The Curious Engineer

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Strange Loop Canon

strangeloopcanon.com

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein. Click to read Strange Loop Canon, by Rohit Krishnan, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

AI / MLEssays / personalSociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
223 from 19 Dec 2020 to 6 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (28 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 24

  1. Agent governance looks less like moral education and more like institutional economics
  2. The Business of Building God
  3. How to control an agent swarm
  4. Who Wins As Intelligence Commodifies?
  5. AIs are companies, my friend
  6. Nobody Knows Anything
  7. LLM councils show groupthink
  8. Who Audits the Auditors?
  9. Introducing BenchBench
  10. Homo Agenticus
  11. Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence
  12. Experiments with Vibe Science
  13. Why Coase needs Hayek
  14. Agent, Know Thyself! (and bid accordingly)
  15. Aligned Agents Still Build Misaligned Organisations
  16. Deciphering Papyri
  17. LLM Enron: experiments on structure vs scale
  18. Can we build a management flight simulator?
  19. Notes on Hong Kong
  20. The future of work is world models
  21. Vignettes from the Takeoff
  22. Aligning Anthropic
  23. Notes on Mexico
  24. The Tragedy of the Agentic Commons

2025 26

  1. Will money still exist in the agentic economy?
  2. Seeing like an agent
  3. Contra Scott on AI safety and the race with China
  4. Epicycles All The Way Down
  5. Poisoned prose
  6. Can we get an AI to write better?
  7. Anomie
  8. Prediction is hard, especially about the future
  9. The future of work is playing a videogame
  10. Walter
  11. Ads are inevitable in AI, and that's okay
  12. The Slow Apocalypse: When will we run out of kids?
  13. Seeing like an LLM
  14. The fair as an allegory
  15. Notes on Japan
  16. Silicon Valley's quest to remove friction from our lives
  17. What happened in the 2010s?
  18. What to do when the AI blackmails you
  19. Betting on AI risk
  20. Working with LLMs: A Few Lessons
  21. Deplatforming: AI edition
  22. Vibe Governing
  23. If AGI is the future, vibe coding is what we should all be doing
  24. In defense of Gemini
  25. How would you interview an AI, to give it a job?
  26. What would a world with AGI look like?

2024 22

  1. No, LLMs are not "scheming"
  2. Is AI hitting a wall?
  3. When we become cogs
  4. People want competence, seemingly over everything else
  5. Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations
  6. What comes after?
  7. OpenAI's Strawberry models can reason like an expert
  8. Predicting AI
  9. Why AI hasn’t shown up in the GDP statistics yet
  10. LLMs breach a threshold
  11. Strange Loop Canon Commencement Address
  12. Seeing Like A Network
  13. Whither Utopia?
  14. AI embraces its product arc
  15. What can LLMs never do?
  16. Ode to software
  17. We all live on a knife's edge, and it's fine
  18. LLMs have special intelligence, not general, and that's plenty.
  19. Google had a very bad week
  20. The mystery of the garage
  21. Soul
  22. Evaluations are all we need

2023 43

  1. State of the Canon
  2. Discovery is the original sin of the modern age
  3. Disruption starts at the margins, but doesn't stop there
  4. The age of access
  5. Power, money and human nature
  6. The agent principal problem
  7. I wrote a book!
  8. Slouching Towards Utopia
  9. Progress
  10. The Dream AI Hardware
  11. Mind the Gap
  12. Symposium: On Building God
  13. We live in a world that social media built
  14. Innovation
  15. The Case Against Prediction
  16. Highlights from the comments on Rest
  17. Rest
  18. The Big Sort
  19. What even is Big Tech?
  20. Symposium: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
  21. Death by a Thousand Meetings
  22. Symposium: It's hard to bet on human extinction
  23. Symposium: The unique uselessness of business advice
  24. Symposium #2: where everyone thinks everyone else is doing badly
  25. Symposium 1: a surfeit of interesting things
  26. Building god
  27. Verify, but trust
  28. How do you govern something that's part software and part people?
  29. Company Lifetime Value
  30. Maintenance, a theory
  31. A safety story
  32. These new white collar jobs
  33. A few questions for policymaking in the age of AI
  34. Cognition for all!
  35. Risk
  36. Computer used to be a job, now it's a machine; next up is Analyst
  37. Don't Panic: Against The Butlerian Jihad on AI
  38. "Oh Bing, Please Don't Be Evil"
  39. CBDCs: More Than You Wanted To Know
  40. People always put their money in futures they predict
  41. Where are all the robots?
  42. The curiosity theory of everything
  43. The Future

