2026-04-03: AI doom formula, neighbourhood internet, community legal structures, new job

2026-04-03 — 2026-04-03

Twelve days, four new posts, thirteen updates, and Dan’s changed jobs — that last bit’s worth noting. He’s signed on with a mob called ACS Research to study how AI might slowly take the wheel without anyone noticing the exact moment it happened, then spent the rest of the fortnight doing the actual doom maths and fleshing out the blueprint for how small communities can look after themselves when the big systems go sideways. The through-line running under all of it: the Pentagon’s been leaning on AI labs, data centres are getting bombed, submarine cables are getting cut — a bloke in San Francisco turns out not to be a reliable long-term plan. Turns out there’s more a neighbourhood of fifty can actually do than you’d think, and most of it starts with a piece of paper filed at the relevant state office.

digest
Figure 1

1 Working out the odds on AI doom

1.1 Quis computat?

Here’s the kicker: Dan’s actually tried to write the formula for whether AI kills us. Not a vibe — a proper formula. He frames it as a race: doom fires first, or an alignment breakthrough fires first, and whoever arrives first wins. You can calculate the odds using survival analysis, the same maths you’d use to work out when machines fail. The nasty insight is what happens if safety research also advances capabilities — because you need powerful AI to do AI safety research in the first place. In that case every dollar you put into alignment also feeds doom, and no matter how much you spend, the conditional probability of catastrophe doesn’t shift.

1.2 History-Based Reinforcement Learning

New stub on history-based reinforcement learning. Normal RL trains computers that only know what’s happening right now — like a goldfish with a reward signal. This variant lets the machine remember everything that came before, which sounds bloody obvious when you say it out loud but turns out to be hard to make work properly. Placeholder for now; Dan says computable versions exist and he’ll come back to it.

1.3 Catastrophic risk

The doom-and-gloom notes got a new ethics section. Turns out even the people who lie awake worrying about existential risk can’t agree on whether saving the whole world should beat everything else on the list. Dan’s now pointed to both sides of that argument, which is either reassuring or deeply worrying depending on your disposition.

1.4 Now

Dan’s changed jobs, the restless bugger. He’s signed on with ACS Research to study how AI might slowly take the steering wheel without anyone noticing the exact moment it happened — they call it gradual disempowerment, which sounds almost polite until you think about it. Also stuck in Europe for all of April because the Iran conflict has mucked up his travel, apparently on the lookout for a spare sofa in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Czechia or Germany.

2 Your street, sorted

2.1 A social platform for your neighbourhood

New post, and probably the most tangible thing Dan’s written in a while. What if your suburb had its own noticeboard — real listings from people who actually live nearby, an events calendar nobody’s monetising, a skills directory for who has a ute and will help you move for a slab? The technology for this is basically solved; the hard part is the cold start. A platform’s useless until enough people are on it, and getting there requires a small group of stubborn people who commit to using it before it feels worth the bother. Dan’s pitch: start with something that scratches a concrete itch — Facebook Marketplace is notoriously crook, and a neighbourhood version that verifies residents would be immediately better — and let the community pull it from there.

2.2 Local social platforms: a technical implementation guide

The practical companion to the neighbourhood platform post above — how you’d actually build and run the thing. Two paths: a cheap cloud VPS (about fourteen dollars a month, a Saturday afternoon to stand up) or a couple of second-hand ThinkPads in someone’s closet for full data sovereignty. The charming bit is the identity verification idea: mail people a postcard with a code to prove they actually live in the postcode. Low-tech, high-trust, and apparently a real option. The whole stack runs in containers from day one, so migrating from cloud to closet later is just an afternoon of planned downtime.

2.3 Internet for the occasionally online

The offline internet notes picked up a section on Project NOMAD — a self-contained survival computer with Wikipedia, manuals and AI baked in for when the network goes away entirely. Kiwix for grabbing Wikipedia offline has been in these notes for a while; NOMAD takes it further and adds AI inference you can run without any internet at all. Fits neatly with the own-your-infrastructure theme running hard through everything this fortnight.

2.4 Virtual private mesh networks

Pangolin got added to the meshnet notes — another tool for connecting your devices securely without routing traffic through a big provider who can watch what’s talking to what. Closer to a secure access VPN than a full meshnet, but it slots into the same drawer: tools for building infrastructure you actually control.

4 Workshop bench

4.1 Zotero

Zotero can now talk to Claude directly. Install an MCP server, point it at the local Zotero app, and Claude can search your library, add papers by DOI, pull annotations out of PDFs — just by asking in plain English. ‘Find everything I’ve tagged kernel methods and export the BibTeX’ is a real thing you can now do mid-conversation. There’s also a new section on the translation server, which takes a DOI and spits back structured citation data without any clicking — handy if you’ve got a hundred references to process at once. The useful bit: it all runs locally, so your reading list isn’t going anywhere near a commercial API.

4.2 Docker containerized apps (for scientists)

Docker Desktop on a Mac’s been a resource pig for yonks — fan going like a turbine, battery flat by smoko, gigabytes of RAM just sitting there looking important. OrbStack’s now the recommended drop-in replacement: lightweight, doesn’t run like it’s mining bitcoin in the background. The GPU section is still honestly described as messy territory, which at least saves you the trouble of finding out the hard way.

4.3 Graphic design for the vexed

Small additions: a generative section pointing toward the AI diffusion art notes, and a logos-and-icons section with a couple of tools for quick logo generation. The notes catching up with how people actually make graphics in 2026.

4.4 London

London’s governance section got a heading trim, but the substance is still there and still genuinely cooked. The City of London employs a senior official created in 1571 whose job includes sitting in Parliament’s gallery watching for legislation that might touch the City’s interests — the City Remembrancer, still active, still doing exactly that. Good companion reading to all the community governance stuff running through the rest of this fortnight, if you’re in the mood to feel better about how Dan’s proposals are going.

5 Minor tweaks

Also had a light once-over on Linux distros as bikes, natalism and fertility, Quarto, computer games, denoising diffusion maths, public sphere business models, and UI design — seven posts, couldn’t tell you what changed, the lad just can’t leave things alone.