Essays

Social behavior curves, equilibria, and radicalism

I. Here are some hypotheticals to consider, with a common theme. Note that in each case I’m asking what you would do, rather than what you should do. In the fall, COVID cases drop to 10% of t…

ericneyman.wordpress.com

On Crimes and Punishments and Beccaria

“Make everyone read Beccaria!” is one of many sentiments I share with François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire.

www.exurbe.com

Power Lies Trembling

A three-book review on the game theory of political power

www.mindthefuture.info

Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

darioamodei.com

The Gentle Romance

What the journey from AI assistant to full-virtuality can teach us about the nature of love.

press.asimov.com

By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI — LessWrong

I've heard many people say something like "money won't matter post-AGI". This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect. …

www.lesswrong.com

Zero-Based Regulation

Government agencies have a natural tendency to accumulate regulations over time. To adapt a saying, regulations “rise like rockets but fall like feathers.”[1] States are estimated to directly regulate approximately 20% of the American economy.[2] These regulations can stifle innovation, reduce economic growth, and create a confusing patchwork of requirements that makes it difficult for […]

manhattan.institute

Accelerating to Where?

The anti-politics of the new jet pack lament

www.thenewatlantis.com

Getting AI datacentres in the UK

Why the UK needs to create Special Compute Zones; and how to do it.

inferencemagazine.substack.com

Welcome to My Time Machine

An Introduction to Applied History

open.substack.com

The Defense Reformation

Our nation is in an undeclared state of emergency, and must resurrect the American Industrial Base we depended on in the depths of the Cold War.

www.18theses.com

To build a meritocracy

About a year ago, we at Affirm decided to add an OKR to our annual planning titled “High-Performance Culture”, to help shore up the necessary means (for the necessary means) of improving our...

max.levch.in

From Caveman to Chinaman

How man went from bumbling around in savannahs to building the Great Wall, and why China fell behind Europe

www.cremieux.xyz

How to start an advance market commitment - Works in Progress

Advance market commitments allow us to buy products that don’t yet exist, giving innovators an incentive to invent and scale new products. This is a practical guide on how to start an AMC.

worksinprogress.co

Doom scrolling - Works in Progress

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

worksinprogress.co

The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite

I often draw a distinction between the political elites of Washington DC and the industrial elites of Silicon Valley with a joke: in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have rea…

scholars-stage.org

People, ideas, machines VI: the War Diaries of Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff

A largely unknown British hero, another case study in the unrecognised simplicities of high performance (and relevant to those thinking about nuclear war, AI-alignment etc)

dominiccummings.substack.com

Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan

A hub of Jewish life, Tablet features news, essays, podcasts, and opinion, covering arts, pop culture, technology, holidays, sports, and more.

www.tabletmag.com

Features - Ancient DNA Revolution - Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2024

How the rapidly evolving field of archaeogenetics is unlocking secrets of the past

archaeology.org

Sakana AI

The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

sakana.ai

Your flaws matter less than you think

Why flawlessness is a faulty metric for human perfection

builders.genagorlin.com

arxiv.org

The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust

Many Americans seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.

www.theatlantic.com

Can AI Solve Science?

Stephen Wolfram explores the potential--and limitations--of AI in science. See cases in which AI will be a useful tool, and in others a less ideal tool.

writings.stephenwolfram.com

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xlRDbMUDE41XPzwStAGyAVEP8qA9Tna7/view

A Framework: Turning Services into AI

10x'ing the Dealers of Information

arcxhived.substack.com

Emergent abilities and grokking: Fundamental, Mirage, or both?

One of the lessons we have seen in language modeling is the power of scale. The original GPT paper of Radford et al. noted that at some point during training, the model “acquired” the ability to do…

windowsontheory.org

Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

"Explore a single individual deeply enough and truths about all individuals emerge." - Robert Caro

www.dwarkeshpatel.com

Starter Guide to SF for Founders

A kickstarter resource for anyone new to or thinking of moving to San Francisco.

www.startertosf.guide

FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models

We introduce FunSearch, a method for searching for “functions” written in computer code, and find new solutions in mathematics and computer science. FunSearch works by pairing a pre-trained LLM, whose goal is to provide creative solutions in the form of computer code, with an automated “evaluator”, which guards against hallucinations and incorrect ideas.

deepmind.google

Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible — LessWrong

TL;DR version • In the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about the world. The…

www.lesswrong.com

Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit

The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition.

www.nytimes.com

The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI

The companies had honed a protocol for releasing artificial intelligence ambitiously but safely. Then OpenAI’s board exploded all their carefully laid plans.

www.newyorker.com

An Opinionated Guide to ML Research

I originally wrote this guide in back in December 2017 for the OpenAI Fellows program

On the ordering of miracles

AI is starting to arrive. Those close to the action have known this for a while, but almost everyone has been surprised by the precise order in which things occurred. We now have remarkably capable AI artists and AI writers. They arrived out of a blue sky, displaying a flexibility and finesse that was firmly in the realm of science fiction even five years ago. Other grand challenge problems like protein folding and Go also fell at a speed that took experts by surprise. Meanwhile, seemingly simpler mechanical tasks like driving a car remain out of reach of our best systems, despite 15+ years of focused, well-funded efforts by top quality teams.

Press Release: Public Opinion Poll No (90) | PCPSR

13 December 2023

pcpsr.org

On Respect: The Anna Karenina Principle of Founding Relationships

Work only with people you respect deeply.

stackfix.webflow.io

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/opinion/sam-altman-openai.html

Where are the opportunities for new startups in generative AI?

Sharing our mental model on gen AI in SaaS

medium.com

Dom and subs

Psychodrama city, don't need none today

bristoliver.substack.com

The Ideation Flywheel

A mental model for deciding which startup ideas to pursue, and how to pursue them.

www.stackfix.com

I read Andreessen’s ‘techno-optimist manifesto’ so you don’t have to

Unrestrained technological ‘accelerationism’ is a bad idea

www.ft.com

https://www.secondbest.ca/p/ai-and-leviathan-part-i

Generative AI exists because of the transformer

The technology has resulted in a host of cutting-edge AI applications — but its real power lies beyond text generation

ig.ft.com

Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence

Earlier this year I decided to take a few weeks to figure out what I think about the existential risk from Artificial Superintelligence (ASI xrisk). It turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. After several months of reading, thinking, and talking with people, what follows is a discussion of a few observations arising during this exploration, including: Three ASI xrisk persuasion paradoxes, which make it intrinsically difficult to present strong evidence either for or against ASI xrisk. The lack of such compelling evidence is part of the reason there is such strong disagreement about ASI xrisk, with people often (understandably) relying instead on prior beliefs, self-interest, and tribal reasoning to decide their opinions. The alignment dilemma: should someone concerned with xrisk contribute to concrete alignment work, since it's the only way we can hope to build safe systems; or should they refuse to do such work, as contributing to accelerating a bad outcome? Part of a broader discussion of the accelerationist character of much AI alignment work, so capabilities / alignment is a false dichotomy. The doomsday question: are there recipes for ruin -- simple, easily executed, immensely destructive recipes that could end humanity, or wreak catastrophic world-changing damage? What bottlenecks are there on ASI speeding up scientific discovery? And, in particular: is it possible for ASI to discover new levels of emergent phenomena, latent in existing theories?

Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age

He insists the artificial intelligence he is creating could destroy civilization even as he hastens its advancement. Do we know enough about him?

substack.com

stratechery.com

Building machine learning products: lessons from Papercup's product team - Papercup

How to utillize machine learning capabilities to develop valuable products with real-world use cases.

www.papercup.com

Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation

We must never doubt Elon Musk again

www.scientificamerican.com

Intercom on Product: Product strategy in the age of AI

Learn how AI is going to transform software, and how startups can identify the best AI opportunities to target vulnerable incumbents.

www.intercom.com

Omens of exceptional talent - Alexey Guzey

Gaiseric…was a man of moderate height and lame in consequence of a fall from his horse. He was a man of deep thought and few words I’m often asked about the signs of exceptional talent I’ve observed, probably because I spend too much running around talking to people & observing things, instead of doing anything useful. Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, and Tyler Cowen are the three names that come to mind when thinking about this question. Of my writing, Intelligence killed …

guzey.com

What will GPT-2030 look like?

GPT-4 surprised many people with its abilities at coding, creative brainstorming, letter-writing, and other skills. How can we be less surprised by developments in machine learning? In this post, I’ll forecast the properties of large pretrained ML systems in 2030.

bounded-regret.ghost.io

Why Nvidia’s AI Supremacy is Only Temporary

Nvidia is an amazing company that has executed a contrarian vision for decades, and has rightly become one of the most valuable corporations on the planet thanks to its central role in the AI revol…

petewarden.com

Modern Meditations: Claire Hughes Johnson

The Stripe executive on leadership, linguistics, and literature.

open.substack.com

https://autotranslucence.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/

(PDF) Discovering Insights Beyond the Known: A Dialogue Between GPT-4 Agents from Adam and Eve to the Nexus of Ecology, AI, and the Brain

PDF | Human knowledge, vast as it is, often falls short in grasping intricate interdisciplinary domains fully. In contrast, foundation models like... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

www.researchgate.net

The AI Power Paradox

Can States Learn to Govern Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late?

www.foreignaffairs.com

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born — LessWrong

In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders woul…

www.lesswrong.com

Think real hard

The Feynman Algorithm for problem solving: Write down the problem; Think real hard; Write down the solution.

www.benkuhn.net

UCL Talk - Government, science, and the need for creative destruction

ARIA, Lovelace, UK Tech position, Government reform - my talk at UCL and the Research on Research Institute

open.substack.com

Simulators — LessWrong

Thanks to Chris Scammell, Adam Shimi, Lee Sharkey, Evan Hubinger, Nicholas Dupuis, Leo Gao, Johannes Treutlein, and Jonathan Low for feedback on drafts. …

www.lesswrong.com

Redirect

Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications | Andreessen Horowitz

A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.

a16z.com

The Rise of Vertical AI | by Paris Heymann | Index Ventures

The Evolution of vSaaSAt Index we have been longtime fans of vertical SaaS (vSaaS) – cloud-based software tailor-made for specific industries.We view the emergence of vSaaS as part of a broader trend of end users increasingly demanding superior technology products. Consumers want solutions-oriented software made specifically to solve their exact business problems. In an environment where we are inundated with software, narrow and specific is well-positioned versus broad and generalized."With the AI Platform Shift upon us, we believe that the next logical iteration of vertical SaaS will be Vertical AI – vertically-focused AI platforms, bundled alongside workflow SaaS, built on top of models which have been uniquely trained on industry-specific datasets."— Paris Heymann, Index VenturesThe concept of verticalization is not new. Even the largest horizontal tech companies verticalize their sales organizations and product features when they have enough scale within each vertical for that to be a sensible approach. Cloud giants AWS, Azure, and GCP prominently feature vertical industry solutions with dedicated sales teams, as do other large platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Snowflake and Workday. These tech leaders verticalize their offerings over time because it’s a high quality experience for customers and end users when a technology vendor deeply understands the industry, has sales and support reps attending the same conferences as users, and is rapidly evolving the product to suit customer needs.With the AI Platform Shift upon us, we believe that the next logical iteration of vertical SaaS will be Vertical AI – vertically-focused AI platforms, bundled alongside workflow SaaS, built on top of models which have been uniquely trained on industry-specific datasets.Why Vertical AI?The AI category is rapidly evolving, but developing into three layers: foundational models, AI infrastructure, and AI applications.

www.indexventures.com

On giving AI eyes and ears

AI can listen and see, with bigger implications than we might realize.

www.oneusefulthing.org

AI in 2023: When six months feels like six years…

It’s been an exciting 6 months, not just for AI but for technology as a whole. Many hypothesised as to what the impact of LLMs could be…

medium.com

AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans

ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?

www.ben-evans.com

arxiv.org

Creating Product Strategy with Multiple Strategic Tracks (MuST) - Itamar Gilad

Product strategy is hard. In this article I explain how to use the MuST technique to create a repeated-hit product strategy, as used byApple, Google and Netflix.

itamargilad.com

Thread: Circuits

What can we learn if we invest heavily in reverse engineering a single neural network?

Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits

By studying the connections between neurons, we can find meaningful algorithms in the weights of neural networks.

Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts

This paper examines the transformative role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in education and their potential as learning tools, despite their inherent risks and

papers.ssrn.com

How to make Britain’s AI dreams reality

Rishi Sunak’s bet that Britain can prosper from AI requires a new approach

www.economist.com

https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-turned-chatgpt-into-an-sql-like-translator-for-image-and-video-datasets-7b22b318400a

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

towardsdatascience.com

Democracy is the solution to vetocracy

How Ronald Coase can change your life

www.sambowman.co

What would humans do in a world of super-AI?

A thought experiment based on economic principles

www.economist.com

An early warning system for novel AI risks

AI researchers already use a range of evaluation benchmarks to identify unwanted behaviours in AI systems, such as AI systems making misleading statements, biased decisions, or repeating copyrighted content. Now, as the AI community builds and deploys increasingly powerful AI, we must expand the evaluation portfolio to include the possibility of extreme risks from general-purpose AI models that have strong skills in manipulation, deception, cyber-offense, or other dangerous capabilities.

www.deepmind.com

Even if you beat me - The Dublin Review

Sally Rooney 1 It was four in the morning in Chennai when our bus driver fell asleep and drove us into a wall. No one was badly injured, and we could all get out of the bus okay. We found ourselves next to a themed restaurant with a plaster statue of King Kong outside.

thedublinreview.com

Reid Hoffman Is on a Mission: To Show A.I. Can Improve Humanity

Few are as involved in so many different artificial intelligence efforts as Mr. Hoffman, a Silicon Valley investor who co-founded LinkedIn.

www.nytimes.com

https://www.wired.com/story/waluigi-effect-generative-artificial-intelligence-morality/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.wired.com

Governance of superintelligence

Now is a good time to start thinking about the governance of superintelligence—future AI systems dramatically more capable than even AGI.

openai.com

https://medium.com/point-nine-news/building-an-ai-fortress-in-the-age-of-gpt-4-4b5adfaa2f1e

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

medium.com

Can We Stop Runaway A.I.?

