The Cognitive Dark Forest

by kaycebasques on 3/29/2026, 7:36:21 PM

https://ryelang.org/blog/posts/cognitive-dark-forest/

Comments

by: scottlawson

The thesis that in the past it was safe to share ideas and projects because the execution was hard, and that now things have changed because of AI is an interesting AI, but I wonder if it is really true.It certainly seems true that for small projects and relatively narrow scoped things that AI can replicate them easily. I'm thinking specifically about blog posts where people share their first steps and simple programs as they learn something new, like "here is how I set up a flask website", "here is how I trained a neural network on MNIST".But if AI is empowering people to take on more complex projects, perhaps it takes the same amount of time to replicate the execution of a more advanced project?In other words, maybe in the past, it would take me 10 hours to do a "small" project, which today I could do in 1 hour with the assistance of AI.And now, with the assistance of AI, I can go much farther in 10 hours and deliver a more complex project. But that means that someone else trying to replicate this execution is still going to need around 10 hours to replicate it.Basically, I'm agreeing that AI can reduce barrier to replicating the execution of another person's project, but at the same time, that we can make more complex projects that are harder to replicate. So a basic SASS crud app is trivial now but a multi-disciplinary domain specific app that integrates multiple systems is still going to be hard to replicate.

3/29/2026, 8:17:50 PM

by: pugio

Thanks, this helped crystallize something for me: the play the AI labs are making is anti-fragile (in the Nassim Taleb sense):> The very act of resisting feeds what you resist and makes it less fragile to future resistance.At least along certain dimensions. I don't think the labs themselves are antifragile. Obviously we all know the labs are training on everything (so write/act the way you want future AIs to perceive you), but I hadn't really focused on how they're absorbing the innovation that they stimulate. There's probably a biological analog...Well there are many, and I quote this AI response here for its chilling parallels:> Parasitic castrators and host manipulators do something related. Some parasites redirect a host’s resources away from reproduction and into body maintenance or altered tissue states that benefit the parasite. A classic example is parasites that make hosts effectively become growth/support machines for the parasite. It is not always “stimulate more tissue, then eat it,” but it is “stimulate more usable host productivity, then exploit it.” (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking. Emphasis mine.)

3/29/2026, 8:42:58 PM

by: movedx

If AI makes replicating other people’s ideas faster and easier, thus allowing capital-heavy market players to just absorb whatever idea you manage to execute, then perhaps, somewhat ironically, the economic moat you’ll have is your human nature, contact, and time? Perhaps we’ll see a shift in sentiment towards wanting to deal with and spend time with the people in the business, rather than just what the business can do for you and yours from a software perspective?I believe the idea of “off-shoring” your IT is a good example of this. My brother works for a business whose clients would drop them the moment they off-shored any aspect of their IT support. Not because of data sovereignty, but simply because they value them being on-shore, in the same time zone, and being native English speakers. And this is despite the fact it would drop the prices they’re paying for IT by 30-40%.

3/29/2026, 9:32:26 PM

by: xantronix

I have been mulling this over and I think I have some solutions in mind, at least for myself.• No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet.• Bring back LAN parties. Not for gaming necessarily, but for the purpose of exchanging works of engineering and art in an intimate, intentional way.• Take this as an opportunity to build closer, longer-lasting relationships with people.• No more emphasis on metrics. I can microdose on dopamine from natural sources, like, looking at a beautiful sky at sunset, or cuddling my dog.• Open hardware, or, in the very least, hardware we can still control on our own volition. If this means we must be retrocomputing enthusiasts, then so be it.

3/29/2026, 9:29:51 PM

by: rhubarbtree

This is mislead by the nerd philosophy that the tech is the business. It absolutely isn’t, the tech is a small part of a startup. Witness that Spotify continues to exist despite being known and replicated by the major giants.Poetically expressed, but ultimately based on a false notion of what a business actually is.

3/29/2026, 9:04:31 PM

by: zenogais

Might just be independent discovery, but the main idea of this blog post is more or less the exact theory advanced in the recent book "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" by Bogna Konior (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Theory-Internet-Redux/dp/150956926X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Theory-Internet-Redux/dp/...</a>).

3/29/2026, 8:37:45 PM

by: king_phil

Dark forest makes no sense to me. Why would a civilization eradicate another, spending huge amounts of resources (time, energy, material) when the universe has such an enormous scale that you cannot even get to each other in a timescale that makes much sense...

3/29/2026, 8:17:20 PM

by: caycecan

Near the end you start to describe the paradigm the machines build in The Matrix. Neo is the aberration they seek to reincorporate to sustain their inability to innovate.

3/29/2026, 8:39:26 PM

by: alembic_fumes

> This is the true horror of the cognitive dark forest: it doesn’t kill you. It lets you live and feeds on you. Your innovation becomes its capabilities. Your differentiation becomes its median.Oh no, the terrible dystopia where anyone can benefit from anyone else's good ideas without restrictions! And without any gatekeepers, licensing agreements, copyright, and not even a lawyer in sight!If this is the dark future that AI use brings for us, I say bring it. Even if it means that somebody gets filthy rich in the process, while making the rest of the humanity better off.

