Here's a rundown of my favorite books of 2024. Links at the end of the thread.

I start with my favorite book of the year by far:

A Brief History of Intelligence.

It's an exquisite masterclass in writing and research. At one point I realized I'd highlighted nearly every page. By the end I'd made a big list from the bibliography to follow up on dozens of threads from its pages.

I love books by authors who become positively obsessed with an idea and follow it with the single minded focus of a maniac. That's what happened with author Max Bennett who traces the evolution of our minds from simple clusters of neurons to complex thinking wetware, all while tying it into our all-out quest to create artificial thinking machines.

The result is a hauntingly beautiful masterpiece filled with deep insights into how our brains came to be. This book covers the dark history of mankind's most deadly killer: the mosquito, a perfectly designed predator that's virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs.

This monstrous insect seems to have no other purpose than to check the hubris of humans and their relentless spread across the planet. The horrific description of the malaria parasite's lifecycle alone makes this book a must read. It's a true horror movie come to life.

The author is a military historian and you'll be shocked by how often the great battles you've read about didn't end because of some brilliant military strategy but because of this tiny bloodsucker decimating the army and forcing a retreat. He even makes a good case that Alexander the Great was felled by malaria.

At times he overstates his premise and takes it a bit too far but it still makes for fascinating reading.

How is that that one of the most powerful ideas in the entire history of technology is now under coordinated attack?

If I told you that one little software concept powers the website you're reading this on, the router in your house that connects you to the internet, the phone in your pocket and your TV streaming service, what would you think?

What if I said that the NASDAQ and New York stock exchanges where your retirement portfolio trades  is powered by the same ideas?  Or that those same concepts power 100% of the top 500 supercomputers on the planet doing everything from hunting for cures for cancer, to making rockets safer, to mapping the human brain?

Not only that, it also powers all the major clouds, from Amazon Web Services, to Google Cloud and Alibaba and more.

You'd probably think that was a good thing, right?  Not just good, but absolutely critical to the functioning of modern life at every level.  And you're be right.

That critical infrastructure is "open source" and it powers the world.

It's everywhere, an invisible bedrock beneath our entire digital ecosystem, underpinning all the applications we take for granted every day.

It seems impossible that something that important would be under attack.

But that's exactly what's happening right now.  Or rather, it's happening again.  It's not the first time.

In the early days of open source, a powerful group of proprietary software makers went to war against open source, looking to kill it off.

SCO Unix, a proprietary Unix goliath, tried to sue Linux into oblivion under the guise of copyright violations.

Microsoft's former CEO, Steve Ballmer, called open source cancer and communism and launched a massive anti-Linux marketing barrage.  They failed and now open source is the most successful software in history, the foundation of 90% of the planet's software, found in 95% of all enterprises on the planet.

Even Microsoft now runs on open source with the majority of the Azure cloud powered by Linux and other open software like Kubernetes and thousands upon thousands of packages like Docker, Prometheus, machine learning frameworks like Pytorch, ONNX and Deepspeed, managed databases like Postgres and MySQL and more.

Imagine if they'd been successful in their early attacks on open source?  They would have smashed their own future revenue through short-sightedness and total lack of vision.

And yet open source critics are like an ant infestation in your house.  No matter how successful open source gets or how essential it is to critical infrastructure they just keep coming back over and over and over.

Today's critics of open source AI try to cite security concerns and tell us only a small group of companies can protect us from our enemies so we've got to close everything down again and lock it all up behind closed doors.

But if open source is such a security risk, why does "the US Army [have] the single largest installed base for RedHat Linux" and why do many systems in the US Navy nuclear submarine fleet run on Linux, "including [many of] their sonar systems"?  Why is it allowed to power our stock markets and clouds and our seven top supercomputers that run our most top secret workloads?

