What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
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Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
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The United States of America didn’t want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn’t want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948. We now have the strategic documents. They were concerned about that, they didn’t want to do that. And certainly they didn’t want to do that in the year 1991.
So the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as a destructive force for the imperial or multi-ethnic, multinational state, as was Ukrainian nationalism or Georgian or Estonian for that matter.
And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the Communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology. And then came back in full force in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Very often people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the one was the collapse of communism as ideology. Another was the end of the Cold War. And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union.
The dating app does not make money from you finding a life partner—it needs you to keep looking, so the app provider can hold on to you as a recurring customer. These companies actually get rewarded by delivering the opposite of what they promise.
They aren’t designed to solve your problem, but actually aim to prevent closure, and create an illusion that there are still infinite choices available to you.
HBM has the unique dynamic of costing a lot more than traditional DRAM, and the dynamic 2x higher capex is driven by the twice as large die size for HBM.
I foresee a much more radical approach to generative UI to emerge shortly — maybe in 5 years or so. In this second-generation generative UI, the user interface is generated afresh every time the user accesses the app. Most important, this means that different users will get drastically different designs.
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.
One pattern is that for simple prompts, weak models can do (nearly) as well as strong models. For more challenging prompts, however, users are much more likely to prefer stronger models.
To be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people.
The MVP as a practice of building a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product does no longer work. Many product categories are already saturated with a variety of alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea you need to build something that is substantially better.
many under-represented languages are primarily spoken; they do not have a written tradition or a standardized orthography. Text-based NLP technology is thus of limited use to them.
if the person responds to "what would you do differently" with "nothing," or with non-actionable vague platitudes, it's a sign they may not be great at figuring out how to get better at things over time.
Theft of Fire offers a plausible and realistic universe. The characters, Marcus Warnoc and Miranda Foxgrove, are not mere archetypes; they are complex, flawed, and deeply human. Their struggle to trust one another and overcome their own demons is a powerful allegory for the modern human condition.
But unfortunately, today, we know conclusively that it is simply not true. A great amount of people's personalities, dispositions, beliefs, and dysfunctions are genetically-driven.
Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.
For now, let me say I tore through Reboot, which is a sharply written and hilarious novel about a has-been actor in a downward spiral who tries to fix his life with a (yes) reboot of the Buffy-by-way-of-Baywatch teen drama that made him briefly a star.
Obviously, my text appears in the book but I would have loved it even if that wasn't the case. Small is just an astounding artist—see his bestselling memoir Stitches
The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that, is kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how much at risk is the business to disruption? And we're in, I would say, the greatest period of disruptability in history.
You want to buy a company at a price that if you're wrong about what you think it's worth and it turns out to be worth 30% less, you paid a deep enough discount to your estimate that you're still okay. A big part of investing is not losing money.
And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.
If you zoom out on a story of technology, you usually see a big exponential curve. But if you look at the curve up close, you see that it's wavy, made of S-curves.
I suspect, considering the process retrospect, a great deal of that pain can be avoided by committing to migrating directly to an SQL system the moment you need an index.
We need to find ways to work with this new tech to get the best of humans and the best of computers, together, rather than thinking in terms of one or the other.
Lots of ML techniques in the post can help with data quality, but fundamentally human data collection involves attention to details and careful execution.
3000 years of factual Arab history, and personal insights from this Oxford Brit who lived in Yemen for 37 years, translates classical Arabic, and clearly cares a lot. Huge and thorough but really wonderful for those with the interest. I loved his writing style and poetic asides. Read my notes here for a taste. What a great book.
With an extra $10 billion over 10 years I’m pretty sure we’d get to 5 or 6 of the 10 on the list, and millions of unnecessary deaths would be prevented.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
The foundations of China’s success in EVs were built a decade ago, when the state decided to bet on batteries, and then bought up a lot of the mines for these metals.
Similarly, most recent discussions of how to promote fertility discuss how we might promote housing, inequality, schooling, day-care, etc., but few consider directly paying parents big amounts to have kids. As indirect approaches require us to guess what are the actual main obstacles to fertility, they are more likely to fail.
El problema es que la justicia social no es justa, sino que tampoco aporta al bienestar general; muy por el contrario, es una idea intrínsecamente injusta porque es violenta; es injusta porque el Estado se financia, a través de impuestos y los impuestos se cobran de manera coactiva.
