Analog Mantra
Magnus Hambleton's place for writing.
Infrequent thoughts on economics, AI and philosophy — and some generative art you can play with.
History shows jobs are lost from automation
How automation has changed the share of our lives spent working — and where we could spend the leisure time created by AI. With interactive charts and a productivity simulator.
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Fragility & Efficiency
I am increasingly worried about the tradeoff between robustness and efficiency of systems and what the effect of this will be on our society. This is a continuation from my thoughts on Fragility and Boundary Conditions E…
Competition and Slack
I am flying long distance for the first time in a long time — this time to the US for a festival. My experience with my flight being canceled made me reflect on how airlines work and the dynamics of the airline industry…
Existential AI risk 101
Why to take existential AI risk seriously
GPT-5
A short story written by GPT-4
Fragility & Boundary Conditions
I’ve had some thoughts over the last few months that felt very disparate, but suddenly came crashing together and unlocked a new insight, connecting how rain behaves to how startups fail. In short: it’s easy to make your startup fragile without intending to. If you are a VC-backed startup with grand ambitions, you may not want to, or be able to avoid this, but you should make sure that those decisions are intentional.
Thoughts on the future of AI
A few frameworks to think about the models that will change the future and the companies that will be built on and around them.
InteractiveChatGPT
ChatGPT writes generative art.
InteractiveMarble
Visualizing streamlines in "curl noise". Some particles are traveling forward through the flow, others backwards. 's' to save, 'r' to restart, click or 'p' to pause/unpause. Colors and setup variables change each time. Press 'a' to randomise the flow while keeping the previous picture and particle positions.
InteractiveFluid
Visualizing streamlines in "curl noise" — an analogy to the movement of an incompressible fluid, at different scales and with various visual characteristics. I've thought about how to generate noise using properties of fluids and it finally clicked when reading this article https://www.bit-101.com/blog/2021/07/curl-noise/
InteractivePool
Had a half-dream while falling asleep of a pool in a desert. Tried to capture the vibe of that dream.
InteractivePerlin lines
Perlin valleys and rivers
InteractivePerlin colors
Testing creating lines and colors based on perlin noise, with (almost) all parameters driven from noise