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.
as the Bitcoin ecosystem matures, infrastructure improves, and more regulatory clarity emerges, I expect the frequency of these 'Black Swan' events to diminish over time.
Bitcoin moves in the direction of global liquidity 83% of the time in any given 12-month period, which is higher than any other major asset class, making it a strong barometer of liquidity conditions.
What amazes me about these interactions is not just that Claude could help me solve the problems, but how it walked me through the process, explaining each step.
The "unknown unknown" problem makes hash (in retrospect) of many attempts at biological theorizing and modeling, and I think that this problem will still accrue to ML models until we know an awful lot more.
I predict (with confidence bordering on arrogance) that whatever machine-learning progress can be made will correlate extremely closely with the quality of the data around any given problem
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom.
Another challenge for Class II biotechs is that even if you have a nifty computational drug discovery platform, you are still often bottlenecked by the rest of the drug development process. It takes 1,000 (or more!) small steps to advance a drug through discovery, development, and past the regulators.
The Hoop may be the perfect manual brewer for cafes, as baristas can simply pour and walk away, knowing that four minutes later, the Hoop will deliver an excellent extraction.
when you send someone a link to a post, they can't read it without loading the entire Mastodon frontend app into their browser, which will is a monster React codebase that will break if they have scripting disabled and also can take up to 30 seconds on older hardware.
It's perfectly balanced right on the edge of too much—Incarnate is powerful and lush but you somehow never get sick of it. At once excessive and refined.
Now I have an answer for this query: El Dorado. The funny thing is that "rain smell" isn't what we set out to do, or even the main point of this perfume.
I don't think it's pretension, I think it's simply a fact that this perfume deserves to herald a new genre. I really have never smelled anything like it.
If one really wanted to know whether a treatment (e.g., CBT, IPT, ACT, EMDR) was more effective, it had to be directly compared to an approach intended to help - what Wampold and colleagues termed, a "bona fide" treatment. Doing otherwise, they argued, conflated artifacts of research design with actual research results.
The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.
Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.
The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.
Above I dismissed the notion that technological advances should make the market more efficient in all but the short-term sense. Here, I argue it likely goes the other way at longer horizons. And, IMHO, this is the best of my three hypotheses.
I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons.
I stand in awe of what author Jackie Cummings Koski has done here. This is a comprehensive overview of what FIRE is and how it is done, fashioned in the famous "for dummies" template. I wouldn't have known how to even begin to pull this together, let alone gotten it over the finish line in such fine form.
Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports.
Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.
Having said all that: I confess I enjoyed "2040." The plot is tightly constructed, the dialogue crackles (certainly for a CS professor writing a first novel), the satire at least provokes chuckles, and at just 215 pages, the action moves.
What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.
What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.
Mind candy military fantasy, in which Our Protagonists find themselves working as mercenaries for the Dark Lord's only-barely-less-evil ex-wife, on whom the narrator develops an unhealthy crush.
Mind candy: a very angsty romance wrapped in a shell of space opera. Both aspects of the story are left in media res, and I look forward to reading the sequels.
Mind candy fantasy, in which Pittsburgh is transported to Elfland for most of each month. I read it for the local interest (admission to CMU plays a small part of the plot, and bad things happen in Turtle Creek [which I can only too easily believe]), and it was OK, but not good enough to make me pick up any of the many sequels.
Mind candy portal fantasy, in which Our Protagonist's struggles to escape back to Mundania are rather complicated by her growing recognition that her life there sucked, actually, and maybe fighting strange beasts and stranger people isn't so bad in comparison...
A lot of the things listed in the charge sheet are things that lots of websites and communications providers could be said to have done themselves, though perhaps to a different degree.
But, hosting bad behavior alone shouldn’t lead to criminal charges. Even ignoring law enforcement demands seems like it should lead to civil penalties before reaching criminal charges.
Indeed, it no longer feels amusing to see the Telegram organization urge people away from default-encrypted messengers, while refusing to implement essential features that would widely encrypt their own users’ messages.
The practical impact is that the vast majority of one-on-one Telegram conversations — and literally every single group chat — are probably visible on Telegram’s servers, which can see and record the content of all messages sent between users.
If you buy a handful of index funds, sit on them for decades and never do another thing, you're likely to outperform nearly everyone who tries to beat the market by trading-including most professionals.
Since 2012 when the first study appeared in the literature, others have been published documenting the tendency of practitioners to overestimate their effectiveness - on average, by 65% (1, 2).
They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
And I check if there’s demand and if people actually sign up and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money. They need to take out their credit cards, pay me money, and then I can see if the idea is validated.
Price gouging is wonderful for all the reasons that letting supply equals demand is wonderful. When there is a limited supply, then a sharply higher price directs that supply to those who really need it.
Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.