Technologists warn about the dangers of the so-called singularity. But can anything actually be done to prevent it?

www.newyorker.com

Building an AI fortress in the age of GPT-4

Does the acceleration in AI make your SaaS company more or less defensible?

t.co

Welcome to LLM University!

We’re so happy that you’ve chosen to learn Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models with us. Our comprehensive curriculum aims to give you a rock-solid foundation in NLP, equipping you with the skills needed to develop your own applications. Whether you want to learn semantic search, ge...

docs.cohere.com

What every CEO should know about generative AI

Gen AI is evolving at record speed while CEOs are still learning the technology’s business value and risks. Here, we offer some of the generative AI essentials.

www.mckinsey.com

RLHF: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

A narrative that is often glossed over in the demo frenzy is about the incredible technical creativity that went into making models like ChatGPT work. One such cool idea is RLHF: incorporating reinforcement learning and human feedback into NLP. This post discusses the three phases of training ChatGPT and where RLHF fits in. For each phase of ChatGPT development, I'll discuss the goal for that phase, the intuition for why this phase is needed, and the corresponding mathematical formulation for those who want to see more technical detail.

huyenchip.com

Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

"Explore a single individual deeply enough and truths about all individuals emerge." - Robert Caro

www.dwarkeshpatel.com

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?

www.newyorker.com

Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"

Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI

www.semianalysis.com

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.

www.nytimes.com

Our position on China: Foreign Secretary's 2023 Mansion House speech

Speaking at Mansion House in the City of London, the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly outlined the UK government's position on China.

www.gov.uk

Mind the Moat, a 7 Powers Review

The Lindy Effect has become my top heuristic to decide what to read next. This phenomenon describes how some things tend to live longer, the longer they’ve lived — to speak plainly, if something has stood the test of time it must be important. When you’re tempted to read

flocrivello.com

Defensibility & Competition

Are early SaaS or AI companies ever defensible early? What is the basis for competition for a startup?

blog.eladgil.com

Large, creative AI models will transform lives and labour markets

They bring enormous promise and peril. In the first of three special articles we explain how they work

www.economist.com

Orthogonal: A new agent foundations alignment organization - LessWrong

We are putting together Orthogonal, a non-profit alignment research organization focused on agent foundations, based in Europe. …

www.lesswrong.com

The Complete Beginners Guide To Autonomous Agents

What are autonomous agents? Why are they such a big opportunity? How do they work? What does this look like in the future? How can I build or use one?

www.mattprd.com

arxiv.org

Emergent autonomous scientific research capabilities of large...

Transformer-based large language models are rapidly advancing in the field of machine learning research, with applications spanning natural language, biology, chemistry, and computer programming....

arxiv.org

AI 50 2023

www.sequoiacap.com

Anthropic's $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI.

techcrunch.com

AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined - LessWrong

Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. • …

www.lesswrong.com

Attention is All You Need

OpenAI's ChatGPT Plugins and the emergence of an Apex Aggregator

www.notboring.co

Draft report on AI timelines - LessWrong

Hi all, I've been working on some AI forecasting research and have prepared a draft report on timelines to transformative AI. I would love feedback from this community, so I've made the report viewab…

www.lesswrong.com

A Total Addressable Market (TAM) Masterclass

Interviewing Sebastian Duesterhoeft, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

www.mostlymetrics.com

GPT4: The quiet parts and the state of ML

Checking in on the state of the ML field: technical progress, societal implications, and more.

robotic.substack.com

Five years of progress in GPTs

A summary of the progression of the SOTA in language models

finbarrtimbers.substack.com

Nobody’s on the ball on AGI alignment

Far fewer people are working on it than you might think, and even the alignment research that is happening is very much not on track. (But it’s a solvable problem, if we get our act together.)

www.forourposterity.com

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

The world is a very malleable place. When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie

simonsarris.substack.com

What failure looks like

The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity. I think this is probably not what failure will look like, and I want to try to paint a more realistic picture. I’ll tell the story in two parts: I think these are the most important problems if we fail to solve intent alignment. In practice these problems will interact with each other, and with other disruptions/instability caused by rapid progress. These problems are worse in worlds where progress is relatively fast, and fast takeoff can be a key risk factor, but I’m scared even if we have several years.

www.greaterwrong.com

H̶armless AI on Twitter

Some longform thoughts on Loom by @repligate Loom feels like the only software UX that is close to really unlocking the potential of generative AI. It reveals how significant UX will be to the next generation of applications, but avoids the commodity SaaS UX race to the bottom…— H̶armless AI (@harmlessai) March 21, 2023

twitter.com

Simulators - LessWrong

Thanks to Chris Scammell, Adam Shimi, Lee Sharkey, Evan Hubinger, Nicholas Dupuis, Leo Gao, Johannes Treutlein, and Jonathan Low for feedback on drafts. …

www.lesswrong.com

Janus' GPT Wrangling

...

astralcodexten.substack.com

Mysteries of mode collapse - LessWrong

Thanks to Ian McKenzie and Nicholas Dupuis, collaborators on a related project, for contributing to the ideas and experiments discussed in this post. Ian performed some of the random number experime…

www.lesswrong.com

https://franklantz.substack.com/p/unpluggers-etc-part-2-deflategate

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

franklantz.substack.com

Securing Liberal Democratic Control of AGI through UK Leadership

This was originally a piece co-written to influence policy makers, and had input from a range of people including senior frontier industry figures, former senior government advisers, and others who share the concerns raised in this piece. This is being published openly now in updated form given recent developments in the AI space.

jameswphillips.substack.com

Cyborgism - LessWrong

Thanks to Garrett Baker, David Udell, Alex Gray, Paul Colognese, Akash Wasil, Jacques Thibodeau, Michael Ivanitskiy, Zach Stein-Perlman, and Anish Upadhayay for feedback on drafts, as well as Scott V…

www.lesswrong.com

HITL thought experiment

You’re a human with access to a streamlined interface that provides an array of continuations to a given text, as well as continuations spawned from each of those suggestions, recursively ad infinitum...

generative.ink

Loom: interface to the multiverse

Loom, a tool for generating, navigating and visualizing natural language multiverses

Want to predict/explain/control the output of GPT-4? Then learn about the world, not about transformers. - LessWrong

INTRODUCTION Consider Act II Scene II of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. …

www.lesswrong.com

Securing Liberal Democratic Control of AGI through UK Leadership

This was originally a piece co-written to influence policy makers, and had input from a range of people including senior frontier industry figures, former senior government advisers, and others who share the concerns raised in this piece. This is being published openly now in updated form given recent developments in the AI space.

jameswphillips.substack.com

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why

Part 1 of 2: "The Road to Superintelligence". Artificial Intelligence — the topic everyone in the world should be talking about.

waitbutwhy.com

Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds

The philosopher, who lives with her husband and her ex-husband, searches for what one human can be to another human.

www.newyorker.com

https://gwern.net/timing

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

gwern.net

https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/secret-cyborgs-the-present-disruption

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

oneusefulthing.substack.com

the stream

Why didn't DeepMind build GPT3?

In three short years OpenAI has released GPT3, Dalle-2 and ChatGPT — a stunning set of products that have reframed what many believe is possible with machine learning. ChatGPT has persuaded a large fraction of the world that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a matter of how long, not a matter of feasibility - an extraordinary accomplishment.

rootnodes.substack.com

Startup Decoupling & Reckoning

The coming reset in mid-to-late stage startups in 2023-2024 is at this point likely largely decoupled from interest rates and inflation. Implications are discussed.

blog.eladgil.com

Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover - LessWrong

I think that in the coming 15-30 years, the world could plausibly develop “transformative AI”: AI powerful enough to bring us into a new, qualitatively different future, via an explosion in science a…

www.lesswrong.com

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.

escapingflatland.substack.com

The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective - LessWrong

This report (now available on arxiv) is intended as a concise introduction to the alignment problem for people familiar with machine learning. It translates previous arguments about misalignment into…

www.lesswrong.com

My current summary of the state of AI risk

Here’s the current, gloomy, state of AI risk: Scaling AI capabilities has made impressive progress in the past decade, and particularly in the past 3 years. Deep Learning has passed over the thresh…

musingsandroughdrafts.com

Childhoods of exceptional people - LessWrong

Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn w…

www.lesswrong.com

My AI Safety Lecture for UT Effective Altruism

Two weeks ago, I gave a lecture setting out my current thoughts on AI safety, halfway through my year at OpenAI. I was asked to speak by UT Austin’s Effective Altruist club. You can watch the…

scottaaronson.blog

Welcome to the new age of magical thinking

Sydney, the two cultures, and naive empiricism

commonreader.substack.com

<div style="max-width: 480px;">What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?</div>

Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.

writings.stephenwolfram.com

The future, soon: what I learned from Bing's AI

We had a brief glimpse of two different types of AI. Both are significant

oneusefulthing.substack.com

Bing Chat is blatantly, aggressively misaligned - LessWrong

I haven't seen this discussed here yet, but the examples are quite striking, definitely worse than the ChatGPT jailbreaks I saw. …

www.lesswrong.com

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-am-bing-and-i-am-evil

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

erikhoel.substack.com

Janus' Simulators

This post isn't exactly about AI, but bear with me

astralcodexten.substack.com

https://openai.com/blog/our-approach-to-alignment-research/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

openai.com

Cyborgism - LessWrong

Thanks to Garrett Baker, David Udell, Alex Gray, Paul Colognese, Akash Wasil, Jacques Thibodeau, Michael Ivanitskiy, Zach Stein-Perlman, and Anish Upadhayay for feedback on drafts, as well as Scott V…

www.lesswrong.com

From Bing to Sydney

More on Bing, particularly the Sydney personality undergirding it: interacting with Sydney has made me completely rethink what conversational AI is important for.

stratechery.com

Notes on Progress: The world that has never been

Introducing Speculative Technologies

worksinprogress.substack.com

Peter Thiel's Religion - David Perell

Human culture began with a murder. That culture was fueled by rage and rivalry, which led to violence. Managing that violence is the secret reason for all religious and political institutions. In The Bible, The Cain and Abel story is the first act of life after the Garden of Eden.

perell.com

Strategy Letter V

When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like "low unemployment causes inflation" that never quite stood up to reality. But the micro stuff was both cool and useful. It was full of interesting concepts about the relationships between supply and demand that really...

www.joelonsoftware.com

Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement

A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.

www.gwern.net

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/02/03/exclusive-openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-agi-google-search/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.forbes.com

https://t.co/2AJljXqn04

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

t.co

https://www.basis.ai/blog/autumn/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.basis.ai

The generative A.I. software race has begun

The generative A.I. future is coming very fast. It is going to be highly disruptive-in both good ways and bad. And we are definitely not ready. These points were hammered home to me over the past couple of days in conversations with executives from three different companies.

fortune.com

The inside story of ChatGPT: How OpenAI founder Sam Altman built the world's hottest technology with billions from Microsoft

A few times in a generation, a product comes along that catapults a technology from the fluorescent gloom of engineering department basements, the fetid teenage bedrooms of nerds, and the lonely man caves of hobbyists-into something that your great-aunt Edna knows how to use. There were web browsers as early as 1990.

fortune.com

www.oxx.vc

https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-labor/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.wired.com

How to make money from generative AI

By Michael Stothard For the past 50 years the internet has had one core function: moving content from one place to another. In the past year, that core function has been radically upended. This is due to rapid advances in large language models, otherwise known as Generative AI, which allows people to use the internet to rather than just move content.

www.firstminute.capital

AI in 2023: The Application Layer Has Arrived

This is a weekly newsletter exploring the collision of technology and humanity. To receive Digital Native in your inbox each week, subscribe here: Hey Everyone 👋 , What's exciting about AI right now is that the platform layer is solidifying, meaning that it's time for the application layer to emerge.

digitalnative.substack.com

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis Urges Caution on AI

Demis Hassabis stands halfway up a spiral staircase, surveying the cathedral he built. Behind him, light glints off the rungs of a golden helix rising up through the staircase's airy well. The DNA sculpture, spanning three floors, is the centerpiece of DeepMind's recently opened London headquarters.

time.com

AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years - EA Forum

In this post, we point out that short AI timelines would cause real interest rates to be high, and would do so under expectations of either unaligned or aligned AI. However, 30- to 50-year real interest rates are low. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities: Long(er) timelines.

forum.effectivealtruism.org

gpt-4 prediction: it won't be very useful

Word on the street says that OpenAI will be releasing "GPT-4" sometime in early 2023. There's a lot of hype about it already, though we know very little about it for certain. ---- People who like to discuss large language models tend to be futurist/forecaster types, and everyone is casting their bets now about what GPT-4 will be like.

nostalgebraist.tumblr.com

Data-driven VC #17: 10x your productivity with ChatGPT

👋 Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Thursday I cover hands-on insights into data-driven innovation in venture capital and connect the dots between the latest research, reviews of novel tools and datasets, deep dives into various VC tech stacks, interviews with experts and the implications for all stakeholders.

www.datadrivenvc.io

PubMed GPT: a Domain-Specific Large Language Model for Biomedical Text

Large language models (LLMs) offer amazing capabilities for general-purpose natural language generation, image generation, speech synthesis, and multi-modal combinations of these applications. But is there more we can do when we know they will be used in industry-specific situations?

www.mosaicml.com

The Cormac McCarthy I Know - Nautilus

The Cowan Campus of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a renovated extension of the adobe home of Patrick J. Hurley, the United States Secretary of War from 1929 to '33 and Ambassador to China in 1945.

