What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
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And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
I would never like hold up a flag saying I'm really good at building highspeed trains. Like that is just a sign that you're really bad at capital allocation.
It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
Almost all discussions of it center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.
Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
I say now that China’s biggest challenge is consumption, it’s not production. We know that China’s very, very competitive in production and supply. China needs to be a consuming country to be a rich country.
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
The biggest misunderstanding is somehow that a group of people or even just one person runs the entire Chinese economy. It is far from the reality. It is a very complex, large economy, and even if there is an extreme form of political centralization, the economy is totally decentralized.
But for a variety of reasons I think it makes more sense to stay agnostic about forecasts of potential GDP growth, and focus more on the signals the current performance of the economy is sending.
I'm with the markets here: I believe in the output gap. The structural slowdown of the Chinese economy is an incredibly consensus view, and I believe in it too.
Any performance test should be accompanied by an explanation of the limiting factor, since no explanation will reveal the test wasn't analyzed and the result may be bogus.
One performance anti-pattern is when a company, to debug one performance problem, installs a monitoring tool that periodically does work and causes application latency outliers.
A new performance team can likely find enough optimizations to halve infrastructure spend in their first couple of years, even for companies that have been using commercial performance or observability tools.
Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.
I see this as the strongest argument against the better futures perspective, and the reason why I don’t feel confident that work on Flourishing is higher-priority than work on Surviving, rather than merely in the same ballpark.
But the difference in value between the world today and that common-sense utopia might be very small compared to the difference between that common-sense utopia and the best futures we could feasibly achieve.
Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine is a memoir I couldn't believe I hadn't read earlier. Many of her observations about engineering culture feel as relevant today as when she was a programmer in the 1980s
I'm getting into screen-time blocking. I use the app Opal on a recommendation from Lucas Gelfond. It won't let me scroll Twitter, Substack, or Instagram for 80% of the day. Gmail is also blocked from 11pm to 8am.
I initially started making Anki (well, Mochi) cards to keep track of Google DeepMind's LLM lineage—Gopher, Chinchilla, Gato, PaLM, Sparrow, Meena, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini, etc.
Yet the production methods still can’t make them below $10 per gram, so they’re still not cheap enough for some “obvious” applications like preventing kids getting malaria in a rainy season.
Going all in on AI is not the highest return-on-investment strategy if you care about human flourishing, even if AI might lead to rapid scientific advances.
Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too.
Those are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
Mind candy: A fun travelogue which does what it says in the title. It pretty much satisfies any impulses I might have to actually see any of the artworks in question. No familiarity with art-critical jargon required, though long passages are (more or less explicitly) art criticism.
I nonetheless found this book somewhat disappointing, because Jay seemed content to expound the authors he covers in more or less their own terms, rather than subjecting them to anything like actual epistemological or methodological criticism.
This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.
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It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.
It’s one thing if residents of Sulawesi like Mr. Jamal and his family have had to risk exposure to toxic pollutants in a successful escape from poverty. It’s another thing entirely if those bearing most of the burden see few of the benefits.
Morowali’s poverty rate has seen a modest decline since 2016, from around 15% to 12%, but this puts it squarely in the middle of the pack of other Sulawesi districts—and not far from the decline in the national average, which fell from 10.9% to 8.6% over the same period.
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates.
I think to the extent that it can predict the next frames in a coherent way, that is a form of understanding, not in the anthropomorphic version of, it's not some kind of deep philosophical understanding of what's going on, I don't think these systems have that, but they certainly have modeled enough of the dynamics, put it that way
I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
And I think the reason that's possible is that in nature, natural systems have structure because they were subject to evolutionary processes that shape them. And if that's true, then you can maybe learn what that structure is.
We contend that games provide particularly rich and controlled environments uniquely well-suited for systematically evaluating rapid model adaptation and the process of world model induction.
We expect that building and evaluating AI systems capable of this kind of rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI capable of functioning effectively in the complex and fast-changing real world, and especially in human worlds - the environments that human beings have evolved in, created, and are continually changing and re-creating.
However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment.
We argue that this profound adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal representations of the environment, commonly referred to as world models, and we refer to this adaptation mechanism as world model induction.
