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2026-10-05 00:35:00

Pick Your Perdition

Everyone's talking about the money. I'm stuck on page 80.

The coverage of Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus has been almost entirely about capital. A $42 billion net loss (most of it on paper, an accounting artifact of investor obligations, but still). Nearly a quarter of its revenue coming from just two customers. A valuation pushing $2 trillion. Fine. Big numbers. But the line I can't stop rereading is this one, from CNN via Reuters:

Anthropic dedicated 80 pages to its risk factors in the leaked prospectus, significantly more than the 48 pages it spent detailing its business, according to Reuters. — CNN

Emphasis mine.

Eighty pages of ways this could go wrong. Forty-eight pages of what they actually do.

I'm not an AI doomer. I'm an anticapitalist, regulation-positive elder Millennial, which is arguably worse, because I think we'll find a way to end things regardless. Maybe it's AI. Maybe it's climate change. Maybe it's good old-fashioned global thermonuclear war.

Pick your perdition.

But that's the thing, isn't it? We pick it.

Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal's wager, published posthumously in his Pensées, is an early mash-up of probability, theology, and good old self-interest. It goes something like this:

God either is or isn't. If God is and you live by His will, you're saved. If God is and you don't, total burnination. If God isn't, nothing you did matters much; you're headed for oblivion either way. So with infinite reward on one side, eternal torture on the other, and a shrug in the middle, the only rational bet is on God.

Here's the crucial part, and the part that matters for everything below: your bet doesn't change whether God exists. God is the fixed variable. You only choose how to respond to it.

p(doom)

"There's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly." — Dario Amodei, to Axios

He also put the odds of things going "really, really well" at 75%. A one-in-four chance of catastrophe, delivered with the same energy as a boring meteorologist. The modern wager goes like this:

invest in AI, because it might solve all of humanity's problems. You'd be a fool not to.

Draw it out and it looks like this:

By this grid, investing is the obvious move: you lose nothing extra and might win big. Pascal would be proud.

The Bet Builds the God

That's the deception and the gamble

Pascal couldn't summon God by betting on Him. We can. We built this thing. Every dollar and every data center changes the odds of which row we end up in. The probability isn't fixed itself but the output of the gamble sure as hell is.

So the table doesn't have two columns. It has at least three:

That last row is the one the "you'd be a fool not to invest" crowd leaves off. It's the whole game. Framing this as all-AI-or-no-AI is a false choice, and a convenient one.

The Prospectus Is the Bottom Row Signed, Stamped, and Notarized

Pascal never had to get his wager past the SEC but Anthropic did. The company wrote the bottom row of the table down, in a legal filing, under its own name, and is asking you to buy in anyway. That's what gets me about those 80 pages.

To be fair: a risk-factor section is a legal shield. Companies list every plausible disaster so they can't be sued later. Disclosing a risk isn't predicting it, necessarily. But it's not nothing either. Someone at that company decided "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity" was material enough to tell investors about.

And to be fair again: Dario Amodei published an essay three weeks ago literally titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling on the whole industry to slow down. I agree but I don't believe it is what he, or the industry, want. I think they're trying to quell you and me, maybe regulators.

None of the pacing call stops training or shipping, conveniently. It doesn't stop a $2 trillion IPO. The pacing essay is the hedge: the middle column, carefully chosen so the money never has to sit out. Everyone gets to be on record warning about the bottom row while still placing the bet that makes it more likely.

It's just capitalism doing what capitalism does. Chose the option where the wealth keeps flowing but call it prudence.

Anthropic, OpenAI, all of them: they're not cartoon villains. They're something more ordinary and more dumbly dangerous. They're so thoroughly trained by the market that "don't extract wealth from this" isn't a column they can see. Even when the downside is the one they wrote down themselves. And one that we're bringing on ourselves.

Pick your perdition. Just don't pretend you didn't pick it.

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2026-10-04 22:05:00

i spent the night at the hospital a few days ago. when i arrived at the emergency and talked to reception, the nice man who took my name and details told me i was great at taking care of myself. that was the first time i heard that. he said he needed to be more like me. i wasn't sure at the time if he was just being kind or if i had actually done something unusual. i called 111, i spoke to a doctor on the phone and he told me to come here. it didn't feel particularly special.

the a&e was busy. there were couples holding on to each other, people coughing on their face masks, a lady in a wheelchair, children crying, drunk people wearing big coats and high heel boots and drunk people in shorts and a t-shirt. the reception guy told me to take a seat and wait for someone to call me. i heard my name twenty minutes later, stood up and marched towards the triage room, dodging families, an old lady with a walking stick and another person in a wheelchair. i could barely breathe at that point.

