What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
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Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
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Even more recently, we’ve begun to use mechanistic interpretability techniques to improve our safeguards and to conduct “audits” of new models before we release them, looking for evidence of deception, scheming, power-seeking, or a propensity to behave differently when being evaluated.
To be clear, speed in itself does not mean labor markets and employment won’t eventually recover, it just implies the short-term transition will be unusually painful compared to past technologies, since humans and labor markets are slow to react and to equilibrate.
By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated.
This is a topic that I warned about very publicly in 2025 , where I predicted that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next 1–5 years, even as it accelerates economic growth and scientific progress.
John Boyer’s Austria 1867-1955 offers parts of the answer, though not in a conceptually organized way. It’s a work of history written for specialists, which means that the narrative serves the footnotes rather than the other way around.
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.
There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.
a lot of old school GTM leaders are like, you know, AI isn't going to hurt sales reps. It's just going to make them give them superpowers. The best ones, yes, the mediocre are just going to be like more mediocre, right?
So, so many of these GTM books are playbooks, especially folks selling courses and stuff, but they're playbooks. Run from the playbooks. Embrace the plays.
And so many behaviors are like that. It's like, well, did you want it or not? You know, like in the one sense, you wanted it so bad that you would check it every 3 minutes when it was next to you, but in another sense, you never wanted it bad enough that you would work for 30 seconds and walk down the hall to get it. And so, a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior.
You want to you want to be able to walk into the rooms that you're in each day, and the good habit is the path of least resistance. It's the easiest thing to do. And a lot of the time you walk into rooms and it's the distractions that are easier to do and you feel like you're swimming upstream and trying to fight your environment to make a change happen.
there's also a flip side to this or a dark side, a shadow side to identity, which is the tighter you cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. And so once you have started to identify as a certain type of person, once you adopt that label, oh, I am a member of this group or I am the type of person who believes this thing, it becomes hard to stretch and grow outside of that.
behavior and belief is like two-way street. You know, what you believe will influence the actions that you take, but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. And you know, every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. And so, my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way.
So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So, when you show up at the gym today, you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. When you sit down and make one sales call, you are casting a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you are casting a vote for being a writer. And no, doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for that identity.
As with self driving cars, most of the early players in humanoid robots, will quietly shut up shop and disappear. Those that remain will pivot and redefine what they are doing, without renaming it, to something more achievable and with, finally, plausible business cases.
Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd).
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
I didn't read much non-fiction this year, but the best of what I did read was Zeke Faux's Number Go Up about the cryptocurrency bubble. This book will not change anyone's mind, but it's a readable and entertaining summary of some of the more obvious cryptocurrency scams. I also had enough quibbles with it to write an extended review, which is a compliment of sorts.
The best book I read this year was also the last book I reviewed (and yes, I snuck the review under the wire for that reason): Bethany Jacobs's This Brutal Moon, the conclusion of the Kindom Trilogy that started with These Burning Stars. I thought the first two books of the series were interesting but flawed, but the conclusion blew me away and improved the entire trilogy in retrospect. Like all books I rate 10 out of 10, I'm sure a large part of my reaction is idiosyncratic, but two friends of mine also loved the conclusion so it's not just me.
The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart's political positions (the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing politics. It's hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and the current structures of governments, but it's bracing to know that even some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.
I also finished Suzanne Palmer's excellent Finder Chronicles series, reading The Scavenger Door and Ghostdrift. This series is some of the best science fiction I've read in a long time and I'm sad it is over (at least for now).
I also finished Suzanne Palmer's excellent Finder Chronicles series, reading The Scavenger Door and Ghostdrift. This series is some of the best science fiction I've read in a long time and I'm sad it is over (at least for now).
The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents. It appears that the best possible tool for any situation is Bash—if your agent can run arbitrary shell commands, it can do anything that can be done by typing commands into a terminal.