The state-of-the-art today can be more accurately described as "last-minute, black-box product testing" rather than auditing, and I think this situation threatens public safety, international stability, and sustainable commercial adoption of AI.
the fortress balance sheet is that you run a company serving clients well, you have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I'm as conservative in accounting as you can find. I don't up-front profits when I can spread them over time.
if you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were earning 30% equity. Most of them went bankrupt. We never did that much. Okay, but in '08 and '09, we were fine, and they weren't.
And so, I always look what I call the fat tails and manage that we can handle all the all the fat tails. And not the stress test the Fed gives us, but all the fat tails.
I've always been very risk-conscious. And risk-conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes.
The main argument they trotted out in that article was that we don’t need more high-yield agriculture because we don’t need more food, just better distribution of the food we already have. That’s wrong
I think we need to correct that ratio somewhat by some testimony of just how God damn amazing it is to literally create life
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those of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing to get married and to have children have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would've seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental of that.
it's a luxury good like you're not paying the penalty for that the people who embrace it and think that they can just ask AI for everything or they can just look everything up but they don't have to understand the copy pasta that they slam into their project they're the ones who going to suffer
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Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.
static typing is the one thing I will literally die on the hill for for Ruby
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It's the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby. This is why I don't fully understand when people call for Ruby to add static typing. 'Cause to me, it's the bedrock of what this is.
I enjoy it even almost like as a sort of pair programmer AI pair programmer who doesn't drive who's just there to give suggestions to know the API to do all these other things but the second it starts wanting to autocomplete my code I'm like yeah I'm out bro
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I love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don't let it drive my code. I've tried that. I've tried the cursors and the wind surfaces and I don't enjoy that way of writing. And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.
I used to think it required more churn to get progress to stay on the leading edge of new stuff. And I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community.
Bitcoin is not going to catch on as a charity. In order for spending it to catch on persistently at scale (i.e. not just billions of dollar-equivalents in annual global medium-of-exchange volume, but trillions), it has to solve problems for spenders and/or recipients that other solutions are not doing.
If a new monetary network with its own unit (i.e. not pegged to an existing currency as a credit rail on top of it, but rather a fully parallel system to central banks) is going to bootstrap from zero to massive, it requires upward volatility.
Perhaps that Goldman makes, at times, too strong a case for the importune of the Nomonhan war, but the conflict surely deserves much more that the oblivion into which it seems to have been consigned by political historians.
People are more likely to have kids if it’s FUN - relative to alternatives. As entertainment-technology improves, it generates a tantalising menu of ways to spend our lives.
We need better beef - which means more efficient beef, not organic grass-fed beef, which is even worse for the climate and the planet than conventional feedlot-finished beef - but in the rich world we also need to eat less beef.
Finally: tmux, which I had been happily using for many years, but slowly collecting configuration for. I decided to give Zellij a try, and haven’t looked back.
I took inspiration from Omakub, which is where I discovered Tactile - a GNOME extension for tiling windows to a custom on-screen grid using the keyboard. I’ve found this to be invaluable, and easily the best window management experience for GNOME.
I’ve grown to like Space Bar - it provides desktop workspaces akin to those in Sway/Hyprland which enabled me to use the muscle memory I’d developed over years.
I switched to zsh around 2013 and have used it every day since: starting with the infamous Oh My Zsh, powerlevel9k, and subsequently powerlevel10k, and finally settling on Starship with a couple of zsh plugins such as zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-syntax-highlighting.
You should remember that the best AIs can perform at the level of a very smart person on some tasks, but current models cannot provide miraculous insights beyond human understanding.
r1, a Chinese model, is very capable and free to use, but is missing a few features from the other companies and it is not clear that they will keep up in the long term.
Little is lost by preventing a 14-year-old from accessing TikTok or Snapchat, or telling a 10-year-old they cannot have unrestricted access to the internet through their own smartphone, but so much will almost certainly be gained.
But, it’s also now clear that this field is no longer actually divided on the question of whether, generally speaking, smartphones and social media are bad for kids.
The stronger such policies are, the more "absence of evidence" (lack of visible whistleblowing or lawsuits) can become "evidence of absence" (regarding flagrant violations).
As AI gets more capable, the risks associated with mistaken claims, fraudulent claims, or too-vague-to-be-verified claims will increase, and a cloud of suspicion between competitors could drive corner-cutting (indeed, this is happening already and could get worse).
governing frontier AI requires standards for safety and security, incentives for the leading AI developers to follow those standards, and evidence that the standards are being followed.