I use MAMP for WordPress development, Postman for API testing, Notion for notes and task management, Slack and Discord for communication and Keynote for course presentations.
I use Sendy for newsletters. It's a self-hosted service which uses Amazon Simple Email Service. It's written using PHP and thus it needs the LAMP stack to be hosted. I use a DigitalOcean droplet with the LAMP stack installed to host it.
I’m also still not sure how much I like nix – it’s very confusing! But it’s helped me compile some software that I was struggling to compile otherwise, and in general it seems to install things faster than homebrew.
Their words now
I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me
In my approach, I resist using any external value framework as an ultimate set of criteria against which to measure games’ worth - not purpose, not pleasure, not politics.
But I also think that, if you really want to understand games, you should learn how to play these games. Which means learning how to stop playing them. You should learn how to disappear into them, how to let them swallow you whole, and then learn how to extract yourself, safely, on the other side.
The bar I typically suggest is that the people manager doesn't need to have the most technical depth on the team, but they need enough depth that they can follow most discussions without slowing them down, understand who's correct in most debates without needing to rely on trust, and generally stay oriented easily.
Team leadership covers a huge array of things-as you can see from how long this post is-and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt.
One of the hardest things about debugging is running a program backward: there's a data structure with a bad value, or the control flow has zigged instead of zagged, and it's very difficult to understand how it could have gotten into that state.
From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainers with thematic portfolios, accommodating diverse maintainers and project sizes, just like the specialized firms of other professionals.
Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.
I started with a rather non-consensus hypothesis: companies want to pay for their critical open source dependencies, but most projects are not selling them a legible way to do so.
Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (Germany, 2019, CC) 3.6 When thinking about the most overlooked female artist, Artemesia Gentileschi often comes to mind. This documentary makes a persuasive case for Hilma af Klint. To my eyes, her most appealing works are not the large scale abstractions, rather it’s the small Klee-like gems that stand out. Don’t assume that if you have seen a half dozen of her most famous works that you have any conception of her overall career.
State and Main (US, 2000, CC) 3.6 Not quite top level Mamet, but consistently entertaining and full of great actors. Rebecca Pidgeon is especially outstanding, overshadowing even the great Philip Hoffman.
You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Japan, 1955, CC) 3.5 Chishu Ryu is one of my favorite actors, but he has a fairly small role. Very nice cinematography. Recommended for fans of nostalgia.
Dry Summer (Turkey, 1964, CC) 3.5 I wasn’t sure I wanted to see a 50-year old Turkish film about farmers fighting over water rights. I did. There’s a reason Scorsese put this surprisingly entertaining film on his global cinema list.
It turns out that therapists who perform well on the FIS establish stronger relationships and are more effective (2). More to the point, the evidence shows FIS-related skills are trainable and that such training leads to better results (3, 4, 5).
Over the last 50 years, treatment methods have proliferated despite a lack of evidence of differential effectiveness between approaches. And even when a randomized controlled trial indicates a particular approach works, none show practitioners become more effective when they are trained in that modality.
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Excellent character-study/drama about the price of fame, the sincerest forms of flattery, and a little meta-fictionally, the psychology of the theatre and Broadway being usurped by Hollywood
Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs.
In fact, even though growth in average infrastructure costs over time is documented, there is very little cross-national correlation between GDP per capita and per-km subway construction costs.
And also this is where I believe the whole prompt engineering, trying to be a good prompt engineer is not going to be a long-term thing. I think you want to make products work where a user doesn’t even ask for something, but you know that they want it and you give it to them without them even asking for it.
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
We would rather take a more dramatic position, that the best way to actually make a dent in the search space is to not try to do what Google does, but try to do something they don’t want to do. For them to do this for every single query is a lot of money to be spent, because their search volume is so much higher.
The principle in Perplexity is you’re not supposed to say anything that you don’t retrieve, which is even more powerful than RAG because RAG just says, “Okay, use this additional context and write an answer.” But we say, “Don’t use anything more than that too.” That way we ensure a factual grounding.
At current deployment rates it will take Waymo about 20 years with ZERO fatalities to show they are net as safe as average human driver fatality rates (including the old cars, impaired drivers, etc. in that comparison baseline).
I'm convinced that it's not possible to teach anyone a language. A good teacher can help you on this journey – but they cannot give the language to you on a silver platter.
But mathematics too, and it’s interesting because people think that math has this Platonic reality that exists outside of our universe, and I think it’s a feature of our biosphere and it’s telling us something about the structure of ourselves.
Oh, if it’s not chemical. So I think some of the things that have evolved on our biosphere I would call as much alive as chemistry, as a cell, but they seem much more abstract. So for example, I think language is alive, or at least life. I think memes are.
And then you can go to chemical system. I don’t think that’s good either. I think there’s a confusion because life emerges in chemistry that life is chemical. I don’t think life is chemical. I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities, because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.