La conclusión es obvia: lejos de ser la causa de nuestros problemas, el capitalismo de libre empresa, como sistema económico, es la única herramienta que tenemos para terminar con el hambre, la pobreza y la indigencia, a lo largo y a lo ancho de todo el planeta.
hoy estoy acá para decirles que Occidente está en peligro, está en peligro porque aquellos, que supuestamente deben defender los valores de Occidente, se encuentran cooptados por una visión del mundo que – inexorablemente – conduce al socialismo, en consecuencia a la pobreza.
David Adeleke's dispatches from the African tech scene introduce me to companies and entrepreneurs who are as fascinating as they are unfamiliar. The sharp analysis and quality-over-quantity approach to newslettering makes it stand out.
Eric Newcomer is the rare Substack journalist who thrives on breaking news. His dispatches from Silicon Valley and beyond have the knowing voice of a veteran observer, but with the open-mindedness that defines a great reporter. The accompanying podcast is also well worth a listen.
It's a deeply humane project that also manages to be formally inventive; I never feel like I'm in surer hands as a podcast listener than when Vogt is telling me about what he has learned.
Longtime tech reporter Matt Lynley offers an uncommonly technical assessment of new AI developments in his newsletter Supervised. Original reporting and a fast cadence help this one stand out from other AI newsletters.
Ben Strak's short and sweet Monday newsletter offers weekly inspiration to designers and anyone else curious about the world around them. A good example of how newsletters thrive on the authentic curiosity of the people who write them.
I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect.
Ann Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea–the man who sentenced Jesus to his gruesome death–was so overwhelmingly good that I could only read a couple pages at a time.
Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.
Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.
In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.
On the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown.
If you aren’t making building the organization someone’s number one job, it won’t be anyone’s number one job, which means it probably won’t get done very well.
But everything I have ever experienced leads me to believe that a fewer number of larger teams, each helmed by an experienced engineering manager, should way outperform this gaggle of tiny groups.
But hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems.
Take the free Attachment Style Quiz and get personalised insight into how you connect, where your patterns come from, and your next step toward secure love.
most macros don't actually do anything other than pure transformation of their arguments. It's almost always safe to run them during static analysis, except you don't know for sure
Mind candy horror/mystery, stalking and being stalked by the somewhat-supernatural serial killer, with extensive local color for contemporary South Africa. There are rough patches, but it's a perfectly enjoyable specimen of this type of novel. It's obviously the set-up for a series, and I'm not sure I need to follow these characters, but I would be happy to read more by Snyman.
The Cruise debacle of the last few months proved (once again; remember Uber ATG?) that it only takes one company doing one ill-advised thing to hurt the entire industry.
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez - Olga grows up in the Puerto Rican community in New York and becomes enormously successful as a wedding planner, but cannot manage her own relationships
I also read a ton of technical books last year, but the most impactful one for me was Neural Network Methods for Natural Language processing by Yoav Goldberg
Best books I read in 2023: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going by Michael Muthukrishna
Best books I read in 2023: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going by Michael Muthukrishna The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa S. Kearney
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell This lesser known book from Orwell offers an illuminating glimpse into the arrogant, entitled, and self-pitying mindset of downwardly mobile elites.
A Personal Odyssey by Thomas Sowell My review here . Insights into the mindset required to climb out of poverty and remake one’s fortunes. A countervailing perspective from the above Orwell work.
Biology is unpredictable, especially when the immune system is involved, and there is no guarantee that a drug that appears safe in animals will be safe in humans.
The most significant factor preventing us from taking better molecules into clinical trials is not our ability to design arbitrary molecules, but our (lack of) understanding of underlying disease biology. In other words, we often know how to make something, but not what to make.
The cost to discover and develop a drug today is orders of magnitude higher than in the 1950s. Despite this, the probability that a drug entering clinical trials will eventually reach the market has hardly improved in the intervening years.
In reality, the productivity crisis in the pharmaceutical industry is the culmination of decades of just about every aspect of drug discovery and development getting gradually harder and more expensive.
Such prolificacy is unlikely to be repeated any time soon; if current trends hold, a drug discovery scientist starting their career today is likely to retire without ever having worked on a single drug that makes it to market.
Diverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.
Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
While there are interesting theoretical arguments for these causes, there’s a disconnect between an almost-neurotic focus on hard evidence of effectiveness in some areas of EA and a willingness to accept extremely abstract and conjectural “evidence” in others.
To that end, I read a few different books from the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the summer, and even wrote a review of How Languages are Learned.
