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.
People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
All my friends know that I'm obsessed with Readwise, which combines a web highlighter, a powerful read-it-later app, and every feature under the sun to organize and remember everything that I read.
More recently, I started using Readwise Chat. Sometimes I don't remember what books I've read, especially now that I've been reading and using Readwise for a long time.
So a lot of the problem is mere herding: If every other top engineering program is using the GRE, it’s too weird to require a different test even if the alternative test is a far superior selection mechanism.
First and foremost: Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.
But the spike in interest rates require to do this would be huge. And the trade shock will cause a sharp recession, or worse, putting even more stress on the budget. A debt crisis is likely along the way as the US finds it impossible to roll over debt.
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
this story tells us how an increase in foreign demand to save in the US rather than at home will push up the dollar, and cause the trade deficit, which is in effect how foreigners send us factories which they would rather build here than in their own countries.
However, luasec does not perform any certificate verification by default! This makes its out-of-the-box behavior very unsafe, and I have to recommend against using it for anything.
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.
That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.
By trying to use misuse as a fig leaf for their real concerns, they end up sounding much less credible than if they just tried to argue for what they actually meant.
But we do not have experience with the kinds of problems we’ll face if we build machines that are smarter and more capable than us, so I feel much less sanguine that an adaptation-based strategy will help us there.
The current status quo—where new models that push the frontier are kept private, and openly available equivalents are only released after a lag of months or years—is valuable.
We should think of the gap between frontier models and proliferated models as an adaptation buffer: a limited time window when we know what bad actors will soon be able to use AI for, which gives us a chance to implement defensive measures that increase society’s resilience to the danger.
But with AI, it’s different: it’s often only a couple of years between when you need a world-class computing cluster to do something and when you can run it on a high-end gaming chip on your laptop.
When we resist not knowing, we often leap to conclusions, make decisions without all of the information, or simply guess. Of course, that might make it even more likely that we're wrong, the very thing our subconscious is trying to avoid. Needing to be right comes at the expense of curiosity.
These systems will be absolutely central to the economy, technology, and national security, and will be capable of so much autonomy that I consider it basically unacceptable for humanity to be totally ignorant of how they work.
The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
you should expect to have something like 10-20% less individual output per engineer you manage, depending on how experienced you are, they are, etc., and with substantial week-to-week variance.
The short, and very much un-sweet, vision of a tariff-bound economy is that it is stochastic. We can observe it, measure it, analyze it, but we cannot really predict it.
The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.
Even if we assume all three of these crashes were Waymo’s fault, that would still mean that a large majority of the 38 serious crashes were not Waymo’s fault.
Say goodbye to cycles of mock and doc feedback, and say hello to code-first prototypes with constant iteration (on prompts, models, etc) to answer three key questions.
When I have conversations with breached companies, my messaging is crystal clear: be transparent and expeditious in your reporting of the incident and prioritise communicating with your customers.
Summarizing all of that into my advice right now: Get Whoop for 9.5/10, reliable, convenient sleep tracking with an excellent app (once you get to know it a bit). Get Oura for 10/10 tracking, if you're ok with the ring form factor.
Summarizing all of that into my advice right now: Get Whoop for 9.5/10, reliable, convenient sleep tracking with an excellent app (once you get to know it a bit). Get Oura for 10/10 tracking, if you're ok with the ring form factor.
I didn't find 8Sleep to be very reliable in its sleep tracking. The scores don't make as much sense to me when I wake up, and as we saw above they don't correlate very strongly with Whoop or Oura.
And number two, the superhuman opportunity deserves everyone who works at the company to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius. And so that includes me as well as everybody else. So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two.
But this is the hard part. When you're when you're doing that market widening, you're not solution deepening. And so your perceived product velocity may decrease. You can avoid some of these things with some smart technology decisions, but mostly you just have to grind through it and it is worth it to get to the other side.
you can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories. Solution deepening and market widening. Now solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users but not making the product itself any better.
It's like trying to find meaning in your job. You can find satisfaction in what you do. That is a very good thing. You can find satisfaction and be happy with what you've created. You can be thrilled by the experience, but you cannot find... I doubt you can find purpose.
