What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
Most importantly, they see the world in terms of collective zero-sum competition between groups. To the New Right, if Indians get into the University of Texas, it means that White people must have been “replaced” at that university — or at American universities in general.
What it tells us is that if you’re a nonwhite immigrant, or the child of nonwhite immigrants, it doesn’t matter what you do — the New Right will still view you as an enemy and as an invader.
Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China. Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured.
If you are reading proposals or for that matter tweets for AI regulation, and the writer does not deal with these China issues in a forthright and very specific manner, you should be very suspicious indeed.
During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened. China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.
we produced our own conservative estimate, finding that the climate impact from 2025's use of NVIDIA'S AI products is on par with the state-owned Russian Coal company.
Republicans' long-term strategy, since Reagan, is to spend a lot of money (mainly on things that won't benefit non-rich Americans), refuse to raise taxes, and therefore greatly increase the national debt.
I think we should use this kinds of data to completely turn around Europe's immigration policy: - We should have super easy inflow for immigrants from countries whose previous immigrants have shown low crime rates You're from Japan? Just fly here and you can stay forever - We should then almost completely ban any inflow from countries whose previous immigrants have shown high crime rates with instant deportations
Social media is destroying out society. Quitting doesn't help because everyone else is still on it. It's a bad equilibrium. It needs to be solved with government regulations.
The European Union is big - the third largest economy in the world, but it has great difficulty in transforming economic strength into geopolitical clout.
Perhaps this is a bold claim, but I think anyone writing about or from the southwest who isn't also in some way clocking how drought and rising temperatures and pollution are affecting the region is being disingenuous.
The winner would then be the AIs, not us. That is not to say that the China issue is not real, hence the export controls and attempted international agreement.
Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.)
I honestly do not know if the Trump administration will be able to completely eviscerate American power over the next two year - but damn they sure seem to be accelerating the decline and fall of American hegemony.
Excessive use of financial statecraft, alliances with overseas populists, or prolonged bouts of anti-immigrant hysteria, however, will force even close allies to start thinking about alternatives.
that doesn't have to persist long for AI to join the ranks of systems that are important enough that there's someone senior in the government who's responsible for regulating them.
Now recently the U.S. economy has experienced a huge positive shock to its Intelligence, with more to come. The core prediction is that this increases marginal returns, employment, and real wages in the Polanyi knowledge sector.
Making trade deals with EU is good for Canada. Anything beyond that is just anchoring ourselves to a block who’s economic ambitions aren’t much higher than being an “open air museum”.
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
nobody was willing to do it because it had been seen as kind of against the norms of the economic system. And as actors like the United States and China do this, it becomes more acceptable.
The concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity are legitimate, but we’re risking talking America, the global AI leader, into self-inflicted obsolescence and the obscurity of bureaucracy.
the models that are actually causing issues right now are all closed weight American models. I’m fairly certain if they were open weight models, we would not have that issue.
If Bush had wanted to whip people up into an inward-looking demagogic fervor instead of an external-facing one, he clearly could have accomplished that, too.
Germany is in trouble. But the trouble goes deep and cannot be addressed by "more of the same" socio-economic measures in the domain of taxes or social spending or regulation.
I do not think those running the government testing understand what is going on, and believe they are reacting basically on vibes and what various trusted people tell them.
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).
Fruit Pig are one of the few black pudding producers at scale who use fresh blood - most black pudding these days is made with dried blood imported from Europe.
The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of "antisemitism" to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
The campaign to paint anti-genocide demonstrations as "antisemitic", violent and threatening to people's "safety" began not under Trump but under the Biden administration.
This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.
I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output.
Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention.
To my mind, if progressive policy hopes to engage with such voters at all - and it is open question whether it should - it must address not just the material realities of relative economic disadvantage, but above all the "outsider" credentials of the AfD.
The US military is being run by a group that apes the Russians and not the Ukrainians—when we have in front of us one of the best statements of command principles I have ever seen from the latter.
Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.