I use a FlexiSpot adjustable / motorized standing desk standing desk and stand about 90% of the time. Been doing this for about a decade. I liked it so much that I have 2 of them
My go-to languages are TypeScript for web stuff, Go for CLIs and Swift if it needs to use macOS stuff or has UI. Go wasn’t something I gave even the slightest thought even a few months ago, but eventually I played around and found that agents are really great at writing it, and its simple type system makes linting fast.
Swift’s build infra is good enough for most things these days. codex knows how to run iOS apps and how to deal with the Simulator. No special stuff or MCPs needed.
This amazing book traces the development of genetic engineering, and how Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson turned the science into a commercial product by developing recombinant insulin.
I mistakenly expected this to be a somewhat shallow, generic popular science book, but it was a very thorough account of how CRISPR gene editing emerged from decades of obscure basic research into bacterial immune systems.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach is a beautiful fable about a seagull who wants to fly for the pure joy of flight, rather than simply to find food, as most gulls do. Ostracized from his flock for his eccentric behavior, Jonathan embarks on a quest for aerodynamic perfection that doubles as a moving spiritual allegory. You've never read a book quite like this one before, and it'll stick with you long after you reach the end.
Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China's engineering state, juxtaposing it against America's lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I've been a keen reader of Dan's personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is a mind-bending psychological thriller about a secret agency tasked with fighting dangerous "antimemes"—ideas that refuse to be remembered. Plenty of stories start with a clever high-concept premise and just let it play out. This one pushes its premise to extremes I never imagined possible, ratcheting up an astonishing amount of tension along the way.
And just like with social media, we're very easily affected by the bombardment of small pieces every single day, without realizing how bad it is for us.
It wasn't my favorite, but it was very different. Like eating food that tastes nothing like what you're used to. For that reason alone, I'd recommend it.
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.
Notting Hill, in addition to being just a lovely little romantic comedy about two people from entirely mismatched stations in life, trying to negotiate a space in the world they might get to call their own, is one of the best films out there showing at least a little bit of what it’s like to be famous to everyone, everywhere, all the time, forever and ever, amen.
Someone recommended this book after my brother passed away. I didn’t want to read a bunch of books about grief, but this one struck a chord. I wish I had read it before he died.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton A simple story about a struggling stand-up comedian going through a difficult break-up. A funny, sweet book. I enjoyed it.
This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.
It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.
It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: "In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists." Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading.
I first read it in college and recently, as we approach this milestone, decided to re-read it and was amazed about how fresh and vivid it felt, as well as how nuanced and humane it is.
I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater.
Mac Mini M4 (16/256GB): I found it very value for money. It's also my first device from Apple and I'm very satisfied using it as a personal computer at home.
Macbook Air M4 (16/256GB): daily driver. Get things done. It's also my second device from Apple and I'm very satisfied using it as a mobility solution.
2025 is where I (and I think the rest of the industry also) first started to internalize the "shape" of LLM intelligence in a more intuitive sense. We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts".
Claude Code (CC) emerged as the first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like - something that in a loopy way strings together tool use and reasoning for extended problem solving.
Hey! There’s a novel called Starship Troopers! It’s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there’s a movie called Starship Troopers! It’s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good.
Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
The causes and meaning of those events have been debated ever since, and Sides delivers a careful, sympathetic and engaging account of the entirety of Cook's final expedition.
I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.
That's a really intelligent way place to land because what they will do is woo you with their enthusiasm and then take you down a rabbit hole where you will spend years of your life and have nothing to show.
They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested. That what in fact what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject.
you grab the listener like I try to grab a reader and get them to the state of mind where they'll let you take them anywhere uh and teach them about stuff that they don't even know they want to learn about.
See's Bridge Mix. My parents had this at their house when we visited in January and we've been buying them throughout the year whenever we come across a See's. The best box to have around the house.
Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.
Full disclosure, I got these for free, but have become unexpectedly obsessed. I wear them constantly and really like how they instantly change the mood of an outfit. Can't really say why they stand out since they're pretty basic but people ask me about them all the time.
It's a beautiful sweater and 100% wool. So far they're pilling a little (to be expected), so I'll definitely be checking in on this one next year. That price is hard to trust.
