foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay
But if you return fire with fire, the only thing that'll burn is our reputation. The troll who triggered you into flashing your teeth won't face any consequences, but every spectator who saw it will judge you.
Even if it turned out that they were drug smugglers, as claimed, and even if it turned out that they were bringing drugs to the United States, a dubious proposition, the penalty for smuggling drugs is not summary execution.
Linux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.
it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
it's it's literally we're looking at neurons in the model's brain that light up when prompt injection happens. So the model won't even tell you but we can actually see those neurons and we can figure out and diagnose that it's happening. And then you combine that with the auto mode classifier and with these three layers we just cannot demonstrate prompt injection anymore.
They just published a secondary analysis of the active trial that showed that um those who did processing speed training with uh booster sessions at one and three years had a significantly decreased risk of dementia 20 years later.
Because if you're those three things, if you got fire in your belly, you learn quickly, and you're self-aware, you can kind of get good at anything eventually.
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
The ideal of this period's justice which is much more shaped by Christianity is the purpose of the trial is the spiritual interior correction of the soul of the sinner.
And then you look at the actual trial records, and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books.
there's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's it's a prayer, but it's but it's it's not it's not founded in anything that your your lived experience.
So, like with lawyers particularly, you need some entity to back up the product. You need kind of like an ownership of the product. You need somebody to be able to fire or or hire, like licensing issues. There's a lot of like sort of like regulatory layers that are like also going to be keeping even if there's no relational element human in the loop that have nothing to do with like the ability of the human to actually perform the service.
I think that you owe it to in that moral contract to your good employees to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.
Another thing that's really cool is you can contribute to the Linux kernel without contributing to the Linux kernel, right? because you might take a Rust language feature we need and implement it and now you've contributed to the Linux kernel indirectly
Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.
There were a handful of people probably managing a security review process or a launch process or a deployment process or, you know, sometimes reviews were a little slow and they got backed up. Well, now we just threw gas on the fire and so all of that is a problem.
There isn't this cumulative process which is, uh, sort of built up interactively. Um, it it it seems to be a lot more trial and error and just repetition, brute force, um, you know, which can see it scales and it can work amazingly well in in certain contexts, um, but yeah, this this idea this this sort of building up cumulatively from, um, from partial progress is kind of is what's still not quite there yet.
You know, obviously, we patch our games and that’s where we fix a lot of bugs, but if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime.
Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.
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.
I think the thing that feels the most compelling for me is just like the experience of the transplant patient. It's really I think constricting. It's like you're waiting for a life-changing surgery and you have no idea when it will even be scheduled
go fire up your browser. Do it in incognito. Go to your app and do everything with a fresh Gmail address. Try support. See how your support is. Try to contact sales.
And so that's going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted for having so many agents.
The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing's going to happen. Like whatever's on that page, that's what's going to happen.
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.
I think if you have especially a B2B feature where you may have some lock in reverse trials can be super powerful. You just want to get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in like building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually like feel, oh man, I probably should keep this and and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work. And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be be the norm.
If you go to look about how psychologists think about learning, there's nothing like uh imitation. Maybe there are some extreme cases where humans might do that or appear to do that, but there's no basic animal learning process called imitation.
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point, but I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.
I totally agree. Sometimes I take too long to come to that conclusion, but I will proudly say, as most theoretical physicists should, that I kill most of my ideas myself.
A unique lens on work in the late 90s that still resonated when I read it in 2018. It's a soulful exploration of how to maintain your humanity, creativity and inner fire in environments that often prioritize conformity and efficiency.
I stand in awe of what author Jackie Cummings Koski has done here. This is a comprehensive overview of what FIRE is and how it is done, fashioned in the famous "for dummies" template. I wouldn't have known how to even begin to pull this together, let alone gotten it over the finish line in such fine form.
Over the last 50 years, treatment methods have proliferated despite a lack of evidence of differential effectiveness between approaches. And even when a randomized controlled trial indicates a particular approach works, none show practitioners become more effective when they are trained in that modality.
Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
Theft of Fire offers a plausible and realistic universe. The characters, Marcus Warnoc and Miranda Foxgrove, are not mere archetypes; they are complex, flawed, and deeply human. Their struggle to trust one another and overcome their own demons is a powerful allegory for the modern human condition.
Because patents have fixed term lengths, with small extensions to compensate for the year or so when the drug is under regulatory review, drug developers are incentivized to go after conditions where clinical trials can be completed quickly, all else being equal.
Large language models are more or less generalizations of stuff that we have. There’s still breakthroughs in AI waiting to happen, and maybe they are happening and maybe they’ll be good, maybe not, but that’s not quite the same.
“lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.
I’ve been a happy Superhuman subscriber since they were Silicon Valley’s hottest invite-only club, and I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for a while.
All radically new products, and air taxi eVTOLs certainly count as radically new, require the convergence of many different capabilities and technologies. Often one or more technology will be lagging and it may take decades for them all to come together in the right place at the right time.
in 1985, um my colleagues and I came up with a description of how people actually make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and certainty. And we called it the recognition prime decision model. And it's a blend of intuition plus analysis. And we found we studied firefighters. We found that most fire that accounted for almost 90% of the tough decisions firefighters made.
After years of people recommending him to me, I finally took the plunge into the literary world of Wendell Berry. Now I can't help but wonder what took me so long. This 2018 collection of Berry's best essays is a fantastic introduction into his genre-defining polemic style, which mixes razor-sharp commentary with a poetry grounded in lived experience, to argue on behalf of land, the environment, and a slower, richer approach to life.
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