Worse, U.S. officials now openly support and encourage politicians from far-right anti-European political parties, partly because they are ideologically aligned, but partly because Americans now want to weaken the European Union so that U.S. tech companies can evade any regulation, or even taxation.
Portugal's choice is cultural though and completely fits the general spirit in Europe which is fully anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress
in this whole USA vs China thing OpenAI and Anthropic aren't relevant because they're positioned differently
them building better models doesn't hurt china at all
the competitor has to be
- american
- open source
- enough compute to do inference at scale
that can shift things
In most of the world there is: no real willingness to solve problems nor an acceptance of people offering to solve their problems (out of pride) simply too much regulation so the problem cannot be solved without a license or long approval time very low standards of what is deemed acceptable so the problem isn't seen as a problem in the first place
And yet, life expectancy about two years more than the national average is rather common in rich regions with selective migration, even in European countries with even access to health care, like France and Spain.
Musk's victims already number in the millions-a Lancet study predicts 14 million by 2030 as the indirect results of shutting down America's humanitarian work, which puts him up there in the Stalin/Mao category, and almost certainly the most deadly human of this millennium.
I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
The most positive use case if you said, you know, what's the number one thing we could use AI for? It's not giving kids chatbots that's going to work. It's giving them an individualized lesson plan based on their level to catch them up to grade level. And that would be the single best thing we could do to fix education in America.
And that's the problem in our current education system today is we are taking eighth graders and we are delivering them eighth grade content because that's what an eighth grade teacher does by law. They need to stand up and deliver the eighth grade content.
We have sort of how you treat academics and how you treat sports. And if we took the sports ethos and the athletic ethos in America and we applied it to academics, we would fix every academic problem in this country.
There's a test, there's a bunch of them, but you can use this one, which is NWA MAP test. It's a 300point scale. The average eighth grader to 12th grader goes up one point from a you know it depends on the subject but 233 to 234 four years later they don't learn anything.
Sometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don't have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow.
While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East
in a world beginning to turn away from oil, the United States has become the biggest force trying to insure we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere.
But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.
However senseless it is, American rhetoric of the non-existence of Canada is concerning, because it resembles the way the Kremlin spoke about Ukraine, and rightly reminds Canada that their sovereignty is indeed the issue.
So my baseline assumption is that people will continue complaining about the trillions of dollars we have in debt but it won’t lead to a financial crisis.
What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
Whether American teenagers should be harassed after 10 p.m. by engagement-baiting push notifications ought to be a matter for Congress, not the social media cartel.
Even if it turned out that they were drug smugglers, as claimed, and even if it turned out that they were bringing drugs to the United States, a dubious proposition, the penalty for smuggling drugs is not summary execution.
Countries and peoples have a right to set an immigration policy, and this notion that we shouldn't have any borders or, or even worse than that, it's all just a blank slate, that all peoples are just the same, and we can take people from one place of the earth and we can place them in another place on the earth and everything's just gonna work out hunky-dory. Empirically not true.
Immigration depends greatly on who immigrates. And a country benefits when the people who immigrate are net contributors to the society, and in most cases, that they assimilate with the local culture.
The Nordic-Baltic warmongering under the current conditions is therefore (i) irresponsible, (ii) hypocritical, (iii) immoral, and (iv) flirts with a disaster of immense proportions.
Such, indeed fragile, peace not only puts an end to today’s carnage, but leaves open a possibility of eventual long-term solution between Russia and Ukraine.
All this combined with the survey data on Americans’ stated reasons for opposing data centers makes me think that attitudes toward AI are probably a meaningful factor for a minority of people opposed to data centers, but I don’t think the backlash overall is driven by people’s thoughts on AI.
Comparing evangelicals to atheists and agnostics – the widest religious contrast the data offers – and controlling for age, race, education, and sex, the gap is about 0.6 children.
It is not because it affects Russian morale, or causes inconvenience, it is because ultimately it is the best way to take away the one thing all war machines need—money.
Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.