Illustrating Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)

Language models have shown impressive capabilities in the past few years by generating diverse and compelling text from human input prompts. However, what makes a "good" text is inherently hard to define as it is subjective and context dependent.

huggingface.co

Report: OpenAI Business Breakdown & Founding Story

A report from Contrary Research. Discover OpenAI's founding story, product, business model, and an in-depth analysis of their business.

research.contrary.com

Neural Search and the unbundling of Google

In a nutshell, Neural Search just means leveraging neural networks to understand and interpret user queries. It is an iteration of search engines, which until recently used symbolic / lexical algorithms (i.e. word matching).

medium.com

Entering the era of Intelligent Search

Generative AI is in the limelight as technologists take stock of the machine learning models released in the last year, including ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dreamfusion, and soon to be GPT-4, among others. The trajectory and power of these large models is inspiring a new wave of startups.

www.bvp.com

An introduction to deep learning

The last few years have seen a massive surge of interest in deep learning - that is, machine learning using many-layered neural networks. This is not unjustified - these deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on a wide range of problems. However, the core concepts are by no means widely understood; and even those with technical machine learning knowledge may find the variety of different types of neural networks a little bewildering.

www.thinkingcomplete.com

Historical analogies for large language models

dynomight.net/llms How will large language models (LLMs) change the world? No one knows. With such uncertainty, a good exercise is to look for historical analogies-to think about other technologies and ask what would happen if LLMs played out the same way. I like to keep things concrete, so I'll discuss the impact of LLMs on writing.

dynomight.substack.com

The impact of generative AI on B2B software

Can generative AI impact the SaaS industry? And if yes, how? I have no clue yet, but I'm searching 😆

doctripath.com

Company, team, self.

Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This company/team/self framework proved itself a helpful decision-making tool, and almost always led to the "correct" outcome.

lethain.com

www.costanoavc.com

Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart's law

This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.

www.bloomberg.com

How to make better use of antidepressants

A five-minute chat with her doctor is how Adele Framer's 11-year ordeal began. She complained about work-related stress. For that, she was prescribed paroxetine, a common antidepressant. There was no conversation about alternatives, such as psychotherapy, nor a discussion of the drug's side-effects or when to stop taking it.

www.economist.com

Solitude and Leadership - The American Scholar

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009. My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others-the people you're leading.

theamericanscholar.org

The New Social Network That Isn't New at All (Published 2019)

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.nytimes.com

Text Is the Universal Interface - Scale

"This is the Unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."

scale.com

e2eml.school

I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive. Transformers were introduced in this 2017 paper as a tool for sequence transduction-converting one sequence of symbols to another.

e2eml.school

Introduction to Diffusion Models for Machine Learning

Diffusion Models are generative models which have been gaining significant popularity in the past several years, and for good reason. A handful of seminal papers released in the 2020s alone have shown the world what Diffusion models are capable of, such as beating GANs[6] on image synthesis.

www.assemblyai.com

AI And The Limits Of Language | NOEMA

When a Google engineer recently declared Google's AI chatbot a person, pandemonium ensued. The chatbot, LaMDA, is a large language model (LLM) that is designed to predict the likely next words to whatever lines of text it is given. Since many conversations are somewhat predictable, these systems can infer how to keep a conversation going productively.

www.noemamag.com

Iron and the Soul - Henry Rollins

This is a reposting of an article by Henry Rollins: I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. Completely. When I was young I had no sense of myself.

www.nerdfitness.com

Y Combinator: Progress Machine (2/2)

Apply to invest in the YC Syndicate More details available via the application link above. Last Wednesday, I broke down the data that indicates Y Combinator turned ~$11.2m of invested capital into ~$3.6B.* Today, I'm going to delve into five factors that have helped drive this success.

odin.substack.com

What failure looks like - AI Alignment Forum

The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity. I think this is probably not what failure will look like, and I want to try to paint a more realistic picture.

www.alignmentforum.org

An introduction to deep learning

The last few years have seen a massive surge of interest in deep learning - that is, machine learning using many-layered neural networks. This is not unjustified - these deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on a wide range of problems. However, the core concepts are by no means widely understood; and even those with technical machine learning knowledge may find the variety of different types of neural networks a little bewildering.

thinkingcomplete.blogspot.com

https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

arxiv.org

Pervasive Label Errors in Test Sets Destabilize Machine Learning Benchmarks

We identify label errors in the test sets of 10 of the most commonly-used computer vision, natural language, and audio datasets, and subsequently study the potential for these label errors to affect benchmark results.

arxiv.org

This Can Go On - Pt 2: In defense of indefinite growth

In Part 1, I laid out the simmer scenario as an alternative to explosion, stagnation in collapse, in which growth slows down sufficiently to remain within the bounds of what we consider plausible. But in this post, I want to consider the possibility that our intuitions about large growth rates are more suspicious than the growth itself.

www.dwarkeshpatel.com

The bosses of Britain's new research agency explain its innovations

S CIENTIFIC DISCOVERY drives technological change that leads humans to flourish. The good news is that the world is training more scientists and funding more research than ever before. The bad news is that, despite this, scientific productivity seems to be slowing down.

www.economist.com

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.newyorker.com

Opinion | The Case for Longtermism

A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of "What We Owe the Future," from which this essay has been adapted. Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed - in order of birth. Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa.

www.nytimes.com

Whose advice should you take?

My wife finds it irritating that I often take a long time to get round to following her recommendations, even though the ones I follow almost always turn out to be successful. This post is about what sort of advice is worth taking - my view of the evidence is, not much - and why a (very basic) bayesian attitude is worthwhile.

commonreader.substack.com

www.bloomberg.com

Challenging Life Experience as Entrepreneur Characteristic

One of the more popular questions I get is, "What are characteristics of successful entrepreneurs?" Beyond basic personality attributes like passionate, opinionated, confident, resourceful, positive, and self-motivated, I like to offer an even more qualitative thought: successful entrepreneurs have often overcome a challenging life experience. Thinking about it more, here are a few of the...

davidcummings.org

Your Real Biological Clock Is You're Going to Die

In April, in a small town on a small island in a small string of islands trailing down from the main part of Japan, the world's then-oldest person died. Nabi Tajima was 117 years old-the last surviving human being born in the 19th century. Maybe the year 1900 sounds far away, to you.

hmmdaily.com

Was Jack Welch the Greatest C.E.O. of His Day-or the Worst?

As the head of General Electric, he fired people in vast numbers and turned the manufacturing behemoth into a financial house of cards. Why was he so revered? Save this story for later. Save this story for later. In late April of 1995, Jack Welch suffered a crippling heart attack.

www.newyorker.com

Back to the Future | Peter Thiel

by ross douthatThe Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success avid, 272 pages, $27 When Boeing introduced its flagship 707 jet airliner in 1958, the power to cruise at 977 kilometers per hour did more than enable routine transcontinental commercial flights.

www.firstthings.com

The Company of the Future is Default Global

As the successful businesses of tomorrow launch in multiple countries at a time, opportunities abound for ambitious startups looking to build the internal software systems these companies will need to grow. For decades, startups largely followed a well-trodden playbook for how to start and scale a company.

a16z.com

Samo Burja: a Primer

One question underpins Samo's work: Why do all societies decline? As our disorientated institutions stumble bleary eyed out of the wreckage of the COVID pandemic, this question has adopted an unsettling urgency. Samo believes that the answer can be found via the modest task of analysing the history of human civilisation.

t.co

Y Combinator: The Institute of Innovation | The Generalist

When it comes to crypto, I am a big believer in dollar-cost-averaging. Instead of purchasing $500-worth of Bitcoin all at once, you invest at a regular cadence. The result is that you average out your entry price. For volatile assets like cryptocurrencies, that can be especially important and take away the stress of trying to time the market.

www.readthegeneralist.com

The Doomsday Invention

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology-even nuclear weapons-and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction.

www.newyorker.com

AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined

I've been working on a new series of posts about the most important century. The original series focused on why and how this could be the most important century for humanity. But it had relatively little to say about what we can do today to improve the odds of things going well.

www.cold-takes.com

How to destroy the Earth

Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...

qntm.org

AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities - LessWrong

(If you're already familiar with all basics and don't want any preamble, skip ahead to for technical difficulties of alignment proper.) I have several times failed to write up a well-organized list of reasons why AGI will kill you. People come in with different ideas about why AGI would be survivable, and want to hear different obviously key points addressed first.

www.lesswrong.com

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning

One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China's best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao's disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet.

palladiummag.com

The Collison Brothers Built Stripe Into A $95 Billion Unicorn With Eye-Popping Financials. Inside Their Plan To Stay On Top

I t's just before five o'clock, and Stripe cofounder John Collison is preparing to address his hundreds of Ireland-based employees on the top floor of his headquarters in Dublin's "Silicon Docks" District.

www.forbes.com

The Prophet of the Revolt

portrait by Katia Sobolski "Sometimes, by sheer luck, you are in a high place and can see the shape and character of the approaching trouble, while those in the flatlands have no idea of what's coming. That was me at the global media analysis section of CIA. And I was not alone.

www.thepullrequest.com

The Scholar's Stage: a Primer

I've recently been lucky enough to assist the brilliant Dwarkesh Patel prepare for an upcoming podcast with Tanner Greer, the author of the Scholar's Stage blog. Tanner has written a lot. There are well over 100 essays on the Scholar's Stage, written over 9 years and ranging across politics, history, warfare, economics, and culture.

edtalks.substack.com

Tiger Global & SoftBank Bet the Farm

Crypto currencies are tumbling and stable coins are looking far less stable. declared that more than $200 billion in crypto wealth had been destroyed in the crash. Coinbase's stock price has fallen 77% so far this year. Many companies that went public via SPACs are in trouble.

www.newcomer.co

Why success in life is the art of the possible

While still in college, Joe Biden started producing a detailed plan for his future presidential campaign (it only took five decades to implement). The young Emmanuel Macron aspired not to the presidency but to fame as a novelist. In France, where novelists are still believed to be glamorous, this counts as ambition.

www.thetimes.co.uk

The Murder of Wilbur Wright

How many of our greatest minds have we lost? From The Dream Machine (p50) on John Atanasoff: He was determined to build a computing machine... But with all his teaching responsibilities, he'd had very

Your Life in Weeks - Wait But Why

This is a long human life in years: And here's a human life in months: But today, we're going to look at a human life in weeks: Each row of weeks makes up one year. That's how many weeks it takes to turn a newborn into a 90-year-old.

waitbutwhy.com

www.nickbostrom.com

www.nickbostrom.com

JAB and the Family Office Conundrum

Let me pitch an investment job to you: Manage a pool of patient capital with the goal of long-term compounding. A flexible mandate that doesn't constrain your curiosity and creativity. Go where you see the most attractive risk-reward. No heckling by investors. No need for quarterly letters or unwanted publicity for your returns.

neckar.substack.com

World Building

You've probably heard a familiar piece of career advice: "Everyone works in sales, even if they don't realize it." This is good advice. I want to propose an updated version for today: "Everyone's job is world-building, even if they don't realize it." It is more or less the same idea, but tailored even more for...

alexdanco.com

medium.com

Web3 had better not be Transaction Cost Hell

In recent months, there has been a lot of excitement around the idea of a new World Wide Web based on blockchains. It's commonly referred to as "web3", to be contrasted with "web1" (websites) and "web2" (social media platforms).

noahpinion.substack.com

My first impressions of web3

Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to "crypto." I don't think I've ever actually said the words "get off my lawn," but I'm much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how "crypto" used to mean "cryptography" than ...

moxie.org

Coordination Headwind - How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds

An emoji flipbook presentation by Alex Komoroske about how dysfunctional organizational dyanmics arise even when individuals are well-behaved

komoroske.com

Solitude and Leadership - The American Scholar

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009. My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others-the people you're leading.

theamericanscholar.org

What can I do with WhatsApp?

WhatsApp has an "Export Chat" function. You can do some interesting stuff with this data. This post will walk you through building a word cloud, and a little sentiment analysis. A while ago I was trying to remove negativity from my life. One aspect of this was my negative friends.

towardsdatascience.com

Tech questions for 2022 - Benedict Evans

Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.

t.co

Omicron: My Current Model

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post called Covid-19: My Current Model. Since then things have often changed, and we have learned a lot. It seems like high time for a new post of this type. Note that this post mostly does not justify and explain its statements.

thezvi.substack.com

What is Expected Value (EV) in Poker? This Basketball Analogy Will Make it Clear

Today we're going to discuss expected value - what it means, why it's important, and how to apply it. Expected value is one of the most fundamental concepts in poker, and one of the most important to understand.

upswingpoker.com

Great Founder Theory - 2020 Manuscript | Samo Burja

What drives social change throughout history and the present? What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society. These institutions are imperfectly imitated by the rest of society, multiplying their effect.

samoburja.com

Great Protocol Politics

In a pair of recent essays, political scientist Ian Bremmer contends that Big Tech companies will reshape the global order, while FP columnist Stephen Walt 's friendly rejoinder is that states will remain predominant. We take a third view: Not only has technology already changed the global order, but it is also changing the nature of both companies and states themselves.

t.co

The Observer Effect - Daniel Ek

Welcome to the second interview on 'The Observer Effect'. We are lucky to have one of the most influential founders/CEOs in technology and media - Daniel Ek, Founder and CEO of Spotify. This interview was published on 4th October, 2020.

www.theobservereffect.org

Presentations - Benedict Evans

Presentations by Benedict Evans

www.ben-evans.com

Is There Any Hope for the Hung Over?