as i described all my symptoms (coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, headache) i saw the screen on the nurse's machine go from white to amber. she took my blood pressure and measured the oxygen levels in my blood. the machine bleeped. for someone who mostly had to deal with mental health crises (my physical health tends to be pretty solid), it felt good have my disease validated by such an objective number: spo2 = 92%. it was real. i wondered if that's what it felt like being in the death zone on mount everest. i was probably being dramatic.

the nurse told me the amber area of the hospital was full, which is why she was taking me to the resus area instead. 'resus' as in short for resuscitation. she told me not to worry about it. i waited no more. we walked fast and i couldn't catch my breath. i laid in the hospital bed and they quickly plugged the oxygen tubes around my face and inside my nose. i felt good for the first time in days.

doctors and nurses came to talk to me, collect my blood, and give me a nebuliser. or three doses of it. my heart started racing from all the medication. my blood pressure was hiiigh. i was exhausted but my heart kept beating aggressively. they got an x-ray of my chest. i wish i could've seen it.

all the exams came back normal, they told me. it wasn't covid, or influenza, or a bacterial infection. it was probably another virus that they couldn't test for. the doctor told me i should stay overnight so they could monitor my oxygen levels. a consultant would speak to me in the morning. it was already 2am. i said i'd stay.

they gave me blankets and i drifted in and out of sleep until the morning. sometimes i heard people convulsing in a bay next to mine. i saw a girl screaming incoherently when i went to the toilet. she looked like she was overdosing. there were emergencies all around me but i slept better than i had all week. i heard an announcement in their internal comms system: we have 77 patients waiting in urgent care. waiting time is 7 hours and .... fuck me. i guess i do know how to take care of myself.

by 9 am the next day my spo2 had increased to 97% and the morning nurse brought me a cup of tea. the consultant came in, prescribed me an inhaler and steroids. she told me steroids have a rare side effect that she's only seen once in her twenty years as a consultant-it can completely change your personality. i memorised this information because seemed like good trivia. by 10 am i was discharged from the hospital.

i'm home now. i slept plenty and rewatched fleabag. i ate ramen and brigadeiro. i had comforting hot showers. the medication is working, but my lungs are still very unhappy. the doctor told me it would take weeks for me to fully recover. i went for a walk around the park today and felt like i was mountain climbing.

i feel tired but at least i won't have to work next week. happy sunday.

2026-10-04 21:07:00

What makes this situation frustrating is that the bar for what advertisers consider “adult content” is very very low. For example they consider plus size characters, two characters hugging, and “barbie doll nudity” to be adult content, despite these being normal everyday things that are not adult at all. This is why you may see other sites with restrictions on how characters can’t be posed or dressed “too provocatively.”

FurAffinity's announcement is here.

To put it simply, FurAffinity can no longer run on advertisements. The hostility toward normal people has predictably reached the point of what I consider to be hysteria. I never thought I would use that term in earnest, but here we are; this kind of censorship (but also all of them) is nothing less than capitulating to the fascist's need to always have an enemy they can blame the consequences of their own actions on.

It's never their fault the economy is fucked and your kids will never be able to retire. It's the weirdos drawing erotic art. So lets stamp them out, and somehow that will materially make your life better.

Sigh.

While we used to be able to use third-party advertisers to help fund the site, they are now bringing in less than $150 USD a month. For reference, the cost to keep Fur Affinity running is over $25,000 USD per month (there’s a breakdown further into the post, for those curious)!

FurAffinity's GoFundMe has a goal of 180k USD, which would hopefully cover 6 months of funding. Currently, the fundraiser is at 88%!

Personally, I'm not able to contribute to the GFM. I tried several times and it literally just tossed errors in my face, LOL. So I made an account and got FA+ instead! It's 5USD a month which isn't insignificant, but I can swing it this month, I think. It's possible to buy/gift multiple months of FA+ at a time, up to lifetime for 400USD! I did not do that; I don't have 400 bucks, OTL, but it's good to know the option exists.

Places like FurAffinity need to exist, and they need to be able to exist without being effectively blackmailed/held hostage by advertisers and payment processors. I'm glad their GFM is seeing so much action ("2.1K recent donations"). I was going to add a but there, but I'll hold my breath. It is important that it works for them, even temporarily, and that it sets a precedent for similar sites daring to take the same gamble even in today's zombie economy.

Still.

Data preservation is an ever-increasing anxiety of mine. At least with physical book-burning, you have to actually track down books and physically burn them, which at least adds a little bit of friction to the process. With digital content, you can wipe them out/lose access at the push of a button.