Mestre and Docktor tackle this challenge by reviewing the large body of literature on learning physics. I plan on writing a full review of their book, which I found to be a helpful summary.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.
suggests that any steering automation safety gains (e.g., Level 2 autopilot) are approximately negated by driver complacency, with autopilot on being slightly worse than autopilot off
Any true safety improvement for Tesla is good to have, but is much more likely due to comparison against an "average" vehicle (12 years old in the US) which is much less safe than any recent high-end vehicle regardless of manufacturer, and probably not driven on roads as safe on average as where Teslas are more popular.
To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night.
The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens
For half a century, Jane Hirshfield has been slaking the world's soul on poems of perspective and consolation, fusing her Buddhist training, her passion for science, and her tenderness for all things living.
Profilers can only show you "what is there"; skillful performance engineering requires understanding the information that shapes and informs the profile but is "not there" in the profile itself.
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because real invention, Not incremental improvement... Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander.
If you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. In almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was say 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did, and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates. Almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be.
I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I'd say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia
Their words now
I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade.
If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I’d say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia (with the obvious potential for black swans along the way).
Their words now
I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade.
Instead of meetings, I used Workplace posts (Meta’s internal version of Facebook Group posts) to share thoughts, start discussions, and make announcements.
wherever in the world can be found the cheapest assemblage of land, labour, energy and capital to produce a given food commodity, that will be a preferential site of its production.
In my opinion, normal market economics is incentivising the wrong things. I think its preference for horse liveries or campsites over vegetables and other local food production will lead us to disaster
One clue to the difficulties I faced, if I hadn’t been too naïve to see it, is that almost nobody works in small-scale, local, agroecological market gardening in Britain and most other rich countries. There’s a reason for that.
That was originally one of the hopes of Large Hadron Collider. I’d say at this point, it would be very unlikely given what they’ve already accomplished, but there are these underground detectors, xenon detectors that look for dark matter coming in, and they are going to try to achieve a much stronger bound than exists today.
That’s also why I like the dark disk because there’s a scientific story behind it. As far-fetched as it might sound, you could actually go and look for the experimental consequences, for the observational consequences to test whether it’s true.
The interesting thing is that if some of the dark matter does radiate, and I like to call it dark light because it’s light that we don’t see, but dark matter would see. It could radiate that and then it could perhaps collapse into a disk the same way ordinary matter collapsed into the Milky Way disk.
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
In fact, dark matter is in some sense more important because it can collapse more readily than ordinary matter because ordinary matter has radiative forces, which makes it hard to collapse on small scales. Actually it’s dark matter that drives galaxy formation and then ordinary matter comes along with it.
Governments should create three tracks for people who come to live in their country. One track is that of people who hope to become Spanish. Another is that of those who we are going to allow to live and work here; the third is that of those of we are going to allow to be in Spain out of necessity.
But once the demographics reverse, the challenge will be to find a person for every job. In the coming years, the impact of demographic changes is going to lead to chronic labor shortages.
In the absence of immigrants, between 2020 and 2050 Spain’s labor force (its active population) will drop from 22.6 to 15.7 million people. You’re not going to fill all the jobs needed in a modern and sophisticated economy like that of Spain’s with 15.7 million people.
These skewed priorities are the exact problem that effective altruism exists to solve - or the exact inefficiency that effective altruism exists to exploit, if you prefer that framing.
Movements are coalitions. Sometimes this means different people with different priorities choose to work together. But other times it means the same people tend to share both priorities.
EA has done a great job working on this (see list of accomplishments above), and I think the AI and x-risk people have just as much to be proud of as the global health and animal welfare people.
And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.
I encountered much the same experience as I did with Obsidian: too much complexity, most of it front-loaded and unavoidable, making it difficult to get to the task of writing.
I liked Mem’s editing experience within notes because it resembled word processing, without extra steps getting in the way. But I found the app otherwise surprisingly lacking in basic functionality, despite its polished appearance.
If you look at the sheer number of different methods for getting content into Evernote, it becomes clear how difficult it will be to replicate this functionality.
But I have come to understand that the feeling of creative control is an illusion, that the songs are predetermined and have their own destiny, that they are not our own.
In my view, too many critics of “cancel culture” are recklessly promoting not the speech of the powerless, but the censorious resentment of the powerful.
Elon Musk’s sullen yawp amounts to a claim that he has a right for companies to sponsor his speech, no matter what he says. That’s nonsense, both legally and philosophically.
His life and work have influenced my own tremendously—and just a few pages into Ritchie’s essential and hopeful new book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, it became clear that she was carrying on his tremendous legacy.