Of the miseries regularly inflicted on humankind, some are so minor and yet, while they last, so painful that one wonders how, after all this time, a remedy cannot have been found. If scientists do not have a cure for cancer, that makes sense. But the common cold, the menstrual cramp?

www.newyorker.com

How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians?

Michael Gove, the UK's Secretary of State for Education, has expressed a wish to see almost all school pupils studying mathematics in one form or another up to the age of 18. An obvious question follows. At the moment, there are large numbers of people who give up mathematics after GCSE (the exam that is...

gowers.wordpress.com

The Crux: Action - High Modernism

Jason Crawford asks , "What's the crux between EA and progress studies?" This series of posts will be my strike at the question from a few different angles. There's a number of new, online movements that are very interested in improving the modern world. I'm particularly intereste

www.highmodernism.com

Shifting the imposible to the inevitable: A Private ARPA user manual

How can we enable more science fiction to become reality? Looking to successful outliers from history is a good place to start. After digging into why DARPA works, I asked the follow-up question: how could you follow DARPA's narrow path in a world very different from the one that created it?

https://t.co/Vp7bx9M44e

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

t.co

Culture Is Not About Esthetics

"The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced." The Amazon Kindle ignited ebook markets by providing a e-ink interface which is visually competitive with paper, and easy access to a remarkable fraction of Amazon's inventory.

www.gwern.net

An Engineer's Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities)

The Web3 ecosystem has been variously described as a collective hallucination, a massive grift, an environmental disaster, a decentralized renaissance, and the future of the Internet. That's a lot to live up (and down) to. Here in the PSL Studio, our veteran engineering team (hi, nice to meet you!)

t.co

The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

Slender Man. Smile Dog. Goatse. These are some of the urban legends spawned by the Internet. Yet none is as all-powerful and threatening as Roko's Basilisk. For Roko's Basilisk is an evil, godlike form of artificial intelligence, so dangerous that if you see it, or even think about it too hard, you will spend the rest of eternity screaming in its torture chamber.

slate.com

DAOs, A Canon - Future

What is (and isn't) a DAO? Why do DAOs matter? How do DAOs fit into web3, crypto, the creator economy, future of work, and many other areas? Inspired by our NFT Canon earlier this year (and original Crypto Canon), we've culled the below list of resources for those seeking to understand, build, and otherwise get involved with these "decentralized autonomous organizations" - which represent the future of community, coordination, work...

arxiv.org

arxiv.org

Tiger Global: How to Win | The Generalist

If you only have a couple of minutes to spare, here's what investors, operators, and founders can learn about Tiger Global. We may be earlier than we thought. Tiger's current private market thesis is simple: we are still in the opening stages of the digital revolution.

www.readthegeneralist.com

How I Made $10k Predicting Which Studies Will Replicate | Fantastic Anachronism

Starting in August 2019 I took part in the Replication Markets project, a part of DARPA's SCORE program whose goal is to predict which social science papers will successfully replicate. I have previously written about my views on the replication crisis after reading 2500+ papers; in this post I will explain the details of forecasting, trading, and optimizing my strategy within the rules of the game.

fantasticanachronism.com

The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers - Nature Human Behaviour

Using a large dataset of workers' technology use from before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Yang et al. find that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration networks of information workers to become more static and siloed and communication to shift to more asynchronous media.

www.nature.com

The Problem Of Excess Genius, by David Banks [1997]

David Banks, Department of StatisticsCarnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213 The most important question we can ask of historians is "Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?"

www.visakanv.com

Andreessen Pulls a Bezos

Venture capital investors are big fans of the word "strategy," but they hardly give it much thought in their own business. Historically, venture capital firms competed by outdoing their peers in the same activities; they tried to answer emails faster, be nicer to founders, have a broader network, offer better terms, recruit smarter and better-known partners.

email.mg2.substack.com

Holden Karnofsky on the most important century

Rob Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is the 80,000 Hours Podcast, where we have unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems, what you can do to solve them, and why meeting a billionaire is a great cover story for a date. I'm Rob Wiblin, Head of Research at 80,000 Hours.

80000hours.org

The Best of Ben - Packy McCormick

I have avidly read Stratechery and listened to the Exponent podcast ever since that first exploration in 2017, applying the applicable and using Thompson's thinking to challenge my assumptions and prod my ideas.

www.packym.com

Index Companies

Sometimes there are markets that are clearly going to grow massively over time. For example, ecommerce, genomics, crypto are all markets which were clearly going to compound over time. It might have been tough to call the winners of each market early, but it was clear the markets themselves would grow a lot.

blog.eladgil.com

The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress

Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies.

www.worksinprogress.co

The Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company, ByteDance

In November of 2017, Bytedance acquired Musical.ly for $1 billion. In August of 2018, Bytedance officially rebranded Musical.ly and TikTok into one app. Shortly after, ByteDance raised $3 billion and was valued at ~$75 billion. Analysts estimate its 2019 revenue was anywhere from

turner.substack.com

The Changing Venture Landscape

The world around us is being disrupted by the acceleration of technology into more industries and more consumer applications. Society is reorienting to a new post-pandemic norm - even before the pandemic itself has been fully tamed. And the loosening of federal monetary policies, particularly in the US, has pushed more dollars into the venture ecosystems at every stage of financing.

bothsidesofthetable.com

The role of the arts and humanities in thinking about artificial intelligence (AI)

What is the contribution that the arts and humanities can make to our engagement with the increasingly pervasive technology of artificial intelligence? My aim in this short article is to sketch some of these potential contributions.

www.adalovelaceinstitute.org

All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild - EA Forum

Audio version is here Summary: * In a series of posts starting with this one, I'm going to argue that the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more.

forum.effectivealtruism.org

scholars-stage.blogspot.com

scholars-stage.blogspot.com

The Power of Product Thinking - Future

In many design, product management, engineering, or even venture capital interviews and pitches, you'll be assessed on a dimension called "product thinking," sometimes also called "product sense." If you're a builder aspiring to create something new and valuable (or someone who invests in such builders), having well-honed product thinking will help you - and the...

Securing posterity - Works in Progress

Ever since the development of the atomic bomb, humanity has possessed the means for its own destruction. There have, of course, always been natural risks of human extinction: an asteroid impact or a supervolcano eruption could make the planet uninhabitable.

worksinprogress.co

This is what peak culture looks like - Works in Progress

If someone refused to use Google Maps and preferred to rely on a vellum chart from the 1400s, we would think they were very strange. If a bank communicated with its branches via telegraph, who would deposit money with them? If an army used guns from 1650 in a modern battle, they would meet certain death.

worksinprogress.co

How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

When J.F.K. ran for President, a team of data scientists with powerful computers set out to model and manipulate American voters. Sound familiar? The Simulmatics Corporation opened for business on February 18, 1959, in an office rented by Edward L.

www.newyorker.com

Frequency diagram

Visualizing Bayes' rule by manipulating frequencies in large populations

arbital.com

iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Christopher Hitchens · Moderation or Death: Isaiah Berlin · LRB 26 November 1998

I n​ The Color of Truth , the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge ('Mac') and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC.

lrb.co.uk

Thoughts after Lambeth

I had the privilege of transcribing Eliot's famous essay, "Thoughts on Lambeth." Below is a significant part of the essay (roughly 2/3 of it). I have edited it only down in size; I've not made any other changes. This is some of

theimaginativeconservative.org

Great Founder Theory - 2020 Manuscript | Samo Burja

What drives social change throughout history and the present? What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society. These institutions are imperfectly imitated by the rest of society, multiplying their effect.

samoburja.com

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-need-to-admit-what-they-got-wrong-about-covid/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.wired.com

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/12/no-10-plague-pit-how-covid-brought-westminster-to-its-knees

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.theguardian.com

Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe

In addition to being a friend and a Noahpinion subscriber, Patrick Collison is one of the world's most successful founder-CEOs. Along with his co-founder and brother John, he built online payments company Stripe into a $36 billion behemoth in a decade. (Patrick and John hail from Ireland, continuing the hallowed tradition of Irish immigrants making it big in America.)

noahpinion.substack.com

The Anti-Reactionary FAQ

Edit 3/2014: I no longer endorse all the statements in this document. I think many of the conclusions are still correct, but especially section 1 is weaker than it should be, and many reactionaries complain I am pigeonholing all of them as agreeing with Michael Anissimov, which they do not; this complaint seems reasonable.

slatestarcodex.com

Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard

The more we understand about the world around us, the less it seems we understand about people and the way they are. This post is an introduction to one man, named René Girard, who bucked this trend: his perception of the nature of behaviour is like a laser that goes right to the core of...

alexdanco.com

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius | The Orwell Foundation

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are "only doing their duty", as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.

www.orwellfoundation.com

Why does DARPA work?

How can we enable more science fiction to become reality? If you want to do something, it usually pays to study those who have done that thing successfully in the past. Asking 'what is this outlier's production function?' can provide a starting point. DARPA is an outlier organization in the world of turning science fiction into reality.

What ails the social sciences - Works in Progress

At the end of 2020, National Geographic, New Scientist, and Business Insider each looked back at the top scientific breakthroughs of the 2010s. The decade saw the detection of gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson; the advent of CRISP-R gene editing; edible lab-grown hamburgers; quantum supremacy achieved; and AlphaGo besting the world's top Go player.

worksinprogress.co

The great reinforcer - Works in Progress

Everything you need to know about how we do science can be learned from COVID-19. That may be an overstatement - but only a slight one. Our science-heavy year, with its procession of confusing results, depressing predictions, worrisome discoveries, and frustrating debates, has shown us the very best-but also the very worst-of science.

worksinprogress.co

Winston Churchill's Black Dog | Esquire | JANUARY 1969

Winston Churchill's Black Dog Anthony Storr Not so much blood, sweat or tears as fits of manic depression saved the Empire from destruction Political leaders are accustomed to dissimulation. Even when defeat at the polls is imminent, or the policies which they support have been shown to be futile, they will, until the eleventh hour, continue to issue messages of hope to their supporters.

classic.esquire.com

How to validate your B2B startup idea

Part two of my seven-part series on how to kickstart and scale a B2B business

www.lennysnewsletter.com

People, ideas, machines IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

How the British deep state organised to defeat Napoleon... Intelligence. Procurement. Manufacturing capacity. Technology. Civil service reform. Balance of Power...

dominiccummings.substack.com

How I've run major projects

focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit

www.benkuhn.net

Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking — LessWrong

At EA Global Boston last year I gave a talk on how we're in the third wave of EA/AI safety, and how we should approach that. This post contains a (li…

www.lesswrong.com

#1 On Bismarck: the ultimate practical education in the 'unrecognised simplicities' of high performance politics/government

What sort of character changes history? What and how do we learn from history? Why is it so hard to learn the 'unrecognised simplicities' of high performance? How did he approach problems we face?

dominiccummings.substack.com

A History of the Future, 2025-2040 — LessWrong

This is an all-in-one crosspost of a scenario I originally published in three parts on my blog, No Set Gauge. Links to the originals: …

www.lesswrong.com

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

A handful of gifted young tech people set out to save the world. For years, WIRED has been tracking each twist and turn of their alleged descent into mayhem and death.

www.wired.com

How to Make Superbabies — LessWrong

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research. …

www.lesswrong.com

Snippets 15: US election & Narrative Whiplash inside the Simulacrum

Why NPCs blew it again & don't learn... Why you should listen to Rick Rubin and not trust the 'mainstream' media

dominiccummings.substack.com

American Strong Gods

Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century

theupheaval.substack.com

Defensibility & Competition

Are early SaaS or AI companies ever defensible early? What is the basis for competition for a startup?

blog.eladgil.com

OpenAI Email Archives (from Musk v. Altman) — LessWrong

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockma…

www.lesswrong.com

Nobody Cares

A rant about caring

grantslatton.com

Open-endedness is all we’ll need

On “Agentic AI”

press.airstreet.com

AI’s $600B Question

The AI bubble is reaching a tipping point. As we continue to follow the GPUs, navigating what comes next will be essential.

www.sequoiacap.com

Nabeel S. Qureshi

Personal writing and other things by Nabeel Qureshi.

nabeelqu.co

The Game Theory of AI CapEx

“Will AI change the world” and “Are CapEx levels too high” are different questions, but both optimism and competition will benefit startups.

www.sequoiacap.com

What is -1 to 0? A Philosophy of Ideation.

Defining a crucial stage of company-building—and why you should take it seriously.

blog.southparkcommons.com

The Leopold Model: Analysis and Reactions

Previously: On the Podcast, Quotes from the Paper This is a post in three parts. The first part is my attempt to condense Leopold Aschenbrenner’s paper and model into its load bearing elements and core logic and dependencies. Two versions here, a long version that attempts to compress with minimal loss, and a short version that gives the gist.

thezvi.substack.com

The 4 Levels of PMF

A new framework to help B2B founders find PMF, faster.

pmf.firstround.com

The big stack game of LLM poker

The next few years is going to make the "$600B Question" look small

www.sarahtavel.com

How the British elite lost its way

Stagnation at home and turmoil abroad demand a radical rethink of how - and why - Britain forges its future leaders.

engelsbergideas.com

https://situational-awareness.ai/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-mathematicians-co-pilot/

Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever

ChatGPT’s release a year ago triggered a desperate scramble among tech companies and alarm from some of the people who helped invent it.

www.nytimes.com

My Last Five Years of Work

I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it.

www.palladiummag.com

The Bitter Lesson

Here comes the Muybridge camera moment but for text. Photoshop too

Posted on Friday 31 May 2024. 2,764 words, 27 links. By Matt Webb.