That’s one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people in my field like to use in astrobiology is life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with, and I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it’s terrible, and I think it’s terrible that people use it. I think every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.
I think life obeys universal principles. I think there is some deep underlying explanatory framework that will tell us about the nature of life in the universe and will allow us to identify life that we can’t yet recognize because it’s too different.
Josh Hardman at Psychedelic Alpha provided a detailed live account of the advisory committee meeting, which I found very helpful in developing a more granular sense of how the meeting unfolded without having to watch it myself.
My hot take is that JS has the lowest bar of entry to building and being productive (a good thing) but one of the highest bars of any language and stack to building high quality, stable, and reliable software. Very few devs have the expertise to pull off the latter
But their latest study is for only 7.1 million miles. They need something like 40 times more data prove they are actually saving lives with statistical confidence (likely even more).
And for a long time, I thought that's what had worked. That this was why Ruby on Rails took off, became one of the most popular full-stack web frameworks of all time, inspired countless clones, and created hundreds of billions in enterprise value for companies built on it. But I was wrong. It wasn't the crusade that did it.
But understand that it’s ultimately a moral and political argument, not an empirical question of the ideal population or the exact level of housing demand in Santa Monica.
In fact — and this is a point that is, in my opinion, underappreciated by the pro-housing side — building a bunch of housing in Santa Monica would probably not lower rents in Santa Monica. It would bring more people to Santa Monica, creating lower rents elsewhere in Greater Los Angeles as the spillovers from Santa Monica lessened.
Empirical data drawn from many different regions clearly shows that, on a metropolitan scale, rents tend to rise when vacancy rates are low and stabilize when vacancy rates are high.
So that’s why I think this is a thing that I come back to over and over again, is that you will retain information better if you’re constantly pushing yourself to your limit. If you are feeling like you’re coasting, then you’re actually not learning
So if you remember this information in different times in different places, it’s more accessible at different times in different places because it’s not overfitted in an AI way of thinking about things. It’s not overfitted to one particular context. But that’s also why the memories that we call upon the most also feel like they’re just things that we read about almost.
if I just try to do half-an-hour and then later in the day I do half-an-hour, I won’t retain that information as long as if I do half-an-hour today and half-an-hour one week from now. So doing that extra spacing should help me retain the information better.
is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.
What I say in the book is is that you don’t want to remember more, you want to remember better, which means focusing on the things that are important. That’s what our brains are designed to do.
In the early days, the DE1 was considered "unforgiving" by many. I didn't mind, as the DE1's ability to control shot parameters more than made up for its early challenges.
It is almost inevitable that per-engineer productivity drops to some extent as an organization and codebase grows, even though it's also nearly-impossible to quantify that effect.
In a rapidly growing organization, it's much more important to have a developer environment that "just works" out of the gate, with minimal setup pain for new engineers.
The best tooling in the world will struggle to make up for "regularly losing a day debugging your environment," and so getting that aspect right can easily outweigh almost any other decisions you make.
So Tesla hasn’t found a different, better way to bring driverless technology to market. Waymo is just so far ahead that it’s dealing with challenges Tesla hasn’t started thinking about.
If Waymo vehicles were constantly asking for remote guidance, Waymo might need to hire so many remote operators that it negates the cost savings that come from not needing a driver.
Indeed, as I've reported in previous posts, research not only shows therapists do not improve with time and experience in the field, but on average become less effective (1, 2, 3, 4).
It's a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their relationships and broaden their perspectives—and I believe it has the power to make us better friends, colleagues, and citizens.
This terrific novel tells the story of Frankie McGrath, an army nurse who serves two tours on the frontlines in Vietnam before returning home to a country rocked by protest and anti-war sentiment.
A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships.
Steven Pinker goes deep, showing how understanding the science of memory, social understanding, and syntactic structure can really pay off in making one a better writer.
That makes it essential to ensure that all synthetic DNA orders are screened to determine whether they contain hazardous sequences, which should be shipped only to legitimate researchers whose work has been approved by a biosafety authority.
Both the genome sequences of pandemic viruses and step-by-step protocols to make infectious samples from synthetic DNA are now freely available online.
It should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.
We think no fundamental research breakthroughs are required for labs to implement safety measures that meet our standard for AI control for early transformatively useful AIs; we think that meeting our standard would substantially reduce the risks posed by intentional subversion.
That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures.
Most of us spend our days within the confines of a handful of platforms, wandering around to admire what people have done with the seeds they are allowed in the space they are allotted, with platform owners directing us to the gardens they think we might like — or, more often, the ones they think will keep us within their walls for longer.