The point is that economic interdependence at its root has prosperity as the core variable. In the realest story, the core variable is survival, and survival always trumps prosperity.
A realist like me would say that it doesn't matter whether a state is a democracy or not, all states behave the same way because the structure of the system, getting back to our earlier discussion about international anarchy, the structure of the system leaves those states no choice, whether they're democracies or autocracies.
So it's very important to understand that I'm not arguing that states are inherently aggressive. My point is that as long as states are in anarchy, they have no choice but to behave in an aggressive fashion.
I believe that power is the currency of international relations, and by that I mean that states are deeply interested in the balance of power and they're interested in maximizing how much power they control.
Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
Best travel book I’ve ever read! Shook my soul many times. Tiny “daily meditation” format, with lots of quotes from others, but wow what wonderful insights. They make me yearn to travel again. Love love love these ideas and perspectives so much.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 killed 2996 people in a day of singular horror. Our ongoing indifference to regulatory inefficiency, considering only the area of green energy development, kills more people every year – more than 10 people per day, and that’s only within the US.
The primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
So generally, I think we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational.
So really the question is like for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create? And if you create more than you killed, you’ve not succeeded. That’s the real situation there.
So the counterintuitive thing here, I think that the thing that I think should be done, even though it’s very difficult, is that I would recommend that Israel engage in the most conspicuous acts of kindness possible
People think of nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact it is not. There’s some quite funny Werner Herzog thing where he is in the jungle saying that it’s basically just murder and death in every direction. The plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill each other every single day, every minute. So it’s not like we’re unusual in that respect.
If the future is like the past, this implies that debt rollovers—that is, the issuance of debt without a subsequent increase in taxes—may well be feasible. Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost.
Their words now
Across advanced economies, the celebrated ( r - g ), i.e., the difference between the interest rate and the growth rate, appears to have durably changed sign or, at a minimum, to have gone from a substantially negative number to a number closer to zero.
Thus, once current debt has been refinanced and the average interest on debt reflects the higher long rates, absent changes in policy, debt ratios will increase.
It is fair to say that, while economists expected the short end of the yield curve to reflect the higher rates needed to win the fight against inflation, the sharply steeper long end of the yield curve in the last few months has come as a surprise. I shall freely admit that I did not predict it.
One thing that drives me crazy about the React ecosystem, and more specifically "tech influencers" and "thought leaders" in the space, is the infantilization of the developers using and working in it. I’m tired of reading takes like TypeScript generics, mapped types, etc should only be needed and used by library authors for most use cases. Or today’s discourse; Don’t use `useCallback’, ‘useMemo’, and React.memo. If you’re building anything beyond a simple CRUD app or a an incredibly focused app with few features, you _will_ need these features.
Sigrid Nunez's novel The Vulnerables: Nunez's most famous novel, The Friend, was what you get when you take autofiction from a well-established NYC writer and add a big, friendly dog.
Bryan Washington's novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved.
Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True: This book is now out in paperback, and you probably don't need me recommending it (it won a Pulitzer), but it is fantastic.
Mind candy: black comedy crime fiction / murder mystery, in rural Finland. I enjoyed both the comic darkness and the convincing happy endings all around. (At least, happy by the characters' own lights...) My first Tuomainen, but I'd read more if they crossed my path and I was in the right mood.
Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.
For AI to be a boon, we must reorient; pushing AI capabilities alone is not enough. We are already behind schedule for this reorientation. The scale of the risks means that we need to be proactive, as the costs of being unprepared far outweigh those of premature preparation.
Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.
“lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.
Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture.
We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less. Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past.
Most people don't read books. If you read a book on a topic (say, clouds, or Italian furniture), you can now only communicate on that topic with 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 people.
So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.
But while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.
the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews
One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
I view Keynes’s bisexuality and his strong interest in gay sex as a significant cause of what made him interesting and which gave him so strong an ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.
I don’t view Keynes primarily as an economist, rather I see him as a British aesthete rationalist who did economics in his spare time, and fortunately he had lots of spare time.
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
I mean, any screen that you have can be a hologram, any media, in any book, art. It can basically be just as effective as a hologram, as a physical object. Any game that you're playing, a board game or any kind of physical game, cards, ping pong, things like that, they're often a lot better as holograms.
And in that world, I think that there are going to be, not too far off, maybe by the end of this decade, we'll be living in a world where there are as many holograms when you walk into a room as there are physical objects.
