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Their words
rice, grains, seeds and potatoes all used to be peasant foods And the kings actually just ate a lot of fresh meat like beef, venison, wild boar, swan, and peacock, and imported fruits and spices like saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper A king's diet was high in protein A peasant's diet was low in protein
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Elliot Hershberg Newsletter
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14 September
13 September
12 September
8 September
4 September
From one piece Why Fei-Fei Li Is Betting on Spatial Intelligence 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
One thing that's under appreciated on the website of the demos is the Stanford demo where Ben showed uh anywhere between 3 to 25 images you can reconstruct that entire Stanford quad. But the thing is we had to show it from aerial view. But every single input image is been standing on the ground taking a picture from the ground. So, everything you see are generated but according to the laws of reconstruction.
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Their words
So in the on the path to spatial intelligence, generating pixels is definitely a a early step, which we have seen with what you call it gazillions of models. But generating pixels that are truly spatially contextualized and grounded is absolutely another major step. And that is the very hard step that Atlas has taken.
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Their words
So okay, so to take a evolutionary view, right? That new viewpoint prediction is exactly evolution had to solve by making animals move. You you nature give animals eyes. But nature didn't give trees eye. Eyes. Why? Because when you move, you see a new viewpoint.
1 September
31 August
30 August
28 August
19 August
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Their words
And it's effectively the next step of, you know, every phase of of software evolution is just like a rising tide of abstractions. This is the next abstraction.
15 August
12 August
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Their words
Uh and just like how we see in language models how now a lot of time is spent actually generating data, generating synthetic data by actually running the model and having it think through things. I think a lot of the data in the future in robotics is going to be the robot attempting to do lots of tasks in lots of real world circumstances.
10 August
From one piece Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But the first photoreceptive cells created a evolutionary force that propelled animals to evolve because sensing the external world changes your self-perception changes the way your relationship with the external world.
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Their words
The next frontier of AI as I have been saying is beyond language because again humans develop first preverbally. evolution took, you know, 500 million years without verbal communication
8 August
2 August
30 July
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Their words
I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.
29 July
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Their words
And often I found with my clients I have to tell them like it's doing a good job at generating the actual design, but in actually expressing what the design is supposed to do, it cannot do that yet. You have to do that part yourself.
28 July
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Their words
This is a supersonic engine adapted for ground power generation that can ship without the rest of the airplane, thereby generating the test data, the learnings, the reliability, and also the capital that we need to go big.
27 July
21 July
30 June
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Their words
I think the way that you'd measure conjecture generating ability is going to be more subjective on like that tone shift where um it'll be mathematicians saying they're not just using it to like solve their problems, but as they step back and decide what their research field should even be that a conversation with such and such model like was genuinely helpful for that.
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Their words
To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy
5 June
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Their words
I think the value of static content will go down, and the value of live interaction will go up.
4 June
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Their words
rather than thinking about individual forecasts like what me and Phil are going to do, rather looking at kind of like basically generating prediction markets, where you get aggregate forecasts, where you get like kind of wisdom of the crowd effects. And kind of the reason that I think this is because we have been famously terrible at forecasting.
3 June
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Their words
So if you find yourself generating the same blocks of code over and over, even though it feels fast or convenient, it is still insane.
7 April
From one piece Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.
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Their words
if you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years, uh evolution just starts to look like a nonstarter.
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korrents.com
AI tools are now highly effective at generating UI code from a rough natural-language descriptionTheir words
This is just one of many situations I've used AI the past month for UI development, and it's been shockingly effective.
20 March
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Their words
So, I think AI has basically driven the cost of idea generation down to almost zero in a very similar way to how the internet drove the cost of communication down to almost zero, which is an amazing thing, but it you know, it it it doesn't make it doesn't create abundance by itself.
13 March
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Their words
well the model the compute efficiency gains you get from research are so large you actually want most of your compute to go to research not to development because you know all these researchers are generating new ideas trying them out testing them and continuing to march along this and push the prao optimal curve of scaling laws further and further and further
28 February
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Their words
Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.
13 February
From one piece Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Pre-training is not the process by which humans learn; it sits somewhere between human learning and human evolution.Their words
I think there's something going on that pre-training it's it's not like the process of humans learning. It's somewhere between the process of humans learning and the process of human evolution.
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Their words
does that mean the robotics industry will also be generating trillions of dollars of revenue? My answer there is yes, but there will be the same extremely fast but not infinitely fast diffusion. So, will robotics be be revolutionized? Yeah, maybe tack on another year or two.
9 February
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korrents.com
People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.Their words
Across much of the world, the opposite is happening: people are switching from these plant-based staples to meat and dairy as their incomes rise.
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
2 February
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Their words
I think most people do. I think it may well be hardwired into us through evolution.
15 January
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korrents.com
Local-first software will not become the dominant architecture, and that is an acceptable outcome.Their words
Local-first is not going to win, but that's okay We'll explore the complexities of traditional stack (db-server-frontend), develop a theory of software evolution: which systems succeed and why.
1 January
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us SmarterTheir words
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).