But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English
But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.
And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.
And my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this: that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact.
And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot.
Good Hang with Amy Poehler: I think this is a wildly popular one now for a reason, it's very fun and I just love how it's chill and mostly comedians hanging out.
Overcommitted: Put simply, thoughtful tech conversations from thoughtful tech people. I'm biased towards this one because it's run by some coworkers, but they are awesome coworkers and it's fun and interesting!
VeggieTales Podcast: Okay this is more for my children than me, but it's a good one for talking about how it's important to be "nice" and stuff (what a concept), and it's been great on roadtrips to visit family!
The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros).
Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.
The goal is not perfect enforcement. Some kids will still find workarounds. The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out.
With so many professional money managers afraid to act, with most of the public in the grip of fear and anger, you should put your cash and your courage to work.
I know that this is a contested idea, but my favorite books of the last five years have all been books of criticism, so...I mean, it's literature to me!
probably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.
But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
people don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.
Nippon Kodo Mori-no-KOH incense. I love this! Incredible bang for your buck, the little box feels so fancy, it smells insane. I'm burning it right now as I write.
COLOR WOW Raise the Root spray. I found out about this on TikTok. I spray when damp and it DOES give my flat Asian hair volume. I don't know how it works, but it does.
There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behavior prove to have been excessive.
There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence.
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
Because when you believe in something, when you become obsessed with something, you sacrifice yourself to it. And that sacrifice actually feels like pain and stress and doubt. Not fun.
ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me how great I was, reinforce any bad beliefs I might have had, and avoid saying anything uncomfortable.
investors at many tech companies, including most on the large cap list, have given up their corporate governance rights, often voluntarily (through the acceptance of shares with different voting rights), to founders and top management in these companies
I think that the pathway that you would need (in terms of revenue growth and profitability) to justify Nvidia's and OpenAI's current pricing is improbable, but that is just my view
the delusion comes from the reality that if you aggregated these breakeven revenues across companies, the market is not big enough to sustain all of them
While there is some utility value in DeFi, it basically lets users transform custodial risk into technical risk (e.g. bridge protocol hacks), which is not a free lunch.
I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework.
After many years, Sublime Text remains one of my favourite code editors. I still often use it to edit huge files or to make heavy edits through its powerful find and replace feature.
I switched to Firefox when Safari 15 was released. John Gruber summarized the issues I had with it perfectly. Since Apple reverted their design changes in recent releases, I'm back at using Safari as my primary
Lovevery Kits are just the ultimate. We have this play gym (as does everybody?!) which works with the Montessori toys they make. They have kits for different age groups from newborn through 51 months (I cannot even begin to calculate how old that is) and they have taught me so much about baby development!
Not a podcast, but Radiooooo is a world map where you can click on countries and pick a decade to listen to popular music from that place and time. What will they think of next!
the coffee bed would act on these molecules by filtering them out a bit like oxygen adsorbers keep oxygen in; it just provides a gigantic maze of free surface area for them to stick on, and hopefully the microscopic fluid velocity is gentle enough to not drag them along.
the depth of a coffee bed, contrary to the width of the coffee bed, is a variable that impacts the flavor of the coffee being brewed significantly, and in a way that you cannot easily compensate for by changing other brew variables.
changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario
In other words, I still use exactly the same recipe that I developed for the Pulsar when I brew with the mini, I just brew with a dose smaller by a factor 0.6 (e.g., 15 grams instead of 25).
Every episode he goes to a small town in England and he does a comedy set in a local venue about the history of the town. And so he does very deep research... I love that sort of like hyperlocal, like comedy, that sort of British culture thing.
I’ve got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.
I’ve got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.
Iyoshi Cola. Craft colas are often disappointing, but this one was absolutely delicious. Wish I could get it in the States for less than $14 a can. (A)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)
Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)
I want to like emphasize that I think the value function is something like it's going to make RL more efficient and I think that makes a difference but I think that anything you can do with a value function you can do without just more slowly.