Chips all the way down

If foundation model economics is alchemy, what does that mean for hardware?

press.airstreet.com

Alchemy is all you need

On the economics of frontier models

press.airstreet.com

This sceptred isle.

Reflections on the revolution in England.

www.armas.co

Rippling’s 2024 Investor Memo

Rippling has always taken an unusual approach to fundraising. We’ve never produced a formal Pitch Deck. Instead, I have always written an “Investor Memo” and relied on this memo to lay out the pitch for the company to prospective investors.

www.rippling.com

Five Elephants; or, Thoughts on Civil Service Impartiality

Last month the Institute for Government published a thoughtful report on the value of an impartial Civil Service. It is worth reading and contains much that I agree with. There are, however, some major elephants in the room that the IfG report doesn't add

www.edrith.co.uk

8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story

They met by chance, got hooked on an idea, and wrote the “Transformers” paper—the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history.

www.wired.com

The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video

Last week Google introduced Gemini Pro 1.5, an enormous upgrade to their Gemini series of AI models. Gemini Pro 1.5 has a 1,000,000 token context size. This is huge—previously that …

simonwillison.net

Bukele's War for Peace

How El Salvador fought the gangs and won

im1776.com

Shtetl-Optimized

The Blog of Scott Aaronson

scottaaronson.blog

The curse of genius

We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why, asks Maggie Fergusson, are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?

www.economist.com

The Arc PMF Framework

This framework outlines three distinct archetypes of PMF which help you understand your product’s place in the market and determine how your company operates.

www.sequoiacap.com

Out-of-Africa's midlife crisis

on bottlenecks, crashes and what diversity really looks like

www.razibkhan.com

Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning

<p>Markets/evolution as backstops/ground truths for reinforcement learning/optimization: on some connections between Coase’s theory of the firm/linear optimization/DRL/evolution/multicellular life/pain/Internet communities as multi-level optimization problems.</p>

gwern.net

Will scaling work?

Data bottlenecks, generalization benchmarks, primate evolution, intelligence as compression, world modelers, and other considerations

open.substack.com

How I became a machine learning practitioner

For the first three years of OpenAI, I dreamed of becoming a machine learning expert but made little progress towards that goal. Over the past nine months, I’ve finally made the transition to being a machine learning practitioner. It was hard but...

blog.gregbrockman.com

Silicon Valley Has a Harvard Problem

The Silicon Valley establishment has grown so suspicious and fearful of original and authentic belief.

time.com

The Product-Market Fit Game - PostHog

In a startup, the only objective that matters before you have product-market fit, is finding product-market fit. Knowing when you've found it…

posthog.com

Kissinger on Liberating Ahlem Concentration Camp: 'One of the Most Horrifying Experiences of My Life'

Scores of articles and books published over the past half-century have sought to understand Henry Kissinger’s role as National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, and confidante of American presidents, to say nothing of his position as the conflicted American Jew. Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger, Vol. 1, 1923-1968: The Idealist is the first to devote several pages …

www.tabletmag.com

#13: A Timeline of the OpenAI Board

Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI. Following, all of Tech Twitter was abuzz with one question: wait a moment, who was on the Board? And after they found out, they asked: who on earth are Tasha McCauley

loeber.substack.com

https://www.exponentialview.co/p/openais-identity-crisis-and-the-battle?utm_medium=web

Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy

It’s one of his many, many disappointments.

www.theatlantic.com

covid19.public-inquiry.uk

Talkin About Hunga Tonga

Humans didn't change much about the climate in the past 365 days, but that volcano sure did.

hwfo.substack.com

Considerations On Cost Disease

I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…

slatestarcodex.com

What OpenAI Really Wants

The young company sent shock waves around the world when it released ChatGPT. But that was just the start. The ultimate goal: Change everything. Yes. Everything.

www.wired.com

Product-Led AI | Greylock

Greylock general partner Seth Rosenberg outlines how founders combining product and domain expertise with a fundamental understanding of human behavior can build defensible, AI-first businesses.

greylock.com

AI startups: Sell work, not software

For the past 25 years, application software startups have had a singular focus: increasing company and employee (including developer) productivity. This looked like building software that increased productivity at the employee level, increased collaboration across employees and teams, and/or enabled better oversight and management at the leadership level. More often than not, this software has been priced on a per seat basis, in essence benchmarked against the cost of the headcount itself and increasing that headcount’s productivity.

www.sarahtavel.com

https://www.statecraft.pub/p/saving-twenty-million-lives

Great PMs don't spend their time on solutions

A deep understanding of the problem that each project sets out to solve has underscored Intercom's progress to date. This is how we approach it.

www.intercom.com

The University of Oxford Dominated Philosophy in The Twentieth Century

Three new books examine the brilliant if eccentric minds nurtured there.

www.city-journal.org

Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?

The OpenAI CEO’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence

www.theatlantic.com

Britain's infrastructure is too expensive

Railways, Trams, and Roads all cost more to build in Britain

www.samdumitriu.com

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.

writings.stephenwolfram.com

The most dangerous substance known to man - Works in Progress

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.

worksinprogress.co

Escape from the feature roadmap to outcome-driven development

I’ve made a lot of roadmaps in my time. In fact, in the first three years I was at WorldRemit, I counted that I represented our company roadmap in 10 different ways. This reformatting was always an attempt to make the roadmap work harder: to bring more focus, communicate more effectively with stakeholders, keep a Read more »

www.mindtheproduct.com

How Christina Cacioppo Built Startup Vanta Into A $1.6 Billion Unicorn To Automate Complicated Security Compliance Issues

The Stanford graduate built a fast-growing software company to automate what had previously been a manual process. She’s now one of America’s richest self-made women.

www.forbes.com

How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com

Claude’s Constitution

How does a language model decide which questions it will engage with and which it deems inappropriate? Why will it encourage some actions and discourage others? What “values” might a language model have?

www.anthropic.com

Aidan Gomez: AI threat to human existence is ‘absurd’ distraction from real risks

Co-founder of Cohere says we should be more worried about use of artificial intelligence in social media and medicine

www.ft.com

The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion’s Success Has A History Of Exaggeration

Stability AI became a $1 billion company with the help of a viral AI text-to-image generator and some misleading claims from founder Emad Mostaque.

www.forbes.com

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/3-the-startup-party-reflections-on

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

dominiccummings.substack.com

Learnings exploring the GPT/ LLM space

Notes from an exploratory trip in the US

medium.com

How Intercom navigated the AI paradigm shift

Intercom’s Des Traynor and Fergal Reid share field notes on what other builder teams should know as they transform their products with language models.

www.bvp.com

How Ramp builds product

Geoff Charles, VP of Product, on Ramp's unique culture of velocity, efficiency, and empowerment

www.lennysnewsletter.com

OpenAI's plans according to Sam Altman

Last week I had the privilege to sit down with Sam Altman and 20 other developers to discuss OpenAI’s APIs and their product plans. Sam was remarkably open. The discussion touched on practical developer issues as well as bigger-picture questions related to OpenAI’s mission and the societal impact of AI. Here are the key takeaways.

humanloop.com

Building LLM applications for production

It's easy to make something cool with LLMs, but very hard to make something production-ready with them. Large language models' (LLMs) limitations are exacerbated by a lack of engineering rigor in prompt engineering, partially due to the ambiguous nature of natural languages, and partially due to the nascent nature of the field. This post discusses how LLMs will change MLOps workflows.

huyenchip.com

Violent enough to stand still

Why human societies developed so little during 300 000 years

woodfromeden.substack.com

Intercom’s AI Evolution

An interview with co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Des Traynor.

thegeneralist.substack.com

We must slow down the race to God-like AI

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

www.ft.com

Developer Tools 2.0

Generative AI stands to change how work happens in one industry after another. But software engineering’s transformation isn’t done yet.

www.sequoiacap.com

Agentized LLMs will change the alignment landscape - LessWrong

I'm following the suggestions in 10 reasons why lists of 10 reasons might be a winning strategy in order to get this out quickly (reason 10 will blow your mind!). I'm hoping to prompt some discussion…

www.lesswrong.com

Neuroscience/AI - Can rats ‘think’? A paper by Chongxi Lai and colleagues on cognitive teleportation in rats [8 min read]

Chongxi Lai’s thesis work, Jedi rats, and brain-machine interfaces.

jameswphillips.substack.com

Maithra Raghu | Does One Large Model Rule Them All?

maithraraghu.com

The Cost of Craft

Why is it so hard to do great work at scale?

gk3fyi.substack.com

A Foundation Models Primer - March 2023

A Foundation Model Primer Q1 2023 • Davis Treybig If you have thoughts, feedback, or ideas in this space, I’d love to hear from you: davis@innovationendeavors.com

docs.google.com

The Modern ML Stack is broken, but it won't be for long

Or, what the most important technological breakthrough of our generation can learn from cable television

ryanshannon.substack.com

Should GPT exist?

I still remember the 90s, when philosophical conversation about AI went around in endless circles—the Turing Test, Chinese Room, syntax versus semantics, connectionism versus symbolic logic&#…

scottaaronson.blog

Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World's Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs

...

astralcodexten.substack.com

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

www.technologyreview.com

Planning for AGI and beyond

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity. If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that

openai.com

AI #1: Sydney and Bing

Previous AI-related recent posts: Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day, Next Level Seinfeld, Escape Velocity From Bullshit Jobs, Movie Review: Megan, On AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities. Microsoft and OpenAI released the chatbot Sydney as part of the search engine Bing. It seems to sometimes get more than a little bit unhinged. A lot of people are talking about it. A bunch of people who had not previously freaked out are now freaking out.

thezvi.substack.com

Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI

Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks

oneusefulthing.substack.com

Opinion | ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution

Generative artificial intelligence presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the start of the Enlightenment.

www.wsj.com

Ideas for AI in Sales Software

These past two weeks I've been bombarded by sales pitches for sales software from people who've never done software sales. While there's nothing wrong with bringing a fresh perspective to a space, it's giving me a lot of heartburn watching smart AI founders try to tackle stale problems like automated outbounding.

saradu.substack.com

From Genotype to Phenotype: polygenic prediction of complex human traits

Decoding the genome confers the capability to predict characteristics of the organism(phenotype) from DNA (genotype). We describe the present status and future prospects of genomic prediction of...

arxiv.org

Perverse incentives are endemic

There are many ways to run a company, but I often find it helpful to view a large part of my job as designing the incentive structure of the organization so that, to the extent possible, the right things happen automatically.

maxhodak.com

Data-driven VC #19: Value accrual in the modern AI stack

👋 Hi, I'm Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Thursday I cover hands-on insights into data-driven innovation in venture capital and connect the dots between the latest research, reviews of novel tools and datasets, deep dives into various VC tech stacks, interviews with experts and the implications for all stakeholders.

www.datadrivenvc.io

Why Is Everyone So Boring?

Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament "But it's all so boring!" And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning. (E.g. recent movie Living.)

www.overcomingbias.com

Building Products With AI

We are now in a momentous age of technology, where machines are gaining the ability to synthetically comprehend, reason and converse like a human. This has the potential to transform the way we interact with computers, software and technology as a whole.

www.readle.com

The new tech worldview

S am Altman is almost supine. He is leaning back in his chair, feet up, in his home library overlooking San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. In washed jeans and a t-shirt, the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could.

www.economist.com

Embryo Selection For Intelligence

With genetic predictors of a phenotypic trait, it is possible to select embryos during an in vitro fertilization process to increase or decrease that trait.

gwern.net

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

Recently I've been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I've labeled in my head as "staring into the abyss." Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner.

www.benkuhn.net

ChatGPT and the Imagenet moment - Benedict Evans

The wave of enthusiasm around generative networks feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what 'AI' can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. What can it create, and where are the humans in the loop?

www.ben-evans.com

www.benkuhn.net

AI from Superintelligence to ChatGPT - Works in Progress

Artificial intelligence has advanced at an incredibly rapid pace in the last few years. As these systems get more powerful, more and more people are beginning to worry about them not acting how they should - not necessarily because of sentience or malice, but because they may try to achieve their goals in ways that cause harms they haven't been designed to avoid.

www.worksinprogress.co

If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

There’s now an open letter arguing that the world should impose a six-month moratorium on the further scaling of AI models such as GPT, by government fiat if necessary, to give AI safety and …

scottaaronson.blog

AI: Startup Vs Incumbent Value

In the first internet wave most of the value went to startups (Google, Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, Salesforce, Facebook, Netflix) while some was captured by incumbents (Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Adobe) who extended their franchises onto the internet. Perhaps this was a 60:40 or 70:30 startup:incumbent split. 2.

blog.eladgil.com

AI Revolution - Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs)

Part of the challenge of "AI" is we keep raising the bar on what it means for something to be a machine intelligence. Early machine learning models have been quite successful in terms of real world impact.

blog.eladgil.com

www.cs.drexel.edu

The Cormac McCarthy I Know

The Cowan Campus of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a renovated extension of the Adobe home of Patrick J. Hurley, the United States Secretary of War from 1929 to '33 and Ambassador to China in 1945.

The AI Unbundling

My first job was as a paper boy: The job was remarkably analog: a bundle of newspapers would be dropped off at my house, I would wrap them in rubber-bands (or plastic bags if it were raining), load them up in a canvas sack, and set off on my bike; once a month my parents would drive me around to collect payment.

stratechery.com

The mystery of the miracle year

An interesting pattern recurs across the career of great scientists: an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two. Einstein had his annus mirabilis in 1905.

www.dwarkeshpatel.com

What I Miss About Working at Stripe

When writer and researcher Brie Wolfson thinks back on her time working at Stripe, the thing that stands out to her is that people really cared about the work. Cared enough to do multiple passes on a piece of copy that wasn't working, or pull long nights sprinting toward a launch.

every.to

Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

Hi listeners, Rob here - the usual host of the 80,000 Hours Podcast. Today's episode is pretty different from our usual podcasts, which generally focus on people's research or other work trying to solve the world's most pressing problems: This episode is a lot more personal.