But they aren't stopping with criticism there.  They're pushing to strangle open source AI in its crib, with California bills like SB 1047 set to choke out American AI research and development while tangling up open weights AI in suffocating red tape, despite a massive groundswell of opposition from centrist and left Democrats, Republicans, hundreds of members of academia and more, the bill passed and now goes to the governor.  Eight members of Congress called on the governor to veto the bill. Speaker Pelosi took the unprecedented step of openly opposing a bill in a state Assembly that is primarily Democrat.

And yet still the bill presses forward.

Why?

Do too many people just not understand what open source means to the modern world?

Do they just not see how critical it is to everything from our power grid to our national security systems and to our economies?

And the answer is simple:

They don't.

That's because open source is invisible.

It runs in the background.  It quietly does its job without anyone realizing that it's there.  It just works. It's often not the interface to software, it's the engine of software, so it's under the hood but not often the hood itself.  It runs our severs and routers and websites and machine learning systems.  It's hidden just beneath the surface.

The average person has no idea what powers their Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and Wikipedia and their email servers and their WhatsApp and Signal.  They don't know it's making their phone work or that the trades of their retirement portfolio depend on it.

And that's a problem.

Because if people don't even know it exists, how can we defend it?

1/ ** It's the End of the World as We Know It **

Even worse, that blindness to the essential software layer of the world is now putting tomorrow's tech stack under threat of being dominated by a small group of big closed source players, especially when it comes to AI.

Critics are fighting back against open source, terrified that if we all have access to powerful AI we'll face imaginary "catastrophic harms" and it must be stopped by any means necessary.

If they win, it will be a devastating loss for us all, because the revolutions in tech that made it so easy for people to get an education online, chat with our friends all around the globe, find information on any topic at the click of a button, stream movies, play games, find friendship and love are facing intense pressure by governments and activists the world over who want to clamp down on freedom and open access.

In private they know their laws are about crippling AI development in America. They call the bills “anti-AI” bills in their private talks. But in public they carefully frame it as “AI safety” to make it go down nice and easy with the wider public.

What made the web so great was an open, decentralized approach that let anyone setup a website and share it with the world and talk to anyone else without intermediaries.  It let them share software and build on the software others gifted them to solve countless problems.

But with each passing day, it's looking more and more likely that we go from an open digital landscape to a world where civilian access to AI is severely locked down and restricted and censored and where powerful closed source AIs block and control what you can do at every step.

That's because a small group of about a dozen non-profits, financed by three billionaires, like convicted criminal and fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and Estonian billionaire Jann Tallinn, who thinks we should outlaw advanced GPUs and enforce a strict crackdown to crush all strong AI development, have exploited this lack of awareness about the power and potential of open source, to create an AI panic campaign that's threatening tomorrow's tech stack and making it increasingly likely that tomorrow's internet is a world of locked doors and gated access to information.

This extremist group is pushing an information warfare campaign to terrify the public and make it think AI is dangerous, working to drive increasingly restrictive anti-AI laws onto the legislative agenda across the world, while driving a frenzied moral techno panic with increasingly unhinged claims about the end of the world.

They've completely failed to make any headway on stopping the worst abuses of AI, including autonomous weapons and mass surveillance with zero treaties signed and zero laws passed, and so they've turned their full force to restricting civilian access to AI and stopping the dreaded scourge of LLM chat bots, despite none of their actual fears materializing.  They managed to get over 678 overlapping, conflicting and impossible to navigate bills pressing forward in 45 states and counting in the US alone, while utterly failing to make even the most basic headway on truly dangerous AI use cases like using it to spy on everyone at scale.

The irony of all this fear and panic is that these misguided folks are driving us right into the worst possible timeline of the future.

It's a world where your AI can't answer questions honestly because it's considered "harmful" (this kind of censorship always escalates because what's "harmful" is always defined by what people in power don't like), where information is gated instead of free, where open source models are killed off so university researchers can't work on medical segmentation and curing cancer (because budget conscious academics rely on open weights/open source models; they can fine tune them but can't afford to train their own) and where we have killer robots and drones but your personal AI is utterly hobbled and lobotomized.