2022 41

  1. Experiments
  2. The Death of Satire
  3. Artificial General Intelligence and how (much) to worry about it
  4. Generative AI: the Anything from Anything Machine
  5. A story of two crashes
  6. Reality strikes back
  7. Why isn't there a philosophy of business?
  8. Cone of foresight: an expanded veil of ignorance for our future
  9. How to play the glass bead game
  10. In the investing foxhole there are no atheists
  11. Divining Talent
  12. Distilled knowledge is the key to progress
  13. Effective Altruism is a constant fight against Knightian uncertainty
  14. AI risk is modern eschatology
  15. The finance world is a Rorschach test
  16. Our love of authenticity rises as all the world becomes a stage
  17. Book Review: The Network State
  18. How to create money
  19. Embrace the curious life
  20. Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise
  21. Anarchy, open source, and utopia
  22. We should have called AI Artificial Intuition
  23. On personality, AI's final frontier
  24. On Wars And Money
  25. On thinkers and doers
  26. On Marriage
  27. The Problem With Experts
  28. AI is an Idiot Savant
  29. What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools
  30. Grant givers need better track records
  31. Beware The Idle Kantian
  32. How To Win Public Opinion, The VC Method
  33. How Easy Is It Really To Get Famous?
  34. Illegible Medicis And Hunting For Outliers
  35. Interview: Noah Smith
  36. On Smilodons And Designing Success
  37. On Minotaurs And Free Science
  38. Why You Should Be Wrong More Often
  39. Zeitgeist Farming
  40. The Shapes Of Our Stories
  41. 2050

2021 54

  1. The Canon
  2. A Progress Check: The Small Successes Of Nanotech
  3. So You Want To Have Impact!
  4. Interview: Byrne Hobart
  5. Building Cathedrals
  6. The Mechanical King
  7. How Much Should You Lie?
  8. Walking Turtles On A Leash
  9. Meditations On Barbells
  10. Greedy Algorithms And The Need For Illegibility
  11. Two Stories About Tacit Knowledge
  12. Advice: How To Be A Good Billionaire
  13. The Search For Immortality In Art
  14. Spot The Outlier
  15. The Unbearable Lightness Of Beauty
  16. Thinking Like A City
  17. Why Do We Dislike Rules So Much
  18. The Endearing Mythology Of A Flat Earth
  19. Meditations On Regulations: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes
  20. Why We Fund Teams And Hire Individuals
  21. On Medici and Thiel
  22. Unbundling Universities
  23. The Mythology Of Genius
  24. Where's My Flying Car?
  25. Book Review: Human Scale Revisited
  26. A Theory of Progress: Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
  27. Gradualist Progress and The Beginning of Infinity
  28. The Ecology of Companies
  29. 10 Ways That Organisations Die
  30. How do you know whom to trust?
  31. A Communist Success Story
  32. Is The Government Efficient? (Adversarial Collaboration)
  33. A Crypto Utopia In Our Future
  34. The Creator Economy Needs Fatter Tails
  35. Should You Go To College?
  36. Market Ecology And The New Species Of Retail Traders
  37. Skepticism re The Crypto Utopia
  38. Strategy Decay as an Institutional Problem
  39. The Costs of Efficiency
  40. Paul Graham and the wealth tax
  41. The New Space Race: What Took So Long
  42. The Price of Immortality
  43. Book Review: Stubborn Attachments, by Tyler Cowen
  44. Why do big businesses seemingly suck at innovation?
  45. Book commentary: Why We're Polarised
  46. A proposal for Progress Studies
  47. A study of eccentricity
  48. On Scott contra Weyl
  49. Isolated narratives of progress
  50. Understanding wage stagnation
  51. A taxonomy of disinformation
  52. How to respond to low probability events
  53. Combating organisational inertia
  54. Simulating understanding

2020 13

  1. Thank you for reading!
  2. The next S curve
  3. Against against Facebook
  4. When ideas lay around for the plucking..
  5. Measuring governance
  6. Punctuated equilibria theory of progress
  7. Eureka! On the clustering of geniuses
  8. Trolley problem as an issue with Bayesian priors
  9. Binary outcomes in multidimensional space
  10. Why is everyone so damn happy?
  11. The value of fictions
  12. Great polarisation: middle class edition
  13. Possible end of the great stagnation: Childhood's End