Make the world better

I'm not avoiding microplastics. I'm doubling down. Chewing the wrapper. Cooking everything in 12 year old tupperware. Contrarian and right. This is how I win.

Cancelling and banning research grants based on forbidden words is an insanely embarrassing move from the “free speech” crowd

Celebrating merit doesn't require you to denigrate anyone else, and the fact those two often go together in Silicon Valley ("NPC") is one of its worst cultural ticks

That something has become more difficult does not mean it is not worth doing. In fact, it may then be more so.

There SHOULD be a lot of overlap between the hardcore consumer protection types and the DOGE efficiency types, if this is really a good-faith attempt to make things better for Americans and not just wage partisan warfare

TurboTax is one of the clearest examples of industry capture rent seeking by the private sector imaginable, it is good to have a simple free government option and we should invest more in it, not less