I love Barry’s writing and read every book he writes. He has total mastery of the contemporary thriller with extraordinarily vibrant characters and a zillion endnotes that tie to things that are actually happening in the real world.
It’s my summer reading project, which is a curated library of eighty pocket-sized books that encapsulate the breadth and diversity of literary history.
the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
So right now I estimate that the time and effort taken to formalize it, proof is about 10 times the amount taken to write it out. So it's doable, but it's annoying.
I'm much more comfortable with the fox paradigm. Yeah. So yeah, I like looking for analogies, narratives. I spend a lot of time… If there's a result, I see it in one field, and I like the result, it's a cool result, but I don't like the proof, it uses types of mathematics that I'm not super familiar with, I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.
If something holds 99.99% of the time, that's good enough for most things. But mathematicians are one of the few people who really care about whether really 100% of all situations are covered by it.
It’s when you really don’t want to do a thing that you imagine a thing you don’t want to do more that’s worse than that and then in that way, you procrastinate by not doing the thing that’s worse. It’s a nice hack, it actually works.
I don’t believe it’s providing a kind of formal explanation of the different positions. It’s just saying which position is better or not that you can intuit as a human being, and then from that, we humans can construct a theory of the matter.
I exclusively use the cheaper Sonnet model. It’s perfectly adequate for my needs, and in fact, I prefer its outputs over the more expensive Opus model.
I’ve evaluated agent performance across different languages my workload, and if you can choose your language, I strongly recommend Go for new backend projects.
The high value human tasks, like understanding the client's true pain points and deciding on priorities and trade-offs, would be easier with a smaller, proactive team.
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.
Consistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
It follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.
The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
GPUs are not nearly as restricted in their future progress as CPUs which are far more constrained in how they can physically improve (compiler-driven ILP only goes so far).
What the Apple paper shows, most fundamentally, regardless of how you define AGI, is that LLMs are no substitute for good well-specified conventional algorithms.
While the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.
higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
I think the element of podcasting or audio books that is about information gathering, that part might be removed, or that might be more efficiently and in a compelling way done by AI. But then it’ll be just nice to hear humans struggle with the information, contend with the information, try to internalize it
the other thing I think people don’t often talk about is probability of doom without AI. So there’s all these other ways that humans can destroy themselves and it’s very possible, at least I believe so, that AI will help us become smarter, kinder to each other, more efficient.
So I do think scaling laws are working, but it's tough to get, at any given time, the models we all use the most, this maybe a few months behind the maximum capability we can deliver because that won't be the fastest, easiest to use, et cetera.
There is no doubt in me that we will enable more filmmakers than have ever been. You're going to empower a lot more people. So I think there is an expansionary aspect of this, which is underestimated, I think.
When the internet created blogs, you heard from so many more people. But with AI, I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands. It'll be tens of millions of people, maybe even a billion people putting out things into the world in a deeper way.
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
The problem is that the conversational interface is potent and that the AI is trained on a lot of human text input which unfortunately is probably enough to do real damage if that conversational interface is hooked up with something that has real world consequences.
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While all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
Shatz brings this Plutarch-like exemplary life to the reader with adroitness and skillful attention to detail as well as awareness of Fanon’s uniqueness, both in terms of personality, and places: centers of the new world that he was trying to create.
Opaque, inert and obstructive elements might occupy the same place as full-screen command line interfaces — a powerful niche UI that was a marker in history, passed on by the windowed environment of the multi-tasking, graphical user interface revolution.
We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.
It actually means that to make it easier for users to transition from something they were used to — in this case, phones typically being slabs with a grid of buttons on them — to what things had become — phones were all-screen, so they could show any kind of button or interface imaginable.
The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is.
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.
There is, however, one approach that tops all of them - which the Swiss banking industry has not yet achieved, but is destined to. And that is to become a centre of true investing excellence.
I had always thought that all "Intelligent Investing" is "Value Investing". And that true value is always sustainable. In otherh words, "All Intelligent Finance is Sustainable Finance."
At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do.
Cut and cover will sometimes be the best choice from a basic cost-benefit perspective, as will elevated rail, and both are useful to have in the tunnel construction toolbox for that reason.
The Tyranny of Structurelessness has yet to be overcome, and for those who still care about creating strong, transparent, equitable organizations, this work matters.
Assuming you are still hiring junior engineers (you really should be even in this AI era), the good ones will learn quickly and want to see career progress in their first few years of working.
You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.