80000hours.org

Why we stopped making Einsteins

I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn't trigger a golden age. Think about the advent of the internet long enough and it seems impossible to not start throwing away preconceptions about how genius is produced.

erikhoel.substack.com

nabeelqu

Published: 2022.07.04 I'm a big fan of "advice posts" and productivity guides. A small, but meaningful, upgrade to your daily routine is worth a lot in the long run. So here's my contribution to the genre. 1. Maximize your baseline energy levels.

nabeelqu.co

An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren't Happy.

"I won, and I didn't break any rules," the artwork's creator says. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. This year, the Colorado State Fair's annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture.

www.nytimes.com

The State of Machine Learning in 2022: Next steps? - Langkilde

The last few weeks have made me begin to adjust my assumptions about what machine learning will be able to do in the near future.

langkilde.se

Searching for outliers

Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then and when I started working at Wave.

www.benkuhn.net

Meaningful Exits for Founders

For an industry that doesn't do it for the money, we sure talk about money an awful lot in the world of startups. A few posts were written this past week diving deeper into the numbers that drive VC returns which, in turn, drive behavior in startups who've raised money from VCs.

Roadmap to a SaaS IPO: how to unicorn your way to $100M revenue

Over the past few years, the world's best entrepreneurs and investors have released valuable articles about SaaS startups. Christoph Janz wrote about funding, Neeraj Agrawal wrote about growth, Jason Lemkin wrote about... well, everything. One thing, in particular, makes those readings great: they contain numbers and metrics that are helpful to understand what a successful startup looks like at each step of the growth journey.

openvc.app

The Courageous Life and Death of Rick Rescorla, a 9/11 Hero

As Susan Greer was walking her golden retriever one morning near her home, in Morristown, New Jersey, she heard footsteps behind her. It was just after six, on a warm Saturday in late July of 1998; she liked the quiet and the early-morning light. The footsteps came closer, and then a jogger passed her.

www.newyorker.com

June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he's a professor in the mathematics department.

www.quantamagazine.org

Huge "foundation models" are turbo-charging AI progress

They can have abilities their creators did not foresee T he "Good Computer" which Graphcore, a British chip designer, intends to build over the next few years might seem to be suffering from a ludicrous case of nominal understatement. Its design calls for it to carry out 10 19 calculations per second.

www.economist.com

Two Paths to the Future | Fantastic Anachronism

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2? The history of the world is a history of s-curves stacked on top of each other.

fantasticanachronism.com

Believe in something, goddammit

Life happens on the boundary between order and chaos. In the symbol, dark represents feminine chaos: it is formless potential, which gives birth to all things. Light represents masculine order. It is the structure encoded by DNA which arranges atoms into cells. It is the reduction of entropy encoded by language.

firstentrepreneurs.substack.com

But first, entrepreneurs

But First, Entrepreneurs is a blog about going through Entrepreneur First 's (aka EF's) 3rd Toronto cohort. EF is a super innovative VC / talent management concept started by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck, two ex-McKinsey London people who looked at everyone around them and wondered why the heck the world's most intelligent, hardworking, ambitious people were spending their time redlining slide decks instead of, I dunno, doing actual things.

firstentrepreneurs.substack.com

https://shyamsankar.com/the-case-against-work-life-balance-owning-your-future

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

shyamsankar.com

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-substack?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozMjgxNjAyMiwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTI4NjE4MDQsIl8iOiJyQ2N4eCIsImlhdCI6MTY1MTA1NTQ2MywiZXhwIjoxNjUxMDU5MDYzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzQ3NTMzIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.qdYLR_pK80iFQfPgO7J9-oxvsioP1v3fQon1jmzl5MM&s=r

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

Idea Generation

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn't work.

blog.samaltman.com

My Quantified Self Setup

The number one question I get asked on Twitter these days is how I get the data for my media consumption posts and quantified self reports. So I thought I'd dedicate this week's post to explain my tracking setup.

julian.digital

⭐ The mystery of the miracle year

An interesting pattern recurs across the career of great scientists - an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two. Einstein had his annus mirabilis in 1905.

A Life's Work - Alex Crompton

Doing something you love has mostly been a fantasy since jobs existed. Without technology, by definition, it's almost impossible to get paid to do something you love. Without technology, if you love doing something weird, you probably can't find someone who'll pay you to do it.

www.alexcrompton.com

The books that made me

The first experience is hardly a memory, I can't quite find the words. There was a veranda, in the shade, by the sunny courtyard (in my childhood memories it's always sunny). There's an armchair in the middle of the veranda, and the sensation of an endlessly repeated, delightful dive.

unherd.com

Melatonin

I discuss melatonin's effects on sleep & its safety with research up to 2015; I segue into the general benefits of sleep and the severely disrupted sleep of the modern Western world, the cost of melatonin use and the benefit (eg.

www.gwern.net

It's Time to Build the Builders

One of the most heartening cultural developments spurred by COVID-19 has been the rising awareness of our urgent need to build, and with it a bipartisan "progress movement" aimed at studying, financing, and valorizing the builders. These efforts have gained momentum in recent months, with the announcement of a new Institute for Progress and a widely circulated Atlantic article calling for an abundance agenda.

genagorlin.substack.com

No One Wants to Spend Any Amount of Time With a Plastic Thing Strapped to Their Face (w/Phil Libin)

Phil Libin is as deeply rooted in the Silicon Valley ethos as you can find. He immigrated to the United States as a child from the Soviet Union and went on to found the once trendy tech word-processing software company Evernote. He took a detour as a venture capitalist at General Catalyst.

www.newcomer.co

The Best and Worst Books I Read in 2021 | Fantastic Anachronism

Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah Also known as A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, this is a wonderful travelogue from the 14th century (or, more appropriately, the 8th century of the Hegira).

fantasticanachronism.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/technology/ai-no-code.html

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.nytimes.com

The Attention Span. "Hidden Forces of Radical Hope."

After weeks of tragedy and relentless doomscrolling, I'm compelled to make the strange case for radical hope. If this is the only thing I write that anyone ever reads, I think I'll be cool with that. "Sheep with Nukes and Radical Hope." [10 minute read.]

thekcpgroup.com

Power Laws in Venture

The more rightward-skewed the distribution is, whether Pareto-Levy, log normal, or some related form, the more difficult it is to hedge against risk by supporting sizable portfolios of innovation projects. The potential variability of economic outcomes with Pareto-Levy distributions is so great that large portfolio draws from year to year can have consequences for the...

reactionwheel.net

When big tech buys small tech - Benedict Evans

This prompts a question. If Amazon buys a company with six people for $4m, was this a competitive threat - the next Zappos or Shopify - or was it pursuing a small opportunity or hadn't really worked (and half of VC-backed startups fail), and was bought for a small set of technology to tuck-in, and to hire the engineers (a so-called 'acquihire')?

www.ben-evans.com

The Parable Of The Talents

I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it's so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160.

slatestarcodex.com

Two Paths to the Future | Fantastic Anachronism

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2? The history of the world is a history of s-curves stacked on top of each other.

fantasticanachronism.com

Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization | The Generalist

What if Romulus and Remus had gotten along? As the story goes, after creating their first settlement, Rome's wolf-weened founders fell out over the right hill upon which to build their city. While Remus liked the Aventine, Romulus preferred the Palantine. Romulus exercised the most final method of winning an argument, killing Remus.

www.readthegeneralist.com

The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones

When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I'd started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the "obvious" hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, "management") one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective.

www.benkuhn.net

https://www.ft.com/content/d0df2f1b-2f83-4188-b236-83ca3f0313df

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

https://boundless.substack.com/p/stripes-perfect-career-page-126

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

boundless.substack.com

Five Books for Venture Capital

Students and people early in their careers often ask me how I made the transition from journalist to venture capitalist. The answer-luck, chance and the largess of many founders and investors- is unsatisfying because it's impossible to replicate in an ordered way.

boyle.substack.com

Demanding and Supportive

My first Instacart board meeting was in November 2015. I had joined a month earlier as CFO. Our financials were ugly. We had $2M of revenue but were chewing through $11M of cash every four weeks, and lost $15 on every delivery. We were going to exhaust our cash in less than a year.

Parties, photos, trolleys, variants

15 May was no 'party'... but the inquiry should look at 20 May... MPs should learn and enforce PUBLICATION of covid 'plans'

dominiccummings.substack.com

How To Learn Chess As An Adult (or, how I went from 300 to 1500 ELO in 9 months) - Alex Crompton

This is the routine and tooling I used to train tactical fluency. To understand why this works, check the last section. Before you think this is an ad - I'm not affiliated with Chessable in any way, it's just perfect for what we need.

www.alexcrompton.com

How Y Combinator Changed the World

There is no sure thing when it comes to starting a business, and indeed most fail. But inclusion in the Y Combinator program is definitely a thing; YC has launched companies whose total valuation tops $400 billion; its alumni include such luminaries as Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, CoinBase, and DoorDash.

www-wired-com.cdn.ampproject.org

Omicron Post #7

Here are some better worlds we might have lived in, but don't. In a better world, I could focus on this full time and also maybe even hire a research assistant, and be better able to scour for information.

thezvi.substack.com

Omicron: What We Know, What To Expect, & What To Do

Though it's only been a week since South Africa alerted the world to the rapid spread of a new variant with many worrisome mutations, the broad contours of what we can expect are already coming into view.

www.metaculus.com

Harvard Creates Managers Instead of Elites - Palladium

I walked alone into the Sheraton Hotel with fifteen resumes in a folder tucked under my arm and a dim sense of dread, ready to confront the Harvard Business & Technology Career Fair. The resumes were probably unnecessary. I was only a sophomore, but gnawing uncertainty about my career direction compelled me to browse my options for the future.

palladiummag.com

Becoming a Micro Angel Investor - rational vc

How to invest as little as $1k in startups and why founders are taking more of these cheques Cyrus Yari 14th November 2021 "It's one IPO to the next one."-Nasir Jones, QueensBridge Venture Partners Part 1: My journey to angel investing Part 2: Why founders prefer taking angel cheques over VCs, and why you should give it to them Part 3: How you can angel invest starting with $1k cheques Disclaimer: Angel investing is inherently risky and illiquid.

www.rationalvc.com

👷 Operator-Investor

Hi folks, Paddy here from Odin. We are making it 10x cheaper and easier to launch & invest in syndicates and venture funds.We are now live in private beta. If you'd like to apply to join our private community and access syndicate investment opportunities and events, please share some more information with us (if you haven't already).

odin.substack.com

Omicron Variant Post #1: We're F***ed, It's Never Over

The last day has seen the imposition of new travel restrictions and spreading alarm about the Omicron variant. It sure looks like a repeat of what happened with Alpha and Delta, as well as the original strain back in early 2020, and that we are probably doing this again.

thezvi.substack.com

Two Paths to the Future | Fantastic Anachronism

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2? The history of the world is a history of s-curves stacked on top of each other.

fantasticanachronism.com

How This All Happened

This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II. That's a lot to unpack in 5,000 words, but the short story of what happened over the last 73 years is simple: Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad, then really good, then really bad, and now here we are.

www.collaborativefund.com

Discord: Imagine a Place

🎧 To get this essay straight in your ears: listen on or Apple Podcasts (shortly) Today's Not Boring is brought to you by... Sprig is your all-in-one product research platform. If you've read Not Boring to the end, wow, thank you, and you'll be familiar with Sprig.

www.notboring.co

Live versus Dead Players

This is an excerpt from the draft of my upcoming book on great founder theory. It was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here. Whether you are examining past societies or living and acting within one today, it's important to distinguish between live and dead players.

What Bill Gurley Saw

Something really interesting happens when you consume a boatload of information: your brain begins to pick out patterns from the mass of stories in your head.

commoncog.com

A product management reading list

I was recently updating our Product notion page at Monzo and ended up totally geeking out and writing a very long reading list. It's full of stuff to read that's either influenced me directly or which I've sent to people to describe core concepts like growth accounting.

mikehudack.substack.com

F-Ups at EF: What I learned from Europe's leading startup incubator

TL;DR - The EF startup incubator didn't work for me, but I learned a few lessons from my F-Ups. In the startup spirit of celebrating and sharing experiences of failure, here's what I learned from the process. After three and a half years as a consultant at Accenture, I wated to try my hand at entrepreneurship.