The difference is mostly the delay, which stems not necessarily from the regulation itself, but from the incentives in the machinery that administers it.
Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed.
Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open.
So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
The debt dynamics work the same for a central government as they do for a person or a company, except that a central government has a central bank that can print money (which devalues it) and it can take money away from people via taxes.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
Because one can measure these things, one can monitor this debt dynamic happening, so it’s easy to see problems approaching. I’ve used this diagnostic process in my investing and I’ve kept it to myself, but I’m now explaining it in detail in How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle because it is too important to keep to myself.
Said another way, for every person who is pretty sure that God doesn’t exist, there are six who are fairly certain of the existence of a Higher Power. Non-believers are statistically rare.
This is one of the best-kept secrets in San Francisco, since most people think it’s just a place to drink, but it actually has a very extensive food menu full of creative and excellent cuisine that’s basically a mashup of French, Latin American, Korean, Japanese, and Italian.
have to abide by this rule that was written before LLMs were even a thing. And that shows how challenging sort of the the the situation is if you try to set the line too firm to begin with.
if the US wants to lead in artificial intelligence, we have to have a vibrant closed and open source ecosystem, and that's the only way they can all work together.
no matter what kind of industry you're looking at, there was this government angle where the government's policy actions could be ones that could actually unlock technologies.
Over time that has sort of inverted completely. The private sector plus philanthropy now do about 70% of R&D and the and the government only does about 30.
This will likely serve as a wake-up call to those not paying attention to the US-China space race—which, to be clear, is the vast majority of Americans.
is it's interpersonal. It's between people. You regulate other people's emotions and you have to pick up on other people's emotions and you influence other people's emotions.
one quick answer to the question of what's the most successful strategy is the earlier you can stop that process, the better. And so, in the first place, don't get yourself into a situation where you're going to be anxious or guilty or sad or whatever emotion you want to avoid.
And I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions that they can become kind of automatically regulated.
Jenkins' flair for legal communications carries over to her scholarly work, of course, which is why her Open Copyright Casebook is a standard text for American law schools:
The problem again was not reliance upon AI but that it was supporting a model of warfare with which the United States had been working for some decades, one that prioritized the rapid elimination of enemy capabilities.
And the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is um, we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world.
Now, nobody died, right? Uh in fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh it was sort of a optics and PR situation um that was mismanaged in many many different ways and the public uh became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear.
it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
By demanding the purification of the individual and branding broad swathes of the public as oppressor classes, 'Woke 1' besmirched the average Americans who Democrats once championed.
It would of course make great sense to tax these windfall profits, earned entirely on the back of dead Iranians and Americans, and everyone who's paying $4.50 a gallon at the pump.
You read that right: The cost of climate-worsened wildfire smoke alone is larger than what earlier studies said every other estimated cost of climate change would be, combined.
it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.
The fastest-growing political movement in America is dead-set on stopping the construction of data centers, which are critical to the growth of the fastest-growing industry in America.
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
Abdul's victory is a blow to the Democratic establishment in a crucial swing state-and a lesson in the kinds of fearless, populist, "fighter" candidates that today's voters increasingly want to support.
His Lansing rally with Bernie and AOC, more than anything else, crystallized the connection between data center opposition and voters' anger about money in politics.
I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Irrigation cools the surface, and the expansion of agriculture and irrigation in the central U.S. in the middle of the 20th century played a key role in why heatwaves were low in the middle of the 20th century
most of commerce in America isn't actually high intent. Like how many years are we into e-commerce now? Like 30 years into e-commerce and e-commerce has never exceeded 20% of retail spend in America.
My view is that an appreciation of China's REER is very much to be desired, but the real (haha) way to get there is through higher inflation domestically, and that means different macro policies.
Mind candy fantasy: in which an early-21st-century American young woman, whose English-lit thesis and love life are going equally poorly, does a good deed; gets rewarded with three wishes, without realizing it; and, in consequence, wanders off, first into Faery and then into a Fantasyland which is convincingly poor, sexist and dirty, but also magical.