You don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.
But for me it just comes down to, is it really a good thing to do? Is it really actually something we want, is to value people in such a profane or just disregarding way? I just really think it's just bad for the soul. Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it's actually bad.
And so we often talk about programming in perspective of web, or something that's pretty narrow, and I think that's just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else, that actually I don't believe it's that representative of the entire programming world out there.
And for me, that is the worst part about programming, is when you already know the solution and it's just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.
A series of autobiographical essays exploring wandering, uncertainty, memory, desire, and place—embracing the unknown as a gateway to self-transcendence.
Ben's personal reflections on reinventing himself at "midlife" (though relatable at any age). I love how he leaned into a new version of himself without dramatically blowing up his life.
This book is a short but inspiring take on living life on your terms while being pragmatic about money and how to make it happen. Reminds me of a less travel-centric Vagabonding.
Part memoir, part raw, honest reflection, part useful ideas for a pathless life. I loved how this book didn't follow a non-fiction formula. His 'on-season'/'off-season' approach was useful for me.
UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.
The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.
Now that we have the answers, it all looks very obvious, and mostly straightforward.
Their words now
I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start.
I'm hopeful this framework will turn out to be a much more robust style for writing performance-sensitive code, especially over time and as compilers evolve.
However, with so many different software projects out there, each moving so rapidly and depending on and being used by so many other projects, it becomes practically-inevitable that some regressions "like that one" happen, almost constantly.
It's easy to get impressive-looking results if you're comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline, and that observation turns out to explain a surprising fraction of supposed improvements.
Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.
In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.
As a Python and JavaScript programmer my favorite models right now are Claude 3.7 Sonnet with thinking turned on, OpenAI’s o3-mini-high and GPT-4o with Code Interpreter (for Python).
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
(publication date March 18, 2025, Viking) by Laura Delano is a compelling and troubling memoir of psychiatric patienthood, iatrogenic harm, and finding a meaningful and flourishing life outside of the mental healthcare system.
Contrary to some people’s beliefs, companies do not in fact have sufficient incentives to mitigate all major risks, and competition is driving corner-cutting that needs to be reined in somehow.
This is what leads to slop JS/TS software. Treating errors generically like this is a mistake. It leads to fragile software, poor telemetry/observability/debugging, and as a result worse experiences
The potential end of USAID is an unfolding public health and humanitarian disaster, but it does not permanently doom the task of growth—in large part because these aid flows were far too small to begin with.
The longevity of that consensus is itself remarkable: in 79 years of data, Republican presidents spent an average of $34 billion a year on aid, while Democrats spent $40 billion.
Even as GDP has grown tenfold, US aid budgets have remained basically flat in real terms—the result (one might guess) of a delicate balancing act between bipartisan consensus among elites and a wariness of attracting too much negative attention.
As I set out last time, the usual story — that this was caused by deforestation, making firewood so scarce that people resorted to burning an inferior but cheaper fuel — simply does not stack up.
England’s deforestation — along with the draining of its peat-filled fens and marshes, and the clearing of its gorse-growing heaths — was instead itself caused by the arrival of cheap coal.
Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries.
Many people assume that they need to keep their jobs forever, because it is their source of health insurance. The good news is, this is usually not true.
I recently used Peddle with great results, and have been recommending them to anyone who has a low-value, possibly even non-driveable car they just want GONE in exchange for $500-1000 of cash.
Small day pack. A lightweight pack is great for carrying a sweater, camera, guidebook, and picnic goodies while you leave your large bag (with most of your belongings) at the hotel.
Disposable washcloths that pack dry but lather up when wet (such as Olay's Daily Facials 5-in-1) are another option; cut them in half to make them last longer.
I recently interviewed Mike Huemer on his new Progressive Myths. To repeat, I consider it “the best book on wokeness.” You know you’re reading a special book by page 3
if you believe we're in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we've been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term.
To some extent, training a model does effectively nothing. They have a model. The thing that Dario is sort of speaking to is the implementation of that model, once trained to then create huge economic growth, huge increases in military capabilities, huge increases in productivity of people, betterment of lives.
I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.
There's not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.
Accepted practice is that for any given model that is a notable advancement, you're going to do two to 4x compute of the full training run in experiments alone.