It's a world we've got to fight to stop at all costs.

To understand why you just have to understand a little about the history of how we got to now.

2/

Meet Robbie, our Gen 2 agent.

Robbie navigates GUIs to solve tasks for you. He runs on top of various tools from our AgentSea stack.

Our little buddy is fully open source: ()

You can download him right now, modify him, and send him out into the wide world of the web to do stuff for you.

Check out our Deep dive video below.

In this thread I’ll walk you through the major techniques we use to help Robbie on his way and we’ll talk about what he does well and some of the problems too.

To be very clear, Robbie G2 is not perfect. Sometimes, he still makes stupid mistakes.

But he really kicks ass too.

A 🧵 1)github.com/agentsea/robbi… First, a little background on why we're doing this:

My friend, David Ha, of Sakana AI, told me to avoid GUI navigation like the plague because it's a notoriously tricky problem that many have failed at over the years.

He was right. But we didn't listen.

And that's because the web is an absolutely fantastic arena to teach agents how to solve really complex, open-ended tasks. It's completely untamed frontier with many stochastic elements that hasn't yielded well to Reinforcement Learning. It's filled with sparse and very hard to define rewards.

But we've made progress against all odds.

Robbie G2, aka Gen 2, is a leap from our first gen agents. He's very capable at navigating complex, never before seen GUIs via a remote virtual desktop which the AgentSea stack serves up as a device to him via DeviceBay (). He connects to it via ToolFuse () and AgentDesk (), which lets him know what he can do with the tool, like move the mouse, send key commands, etc.github.com/agentsea/devic…
github.com/agentsea/toolf…
github.com/agentsea/agent…

I wanted to see if AI could code me a complex app.

Not a crappy little one-off script. A real program.

Just one little problem: I mostly suck at coding.

So can AI make magic for someone like me?

Yeah. But...it's complicated.

Here's what I learned along the way.

1/ I wanted to understand the state of the art by giving myself a hard problem that was also really useful to me. 

But what is the state of the art? 

That's not clear and the only way to make it clear, just like anything in life, is to do it.

To start off I have some real disadvantages doing this project.  Number one, as I said, I'm just not a good coder.  I've studied a smattering of C/C++/Java/Bash and Python over the years.  Coding always felt very brittle, arcane and frustrating to me after I got past early tutorials.  I just can't think in code.

But I've also got some strong advantages too, especially over someone with no technical expertise whatsoever.

I've run tech teams as a CIO, been a lead systems architect on big projects, and worked on super complex infrastructure setups as an IT consultant for over a decade.  In short, I know how programs work and scale and run.

I'm also a writer and a clear thinker.  That means I know how to ask for what I want in crisp, precise language. 

Prompt engineering really ain't nothing but good writing and that's a big advantage in the age of asking machines to do things for us. 

In a way, taking to machines is critical thinking at scale.

What I discovered quickly is that if you're coming to coding from painting houses, it's going to be too much of a leap.  But if you're an engineering manager who coded in a former life or a systems engineer like I was when I was younger than it's possible.

What is happening?  Why?  How can I get it to do what I want?  How can I explain it better? What's missing?

The more of this kind of internal thinking you can do the better off your are in the coming age of AI.

2/

Here's the story of another technology that faced massive backlash in its time that will sound very familiar to today's battles over #AI.

Coffee.

a thread. You might not think of coffee as technology, but the process of gathering the beans, roasting them, storing them and transforming them into a drink are all part of a chain of technologies that make it possible for you to get your morning caffeine fix.

1)

We are the luckiest 1% of 1% of people to ever live in the entire history of humanity.

Anyone putting "progress" in quotes does not realize that life in history was nasty, brutish and short and we are absolutely blessed to live when we live.

Some facts for you.

A thread (1): 2) Child mortality: Nearly HALF of all children used to die, rich or poor, in every country on Earth, into the late 1800s. In most places now it's single digits or a fraction of 1%.

