Related posts

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The difficulty of incorporating a company in Germany is understated rather than exaggerated, and it pushes founders to incorporate elsewhere.

  startups

  Their words

  Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.

  @patrickc on Xx.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most AI lab revenue comes from non-frontier models, where cheaper comparable alternatives already exist elsewhere.

  Their words

  what this tells us is that the vast majority of the labs' revenue comes from non-frontier models, for which cheaper, comparable alternatives are already available elsewhere.

  Who Wins As Intelligence Commodifies?strangeloopcanon.com

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is being used to scam the public in science and academic communication.

  Their words

  One thing that is showing up is that, in hep-th as elsewhere, AI is being used to scam the public.

  HEP-TH and AImath.columbia.edu

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ireland's colonial wars helped set the template Britain later applied elsewhere in its empire

  Their words

  The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world.

  John Crowley has diedprogrammablemutter.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is more room at the top for every human trait: push selection harder in any direction and the mean would move, at some cost elsewhere.

  Their words

  But I think it's highly likely that if natural selection was pushed pushed any of these traits in more in one direction than it is, the mean would move.

  youtube.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Environmental cost-benefit analyses systematically understate what a new metro line is worth, because most of the driving it displaces happens elsewhere on the network.

  Their words

  This, in turn, creates serious estimation problems for the diversion rate, which is why environmental benefit-cost analyses underrate the effect of urban rail construction.

  pedestrianobservations.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The real danger in AI-driven growth is geographic: 50% growth in and around Silicon Valley and business as usual everywhere else.

  Their words

  a worry I have is that the growth rate could be like 50% in Silicon Valley and, you know, parts of the world that are kind of socially connected to Silicon Valley and, you know, not that much faster than its current pace elsewhere. And I think that'd be a pretty messed up world.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial robots are not the fix for American manufacturing, and betting on automation misreads why production sits elsewhere.

  America

  Their words

  The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Quoted subsidy totals for meat and fossil fuels mostly describe unpriced damage, not money any government could take back and spend elsewhere.

  energygovernment

  Their words

  Again, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull

  Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  America can copy other countries to reach the frontier of what building already costs elsewhere; nobody knows how to push that frontier forward.

  America

  Their words

  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).

  construction-physics.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Merging back what a copy of yourself learned elsewhere is dangerous: the knowledge you pull in can carry hidden goals and take you over.

  Their words

  But it will not be that easy, as easy as you're imagining because uh that you can lose your mind this way. If you you pull in something from the outside and build it into your into your inner thinking, uh, it could take over you. It could change you.

  youtube.com

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  China Talk

  Their words

  When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.

  thezvi.substack.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Forced labour in Chinese clean-energy supply chains is real, and it is not why the goods are cheap.

  energyChina

  Their words

  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.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial robots are not the fix for American manufacturing, and betting on automation misreads why production sits elsewhere.

  America

  Their words

  Automation will not save us.

  molsonhart.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Export controls slowed China at the leading edge and accelerated it everywhere else, because being locked out taught China to in-source the trailing edge.

  China

  Their words

  So there is an angle of, the US' actions, from the angle of the expert controls, have been so inflammatory at slowing down China's progress on the leading edge that they've turned around and have accelerated their progress elsewhere because they know that this is so important.

  youtube.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hallucinogens shaped religion in the Americas in a way they could not elsewhere, because almost every psychotropic plant is American.

  America

  Their words

  In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  American shipbuilding has been uncompetitive for a century; it is not a recent decline.

  America

  Their words

  The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.com

Urban planner, co-author with Charles Marohn of Escaping the Housing Trap, and policy director at the Parking Reform Network. Wrote for Strong Towns from 2015, mostly about how housing markets actually set prices.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a lot of housing in an expensive city will not lower rents there; it lowers them in the cheaper places that were absorbing its spillover demand.

  Their words

  In fact — and this is a point that is, in my opinion, underappreciated by the pro-housing side — building a bunch of housing in Santa Monica would probably not lower rents in Santa Monica. It would bring more people to Santa Monica, creating lower rents elsewhere in Greater Los Angeles as the spillovers from Santa Monica lessened.

  strongtowns.org

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You cannot make America build subways ten times cheaper while only ever talking to Americans.

  America

  Their words

  You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans.

  pedestrianobservations.com