And I kind of think increasingly, the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is the combination of the physical world and the digital worlds coming together.
My friend Nicole has written a provocative, funny and honest memoir. Nothing Is Missing: A Memoir of Living Boldly. I'll be interviewing her in NYC on October 9.
Conical burrs appear on average less unimodal and less uniform, although there is a large overlap meaning that one can easily find a specific flat burr that is less unimodal and less uniform than a specific conical burr.
As we just saw, one cannot just discard the Collapse Postulate. For this reason, if one does calculations in any Many Worlds approach, one must effectively replace the Collapse Postulate by other assumptions, notably about what happens to observers and/or measurement devices when worlds branch.
while decoherence has the potential to solve this aspect of the measurement problem, it hasn't yet been satisfactorily done. Decoherence also certainly does not return us to Local Causality.
Since Local Causality is a property of a model, observing violations of Bell's inequality cannot tell us anything about nature itself, but merely about the properties of the model that we use to describe nature.
I was super excited when I saw the Lvl-10 dripper, because it was very close to what I wanted to achieve, and as I expected, it performed very well in terms of extraction quality.
The world’s croplands are still expanding. At a time when we should be using less land for farming, allocating high-quality farmland to grow food that we then put into cars is a mistake.
Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.
So if you think about entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes one is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap.
So we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy. So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.
Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence, and it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
I think that let's say from the beginning of mankind going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.
Buroker is a reliable author of very fluffy mind candy, either science fiction or fantasy. A lot of her output is re-working material from identifiable prior art, without hewing so closely to the canon as to constitute fan fiction.
They suck! But they also feed the world. Half the people alive today would be very not alive if fertilizers manufactured from natural gas weren’t super-sizing our harvests.
But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.
There is no "spooky free will" that violates the laws of physics in our common model of them, but the experience of free will certainly exists and is informative.
Redness is not "objective" in the sense of being "in the object", it only exists in the models generated by the sort of brains which are hooked up to eyes.
Even in that case, though, what we should trust is not the particular output of the scientific process at any given time. It can make wrong turns. Instead, we should trust that it will find the truth eventually, and that it is our best and only method for doing so.
Reading the book had not changed my fundamental belief that, in balance, we were on a good trajectory with AI research: good for science and good for society with expected positive impacts in many domains.
Their words now
I now believe that I was wrong and short-sighted to ignore that dual-use nature. I also think I was not paying enough attention to the possibility of losing control to superhuman AIs.
Neurobiologists tell us that it takes two things to unlock and open up a neural pathway. The first is that the implicit must be made explicit. Sometimes you need help seeing what you don't see. But you must be open to the feedback. Second, there must be some sort of recoil, a sense of discrepancy, of "Oh no, I'm not sure I really want to keep doing that."
In my practice, I have seen that opening neural pathways can lead to profound change, to brand-new traits and behavior, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.
You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans.
Google’s the first — and often the last — place we go to for answers, so snagging top billing in a Google search results page is, approximately speaking, equivalent to being “true.”
In the fall of 1999, against the backdrop of the massive gains being achieved in tech, media, and telecom stocks, I read Edward Chancellor’s excellent book Devil Take the Hindmost.
I was born in Brazil and I've been living in the US for the past 11 years, yet, english doesn't feel like my first language. I use Grammarly to help me with that.
I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.
I’ve been a happy Superhuman subscriber since they were Silicon Valley’s hottest invite-only club, and I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for a while.
I think we’re going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird. A bird is an incredibly robust organism. We’ve built nothing like this. We haven’t built a machine that’s capable of reproducing.
We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.
When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.
It is actually all their nuances and quirks and slight annoyances that make this relationship worthwhile. I don’t think we’re going to realize that until it’s too late.
I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not. Right. Does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether it’s a useful model to describe reality.
The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
Most of our fears begin to subside when we just allow ourselves to be in this moment, as anxiety and worry stem from a preoccupation with an anticipated or envisioned future.
Whether one does find a good spouse or not depends more on one's orientation towards actually building relationships, and whether they can identify non-trivial traits in a partner that would contribute to that.
I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders.
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
RSC is the future of React. The React team has made this very clear and we are lucky to be in touch with their amazing team members to help us along this path.
While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Africa, its central role in the world, and the ways in which both have been misunderstood in the West, I highly recommend Born in Blackness.
But we do not have enough data and we do not have enough insight to use AI/ML to pick better targets that have a higher chance of succeeding in the clinic.
The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.
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