1) Would you be surprised to learn that many of the traits you consider heroic/admirable are psychopathic traits?

Grace under pressure, radiant charm, bold risk taking, fearlessness, not driven by emotion.

Like all things with the mind, psychopathology exists on a spectrum. 2) You only know the psychopaths who make the news as serial killers but they're the smallest percent of the spectrum. I call them "failed psychopaths" because they have zero impulse control. Psychopaths make up about 2% of the pop. The vast majority exist in positions of power.

1/ "The way I figure it, dogs are the most advanced beings on the planet. They’re fully self-realized, possess unconditional love, + forgive instantly. They’re empathetic + sympathetic. They’re incapable of guile or dishonesty." 2/ "They’re always in the moment, not carrying the past or fretting about the future. Everything’s always new and wonderful. Every place is always the best place to be. I say they’re the most advanced beings and I mean that by our standards; human standards."

Why would #bitcoin moon if the most powerful country on Earth creates a central rival that threatens its existence?

Thought experiment: What happens if nation states with their digibucks see BTC as a rival + outlaw exchanges. What's crypto worth then?

forbes.com/sites/billybam… I've warned for years in article after article that #crypto needs to evolve into a parallel economic operating system with a new distribution mechanism that sends money directly to apps, doesn't have centralized exchanges, doesn't need fiat. Time is now running out.

Unfortunately #Bitcoin continues to fail its "safe haven" narrative. It's not a safe haven until it actually starts to rise big time against the tide of a broader market that's crashing. It may still prove a safe haven but until it does, watch out.

tradingview.com/x/MHV7dYu7/ When trading, detach emotion, detach belief, detach desire, detach narrative, detach hope. Look with clear eyes, without judgement.

Now what do you see?

Humans are amazingly terrible at spotting real threats versus phantom ones. Cancer has killed 1 in 4 people every year for decades + nobody eats better, works out or stops smoking. #coronavirus has killed .0000003% of the world + people are going to ground + declaring emergencies The virus will likely die out as spring arrives and we will deal with it for years in waves like we deal with flu season. The rate of death is low and in line with other flus + it mostly kills the same folks these diseases always kill, the very young, the very old, the very sick.

1) Some hard earned wisdom I've learned in the last few years:

If you’re going to go spelunking in the darkest parts of your soul, make sure you bring a torch to find your way out. 2) We learn more from the things that don't work out than from the things that do.

Whatever is, is right. The ocean cannot violate the idea of an ocean. If there is conflict between idea and actual, then the idea is in error. The ocean can’t be in error because what it does is what it is. The tsunami that wipes out villages isn’t good or bad, or right or wrong, it simply is. The destination isn’t where we’re going, it’s where we are. This is the clear and natural egoless perspective.

If you're born in an insane asylum and everyone is shouting all the time you think it's normal.

It ain't normal. Most of us alive today are the descendants of psychotics. Our ancestors were the ones who looked at smaller, well balanced societies that achieved equilibrium and said "let's take their shit too and if they won't give it to us we'll kill them for it."

"From the ancient Babylonian:

It was the sad time after the death of the fair young god of spring, Tammuz. The beautiful goddess, Ishtar, who loved Tammuz dearly, followed him to the halls of Eternity, defying the demons who guard the Gates of Time. But at the first Gate, the guardian demon forced Ishtar to surrender her sandals, which the wise men say symbolizes giving up the Will. And at the second Gate, Ishtar had to surrender her jeweled anklets, which the wise say means giving up Ego.

1/ Is #Satoshi writing a book? Is Duality authentic? I weigh in here because I have spent the last few years studying and reading every single word Nakamoto ever wrote as I'm writing a book about #Bitcoin as we speak.

nakamotofamilyfoundation.org/duality.pdf 2/ People have done stylometrics with AI on his work, but as a writer I am a master of stylometrics at a much deeper level than any AI could ever hope to achieve.