Is $5M in Treasury Bills enough to be set for life? Kevin O'Leary (Mr. Wonderful) says yes. History says no. O'Leary is right...but not for the reason he thinks. My latest:
In QE, the Treasury issued long-term bonds. The Fed bought up the long bonds, issued overnight debt, and passed the interest difference back to the Treasury. In the end, it is just as if the Treasury issued overnight debt in the first place.
Simplifying a bit, the Treasury should introduce a fixed-coupon perpetuity and a fixed-value floating-rate perpetuity. These should gradually make up the bulk of government debt.
The tradeoff between cost of borrowing and how much interest rate risk taxpayers shoulder should be squarely on the shoulders of the politically-accountable Treasury not the independent Fed.
A few AI researchers pull up the average by being very certain that AI will kill everyone. But the typical AI researcher still thinks there's a ~10% chance that AI will kill everyone.
Right now OpenAI is extremely dependent on CoT monitoring, everyone else depends on it quite a lot as well, and it looks like it may not last much longer, and that Astra already is on the edge of steganographic capabilities and can do substantial obfuscation if and only if it thinks you would think it is up to no good.
Everyone always asks me like with all this AI is anything still the same? And the answer is so far almost everything is exactly the same. The only weird The only weird new thing is that companies have these giant AI bills.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
I think this constitution is in some sense very compatible with Claude doing huge amounts of power seeking because it thinks that will result in better outcomes.
you do need to think about how do you get to revenue so that not just you can do it forever, but then you'll be valued on your long-term road map, not not valued on your probability of dying.
But it's also your instruction budget is like if you give the model too many instructions and especially too many conflicting instructions and that's in your initial prompt and also like if you have a conversation you start going down a path and then you change your mind and you start going down a different you actually I don't want to do any of that I want to do this. It's like a it's a lot of computation the model has to do to notice that it has to ignore that whole thing.
Um so if you say okay well we're going to instead of just running this model once we're going to run it five times and take the best of the five responses or like ask a judge which one it thinks is best then you can get much higher scores than that model. And so it's really easy to make something that looks a lot better on paper but is actually not better once you control for the amount of test time compute.
this is a period in which backwards is forwards, which is to say this is not a period that like us thinks of the future as where potential is and humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome.
And their idea is we must hash out our different differences with diplomats and lawyers cuz when you send the soldiers in, it is uh whatever gains you think you're going going to get are going to be inferior to what you would have done with the diplomats.
Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.
But I'm serious, if you're working at a company that uses that gave you Copilot, they think that they're starting to move faster and there's a barbarian horde of people using Opus 4.5 that are going to destroy your company sooner or later.
Levy was given unprecedented access to Google, and the result is what I consider to be an accurate depiction of how the company operates. A good overview of how Google product managers work.
reinforcement learning is a lot worse than I think the average person thinks reinforcement learning is terrible. It just so happens that uh everything that we had before is much worse
These models don't really have this distillation phase um of taking what happened, analyzing it, obsessively thinking through it, um basically doing some kind of a synthetic data generation process and distilling it back back into the weights
I can tell you right now, every single manager I've ever managed where they're like, I don't really think this is a good idea. The there's no case where I can think of where the project somehow turned out to be like wildly successful.
And then I found a smoking gun: October 1943. Kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergotamine, which is the precursor drug to LSD. And so it's highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau.
1929, and man, history does rhyme. Too much leverage, too much risk. Everyone thinks it's going to be great. No one thinks it's going to go down a lot.
And so when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they're the smart people and they design for the dummies.
I forget (again!) how I chanced across it, but it fills a very real need for a lot of the students in my inequality class, and I intend to make it recommended/optional reading in the future. (I'll have to see if the library can buy a digital copy.)
That's an inventor's greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.
I would recommend that anyone who thinks they're suffering from trauma (eg PTSD) try a trauma-focused therapy like EMDR before trying to address nightmares directly, unless the nightmares are overwhelmingly worse than all their other trauma symptoms.
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