Osama bin Laden's one concrete strategic goal was to end the American military presence in the Gulf and on the Arabian Peninsula. A generation later, Donald Trump's war on Iran has apparently delivered it for him
The value of a degree is in question, as tuition costs have increased in the last few decades while the college premium-the expected benefit from getting a diploma-has flatlined and possibly even declined in the last few years.
Been using Astra for the last few weeks and it’s so good and proactive. There’s a bunch of PRs on vitest, tsx or SwiftPM where Astra debugged OC and ended up finding and patching issues in upstream dependencies.
the Trump administration's deferential posture towards Russia and China has alienated allies. But on the other hand, it has gained the United States nothing in the way of strategic stability.
And we ended up with a lot of PRs that individually perhaps could have been justified for a hot moment, taken all together, destroyed the architecture of the system. And we actually had to clean up manually, mop it up by hand, by human hand, to get back to an architecture that felt cohesive and coherent.
But, so far, mixing has not proved to be good enough. There ended up being too many correlations between values in \(C\) and values in the obfuscation that remained.
if you are using these systems right you can just grow more quickly you can build more things you can take on more stuff so you know I would be surprised actually if we ended up with like net fewer
And now I actually think with the power of agents um and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like I think but maybe the startup is like a Mecca Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI and you know, the the large companies are the sort of like more traditional Goliath, so to speak. But I think that startups now like if you properly embrace AI agents and um figure out the way to leverage their strengths in the most like ambitious ways, you can easily outcompete incumbents.
I did try Dell's laptops a few years back, didn't like what I saw, and ended up spending a few years using Framework computers instead (they're still great too).
I believe that if you are too prescriptive as a leader with a team you end up stifling good ideas but if you're too open-ended sometimes teams just waste time um going in the wrong direction.
However, these LLM reasoners that generate informal reasoning in natural language are fundamentally limited by the lack of precise, machine-checkable semantics, making their outputs prone to hallucinations [Huang et al., 2025b] and precluding autonomous verification, a prerequisite for tackling open-ended mathematical research.
part of the goal of programs is to communicate intent to other human beings and now to models as well which which is a much more open-ended problem. We understand a lot more about how to communicate to other human beings whether we apply that understanding or not. We don't understand at all how to communicate effectively to models
we are trying to encourage people to not spend all their time just like going through all the mathematical open problems physics problems and um just seeing pushing the models to their limits to see what they can prove or disprove.
I ended up making this site with Tailwind CSS, and it helped me make a site I felt pretty happy with my minimal CSS skills and just 2 evenings of work!
Their words now
I’m a lot better at CSS than I was when I started using Tailwind
Ultimately Tailwind is limiting: if you want to do Weird Stuff in your CSS, it’s not always possible with Tailwind. Those limits can be extremely useful (a lot of this post is about me reimplementing some of Tailwind’s limits!) but at this point I’d like to be able to pick and choose.
So, uh I'm interested in the possibility that actually the right way to think about Neanderthals is actually as somehow culturally modern humans. Uh and uh even though that genetically they're mostly Denisovans.
Um we are seeing a lot fewer sort of pure AI solutions now where um they are just one shots the problem. Um so so there was there was a month where that happened and and that has stopped.
you don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs. You find entrepreneurs in casinos. They're playing poker. They're playing bat gam. You know, they're playing games of chance with an occasional very high payoff. And a lot of life is exactly like that, but you don't know where the huge payoff's going to come in advance.
But in fact and in practice it has always turned out to be bad because people get locked into the human knowledge approach and they psychologically or you know now I'm now I'm speculating why it is but this is what has always happened.
I I I just feel at the end of life you meet the people the person you could have become. Um, and uh I So so you I think the work in life is try to minimize the difference between um that person and and who you actually ended up being.
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.
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