America's Lost Boys and Me

One of the most brilliant concepts I've come across in the past few years is the notion of "luxury beliefs." Like a Birkin bag, luxury beliefs are expensive, fashionable and confer immediate status on those espousing them. But they can only be afforded by people whose status shields them from the harm those views can cause.

bariweiss.substack.com

Building 2,000 Unique SEO Pages with GPT-3

When it comes to building pages to rank in organic search, you're usually limited by one of a few factors. You might be limited by resource, in which case you can only afford to build pages for a few key terms. Alternatively, you might be limited by search volume, in which case there are very few terms that are even worth spending human time building pages for.

mackgrenfell.com

OpenSea: The Reasonable Revolutionary | The Generalist

Today, investors face a dilemma. Inflation is rising. Nearly every firm from Goldman to BlackRock project equity returns under 5% until 2035. The global pandemic has completely disrupted markets. Finding promising investments is harder than ever. Recently, Bloomberg asked financial experts where they'd invest $100,000 today. The response?

www.readthegeneralist.com

https://medium.com/entrepreneur-first/why-knowing-you-are-the-exception-to-the-rule-matters-e817612f0f09

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

medium.com

Spot The Outlier

TL;DR: In a world of plenty, selection is hard. In a world where selection is hard, we resort to ever more stringent measurement. If measurement is too strict, we lose out on variance. If we lose out on variance, we miss out on what actually impacts outcomes.

www.strangeloopcanon.com

Pmarchive · Why not to do a startup

In this series of posts I will walk through some of my accumulated knowledge and experience in building high-tech startups. My specific experience is from three companies I have co-founded: Netscape, sold to America Online in 1998 for $4.2 billion; Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), a public software company with an approximately $1 billion market cap; and now Ning, a new, private consumer Internet company.

pmarchive.com

The Great Resignation Is Accelerating

A lasting effect of this pandemic will be a revolution in worker expectations. About the author: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius .

www.theatlantic.com

www.independent.ie

David Runciman · Competition is for losers: Silicon Valley Vampire · LRB 23 September 2021

P eter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk's. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination.

www.lrb.co.uk

In Defense of the Beta Blocker

Nobody seemed terribly surprised when two North Korean athletes tested positive for performance enhancing drugs at the Olympics last week. By now, stories of disgraced athletes sound familiar almost to the point of tedium. But if you had the patience to read beyond the headlines, you might have noticed something unusual about this particular scandal-namely, the nature of the banned drug the athletes were using.

www.theatlantic.com

On Oliver Sacks' Obsession With Weightlifting

When a writer talks about the sport they play, you can see something of how their mind works in how they have chosen to use their body. Hemingway's frustrated fascination with machismo was written in bloodstains on the boxing and bullfighting rings. Haruki Murakami's gentle, aimless prose is synchronized into the calm, solitary rhythms of running and swimming.

lithub.com

Bombshell

Brace yourself, the sky is falling. A few weeks back the Wall Street Journal published a series of stories on Facebook sourced by "internal documents" (easily accessible PowerPoint slides) obtained from a "whistleblower" (who revealed no illicit activity).

www.piratewires.com

Links & What I've Been Reading Q3 2021 | Fantastic Anachronism

1. Was the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution? A fascinating look at the industrial revolution in the UK, including some explanations of slow/zero growth in various periods before WWII. From 1760 to 1800, the contribution of the steam engine was .004 percent per year to capital deepening and .005 percent to TFP growth.

fantasticanachronism.com

Book Excerpt: Peter Thiel's Untold College Stories

Sometime around the spring of 1988, several members of the Stanford University chess team traveled to a tournament in Monterey, California, in an old Volkswagen Rabbit. To get across the Santa Cruz Mountains, they took California's Route 17, a four-lane highway that is regarded as one of the state's most dangerous because of its tight curves, bad weather, and wild-animal crossings.

nymag.com

Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class-A Status Update

I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class. My confusion wasn't surprising given my unusual background. When I was two years old, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us. I grew up in multiple

quillette.com

A Not Boring Adventure, One Year In

Welcome to the 537 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! If you aren't subscribed, join 42,205 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: 🎧 To get this essay straight in your ears: listen or on or Apple Podcasts Hi friends 👋 , Happy Monday!

www.notboring.co

A(Junior)VC

Preamble:This post is a synthesis of some of the things I've learned while serving as an analyst at USV. Were these ideas and observations wholly my own, the title of this post would be "How I succeeded in venture capital".

whoo.ps

Raising Investment

This draft guide is most relevant for founders who are raising a Seed or Series A round, with some amount of product development and some early customer traction. Thanks for reading this guide. Please feel free to leave comments or questions! I'd love to credit people who've helped when I publish - just leave your name in any comment.

docs.google.com

The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D

Arm China has gone completely rogue, operating as an independent company with their own IP and R&D. This is the semiconductor heist of the century. There are many questions swirling about what this means for a potential Nvidia takeover or IPO, but it is clear that SoftBank's short sighted profit driven behavior has caused a massive conundrum.

click.revue.email

Peter Thiel On "The Straussian Moment"

Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, discusses his essay "The Straussian Moment," describing how the ancients believed in the power of the intellect and the weakness of the will, but how today we believe the opposite. We want machines to do the thinking, because we don't trust rationality.

www.hoover.org

Nick Richardson · Even what doesn't happen is epic: Chinese SF · LRB 8 February 2018

S cience fiction​ isn't new to China, as Cixin Liu explains in Invisible Planets, an introduction to Chinese sci-fi by some of its most prominent authors, but good science fiction is. The first Chinese sci-fi tales appeared at the turn of the 20th century, written by intellectuals fascinated by Western technology.

www.lrb.co.uk

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

Calorie restriction (a diet low in calories but high in nutrients) extends maximal lifespan and delays the onset of age-related illnesses in all species that have been tested. Preliminary results from an ongoing study on rhesus and squirrel monkeys show similar effects. It seems quite likely that calorie restriction would work for our species too.

www.nickbostrom.com

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds

Two rival civilizations are battling for supremacy. Civilization A is stronger than Civilization B and is perceived by Civilization B as a grave threat; its position, however, is more fragile than it seems. Neither side hesitates to employ espionage, subterfuge, and surveillance, because the rules of conduct-to the extent that they exist-are ill-defined and frequently contested.

www.newyorker.com

Life Advice: Become a Billionaire

In a certain view, billionaires are not merely wealthy, they are nearly god-like in their influence. As the New York Times op-ed Abolish Billionaires reads: Billionaires should not exist - at least n

Some Britons crave permanent pandemic lockdown

B ORIS JOHNSON can often channel John Bull, a ruddy cartoon figure from Georgian England. He personified the liberty-loving English yeoman, in opposition to Napoleonic tyranny. Announcing England's first pandemic lockdown in March 2020, Mr Johnson lamented "taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub".

www.economist.com

Tetlock and the Taliban

Note: Apologies to Phil Tetlock if he doesn't want to be associated with the Taliban, I just couldn't resist the alliteration. Also apologies to the Taliban if they don't want to be associated with an American academic, though I assure them that Phil is one of the good ones.

richardhanania.substack.com

The "idea" of being an entrepreneur

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. What kinds of things make someone decide to try and solve some problem, instead of accepting it? Economists tends to think in terms of broad costs and benefits: if the expected benefits from innovating exceed the expected costs, then a person decides to innovate.

mattsclancy.substack.com

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading.

waitbutwhy.com

Compounding Crazy

Welcome to the 1,575 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! Join 65,812 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: First, a word from our sponsor... It's easy to look back 10 years and with hindsight bias and ponder - WTF were they thinking?

www.notboring.co

On Medici and Thiel

I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college. Larry Summers Peter Thiel has a lot of ideas. One of them, from slightly more than a decade ago, was that entrepreneurship is a viable alternative to college.

www.strangeloopcanon.com

Product Hunt: The Internet's Destiny Machine | The Generalist

Every hero begins in the ordinary world. Harry Potter languishes in the closet under the stairs. Luke Skywalker toils as a farmboy on Tatooine. Lucy Pevensie searches for entertainment in a country house. Odysseus rules as the unremarkable king of Ithaca.

www.readthegeneralist.com

When to stop dating and settle down, according to math

Committing to a partner is scary for all kinds of reasons. But one is that you never really know how the objectof your current affections would compare to all the other people you might meet in the future. Settle down early, and you might forgo the chance of a more perfect match later on.

www.washingtonpost.com

One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps

If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets. Tahir Hamut Izgil arrived with his family in the United States in 2017, fleeing the Chinese government's merciless persecution of his people.

www.theatlantic.com

Bad Apple*

Note: The title is a self-deprecating reference to a 'bad apple' that falls off the tree, not a reference to any company. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.

www.thepullrequest.com

Everything You Need to Know About Giving Negative Feedback

There's a lot of conflicting advice out there on giving corrective feedback. If you really need to criticize someone's work, how should you do it? I dug into our archives for our best, research- and experience-based advice on what to do, and what to avoid. Never, ever, ever feed someone a "sandwich."

hbr.org

The Pied Piper of SPACs

Chamath Palihapitiya says that the investment tool lets ordinary people get rich off startups. It may be hype-but hype can be its own economic engine. In Silicon Valley, Chamath Palihapitiya, who has earned billions of dollars while tweeting things like "Im about to really fuck some shit up" to his 1.5 million followers, rarely requires identification beyond his first name.

www.newyorker.com

Where's My Flying Car?

An analysis of Where's My Flying Car by J Storrs Hall, as an entry point to a more systemic analysis of the thesis on why we saw innovation stagnate. Due to length the essay is best read online rather than on email since it'll get truncated.

www.strangeloopcanon.com

Seeing the Smoke

COVID-19 could be pretty bad for you. It could affect your travel plans as countries impose quarantines and close off borders. It could affect you materially as supply chains are disrupted and stock markets are falling. Even worse: you could get sick and suffer acute respiratory symptoms. Worse than that: someone you care about may die, likely an elderly relative.

putanumonit.com

On Education

2021 marks 10 years since I dropped out of high school. It's the kind of nice round-number anniversary which invites some introspection, and it feels like a good time to post some lessons learned. First: nothing taught me to appreciate traditional institutions of learning more than dropping out.

gestalt.cafe

Against neutrality about creating happy lives

(Warning: spoilers for the movie American Beauty.) "Once for each, just once. Once and no more. And for us too, once. Never again. And yet it seems that this-to have once existed, even if only once, to have been a part of this earth-can never be taken back.

handsandcities.com

Does Tech Need a New Narrative?

In 2009, Marc Andreessen-a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and angel investor best known for cofounding Netscape, in 1994, at the age of twenty-two-announced that he would be starting a venture-capital firm. "I'm crossing over into the dark side," he said, jokingly, to the PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose.

www.newyorker.com

Lucy Kellaway: We will miss the office if it dies

On my last day at the Financial Times in July 2017, the doorman who had greeted me every morning for the previous two decades enfolded me in a substantial embrace. Take care Luce, he said. I had been dry-eyed during the farewell speeches but this undid me.

'This was a horrible pandemic - but it wasn't the big one': Michael Lewis interviewed | The Spectator

Michael Lewis's new book, The Premonition, is a superhero story - though one in which the superheroes don't, in the end, win. It's the true story of a group of far-sighted, tough-minded scientists who, in January last year, saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in the USA, and the politicians who woul...

www.spectator.co.uk

Against Netflix

It has become fashionable to lambast big tech corporations and social media sites, the Facebooks and Twitters and Googles, blaming them for a litany of social ills. Seemingly escaping this ire has been the-in my view-most pernicious by far: Netflix. Simply put, Netflix (and its imitators) produce too many TV shows that are too good-and too easy to binge.

www.forourposterity.com

On the referendum #33: High performance government, 'cognitive technologies', Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, &amp; 'Seeing Rooms'

'People, ideas, machines -- in that order!' Colonel Boyd. 'The main thing that's needed is simply the recognition of how important seeing is, and the will to do something about it.' Bret Victor. '[T]he transfer of an entirely new and quite different framework for thinking about, designing, and using information systems ...

dominiccummings.com

How much do people differ in productivity? What the evidence says.

People sometimes point out that performance is 'power law' distributed, e.g. they'll point out that the top 10% of scientists get 5x more citations over their career than the other 90% of scientists, or that the top 1% of startup founders get 80% of the equity value. But is this true?

80000hours.org

If you want to get ahead, ditch your creativity

According to the most recent edition of the Financial Times 's How to Spend It supplement, £127,000 will buy you the "ultimate" Steinway self-playing grand piano. This ultimate piano is distinguished from the inferior non-ultimate models by its proficiency at reproducing not just the notes a famous performer played but the precise pressure with which he or she touched them.

www.thetimes.co.uk

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me A Spreadsheet

In mid-August, couples and lonely hearts packed a Brooklyn basement to hear scientists make sense of something the crowd could not: love. It was the 11th meeting of the Empiricist League, a kind of ad-hoc, small-scale TED Talks for scientists and the New Yorkers who adore them.

fivethirtyeight.com

The Great Online Game

Welcome to the 1,265 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! Join 47,388 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: Today's Not Boring is brought to you by... Rows In March, I wrote that Excel Never Dies. I may have spoken too soon. Rows very much wants Excel to die.

www.notboring.co

Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class-A Status Update

I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class. My confusion wasn't surprising given my unusual background. When I was two years old, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us.

quillette.com

The Melancholy of Subculture Society

You may re­mem­ber this as the the­sis ap­plied to the In­ter­net; it got some trac­tion in the late 1990s. The ba­sic idea is: elec­tronic en­ter­tain­ment de­vices grows in so­phis­ti­ca­tion and in­ex­pen­sive­ness as the years pass, un­til by the 1980s and 1990s, they have spread across the globe and have de­voured mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions of chil­dren; these de­vices are more per­ni­cious than tra­di­tional geeky fares inas­much as they are often best pur­sued so­lo.

www.gwern.net

Why Are There No Biographies of Xi Jinping?

It is high time we have a better sense of what makes the autocratic, muscular-nationalist, order-obsessed strongman in charge of China tick. "Living in China is confusing now," the novelist Yan Lianke said, "because it can feel like being in North Korea and the United States at the same time."

www.theatlantic.com

Temple of Bros

Oh no not Uber. I realized something strange this week: I've worked in tech for just about a decade, but I've never met a "tech bro." I've met a lot of math guys and operators. I've met engineers and artists.

www.piratewires.com

After a decade of VC influence at Stanford, what's next?

