Séb Krier reposted
Nabeel S. Qureshi [verified] @nabeelqu · 3h
Working at a company and experiencing the messy reality and the twists and turns along the way, it's funny to notice the disparity between that and the neat, packaged story that ends up being told.
This gives you serious intuition for how much history is fake or just lost.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Nabeel S. Qureshi observing that the gap between the messy lived reality of working at a company and the neat retrospective story told about it gives intuition for how much of history is fabricated or lost.
Joshua Achiam @jachiam0 · 17h
A long way down the road, people will speak in reverent tones about Bay Area house parties the same way they talk about Vienna coffee houses
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet from Joshua Achiam comparing future reverence for Bay Area house parties to how people speak of historic Vienna coffee houses (associated with early 20th-century intellectual ferment).
@lu_sichu (Sichu Lu) — 4h
every sci-fiction dystopia reads as retarded MCs essentially until i realize i am now living in one and we humans are the retards
> QUOTED: @dioscuri (Henry Shevlin) — 9h
> As a teenager reading about the decline of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, I couldn't understand why they mostly just let it happen. Why not reform urgently, slash the bureaucracy, race to adopt the new technologies?... [truncated]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Quote-tweet chain drawing an analogy between historical imperial decline (Ottoman/Habsburg) and present-day inertia in the face of AI change; quoted tweet cut off by platform truncation.
↻ Sichu Lu reposted
Henry Shevlin ✔️ @dioscuri — 8h
As a teenager reading about the decline of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, I couldn't understand why they mostly just let it happen. Why not reform urgently, slash the bureaucracy, race to adopt the new technologies?
Much less confused these days.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Text-only tweet drawing an implicit analogy between historical imperial decline/inertia and present-day institutional responses (to AI, presumably, given context of the batch).
Séb Krier @sebkrier · 1h
Warning to the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1976)
> QUOTED (image of text):
Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A quote from Solzhenitsyn's 1976 "Warning to the West" shared by AI policy researcher Séb Krier, on how societies with unlimited information access can nonetheless fall into voluntary self-deception. Likely read by Nathan for its resonance with epistemics/governance discourse rather than AI-specific content, though Krier is an AI policy figure (works on Google DeepMind policy).
Aella ✓ @Aella_Girl [Subscribe]
Getting into history stuff, I don't think I realized how fragile democracy is at its early stages. So many times people are like "fuck this monarchy/dictator shit, let's do a democracy" and then someone they don't like gets elected and they're like "wait not like that" and then they ignore or bend the rules to let them be the ones staying in power and then it's we're back to monarchy/dictator shit.
12:23 PM · Jan 19, 2026 · 17.6K Views
💬32 🔁13 ❤️316 🔖27 [share]
Daryl ✓ @allvibesnoskill · 2h
[Embedded image, book page]:
CHAPTER XLII.—How easily Men become corrupted.
In this matter of the decemvirate we may likewise note the ease wherewith men become corrupted, and how completely, although born good and well brought up, they change their nature. For we see how favourably disposed the youths whom Appius gathered round him became towards his tyranny, in return for the trifling benefits which they drew from it; and how Quintus Fabius, one of the second decemvirate and a most worthy man, blinded by a little ambition, and misled by the evil counsels of Appius, abandoning his fair fame, betook himself to most unworthy courses, and grew like his master.
Careful consideration of this should make those who frame laws for commonwealths and kingdoms more alive to the necessity of placing restraints on men's evil appetites, and depriving them of all hope of doing wrong with impunity.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Aella reflects on the historical fragility of early democracies collapsing back into autocracy, and a reply quotes a chapter from what appears to be Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy about the corrupting effect of power (the Roman decemvirate). General political-philosophy content, not directly AI-related, but thematically adjacent to Nathan's interest in power concentration and governance structures (relevant lens for AI governance/institutional-design thinking).
web weaver ✓ @deepfates · 8h
You see this across all types of societies. A sudden mania for tower building, and then just as suddenly it stops. only one tower survives. evidence of The wizard war
> QUOTED: núll ✓ @nullpointered · 10h
I think about this a lot
[Image 1: old illustration of a medieval city with dozens of tall stone towers, likely San Gimignano or medieval Bologna]
[Image 2: modern aerial photo of Bologna showing the Two Towers (Asinelli and Garisenda) rising above the city, most other towers gone]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A humorous historical observation (medieval Italian "tower societies" like Bologna/San Gimignano, where competitive tower-building booms then collapses to a few survivors) framed jokingly as "evidence of a wizard war" — general internet-history curiosity, no direct AI content.
signüll @signulll · 42m
i absolutely love that literal instructions for how to deliberately derail organizations were published in 1944 by the cia & yet, in most large corps right now, this reads like a standard operating procedure doc.
remarkable.
[scanned document image:]
(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A viral excerpt from the CIA's 1944 "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," listing bureaucratic-sabotage tactics that the poster notes now read as standard corporate meeting behavior. General organizational/culture commentary, not AI-specific.
Wolf of X @tradingMaxiSL · 16h
15. In Japan you can find centuries-old stones near coasts inscribed with a warning: "Do not build any homes below this point. High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis." These are the Tsunami Stones.
[Four photos of weathered Japanese stone markers with vertical kanji inscriptions, standing in forest/coastal terrain]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A trivia/history tweet about Japan's "tsunami stones" — ancestral warning markers about safe building elevation, passed down as inter-generational risk memory. Likely of interest to Nathan as an analogy for long-timescale institutional knowledge transfer and civilizational memory, themes that recur in his ancestor-tree / long-term-safety thinking, though not explicitly AI-related.
tkasasagi @tkasasagi
"When I first saw this, I thought it's alien language for a sec, but it's Japanese in 17th century called Jindaimoji
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindai_mo..."
[Photo: a page from a Japanese reference book, numbered 573, showing a chart of "神代字三十六人首" (Jindaimoji — "age of the gods" script) characters that resemble a runic/alien-looking script, credited to 小野寺成美編, 江戸後期刊 (Edo late-period publication)]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet from a scholar of historical Japanese texts sharing an image of Jindaimoji, a pseudo-ancient script claimed to predate kanji, whose characters visually resemble runes. Casual browsing/interest capture.