3/29/2026, 9:19:55 PM

by: bonoboTP

Valuable ideas have already been those that others find unintuitive and it's kinda hard to get people on board because they are skeptical and they need long form, tailored explanation for them to get convinced. If a short elevator pitch convinces them to go home and try to build it, it's probably already being considered by others.

3/29/2026, 8:39:51 PM

by: noident

The LLMisms in the "thinkpad" section caused me to close the tab

3/29/2026, 8:17:07 PM

by: beej71

Makes me think of rebuilding libraries with AI to change the license.

3/29/2026, 8:42:55 PM

by: simianwords

Can someone explain what I'm missing here?If we are talking about releasing OpenSource software, they can already be used by companies with zero effort.I'm guessing the author is talking about released closed source software or simply talking about ideas? What kind of serious company or startup is building in the open and sharing trade secrets or ideas?I'm genuinely confused and I think this article is pure slop without any core idea.

3/29/2026, 9:40:56 PM

by:

3/29/2026, 9:39:48 PM

by: Chance-Device

> I wrote this knowing it feeds the thing I’m warning you about. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the condition.HN needs a better AI slop filter.Or maybe I do. Maybe I can vibe code a browser extension that pre loads TFA links and auto hides anything that isn’t sufficiently human authored.

3/29/2026, 9:40:22 PM

by: kadhirvelm

Honestly my hope is the arbitrage that allowed big tech to make the kind of margins it does on software starts to go away because it’s sooo cheap to build software. In other words, defending the technical moats that we rely on today doesn’t make sense in the future because it’s not a reliable way to make money. Aka no need to protect your technical secrets because there’s no capitalist reason to lol. Taken further, my naive hope is societal attention moves away from this layer and onto whatever becomes the new way to make money and the people left paying attention to software are big on sharing

3/29/2026, 8:24:23 PM

by: xstas1

This maps nicely to Cybermen in Dr Who

3/29/2026, 9:18:53 PM

by: mpalmer

As a work of persuasive writing, this is unfocused and seems mostly generated.One thing I would have expected of someone who knows their history - forget LLMs, this is how startups have worked for decades now. You're only as good as your idea, your ability to execute, and your moat. And the small fish get eaten.> The original Dark Forest assumes civilizations hide from hunters - other civilizations that might destroy them. But in the cognitive dark forest, the most dangerous actor is not your peer. It’s the forest itself.Note the needless undercutting of the metaphor for the sake of the limp rhetorical flourish.> I wrote this knowing it feeds the thing I’m warning you about. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the condition. You can’t step outside the forest to warn people about the forest. There is no outside.Quite dramatic!Except literally going outside and just talking to people? Using whiteboards?Also, you fed it when you used a model to write this blog post. You didn't have to do that.

3/29/2026, 8:48:47 PM

by: ginko

>You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.That's not exactly a new phenomenon and doesn't require AI. If anything that was worse in the 90s with Microsoft starving out pretty much any would-be competitor they could find.And it wasn't just Microsoft: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked_as_a_term" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...</a>

3/29/2026, 8:19:43 PM

by: jauntywundrkind

The view here shows big huge powers of technocapital consuming all else, stealing every idea.My hope is the opposite. Integrative, resonant computing (<a href="https://resonantcomputing.org/" rel="nofollow">https://resonantcomputing.org/</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659456">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659456</a> although I have some qualms with it's focus on privacy), with open social protocols baked in seems like maybe possibly can eat some of the vicious consumptive technocapital. In a way that capital's orientation prevents it from effectively competing with. MCP is already blowing up the old rules, tearing down strong gates, making systems more fluid / interface-y / intertwingular again, after a long interregnum of everything closing it's APIs / borders.People seem so tired and exhausted, so aware of how predatory the technosystems about us are. But it's still so unclear people will move, shift, much less fund and support the better world. The AT proto Atmosphereconf is happening right now, and there's been a long mantra of "we can just build things"; finding adoption but also doing what conference organizer Boris said yesterday, of, "maybe we can just pay for things", support the projects doing amazing work: that's a huge unknown that is essential to actually steering us out of the dark technology, where none of us get to see or get any way in how the software-eaten world arounds us runs, where mankind for the first time in tens or hundreds of thousands of years been cut off from the world os, has been removed from gods's enlightenment / our homo erectus mankind-the-toolmaker natural-scientist role.I think the answer to the Dark Forest fear to be building together. To be a radiant civilization, together. To energize ourselves & lead ourselves towards better systems, where we all can do things, make things, grow things, in integrative social empowering ways.

3/29/2026, 8:44:33 PM

by: ben8bit

[dead]

3/29/2026, 8:25:24 PM

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