And more than half the rise in the top 1% share since 1985 flowed through the pass-through businesses that was a "tax efficiency innovation" feature of the Reagan Revolution.
the best way to think about AI is as another social, political, cultural and economic shock in the series of shocks that have been underway over the long industrial revolution.
Countries and peoples have a right to set an immigration policy, and this notion that we shouldn't have any borders or, or even worse than that, it's all just a blank slate, that all peoples are just the same, and we can take people from one place of the earth and we can place them in another place on the earth and everything's just gonna work out hunky-dory. Empirically not true.
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
An old (1962) but still interesting history of the earlier part of the scientific revolution. In every field, Boas traces a basically-humanist impulse to discard medieval ideas and accomplishments, in favor of reviving antiquity, the more antique the better, which only gradually turned towards striving to go beyond Greco-Roman science to something actually new and unprecedented.
This is like a crazy result because uh it looks like there's no key selective sweeps that have occurred in this period that is ancestral to everyone living today.
And if everything is proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around, with. And so… Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution.
you know, right now we're going through uh an in um an cognitive version of the Copernican revolution where we used to think that human intelligence is the center of the universe. And now we're actually seeing that there's there's very different types of intelligence um that that that are out there uh with very different strengths and weaknesses.
If you’re interested in the environmental impacts of our current food system and want to dig into the opportunities for meat-like products without the animals (and their impacts), I really recommend it.
Two other formally odd books I love: Alejandro Zambra's Multiple Choice (trans. by Megan McDowell), structured as a standardized test with e.g. chapters of fill-in-the-blank questions
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.
And so it's not really about the environment or the wall. It's really about how we see it and whether we can find the thing that is deep and rich and infinite in that direction.
And the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was uh metabolism, right? It's just like how much like oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for you know their their um their peasant overlord or whatever.
And the thing that's going to be harder to deal with this time around is that I think what we're going to see is something like probably 10 times the impact the Industrial Revolution had, but 10 times faster as well. So instead of a 100 years, it takes 10 years and so that's going to make, it's like a 100X, the impact and the speed combined.
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.
This shared past between Persians and Jews is etched into my consciousness and that of many Israelis and Iranians. It will outlast the predations of the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolution of 1979.
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.
They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever.
A friend of mine sent me Christopher Rufo's book, America's Cultural Revolution, which is sort of a sociological study of the origins of the DEI movement and critical race theory. I found it actually one of the more important books I've read and also I found it quite concerning. Ultimately, DEI comes out of a kind of Marxist socialist way to look at the world.
So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word "about," that I've ever encountered.
This is incredibly interesting because from our perspective, we have forgotten (if we ever knew) what went into the process of taking the thousands of villages and regions differing in all sorts of ways
In my view the key takeaway here is just how contingent the industrial revolution was: the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period.
The thing is, being a particularly complex or efficient agrarian economy doesn’t seem to have been the most important thing for producing the industrial revolution or it almost certainly would have happened earlier and probably not in Europe.
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