I guess what I'm saying is; we should all become bookbinders and bind our favorite online articles, stories, essays, etc into physical media.

But also, financially support places like FurAffinity. Let's stave off the corporate capitalist fascist dystopia for a couple more months, please.

2026-10-04 20:35:19

Days blurred so much that I completely forgot it was October. I don't care about the Inktober brand other than it being a nice shorthand for "the month where we make things and share with friends", so it suits me just fine if folks want to use any other name. We can always make things all year long anyway, a designated time just makes it easy for people who want to feel a bit of festival cheer.

Anyway. I forgot it was October already, but I more-or-less kept up with painting something every day. My original plan was to actually try doing the whole month in ink, but eh. The ink was never the point, I guess. Draw with abandon. Draw because you like it. While you still can.

Since we're getting nearer to the largest annual convention of the year and with mounting frustration over the current economy, I keep seeing the old debate creeping up more often. It used to be where I would meet people and chat, check out what people have been making. Now it's a hotbed of kitschy trinkets, groups forming specifically to farm after the largest trendy fandom. If you're not there to shop, shop, shop till drop, better not make the trip. Ain't getting any convo in with that crowd.

Someone asked people if they weren't there for profits, why would they even be there at all? Too much free time? I don't know man, maybe I just like to make my stupid things to find the 4 people in the country who could recognize the thing I was referencing? Maybe I like hanging around the same dozen circles who just appeared in every event? But they were right, I had stopped attending. Someone said they did fanworks to build an audience for their original works. Which is valid perhaps, but it saddened me still.

I don't like being in a world where making stuff just because is a privilege. I don't like being in a world where sharing things for free is a privilege, or even a cause to fight against because apparently it ruins the market for other people.

I do believe the illness of "the creative industry" is deeply tied to the world economy as a whole. You can afford to have hobbies you don't monetize if your usual job provides for you and isn't actively killing you. The anger percolating in the comments isn't exclusively anger towards people's stances, you could smell the desperation from miles away. People are suffocating and they need to justify it somehow.

On a brighter note, I got the opportunity to watch Suikoden's stage play. Whoever did it know the thing. They really tried. It wasn't the fanciest of shows, it was clear they had tight budget to work with, but no one could accuse them for being soulless. I cried. That I was able to see it come into fruition, that it was something people rallied for, that we could (in this day and age) have a show this earnest... That I, in the depth of my heart, still want to believe people can set aside their differences to work towards something together.

It's difficult to talk about this as an aside, as the importance of Genso Suikoden in my life cannot be overstated.

With both the stage play and anime premiere, my internet space is filled with artworks celebrating the series. It's a welcome respite from all the drama.

2026-10-04 11:59:00

The light in my bathroom went out while I was showering today. And my brain immediately went to “Oh wow I’ve been in the shower too long, what a waste of time. Its good that the lights went out, I can get out sooner.”

But then I stayed a bit longer. My mind was racing to get out. I could be doing something more productive with my time.

But then I stayed a bit longer. And all of a sudden, my mind felt present(?). I let the scalding hot water fall on my back. On my neck. My shoulders relaxed a few inches. I took in deep breaths and could smell the black tea scented body wash. I could hear cars honking away, could see the street lights leaking in through the window.

I finally got out of the shower after 17 minutes, possibly the longest I’ve been in years. I didn’t stay in for so long to practice mindfulness or learn to focus better, I just happened to be there until the activity ended.

I think our lives are so fast paced lately, that doing anything that doesn’t bring tangible value feels wasteful. It feels like time is running out and we have to get to a destination that’s always two steps ahead of us.

After what I experienced today, I’m convinced that with all the intention we’re putting behind running faster and faster towards our goals, we should also learn to intentionally slow down.

2026-10-04 11:57:00

required listening

I decided that I didn't go far enough in making my phone unpleasant to use. Really, I was slipping quite a lot and racking up 4-6 hours a day phone time, and that's no good. I'm tempted to go for a real dumbphone but for now I've taken drastic measures.

Most apps are uninstalled. I used to use PipePipe for YouTube, and that's gone. Now I have to use the god awful browser version, and that's time limited. My password to unlock my time limits is now a randomly generated 32-character string on a piece of paper on my desk so I can't autofill it. I also removed all apps from my home screen except for signal and phone.

So far it's been a success. My screen time was under 2 hours today, and pretty much all of that was in the morning before I got out of bed. It's not as cool or trendy as a flip phone but it is awful to use. Maybe soon I'll build up the nerve to fully remove Google Play services.

Don't use spotify, kids. Burn a cd with some pirated mp3s.

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