The models are much more like the first student but even more because then we say okay so the model should be good at competitive programming so let's get every single competitive programming problem ever and then let's do some data augmentation so we have even more competitive programming problems
Further, the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘Dark Ages’ and that a term we used for source survival has escaped containment and been rendered meaningless by a bunch of poorly read self-congratulatory dolts is, in fact, what we call ‘settled academic fact’.
Because of how source survival works, or indeed, how architectural survival works, we are often encouraged to think of the past as a place populated entirely by the wealthy elite.
There is no such thing as revisionist history. Writing history is a constant process of re-evaluation of sources and attempts to control for the biases of the past as well as our own.
If you are interested in learning more about how humans communicate and work together, I highly recommend reading When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.
If you're stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, and you somehow haven't discovered the glory of Starlink, maybe just stick to your old full-disk backup ways.
There's even a case to be made that those policies actually depressed the manufacturing share of GDP: by boosting output and capacity above where they would have been otherwise, subsidies probably contributed to the sustained decline in prices for China's manufactured goods over the past few years, weighing on their share of nominal output.
Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.
It isn't easy dealing with peer pressure and a room of warm and friendly staff begging you say something, anything nice about their terrible product for fear of losing their jobs -- and realizing you must be brutal to their faces otherwise you're not helping the vendor or your own company.
If you are in regular meetings with a hardware vendor as a customer (or potential customer) you can accomplish a lot by providing firm and tough feedback, particularly with Intel today.
This is, bar none, the best sled I have ever used for pushing or pulling. It isn't cheap, but I use it infinitely more than the cheaper sleds I've bought in the past.
Similarly, AI translation will prevent you from learning to speak another language, AI summaries will block you from really understanding the arguments laid out in a book, and AI analyses of your personal problems will make it harder for you to think through solutions to your own problems.
Point of view is essential for effective twists. Contrast Frozen with Fight Club, where the narrator's unreliability works because the entire story flows through his perspective and he maintains a direct relationship with the audience through fourth-wall breaks.
Cormac McCarthy's Child of God is the perfect starter book to see if you enjoy McCarthy's maximalist prose and macabre images before tackling the longer Blood Meridian.
A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it "brilliant" (Esquire), "a total blast" (Chicago Tribune), "unrelentingly smart and inventive" (Locus), and "just plain wonderful" (Booklist). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life?
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole
society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you
are going to crash society.
Making licenses suddenly commercial for big entities? You are forcing people to
go back through the Procurement process. They will shift over time back
to a FOSS solution, even if it is less good.
FOSS solve that problem far more than it solves “we don’t want to pay”. Most
corporations would be surprised by how cheap it would cost them to pay
for the FOSS software they use.
But even more important than efficiency, designed experiments can inform about causality, which is very difficult to determine from collected observed data.
this fundamentally this category of coding and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest categories right it is a software factory category in fact it may be bigger than knowledge work
So this AI thing will be that right. So if you take coding um what we built with GitHub and VS code in over whatever decades uh suddenly the coding assistant is that big in one year and so that I think is what's going to happen as well which is the market expands massively.
even if the tech is diffusing fast uh this time around for true economic growth to appear it has to sort of diffuse to a point where the work the work artifact and the workflow has to change and so that's kind of one place where I think uh the change management required for a corporation to truly change I think is something we shouldn't discount
Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!
If a bed is too deep, one has to use a very coarse grind. The result in the cup may or may not be good enough, but the extraction level will be low, which is inefficient, in the sense of wasting coffee material.
That's great, but I don't think it can replace a human poking at virtual machines; my experience with EC2 is that images break in all sorts of wild ways, and nothing beats a human for saying "huh, I have no idea what's going on here but something seems weird".
In Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. It's astounding
I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”
And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.
Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.
You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.
I do not think this book could really be enjoyed without the previous book, but with it, it's lots of skillfully-written fun, and leaves me eager for more.
I think a great book could be written on all this. (Among other things, it should be catnip to anyone who wants to call themselves a historical materialist.) This book, however, is merely OK.