I mean, I think for the history of humanity, um you know, groups of smart people getting together towards a shared goal was was the bottleneck of progress. You know, US The United States of America in some sense was an example of this. Like the United States of America was formed from a smart group of very smart people getting together and having a vision for the future that they wanted to enact.
By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.
Why? We engaged early. We made the regulators part of the team and we worked together. We made it boom plus FAA versus the problem, not Boom versus FAA.
it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
fossil fuel money is an immensely powerful, intensely corrupting force in American politics that limits not only what conversations we can have about massive problems, but what we can do to solve them
I told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is.
Privately held businesses in the United States are collectively worth trillions of dollars, and demographically speaking, they have an aging set of owners who are seeking liquidity or diversification as they explore how to pass on what they've built.
I loved this historical biography of America's greatest landscape painter, and not just because I have an intense personal interest in Church. Johnson's writing is luminously beautiful, her assiduous research never impedes the narrative, and the illustrations are spectacular.
even the most committed American nationalist is hard pressed to name a country that’s better off after a recent US military intervention, something that wasn’t that hard to do from 1945-1991.
After the financial deplatforming of Western proles and foreign elites, of Canadian truckers and 145M Russians, it’s clear that digital finance is a weapon of war.
It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)
More data for better comparisons are good. Now everybody has to do it, and regulators and the public have to learn to look at only the data, and not individual incidents
increasingly I see America as the place that rewards first principles thinkers and builders; that asks "why not?" instead of telling you why you cannot; that imperfectly supports optimism, reinvention and perseverance in spite of cynicism.
And now it's Everybody's Perfect, a book that pretty much defines what it means for one text to be "in dialog" with another text. In this case, it's Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning magnum opus that tells not just the story of the Renaissance, but the story of the story, all the different ways the Renaissance has been used, abused, revised and recovered, starting with the Renaissance itself. It's a book that will make you rethink everything you know about European history, about the world today, and about the very idea of history itself
Well, PRC HSR construction costs relative to the amount of tunneling aren't particularly low. France's are lower; Germany's are inconsistent, depending on whether money is wasted on excessive tunneling or on other things.
To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.
elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity.
Europe is not actually poor. Japan is about as wealthy as Europe, and almost all Japanese homes are air-conditioned. Europeans could afford to air-condition their homes (and their hospitals!) just like the Japanese do.
Justin Gest, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy is a political economy argument that widespread immigration can drain home countries of their democracy supporters to some extent.
And then in terms of the capital intensive like AI in a factory and also the foundry and then you really need to tap either government funding or some sovereign fund
Just I explained to President Trump, TSMC when they started they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, you look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support.
And you have to have a robust and resilient supply chain. You cannot just depend on one or two player in different geographical. And so, I think, you know, the more and more people going to realize making in United States is critical.
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
The Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.
Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time.
I suspect the same is often true in the rest of Europe: NIMBYism is the ultimate reason why the French and German states don’t solve their housing shortages through unbanning densification, but since the claims of the NIMBYs have been preemptively conceded by everyone, NIMBYism has basically remained latent.
But this effect is far too small to explain the increase in house prices in Europe since 1914, when, after all, most urban continental Europeans lived in flats.
By resisting Russia, Ukrainians are defending what is perhaps most basic about decent political life: the idea that people should be who they choose to be, not whom they are forced to become.
They're the only uh power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores cuz they're going to be drowned at sea.
It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive that could actually lead to more igopoly and I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
all of these frictions on um the political type decisions that we are accustomed to only trusting human you know, only having humans for like legislation and being a judge, being a jury or all the licensing thing that keeps certain professions human that all strikes me as transitional, right?
it's already not that hard to index. So it's not There's been a bit of an increase in the privatization of returns but it's still like you know well under 20% of the total market cap of um non-non-tiny companies in in the US is is a private.
The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage.
It's false to believe that a company is a democracy. The way I run the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone everyone's voice to be heard and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef. I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere and hear from everybody and then they're going to make the decision and they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular in the company.
