Nadia Asparouhova

This account is verified. Learn more

@nayafia

publishing @asteriskmgzn // books: Working in Public (open source) + Antimemetics (ideas that don’t spread)

San Francisco nadia.xyz Joined June 2011

388 Following 30K Followers 5.2K Posts

Latest posts 5

Pinned post

Nadia Asparouhova @nayafia Mar 26, 2025

I wrote a new book! It's called ANTIMEMETICS: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, and it's about ideas that don't want to be shared or remembered, despite their importance.

Now available for pre-order: darkforest.metalabel.com/antimemetics

Nadia Asparouhova @nayafia Oct 21

A funny thing about this is that by definition, this sort of authenticity can't be faked or exploited - people eventually figure out who's who. It's in some ways the easiest hack, but requires you to actually be a good person

will o’brien Verified account @Willob Oct 20

Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.

There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with sustained warmth, authenticity, humor, and integrity, great gifts will be laid before you. White pill.
View quoted post on X

Nadia Asparouhova @nayafia Oct 19

I've come to believe that it's a lack of self-reflection, not being conniving or manipulative, that makes someone a bad person.

Everyone engages in occasional behavior that is harmful. A "good person" takes that feedback to heart, takes responsibility for their actions, and tries to do better next time. A "bad person" pushes the thought away and refuses to reflect on their behavior.

Over time, doing that repeatedly - refusing to be morally accountable - is what makes someone a bad person. It doesn't mean they don't have the capacity for redemption, but it's impossible to collaborate with people who refuse to learn from iterated moral games.

Nadia Asparouhova @nayafia Oct 5

We’re on the cover of New York Magazine today! Asterisk teamed up with NYMag to interview recently-departed frontier lab employees about their decisions to leave. It’s a privilege to bring a piece of Bay Area culture to a national audience, and I’m proud of my colleagues @clarabcollier and @chengela for their hard work on this.

New York Magazine Verified account @NYMag Oct 5

On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old Anthropic employee, posted a resignation statement on X that ricocheted around the internet. He quit in protest of what he saw as the company’s suicidally reckless pursuit of artificial general intelligence. To the AI community, an Anthropic employee believing that the technology their company is developing might end the world is not exactly news. (Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who believed OpenAI, if left unchecked, would do just that.) But an Anthropic employee publicly quitting in protest is.

Afterward, a debate broke out: If you’re a lab employee who believes in these risks, what should you do? Is it best to leave in protest? Or is it better to agitate from the inside, close to the seat of power? And how would the choice affect your friendships and community?

“For me, there’s quite a distinction between my rational beliefs and the things I feel in my gut,” says Coxon. “If you’d asked me to narrate my opinions when entering Anthropic and when leaving Anthropic, they would probably sound pretty similar. But in terms of the actual feeling between the start and the end, it just felt very, very different.”

Coxon joins a small set of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind who, over the years, chose to walk away.

For our Cover Story, in collaboration with Asterisk Magazine, we brought together eight of them. They don’t share the same concerns or the same p(dooms) — in fact, they wouldn’t necessarily agree that p(doom) is a coherent concept. But together, they provide a candid view of the AI race and the individual calculus many employees face.

Read their interviews in full: nymag.visitlink.me/HbG6LU

View quoted post on X

Nadia Asparouhova @nayafia Sep 30

I enjoyed how Jesse breaks down the status hierarchies of blue-collar work in this piece. Why doesn't every blue collar worker just become an electrician? Because that's the equivalent of making partner at McKinsey, whereas the median blue collar job is more like working as an Amazon delivery driver.

Asterisk @asteriskmgzn Sep 30

Skilled trades are frequently thought of as a route out of poverty. But trades workers tell a different story.

@JesseTayRiver, a contractor who works in home remodeling, explains:

View quoted post on X