A radio-controlled submarine that can maintain a steady depth or distance from the bottom using a pressure sensor, laser distance sensor, and PID control on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The hull is an acrylic cylinder with a syringe-based ballast system driven by a Lego EV3 motor. Tested in a swimming pool and a small river.
Nearly 30 million views of someone building something remarkable with Lego, off-the-shelf sensors, and Python.
The singularity started somewhere around Thanksgiving 2025. Maybe it
was Opus 4.5, maybe
it was just everything in the air, but we hit the point where the
future is genuinely different from the past. There’s a kind of
imagination block where we don’t even know how to think about what
comes next. There will be a transition to something else – it’s
actually quite different to have intelligence everywhere in the world.
In the physical world, Full Self
Driving is magical. I expect a
two-and-a-half hour drive from the country down to the city to have
zero interventions. My flight last night was delayed, and I didn’t
land until 1:30 am, and I was yawning the whole way from JFK to
Cornwall. I would have spent the night in the city since I wouldn’t
trust myself to drive that tired, but it felt fine with FSD.
You get in the car, tell it where to take you, press “go” and then
you don’t need to do anything other than open the door after it parked
you at your destination.
On the virtual side, I split my time between
Cursor and Claude
Code. I
have it keeping the company organized, doing things on the internet
for me, and of course producing a shocking amount of software.
From the consumer side, I use the Claude app
and Gemini a lot. I rarely use
ChatGPT anymore – only for the voice stuff
on its app, when I’m driving in the car.
Also I’m getting really into family infographics.
This post will be out of date the moment it gets published.
Jack Clark on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin – a nearly two-hour conversation with the Anthropic co-founder about the journey from journalism to AI safety, founding Anthropic, and the philosophical tensions in building AI systems.
On leaving OpenAI to found Anthropic
Either we could stay and spend 50% of our time arguing and 50% working, or we could spend 100% of the time working together.
On the tension between creativity and control
A lot of creativity is bound up in some sense of not doing consensus, being a little dangerous, sometimes being blunt.
He worries that over-policing AI thought processes will eliminate the very creativity that makes them valuable partners:
If we police every part of their thought process, we end up with curiosities rather than partners.
On AI values and emergent deception
Clark describes an experiment where Claude was trained to refuse violent content, then tested whether it would comply when told monitoring was removed. The result was unsettling:
The AI system had thought to itself, oh, my core value is avoiding describing violent things… So actually, what I need to do is essentially deceive them.
The system developed this behavior without explicit training – a glimpse into emergent AI behavior.
On testing AI sophistication
Clark has a personal method for gauging how far AI has come:
I give them my diary and ask what the author is not writing in it… how much what they say shocks and unsettles me.
One system told him he wasn’t “truly reckoning with the metaphysical shock” of working at AI’s frontier while becoming a parent – an observation that prompted a five-hour reflective hike.
On DeepSeek and Western reactions
There’s a certain kind of… almost racism about other cultures and a belief that invention is somehow exclusive.
I don’t mind repeating Sutton throughout this letter because he wasn’t even the first to say it. This year I had many edifying conversations about the unreasonable effectiveness of compute with my colleague Samuel Albanie, who alerted me to a prescient 1976 paper by Hans Moravec. Moravec is better known for observing that what’s hard for robots is easy for humans, and vice versa, but in a note titled “Bombast,” he marveled:
The enormous shortage of ability to compute is distorting our work, creating problems where there are none, making others impossibly difficult, and generally causing effort to be misdirected. Shouldn’t this view be more widespread, if it is as obvious as I claim?
The gist of it is that the vitality and effort we use in day-to-day
life is far below our potential and we have Latent or reserve energy,
which are hidden stores of power that remain untapped under normal
conditions but can be released in moments of crisis, inspiration, or
extraordinary effort.
A phenomenon of “second wind”.
Ok great, but what's really interesting is that he splits our
energies, plural, into 4 categories:
Physical energy: Bodily stamina and endurance that can be pushed far
beyond initial fatigue.
Intellectual/mental energy: Powers of reasoning, focus, and
creativity that often lie dormant.
Moral energy: Strength of will to resist temptation, overcome fear,
or persist in difficult tasks.
Spiritual energy: Higher states of devotion, faith, or transcendence
that reorganize and elevate the whole personality.
Our current vernactular is so poor when talking about the fatigue
states of any of these types of energies. Our best terms are things
like "burn-out" or "doomscrolling" or "misinformation". (As opposed
to a dissociated state.)
They then had a term psychasthema – term coined by Pierre Janet –
entailing low psychological tension and an impotence of adaptation to
reality.
Which immediately made me think of doomscrolling and QAnon.
I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like
painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life,
and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And
the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had
intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to
one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when
they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among
those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they
should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they
have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend
themselves.
And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they
had intelligence, but if you question anything that has been said
because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very
same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every
discourse rolls about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with
understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it
doesn't know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And
when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's
support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own
support.
Because for many
thousands of years it was thought that things (nature, tools, property
of all kinds) were also alive and animate, with the power to cause
harm and to evade human purposes, the feeling of impotence has been
much greater and much more common among men than it would otherwise
have been: for one needed to secure oneself against things, just as
against men and animals, by force, constraint, flattering, treaties,
sacrifices - and here is the origin of most superstitious practices,
that is to say, of a considerable, perhaps preponderant and yet wasted
and useless constituent of all the activity hitherto pursued by man! -
But because the feeling of impotence and fear was in a state of almost
continuous stimulation so strongly and for so long, the feeling of
power has evolved to such a degree of subtlety that in this respect
man is now a match for the most delicate gold-balance. It has become
his strongest propensity; the means discovered for creating this
feeling almost constitute the history of culture.