To change course in democratic nations will require a major change in public opinion as a signal to political leaders that the current course is not acceptable.
Canada recognised these developments earlier than most, and our response reflects the core lesson we have taken from these tectonic shifts: We have to take care of ourselves and be true to ourselves.
And so one possible explanation for that is just that there's only a handful of generations maybe five over which the natural selection would operate. And so maybe if the selection was 2% a generation you would still only see maybe a 10% compounded effect and there's just not enough time to detect it. But the Bronze Age is not 300 years, it's 3,000 years. It's the power of compound interest and you have enough time to begin to see a strong effect.
And so, maybe what you're seeing is that this group of people in Europe and the Middle East over the last 10,000 years has moved into a a period of relatively more stable food, where building up stores of fat are not as advantageous, and there's been selection against this combination of traits.
So we just could not see a way this could happen by chance and once we saw that we really felt quite convinced that this was a real signal and that really somehow there has been natural selection to increase the genetic changes that today manifest themselves as more years of school at predicting more years of schooling.
This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).
With that disclaimer out of the way, this is a great book, which simultaneously illuminates some very, very important phenomena, and is very well-written.
Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method — which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.
So, what if geopolitics was to go horribly wrong and tensions escalate and Europe find itself suddenly locked out of US cloud services? I hope that doesn't happen. I still think it's fairly unlikely, but it's no longer unthinkable.
And so you just have to first realize that chips exist in China. They manufacture 60% of the world's mainstream chips, maybe more. It's a very large industry for them. They have some of the world's greatest computer scientists.
We have got to acknowledge that most of the advanc advances in AI came out of algorithm advances not just the raw hardware. Now if most advances came from algorithms and computer science and programming tell me that their army of AI researchers is not their fundamental advantage.
So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today
Um, just shipping out all the engineers and blowing up the fabs means China has a stronger semiconductor supply chain than the rest of the world, right?
But I don't know like I don't know what fast timelines means, right? Like I I like don't think you have to believe in AGI to have the timelines where the US wins.
And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space
I think they'll have working tools. I don't think that they'll be able to manufacture a bunch yet, right? You know, there's they're sort of having it work and then there's production hell, right?
But please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed.
But, your 'calling' will never involve constant discomfort. If you are passionate about a political issue but you hate crowds, you do not have to go to protests.
There were booms and busts, and cumulative price inflation was zero, and the United States went from a new-world emerging backwater in the late 1700s to being the world's largest economy by the late 1800s.
Polyvagal theory provided me with a coherent framework for understanding why cognitive insight alone often fails when a nervous system is in defensive dominance. In such states, higher-order cortical processes are functionally constrained.
given the serious dangers that I lay out in adolescence of technology around things like the you know, kind of biological weapons and bioterrorism, autonomy risk and the timelines we've been talking about, like 10 years is an eternity. Like that's that's a that's a I I think that's a crazy thing to do.
The counterarguments against it are I'll politely call them fishy. Um, uh and yet it doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it.
Long lead times and soft costs, fueled by the world-leading US wages for "white collar" work, are the root cause of poor performance in low-volume production because there are few units to spread the soft costs over.
there’s also within that excitement, and within everybody talking just to each other, there’s a dismissal of the basic human experience across the United States and the Midwest, across the world.
Tariffs, and especially the erratic implementation of them, are teaching our allies and enemies alike that the US is no longer a reliable trading partner.
The Coens are typically considered to be at their best when they're cruel diagnosticians of American life - see their portentous, overstuffed, painfully self-impressed No Country for Old Men
Back when the Fourth Amendment was enacted, the most fundamental remedy for an unlawful government entry into your home was a civil suit for trespass against the officers.
That's the opening of "The Green Fields of the Mind," collected in this slim, wonderful volume. Recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey.
if it walks like a checking account, quacks like a checking account, and is marketed as an alternative to checking accounts, then it is almost certainly within Reg E scope
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.
But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English
But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global. Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham.
The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros).