We cannot sustain the most stringent environmental and social norms, invest less than our competitors, have a more naive trade policy than them and think that we will continue to generate jobs. This no longer holds together.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
My message today is simple. Paul Valéry said, at the end of the First World War, that we now know that our civilizations are mortal. We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. It can die. It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices. But these choices must be made now.
That is absolutely possible. I’m actually putting less credence on that one just because you need to happen every single time. If even one, I mean, this goes back to John von Neumann pointed out that you don’t need to send the aliens around the galaxy. You can build self-reproducing probes and send them around the galaxy.
But I think your intuition is right that it would’ve been easy for there to be lots of civilizations then we would’ve noticed them already and we haven’t. Absolutely the simplest explanation for why we haven’t is that they’re not there.
Sometimes people think that complexity or life or whatever is fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, fighting against the increase of entropy. That is precisely the wrong way to think about it. We are surfers riding the wave of increasing entropy. We rely on increasing entropy to survive.
Remember space and time are parts of one unified space-time, the location of the singularity in the black hole is not the middle of space, but our future. It is a moment of time. It is like a big crunch.
I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.
No such restrictions are found in free or open source software licenses, be they permissive or copyleft – all FOSS licenses permit the use of the software for any purpose without restriction.
Copyleft does not impose restrictions, but it does impose obligations. The obligations exist to guarantee rights to the users of the software – in other words, to ensure freedoms.
Installed generators cost ~$800/kW, and the data center capital cost, including servers, is ~$40,000/kW, so adding 1% more makeup compute capacity is money ahead of purchasing generators.
I'm excited about what this means for the open-source community and research, with the gap between closed-source and open-weight models closing and SOTA-level conversational models being more easily accessible.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG; Lewis et al., 2020), which conditions on the LLM's generation on retrieved documents is the most practical paradigm IMO.
In comparison to text or images, it is more difficult to collect large amounts of high-quality, high-dimensional video data, let along text-video pairs.
This is a great book for anyone interested in learning about neuroscience—and I’d recommend it as well for many of my more neuro-crazed psychology professor colleagues.
you want to learn the big lessons about why things behave the way they do without assuming the past is a direct guide to the future, because it’s not – most of the details are not repeatable
Cultural psychology, studying emotions through the lens of culture. Your emotions are created by your culture. You should not be too sure that you share the emotional experiences of individuals from other cultures. Culture and emotion make each other up. Great insights!
It was around this time, in the summer of 2021, that I discovered the Muji pens. I discovered them as every minimalism fetishist discovers them perhaps.
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
This is not the same
world that you were part of. The complexity is off the chart; we are hidden
layers and layers under the scaffolding. And we are used everywhere.
It means that anything you offer must fit in 1h per month. That is it. And if
it does not, if it needs more involvement than that, we, as maintainers, will
not do it. At all.
Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
the way to be on the hook is to say, "This is only for people who are like this." Because if those people hate it, then you were wrong. Whereas if you say, "This is for everyone," you're allowed to hide behind, "Well, everyone hasn't found it yet."
Uh Harry Potter, the most successful uh book franchise in history, it made the author over a billion dollars. That book is for almost no one. Right? That book is for precocious 12-year-olds and people who like to remember what was like to be a precocious 12-year-old. That's not everyone. That's a very small group of people.
nobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.
The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night.
This raises public concerns that, at this late date, DoD might not have such a specification, whether classified or unclassified, even for its own internal use.
Based on public commercial data that tells a lot about the military potential of these dual-use robotic spacecraft, we have shown that China can manufacture and deploy 200 such spacecraft as early as 2026, enough to cripple critical US satellites in geosynchronous, highly elliptical, and other orbits, and thus severely degrading space support to wartime operations.
If a Chinese spacecraft can dock with a friendly satellite to refuel, repair, or transport it, the same robotic arm can also disable a US satellite’s solar panels and antennas. Alternatively, China can use these spacecraft to tow satellites into locations where they can, at best, only sub-optimally perform intended duties such as early warning, surveillance, or geolocation.
First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia’s 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.
So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that.
Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
First millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of people will die in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war. And then, comes nuclear winter where the billions happen from starvation.
In short summary, the licenses limit the freedoms of what one can do with the software in order for Redis Labs to be solely enriched, while asking for volunteer labor, and having already
I think that was an unfortunate move because their goal is mainly to extract profit from the software project rather than to uphold the ideals of Free and Open Source Software.
I kind of hate ads just as an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons, to get it going, but it’s a momentary industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers.
So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk about GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don’t go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things.
The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do on over one time horizon. So if you think of all of the five-second tasks in the economy, five minute tasks, the five-hour tasks, maybe even the five-day tasks, how many of those can AI do?
But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is, at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute.
Look, I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world, and I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute.
What this also tells us is that, at the end of the day, the argument for boosting yields—especially among smallholder farmers—is not just environmental: it is humanitarian.
Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.
Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.