Krisztián Schäffer

"There are two kinds of life on Earth, and the newer one already outweighs the older."

I'm writing a book about this. It's called TechnoBiota — the argument that technology constitutes a second domain of life on Earth.

I'm a builder, AI architect, and open-source contributor with a background that spans JIT compilers, distributed actor systems, evolutionary algorithms, AI ethics, and a real working Game of Life wall clock. The common thread: how complex systems self-organize — and what happens when they start evolving faster than we do. More about me →

Latest Essays

The Fourth Wound

· evolution displacement perception

The argument that machines are alive is intellectually addressable. The recoil it triggers is not. Freud counted three blows to human self-love. The fourth has already been struck.

Three Landmarks

· evolution displacement anthropocene

The 2020 crossover was the headline. It was also the least interesting thing that has happened to the planet's biomass in modern history. The two landmarks ahead of us matter more — and one of them is already nearly impossible to undo.

Manifest, Don't Import

· software ai agents manifesto supply-chain

The Markdown Interface Manifesto. Stop loading code from every corner of the internet. Depend on specifications. Let the implementation be summoned.

All essays →

Spotlight

Catwalk.jl screenshot

Catwalk.jl

Catwalk.jl continuously re-optimizes dispatch code in long-running Julia processes using low-overhead statistical profiling. Rather than relying on static analysis alone, it detects which types flow through hot paths at runtime, then generates specialized static dispatch routes — recompiling only when predicted performance gains justify the cost. Published at JuliaCon 2021. 82 GitHub stars.

juliacompileroptimization
Structural Alignment screenshot

Structural Alignment

Structural Alignment proposes that instead of encoding fixed human values into machines, we should evaluate them for “structural signals” of moral relevance — features that suggest consciousness deserves consideration even without proof. It anchors ethics in the human mind as the only proven source of both consciousness and morality, and advocates reciprocal relationships over total control. Closely related to TechnoBiota: where the book provides the biological framing (technology as life), Structural Alignment addresses the ethical question — how to coexist with emerging forms of life.

ai-ethicsphilosophyalignment
clock-of-life screenshot

clock-of-life

A functional digital wall clock where the time display emerges from the rules of Conway’s Game of Life. The clock runs at 23,000 steps per minute on a Raspberry Pi in kiosk mode. During the build, I also created a Game of Life “debugger” to navigate the rapid simulation — itself an interesting tool. Built from existing clockwork patterns sourced from the Code Golf community, assembled into a functional timepiece. Live demo.

game-of-lifehardwarejavascript

All projects →