But by the available evidence, the War on Drugs was far less successful at reducing use among the “hard core” of users, mostly meaning people addicted to their drug of choice.
Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.
It's a lot easier for someone to engage with an argument if they generated the key steps themselves by answering my questions - if imposed by me, it sparks contrarianism and defensiveness
No matter how much I know about a domain, the other person will always know far more about their own situation, context, beliefs, skills, preferences, etc than I do.
Recently I reviewed Adrian Kind’s 2025 book, “How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning,” on this substack. I had mentioned that Kind’s book is the first systematic, in-depth, book-length philosophical investigation into how psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions.
I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure really, and incompetence.
I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.
So people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it’s a kind of misnomer, because you’re sort of suggesting that it’s highly mechanized and industrialized, and all the rest of it. And nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not.
So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, you’re dealing with an operation on such a vast scale, that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn’t matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven’t got the backup, it’s not going to work.
Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.
Nor do I do many promotional emails (this is the first in nearly a year), but if you want to provide some indirect support, and get what I sincerely think to be a very good book while you’re at it
That story is told in her riveting memoir Personal History, which came out in 1997—just a few years before she passed away—and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy — especially as the position became defined by its lack of actual production — but on whether they resemble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did.
The Chief Executive — who makes over 300 times more than their average worker — is no longer a leadership position, but a kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company.
We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.
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However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
Your actual biological age is really moot. Anybody over the age of, I don't know, 17 that has a pretty adult mind, all the way up until you're senile and getting Alzheimer's or dementia, anything between there, we're all pretty much equal.
the tool is used when you are overwhelmed with too many options. You've said yes to too many things, and you need to raise the bar all the way up so that almost everything doesn't pass the bar. It's a tool for a certain situation so I rarely use it. I would not call it a approach to life that everyone should use all the time.
As much as possible, try to not predict what the future may hold, but just wait as long as possible for that future to become the present and show you what it actually needs.
If you notice that something repulses you and you have like a revulsion response to something, steer into it to learn more about it instead of avoiding it.
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
The problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do.
The technology powering ChatGPT had already launched prior to November 30th, 2022. It was just wrapped in a different interface. Very few people paid attention. Why did ChatGPT explode in popularity? Because of its obvious chat interface, which everyone intuitively already knew how to use it.
Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
The inconvenient facts are that SMRs has so far disappointed, and look like being as slow to get through the permitting process as GW-scale reactors, and even more expensive.
CCS can never be competitive in the sense of working economically in the absence of a policy framework to price in the cost of carbon, unlike clean electricity.
Whatever the solution to climate change is going to be, it is certainly not going to involve anything that costs $1,000 per tonne of carbon removed, or even the $400 to $600 that they promise by 2030.
So no, UX doesn’t die; it metamorphoses. We’ll still craft humane experiences, but increasingly through policies, protocols, and orchestrations rather than panels and palettes.
The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.
In other words, the singularity ends up in their future and they can no more avoid the singularity than they can avoid time coming their way. There’s no shenanigans you can do once you’re inside the black hole to try to skirt it.
But then I think that there’s a confusion that dead stars, these very, very massive stars that die, are synonymous with the phenomenon of black hole. And it’s really not the case. Black holes are more general and more fundamental than just the death state of a star.
The black hole is not the mass crushed to a point. The black hole is the event horizon. And the event horizon is really just a point in spacetime or a region at spacetime.
Nobody wants to follow a joyless leader. If your presence signals, "Everything is fine. I've got this all figured out. Please don't show me anything messy," your team will take the hint.
We'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
But most of the time the company that's succeeding and winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.
I think the big thing to realize for indie developers right now is there's massive, massive competition in every major genre, and it's very unlikely that unless you just happen to be the world's best at a particular thing that you're going to release a game in an existing highly competitive genre and win.
There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof? But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.
I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.
Everyone’s software is good enough these days. The barriers to entry are low. To stand out, you need to make your product feel great. One way of doing that is through animations.
Easing is the most important part of any animation. It can make a bad animation feel great and a great animation feel bad. That’s why you have to know which easing to choose in a specific situation.
a passing test can still execute buggy code if the bug is data-dependent, or if the test is not sensitive to the specific mistake in the code. But a lot of the time, buggy code only triggers failures.
Unfortunately, making those simple changes is infuriatingly difficult. Global meat consumption keeps rising every year. The world still wastes at least one fourth of its food.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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