This is why you want to work in post-training because the GPU cost for training is lower. So you can make a higher percentage of your training runs YOLO runs.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
And we'll get into the details of the models and again and again as we try to get deeper into how the models were trained, we will say things like the data processing, data filtering data quality is the number one determinant of the model quality.
GPT-2, R1, and nearly every other AI model released since 2018 have all been part of a consistent story: AI capabilities that rival and ultimately exceed human intelligence are easier and cheaper to build than almost anyone can intuitively grasp, and this gets easier and cheaper every month.
AI competition needs to be tempered with a recognition that China isn’t going away as a player in AI, and that coexistence must also be a part of America’s strategy.
Each and every time, it took at most a few years but typically months before other companies would achieve the same level of performance using a broadly similar, and always relatively simple, recipe.
Re-read because I couldn't interest myself in a couple of other pieces of mind candy and thought "you know who did this sort of thing well...". Which got me thinking, again, about the relationship between this series and feminism.
First and foremost, I use this to talk to local models hosted by Ollama, but secondarily I also use it to interface with other remote services like OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek.
It is a fork of Visual Studio Code with AI-based auto completion and code generation built-in. It’s my go-to for programming with AI assistance at the moment.
This is a command line tool with plenty of plugins that lets you prompt different models. Think of it as a command-line version of Open WebUI. It’s particularly useful for quick scripting and basic automation.
Like probably most AI users, I use ChatGPT, particularly on my phone. I pay for the Plus subscription because I use it enough to get a lot of value out of it.
This allows me to run models locally on my MacBook Pro M1 Max. With the 64GB of RAM it has, it’s a pretty potent machine for basic inference despite it being three years old.
Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
Overall, though, this experience reinforced my belief that the tooling and interface design around LLMs is lagging way behind the actual capabilities, and is an area of active experimentation and development, even aside from any future model improvements.
Thus, code is cheaper than ever, but I suspect that insight and good architectural design and understanding, at least for now, will become more valuable than ever.
and really only has one model you care about - Claude 3.5 Sonnet. But Sonnet is very, very good. It often seems to be clever and insightful in ways that the other models are not.
if you want a very good all-around model with excellent reasoning. As an open model, you can either use it hosted on the original Chinese DeepSeek site or from a number of local providers.
currently has the best Live Mode in its Advanced Voice Mode. The other big advantage of ChatGPT is that it does everything, often in somewhat confusing ways
Gemini’s advantage is a family of powerful models including reasoners, very good integration with search, and a pretty easy-to-use user interface, as you might expect from Google. It also has top-flight image and video generation.
Deborah Kasdan’s Roll Back the World: A Sister’s Memoir (2023) is an honest and vulnerable account of her sister Rachel’s life with schizophrenia and the challenges this presented for the family.
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
Growth team can optimize. Growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15% maybe that's enough for you even that like is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do if there is a slow down trajectory
If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.
It depends on how you're actually going to collect the money. If your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
Milton Friedman is very open to doing things differently in a state of emergency. He will have different ideas during World War II than any other time and that's why I argue I think he would have been supportive of at least the first rounds of coronavirus relief because I think he would have put his emergency thinking hat on.
Friedman and Schwartz becomes the playbook for the Federal Reserve. We have lived through this, the financial crisis. The Federal Reserve is ready to loan. Covid, the Federal Reserve does all kinds of new things, because no Federal Reserve chair wants to be in Friedman-Schwartz 2.0 that somebody writes, where they're the bad guy who let the economy meltdown.
So, I think she comes back in to relevancy in a different way than Friedman does, because I think in some ways she's tapped into a more universal human longing for independence and autonomy and self-creation and self-discovery.
So, she thought of herself as rational. She thought of rationality as what she was doing, but she was actually doing a kind of mythopoetic psychological work as well.
Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
This is perhaps one of the first painful lessons anyone who has built an AI product quickly learns. It's easy to build a demo, but hard to build a product.
If you're a guy in your early 20's, get married and have kids. Go into debt if you have to.
Their words now
Most people should get married and have kids much earlier than the current average (and have more kids than the current average). Doing this successfully (without screwing it up with selfish pride) will make the world better and make them happier than anything else they’re doing.