26 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The NotebookTheir words
Another favorite of 2025. The author traces the evolution of notebooks, from wax tablets and parchment to paper, and examines how figures like Leonardo, Darwin, and Newton used them to develop ideas.
12 December 2025
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korrents.com
Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and people who talk about progress have no idea of it.Their words
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.
9 December 2025
From one piece Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.
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Their words
We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.
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Their words
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.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Capital Evolution: The New American EconomyTheir words
Seth and his co-author, Elizabeth MacBride, do an outstanding job of defining capitalism clearly and explaining how it evolved into today’s approach.
1 December 2025
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korrents.com
Spirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.Their words
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.
25 November 2025
From one piece Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
What I meant to say is that language math and coding and especially math and coding suggests that whatever it is that makes people good at learning is probably not so much a complicated prior but something more some fundamental thing.
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korrents.com
There is no human analogue to pre-training — neither childhood nor evolution is the same thing as it.Their words
I don't think there is a human analog to pre-training.
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Their words
I think what's going to happen is that the way competition like competition loves specialization and you see it in the market, you see it in evolution as well. So you're going to have lots of different niches and you're going to have lots of different companies who are occupying different niches
17 October 2025
From one piece Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
We are not building animals, we are summoning ghosts: entities made by imitating human text rather than by evolution.Their words
we're not doing training by evolution. Uh we're doing training by basically imitation of humans and the data that they've put on the internet. And so you end up with these like sort of ethereal spirit entities because they're fully digital and they're kind of like mimicking humans.
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Their words
So that's why I kind of call pre-training this kind of like crappy evolution. It's like the practically possible version with our technology and what we have available to us to get to a starting point where we can actually do things like reinforcement learning and so on.
4 September 2025
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Their words
I think people think evolution is, like, perfecting things in some way. And they're not. They're bodge jobs, you know? That's why we have a blind spot in our eye, but things like squid don't.
22 August 2025
15 August 2025
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Their words
well their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.
3 August 2025
23 July 2025
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Their words
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.
15 July 2025
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Their words
As a result, natural selection is very unlikely to have produced in humans any predisposition or preference for a certain number of births.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com
1 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Selfish GeneTheir words
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.
3 February 2025
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Their words
Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power's really hard.
19 January 2025
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korrents.com
A growth model that works today still has to be evolved by overlaying other growth models on top of it.Their words
If you have a growth model that works for you, that's wonderful. Good for you. Optimize it, grow it, scale it, create a team that will be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it. But you're going to need to evolve it. And that evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it.
22 December 2024
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Their words
Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
6 November 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Design and Evolution of C++Their words
Biography of a language.
16 October 2024
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Their words
The general view of science, I think, is that we’re accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There’s no more of us. There’s no such thing as the soul. But that’s not a proven point. There’s no experiment that proves that’s the case.
19 September 2024
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Their words
So for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.
7 July 2024
13 June 2024
From one piece Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #433 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.
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Their words
That’s one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people in my field like to use in astrobiology is life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with, and I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it’s terrible, and I think it’s terrible that people use it. I think every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.
20 March 2024
18 March 2024
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Their words
I think the question behind that question is, do people who create valuable data deserve to have some way that they get compensated for use of it, and that I think the answer is yes. I don’t know yet what the answer is. People have proposed a lot of different things. We’ve tried some different models. But if I’m like an artist for example, A, I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style. And B, if they do generate art in my style, I’d like to have some economic model associated with that.
29 November 2023
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korrents.com
Anti-immigration parties gain ground by generating fear, not by winning the argument about what immigration does.Their words
The thing about the far-right parties is that they are trying to get people to equate all foreigners in a country with a threat to our future, but they are only gaining ground because of their ability to generate fear.
20 July 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
How Religion EvolvedTheir words
Great anthropology! So many insights into religions, tribes, friendships, organizations, the evolution of minds, superstition, and more. Got me thinking most about friendships.
6 June 2023
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Their words
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
23 May 2023
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Their words
The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.
1 May 2023
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Their words
I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate. I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation.
4 January 2023
6 December 2022
23 November 2022
7 September 2022
From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In some ways, maybe it does do good. I don’t want to make an argument for nuclear arms, but predation as a mechanism forces organisms to adapt, to change, to be better, to escape, or to kill. If you need to eat, then you’ve got to eat. A cheetah is not going to run at that speed unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to much greater feats of evolution would ever have been possible without it, and in the end, to a much more beautiful world.
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korrents.com
A society cannot morally be based on the way evolution works, even though competition is what drives innovation.Their words
Morally, we cannot base society on the way that evolution works.
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korrents.com
Evolution only happens because of death.Their words
Survival of the fittest, if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Now, what’s fit? What’s weak? These are terms that don’t have much intrinsic meaning, but the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.
15 April 2022
15 July 2021
From one piece Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (with 33 co-authors) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known.
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Their words
Despite recent progress10-14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available.
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Their words
Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics.
5 June 2018
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korrents.com
Substack's platform design emphasizes paid subscriptions so strongly that it obscures the option to sign up for free.Their words
Substack is focused mainly on generating paying subscribers, rather than just subscribers, and so it can be hard for people to realize that it's entirely possible (and welcome!) to sign up for free.
13 May 2018
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