Raymond Biesinger's new book 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off is a masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
An idea I'm trying to hold tighter is that the only way to be useful here is to risk offending people. And perhaps if you're not taking any risk offending people then it's unlikely you're saying something useful.
I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.
Read this in the context of Christopher et al., and the reasonable conclusion is that many of the problems associated with homelessness are the result of unsheltered homelessness.
It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
My sense is that this hybrid is fairly common in practice; solvers aren't magical and if you can deduce additional structure using domain-specific analysis, it will often give the solver an important boost.
If human beings can dismiss academic arguments merely because they lead to politically unwelcome conclusions, what’s the point of having academic arguments about politically-charged subjects?
It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.
An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t. To make something alive with AI, we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing.
So while vibe coding may be useful for short-term work, it’s not a suitable approach for anything intended to last longer than a tub of yogurt. Time saved is not strength gained, so I went looking for other examples about how to work with the machine.
The fractures fell neatly along disciplines: engineers using AI to wish away designers, designers wishing away engineers, product managers wishing away both. In this climate, AI becomes frenemy identification technology, another way to avoid working together.
You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.
With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have the autonomy to choose what to work on, but there's the expectation of accountability and impact.
Being right is less than half the battle. You also have to convince others that you're right, and more importantly, convince them to care enough to act on it.
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
So like they don't have enough intelligence. They're not multimodal enough. They can't do computer use and all this kind of stuff. And they don't do a lot of things. You know, they don't have continual learning. You can't just tell them something and they'll remember it. And they're just cognitively lacking. And it's just not working. And I just think that it will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.
I think that for those who can create and then articulate a framework around what is taste for us that is really a important skill and uh then I think people can a lot of people can basically match a framework not many people can create the framework.
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.
I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future and I think that more designers need to speak step into that leadership role
if you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Like that's again how you win or lose. Craft matters. And so we're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. It's like good enough is not enough.
The empirical evidence strongly refutes the idea that rising opportunity costs of childbearing are driving low fertility. Declining marriage due to exogenous technology and economics shocks is tanking fertility irrespective of child direct or opportunity costs.
the shift from 50th to 99th percentile earnings has no negative effect on women’s fertility, and unearned income for women has a neutral-to-positive effect
Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.
I don’t see population collapse or lack of workers as the central policy problem: the central policy problem is human happiness, human flourishing, and the freedom to live life well.
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
This is the best screenshot utility for Macs. You’d think how much can there be in a screenshot utility, and CleanShot X will still color you surprised.
I approached Echoes of October with trepidation. A graphic novel about violence and grief isn’t easy terrain. But it succeeds in a haunting, urgent way.
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
So AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America’s freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers.
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
In some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something.
And I think what's also kind of interesting is that just human nature is that if you have a question that you feel like, you know, you might be a bit embarrassed to ask or you don't want to bother someone, you just don't ask the question, right? And so by the nature of having these tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked.
And if I'm starting to see like more and more experiments that are not statistically significant, that may be a signal to me to say, okay, we might have kind of tried to exploit a little bit too far. Like there might not be as much juice to squeeze.
I mean in my experience the typical win rate and I hate to use that term for experiments is is often something like 30 to 50%. Like usually you're not actually get like you're trying a bunch of things a lot of hypotheses turn out not to be true. you know, consumer products are very unpredictable like that.
When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your like horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head. And so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves. And we have coach say something encouraging. You know, losing just part of learning like keep it up, that type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%
If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MMO of growth teams, it can lead to this like saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing.
The overall workflow is intuitive, especially for those new to formal evaluation processes. The UI guides you through creating datasets, running experiments, and annotating results.
The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.
The panel had a generally positive view of Phoenix, with one panelist calling it one of his “favorite open source eval tools.” The tool is positioned as a developer-first, notebook-centric platform.
As for me personally, I tend to use these tools as a backend data store and use Jupyter notebooks as well as my own custom built annotation interfaces for most of my needs.
So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of.
it seems like struggle is a part of life, either you do it earlier or you do it later. And it’s true, that’s such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself.
If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
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