Most people should get married and have kids much earlier than the current average (and have more kids than the current average). Doing this successfully (without screwing it up with selfish pride) will make the world better and make them happier than anything else they’re doing.
What prevents this from being a broad-based bubble is that we are missing a critical feedback loop from the announcement's impact, like network growth or land value.
And in a way that’s the irony of AI… It will make public services more human… Reconnect staff with the reasons they came to public service in the first place…
This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?
Since inflation is not primarily driven by private-sector lending in the current environment, making borrowing more expensive will not significantly cool the economy.
Structural fiscal deficits have surpassed private sector lending and monetary policy as the primary drivers of economic activity and inflation, marking a fundamental shift in the economy's liquidity dynamics.
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
Planning, at its core, is a search problem. You search among different paths towards the goal, predict the outcome (reward) of each path, and pick the path with the most promising outcome.
I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly.
I read that last month, and visited Venice while I was reading it, and I was struck by the extent to which medieval Venice was a well-oiled political economy machine.
Q3 2024 had the rate 8.9% so there is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic at a time when EV enthusiasts thought I was horribly pessimistic.
Waymo now has a service that looks and feels like this in San Francisco, 8 years earlier than I predicted. But it is not what every one was expecting. There are humans in the loop.
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez - I was struck to the bone by this book. I thought about it for many weeks after I read it and even had several dreams about it.
The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes - In an age of LLM-generated poetry and machine learning curation (even coming from yours truly sometimes), it's refreshing to have real people who love poetry curate it and show you what you need to read to touch grass.
The Tombs of Atuan - My only regret is that I came to Ursula K. LeGuin so late in life, and this might be my favorite of all of her books I've read so far.
I picked this book up, and I liked it. On the surface, it's about wizards and magic, but there's more to it. Every now and then, Ursula Le Guin sprinkles in some wisdom.
Some of his essays are thought-provoking. His reflections on education, nationalism, and other topics are not only stirring but also showcase literary brilliance. The man could write.
It's stimulating work as well as easy to read. Although parts of South Asia are not commonly known to have an argumentative gene, Amartya Sen convincingly shows that Indian history is deeply rooted in an argumentative tradition. He masterfully weaves evidence and tales to make his point.
We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world
A simple and tested method for communicating and connecting with anyone, Supercommunicators is an exploration of the psychology and neuroscience of communication — and how to use those skills at work, home and in life.
My first book, which spent three years on New York Times bestseller lists, takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist — and how they can be changed.
My second book is about the science of productivity, and how to succeed with less stress and struggle, to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most.
And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it
So, we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look.
But I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that's why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other, that's all they had to go with.
And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed.
In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison
Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
This "memorize, fetch, apply" paradigm can achieve arbitrary levels of skills at arbitrary tasks given appropriate training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or pick up new skills on the fly (which is to say that there is no fluid intelligence at play here.)
Their words now
OpenAI's new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in AI's ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough, marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared to the prior limitations of LLMs.
Passing ARC-AGI does not equate to achieving AGI, and, as a matter of fact, I don't think o3 is AGI yet. o3 still fails on some very easy tasks, indicating fundamental differences with human intelligence.
o3's improvement over the GPT series proves that architecture is everything. You couldn't throw more compute at GPT-4 and get these results. Simply scaling up the things we were doing from 2019 to 2023 -- take the same architecture, train a bigger version on more data -- is not enough.
Earlier this year I started writing a piece on why “hire great people and get out of their way” is such terrible, dangerous, counterproductive advice to give anyone in a leadership role.
Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
Investment Philosophies (Wiley, 2nd Ed): This is the best book for this class, and provides background and evidence for each investment philosophy, with a listing of the personal characteristics that you need to make that philosophy work for you.
Applied Corporate Finance (Wiley, 4th Ed): This is the book that is most closely tied to this class and represents my views of what should be in a corporate finance class most closely.
For one thing, typical deposit accounts in the U.S. are actually credit products. It's baked in and can't be baked out without making them unfit for purpose.