And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
There's even a case to be made that those policies actually depressed the manufacturing share of GDP: by boosting output and capacity above where they would have been otherwise, subsidies probably contributed to the sustained decline in prices for China's manufactured goods over the past few years, weighing on their share of nominal output.
Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.
Gold by Rumi and Haleh Liza Gafori. Poetry, 112 pages. A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, an American poet of Persian descent. Read 1–2 poems before bed each night and thank me later.
that 50% happens because quite frankly the trust the world has in the United States whether it's its capital markets or whether it's its technology and and its stewardship of what matters at any given time in terms of leading uh sector. So if that is broken uh then that's not a good day for the United States.
you just made the point of why I think trust in American tech is probably the most important feature. It's not even the model capability. Maybe it is like can I trust you the company? Can I trust you? Your country and its institutions to be a long-term supplier may be the thing that wins the world.
I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was that there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
So AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America’s freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers.
That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.
Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.
And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.
Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night they're going to be sleepy on red wine, and the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them.
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
This is Russia's war. And it is Russia that should pay. This is why we need to work urgently on a new solution to finance Ukraine's war effort on the basis of the immobilised Russian assets. With the cash balances associated to these Russian assets, we can provide Ukraine with a Reparations Loan.
Battlelines for a new world order based on power are being drawn right now. So, yes, Europe must fight. For its place in a world in which many major powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.
Why don't Chinese dragons look like Mexican dragons or equivalent thunderbirds or whatever? Well, because it probably wasn't influencing them. If they were all seeing the same skeleton, they'd probably all produce the same kind of mythical animals.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
I think regulation of AI is sort of the wrong level of abstraction. Talking about regulating AI as AI is the wrong level of abstraction. And it's like saying we're going to regulate databases or regulate spreadsheets or regulate cars. Well, we do, but not like that.
It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.
And what’s more, you use your leverage once, and that leverage has a half-life. It becomes a lot less effective the second time around because other countries, other companies are going to try to substitute away. If China uses the rare earth leverage, which I think it is now a little bit, there will be alternatives and substitutes.
Maybe on the good side, it’s actually a golden age for Chinese women because the Chinese girls never had as much education investment apportioned to them as they’ve had after being the only child in the family. And you raised a daughter like a son. And if we look at all the skill gaps and the education gaps and the returns to education, actually girls fared better.
Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
Those are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone
The Mongol strategy is first you take the countryside. They're country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that's how they did it every time.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again.
But this great system that united, it's called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
Mind candy: A fun travelogue which does what it says in the title. It pretty much satisfies any impulses I might have to actually see any of the artworks in question. No familiarity with art-critical jargon required, though long passages are (more or less explicitly) art criticism.
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
So, you while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay 5 billion dollars on the more the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again.
When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.
r1, a Chinese model, is very capable and free to use, but is missing a few features from the other companies and it is not clear that they will keep up in the long term.
Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.
But Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There was not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939.
And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.
And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion.
And Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.
Their words now
However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.
this story tells us how an increase in foreign demand to save in the US rather than at home will push up the dollar, and cause the trade deficit, which is in effect how foreigners send us factories which they would rather build here than in their own countries.
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.
A unique lens on work in the late 90s that still resonated when I read it in 2018. It's a soulful exploration of how to maintain your humanity, creativity and inner fire in environments that often prioritize conformity and efficiency.
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
The longevity of that consensus is itself remarkable: in 79 years of data, Republican presidents spent an average of $34 billion a year on aid, while Democrats spent $40 billion.
Even as GDP has grown tenfold, US aid budgets have remained basically flat in real terms—the result (one might guess) of a delicate balancing act between bipartisan consensus among elites and a wariness of attracting too much negative attention.
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
AI competition needs to be tempered with a recognition that China isn’t going away as a player in AI, and that coexistence must also be a part of America’s strategy.
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
if you want a very good all-around model with excellent reasoning. As an open model, you can either use it hosted on the original Chinese DeepSeek site or from a number of local providers.
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.
I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.
This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.