Until we develop better ways to bridge this gap - aligning what analysts understand with what is formally forecast - we'll continue to see the same pattern: reality consistently outperforming conservative predictions.
I do not believe that analytical skills are the missing ingredient in thinking about the future. Rather, I believe that imagination about the future and a theory of change that helps to describe it clearly, are what is needed to look ahead in a more compelling way.
So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed.
A single case study can lead to overlearning from the peculiarities of one place, where the right thing to do is look at a number of successes and look at what is common to all of them.
A number of studies, conducting full life-cycle analyses, have found that vertical farms currently have a higher carbon footprint than conventional outdoor farming.
Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction.
Whether you already know a lot about the ’60s or you’re just dipping your toe into those waters, whether you want a deep dive into the art of political writing or a charming story about a married couple who adored each other, you’ll get it from An Unfinished Love Story.
Most of the coverage of The Coming Wave has focused on what it has to say about artificial intelligence—which makes sense, given that it's one of the most important books on AI ever written.
So even though women’s economic advancement did displace some men, and triggered some private hostility, it was never actually catapulted into social antagonism. This is primarily because it was never leveraged by political entrepreneurs!
Point being that it was probably inevitable I would love this short and absurd novel about a sexagenarian Roman general who is obsessed with staging the sole play he ever wrote—back as a precocious young artist—over and over again.
A more intelligent agent is more capable of finding "holes" in the design of reward function and exploiting the task specification-in other words, achieving higher proxy rewards but lower true rewards.
Humans being awful drivers leads to a massive increase in vehicle costs and weight, makes cars more dangerous to people outside of them, and imposes significant costs on infrastructure like roads.
A battery that’s discharging every day gets great utilization, but one that’s only there in case the sun doesn’t come up for two days in a row, barely gets used.
For loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.
One of my favorite books is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Markets, published in 1841, and it chronicles how market mistakes form and grow, using the South Sea Bubble and the Tulip Bulb Craze as illustrative examples.
I forget (again!) how I chanced across it, but it fills a very real need for a lot of the students in my inequality class, and I intend to make it recommended/optional reading in the future. (I'll have to see if the library can buy a digital copy.)
You might be skeptical of using synthetic data. After all, it’s not real data, so how can it be a good proxy? In my experience, it works surprisingly well. Some of my favorite AI products, like Hex use synthetic data to power their evals
He has been a confidant of Buffett and Munger, a co-author with Daniel Kahneman, an editor on two revised editions of Ben Graham’s masterpiece The Intelligent Investor, considered to be the best book on investing ever written.
So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle.
The only way you can make H2FC cars look cheaper than BEVs is to underestimate or ignore the cost of hydrogen production and infrastructure, socialise it, and then load the entire cost of grid build-out onto the marginal BEV.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It’s the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archeology and including oceanography as well.
I’m not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur, and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the ice age.
And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures.
It’s often said that I’m claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I’m putting forward to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory.
I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
Many software investors eschew hard tech startups because of their capital intensity, but it’s hard to deny that huge returns are possible in hard tech: just consider SpaceX.
Another manifestation of the lack of sufficiently abstract, formal reasoning in LLMs is the way in which performance often fall apart as problems are made bigger.
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
This is a worthy entry in the genre. It suffers a bit from extensive plot not about banking and characters who barely speak to dragons. But all of that irrelevant fluff makes it one of the most underrated fantasy series I’ve ever read.
The Phoenix Project is actually assigned at some infrastructure companies, because the narrative makes the pedagogy about project management go down more easily.
The Social Network is substantially made up, more a source for vibes rather than a source for facts. Even the vibes fail to cohere with reality. And yet it convinced many proto-founders to put in YC applications.
And it doesn’t always take a job at The New York Times or a huge pre-established platform to become one of the voices speaking up, helping to turn that tide.
Websites outside of these handful of social networks are harder and harder to even find, and partially because of that, they have a harder and harder time sustaining themselves.
The web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.
The required organizational transition is equivalent in scope and difficulty to the Apollo program, and will be made or broken during the tenure of the next NASA administrator.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.
Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty.
To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.
In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing 6000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Huaca Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
We see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration, but now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago.
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school.
For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
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
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.