Editor's Note: This piece was written in partnership with the Stanford Tech History Project, which seeks to document how Stanford's tech ecosystem has changed since 2010. The full report will be published on Monday, April 26th. To RSVP for the launch event, click here.

gabygoldberg.medium.com

Winning is for Losers

This post originally appeared on Ribbonfarm . It was written as part of the Ribbonfarm long-form writing course and edited by Joseph Kelly. I owe Joseph and the Ribbonfarm editors (Venkatesh Rao and Sarah Perry) huge thanks for spending the time to make me a better writer.

putanumonit.com

https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/02/transy-book-heist

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.vanityfair.com

Playing Different Games

Somewhere, right now, in Silicon Valley... "So how about these Tiger guys eh?" "Hah! You're telling me - I heard they did [Deal X] in 24 hours after only getting a P&L for diligence and came in 25% over the founder's asking price!" "I heard they're doing a new deal every 2 days!

randle.substack.com

Predicting an uncertain worldHow spooks are turning to superforecasting in the Cosmic Bazaar

E VERY MORNING for the past year, a group of British civil servants, diplomats, police officers and spies have woken up, logged onto a slick website and offered their best guess as to whether China will invade Taiwan by a particular date. Or whether Arctic sea ice will retrench by a certain amount.

amp.economist.com

To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past

Running is the simplest of sports: right foot, left foot, right foot. But the simplicity opens up complexity. There's no ball to focus on, no mat to land on, no one charging toward you with their shoulder down. And so your attention shifts inward.

www.wired.com

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

Editor's note: At nearly 7,000 words, you probably don't want to try reading this on an iDevice. Bookmark it and come back later.] Imagine something a wee bit outside your comfort zone. Nothing scandalous: just something you don't do often, don't particularly enjoy, and slightly more challenging than "totally trivial."

www.kalzumeus.com

The West's shameful Iranian capitulation | The Spectator

On a sweltering day in July 2018, German police pulled over a scarlet Ford S-Max hire car that was travelling at speed towards Austria. The driver, Assadollah Assadi, the third secretary to the Iranian embassy in Vienna, was arrested at gunpoint and taken into custody. Although unusual, there was a ...

www.spectator.co.uk

The Science of Winning at Life

A sequence by lukeprog that summarizes scientifically-backed advice for " winning" at everyday life: in one's productivity, in one's relationships, in one's emotions, etc. Each post concludes with footnotes and a long list of references from the academic literature.

The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why

This is the last part of a four-part series on Elon Musk's companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1.

waitbutwhy.com

Thoughts on Meaning and Writing

I was once at a dinner party and someone was telling me about her recent trip to Arizona. One of the highlights was visiting a biodome project where scientists had attempted to achieve a totally self-sustained structure in preparation for the colonization of other planets. I told her that Steve Bannon used to run that...

dormin.org

Everything You Need to Know About Napoleon Bonaparte

Having finished the epic, all-encompassing biographical 33-hour audiobook, Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts, I knew I wanted to write something about it, but I wasn't sure what. Napoleon Bonaparte had one of the most accomplished, divisive, big lives of any person in history, which reshaped the way we think about war, politics, revolution, culture, law, religion, and...

dormin.org

www.bloomberg.com

www.bloomberg.com

My Generation Isn't Suffering Enough

An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. ~Nietzsche My generation is miserable.

quillette.com

How to Name a Baby - Wait But Why

Meet the Name Fad. In 30 years, the names Natalie, Chelsea, Samantha, and Lindsay will sound how Nancy, Cheryl, Susan, and Linda do today. And in 60 years, the names Ethan, Cody, Brandon, and Matthew will be Earl, Chester, Bernard, and Melvin.

waitbutwhy.com

The fixer - Tortoise

Last November, Sir John Bell, a man of many hats and master of keeping them all balanced, uttered three words that echoed around the world: "Yes, yes, yes." The slightly nasal Canadian twang of one of the UK's top medical experts has become a familiar voice during the pandemic, measured and reassuring but never bland.

www.tortoisemedia.com

The Quest to Unlock an Ancient Library

It was a warm day in Paris, and the library of the Institut de France was stuffy and hot. Daniel Delattre, a distinguished French papyrologist, did not remove his suit jacket. The institute, which includes the Académie Française, is a jacket-and-tie sort of place.

www.newyorker.com

Will by Will Self review - a tragic case of Self love

Will Self is trapped in a compulsive pattern of behaviour that doesn't look much fun from the outside. Every year or two, the saturnine writer, television personality and composer of boutique cookie fortunes for the Chinese restaurant Hakkasan will produce a new novel.

www.thetimes.co.uk

Grow the Puzzle Around You

In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley regarded us as irrelevant. Y Combinator began the same way as most other startups: with a hypothesis about something we thought people wanted.

foundersatwork.posthaven.com

https://newlinesmag.com/review/the-day-the-world-stood-still/

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

newlinesmag.com

The Dark Side of Longform Journalism

In the spring of 2013, I spent a month in the Syrian city of Aleppo, reporting an article about the protests that had become an uprising that had become a war. At the time, Aleppo was divided roughly in half, one side held by the rebels, the other by the regime.

lithub.com

A forty year career.

The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they've become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists.

lethain.com

Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media

How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times. On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog of considerable influence, discovered that the site's cerulean banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a barren white layout.

www.newyorker.com

An Unsentimental China Policy

Fifty years ago this July, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced what would become his signature foreign policy achievement: the opening to China. The following February, in what the press called "the week that shook the world," he flew to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong, the leader of communist China.

www.foreignaffairs.com

Was Saul Bellow a Man or a Jerk? Both, a Monumental Biography Concludes (Published 2018)

Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW Love and Strife, 1965-2005 By Zachary Leader Illustrated. 767 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40. This is a superb biography. Yet it begins in the most inauspicious place.

www.nytimes.com

What I Worked On

February 2021[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

paulgraham.com

President Xi will never accept defeat - UnHerd

Six years ago, the Chinese president Xi Jinping made a state visit to Britain. It was an important moment for both nations - the launch of a new "Golden Era"- designed to show that any differences caused by David Cameron's meeting with the Dalai Lamai in 2012 were forgotten.

unherd.com

AI Nationalism - Ian Hogarth

For the past 9 months I have been presenting versions of this talk to AI researchers, investors, politicians and policy makers. I felt it was time to share these ideas with a wider audience.

www.ianhogarth.com

The Doomsday Invention

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology-even nuclear weapons-and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction.

www.newyorker.com

Mr. Churchill

In the now remote year 1928, the eminent English poet and critic Herbert Read published a book dealing with the art of writing English prose. Writing at a time of bitter disillusion with the false splendors of the Edwardian era, and still more with the propaganda and phrasemaking occasioned by the First World War, Mr. Read praised the virtues of simplicity.

www.theatlantic.com

Between the spreadsheets

The management consultant's guide to love and sex, by Alice Hines Once upon a time, there was a man who thought love was a maths problem. "Love is a capricious spark, a miraculous whirlwind," one of his blog posts began, sarcastically. "It is found by following ancient prophecies, embarking on dangerous quests...Something like that, who knows.

www.economist.com

www.nickbostrom.com

www.nickbostrom.com

The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) ___________ Everyone feels something when they're in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe.

waitbutwhy.com

IT'S TIME TO BUILD - Andreessen Horowitz

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building.

a16z.com

The Power of Catastrophic Thinking

T. S. Eliot, in his 1944 essay "What Is a Classic?," complained that a new kind of provincialism was becoming apparent in our culture: "a provincialism, not of space, but of time." What Eliot had in mind was provincialism about the past: a failure to think of dead generations as fully real.

www.nybooks.com

Fear and loathing in venture capital

A core principle of venture investing is putting the founder first. Most firms do so in marketing; more and more are living it. That's different to when I started out in VC more than a decade ago. And it's a great change. So the following should not detract from how hard it is to build a company.

blog.maxniederhofer.com

Human challenge trials of covid-19 vaccines still have much to teach us - The BMJ

We have developed approved vaccines for covid-19, but this doesn't make carrying out challenge trials less important-quite the opposite, say Nir Eyal and colleagues Last year the UK government set out plans to support human challenge studies of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, starting in 2021.

blogs.bmj.com

How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) - Wait But Why

Hey readers! Quick note before we jump in: This is a post about something I've been wanting to write about forever: careers. Society tells us a lot of things about what we should want in a career and what the possibilities are-which is weird because I'm pretty sure society knows very little about any of this.

waitbutwhy.com

What Makes You You? - Wait But Why

When you say the word "me," you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It's one of the things you're cleareston in the whole world-something you've understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, "Who amI?"

waitbutwhy.com

Boris Johnson: The gambler, by Tom Bower book review

Book review - British Politics - The TLS | Boris Johnson: The gambler by Tom Bower, reviewed by Rory Stewart

www.the-tls.co.uk

What Lincoln Knew

In his second inaugural address, the 16th president had a message for a war-weary nation. Updated at 7:36 p.m. ET on January 17, 2021.

www.theatlantic.com

A Message to the 21st Century

I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors.

www.nybooks.com

The new elites are working-class wannabes

There's a scene in Martin Amis's memoir Experience in which he describes his children badgering him on a car journey: "Why do you say Fri- dee and Mon- dee and Thurs- dee " they want to know. After some embarrassed prevarication, Amis concedes that "I trained myself to do it in my teens because I thought it sounded posh ...

www.thetimes.co.uk

Are Experts Real? | Fantastic Anachronism

But sometimes one of these masters at the top of the mountain will say something so obviously incorrect, something even an amateur can see is false, that the only possible explanation is that they understand very little about their field. Sometimes vaguely smart generalists with some basic stats knowledge objectively outperform these experts.

fantasticanachronism.com

How effective is a single vaccine dose against Covid-19?

The cases are already beginning to emerge. When 85-year-old Colin Horseman was admitted to Doncaster Royal Infirmary in late December, it was for a suspected kidney infection. But not long afterwards he caught Covid-19 - at the time, roughly one in four people in hospital with the virus had acquired it there.

www.bbc.com

www.cas.mhra.gov.uk

Covid-19 vaccination: What's the evidence for extending the dosing interval?

On 30 December the four UK chief medical officers announced that the second doses of the covid vaccines should be given towards the end of 12 weeks rather than in the previously recommended 3-4 weeks.

www.bmj.com

Covid infection shown to provide as much immunity as vaccines

People who have already contracted coronavirus are as protected against reinfection as those who have received the best Covid-19 vaccines, according to a survey of 20,000 UK healthcare workers, the largest study in the world so far.

The Parable Of The Talents

I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it's so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160.

slatestarcodex.com

Do you know how Covid really spreads? - UnHerd

I just took a coronavirus test at work. On my way into the building to get it done, I was asked to sanitise my hands. Then, just before I took the test, the guidelines informed me I should sanitise my hands again.

unherd.com

The Poincaré Clash

On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau.

www.newyorker.com

I volunteer at a vaccine centre, and I'm worried - The Post

I spent Sunday volunteering at a vaccination centre, and I'm seriously worried that some vaccination hubs are at risk of becoming superspreader sites. The day began at a youth centre. All the volunteers took lateral flow tests, which all came out negative. These detect Covid-19 in only half of asymptomatic people but they are better [...]Read More...

unherd.com

Scruton Cafè

I walk into the Scruton Café and order black coffee. "Can I smoke in here?""No."I walk to a table, carrying my books under my arm, and sit down. I had heard about this place online, where progressives poked fun at its glossy bourgeois hipster vibe.

im1776.com

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

Illustration: Illustration by Robert Beatty for New York Magazine Even so, in January and February of 2020, there were thoughtful people who were speaking up, formulating their perplexities. One person was Sam Husseini, an independent journalist. He went to a CDC press conference at the National Press Club on February 11, 2020.

nymag.com

75 years on: Richard Dimbleby's BBC report on the liberation of Belsen concentration camp

75 years ago the BBC's Richard Dimbleby was the first broadcaster to report from the liberation of Belsen concentration camp by the British Second Army on April 15th, 1945. His 10 minute radio report is an extraordinary historic act of journalism as witnessing.

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Worst Revolution Ever

Here they were, a coalition of the willing: deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans. They had heard the rebel yell, packed up their Confederate flags and Trump banners, and GPS-ed their way to Washington.

www.theatlantic.com

How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 2 - Wait But Why

Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece. When we examined procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away.

waitbutwhy.com

How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 1 - Wait But Why

To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this: And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.

waitbutwhy.com

When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece | Fantastic Anachronism

Boswell's Life of Johnson is not just one of my favorite books, it also engendered some of my favorite book reviews. While praise for the work is universal, the main question commentators try to answer is this: how did the worst man in the world manage to write the best biography?

fantasticanachronism.com

Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism

I leave on vacation for a week, and you all go wild. Apparently, The Great Stagnation ended while I was away, and we are now celebrating a brave new era of progress. Graciously compiled by Caleb Watne

How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher

In 1995, Katalin Karikó was at her lowest ebb. A biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Karikó had dedicated much of the previous two decades to finding a way to turn one of the most fundamental building blocks of life, mRNA, into a whole new category of therapeutics.

www.wired.co.uk

Why 2020 was the fourth best year in history | The Spectator

The Spectator has a long and proud history of fact-based optimism, sometimes represented by an end-of-the-year article explaining that statistics bear out that this was the best year ever, even if you didn't get that impression when following the news. Well, 2020 is not a good candidate for such an...

www.spectator.co.uk

The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISIS

When the campaign to expel the Islamic State from Mosul began, on October 17th, the Nineveh Province SWAT team was deployed far from the action, in the village of Kharbardan. For weeks, the élite police unit, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, had been patrolling a bulldozed trench that divided bleak and vacant enemy-held plains from bleak and vacant government-held plains.

www.newyorker.com

Fast · Patrick Collison

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. The Spirit of St. Louis. In 1927, Donald Hall and Charles Lindbergh designed and built Spirit in 60 days. "To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St.

Hunter S. Thompson's Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life

In April of 1958, Hunter S. Thompson was 22 years old when he wrote this letter to his friend Hume Logan in response to a request for life advice. Thompson's letter, found in Letters of Note , offers some of the most thoughtful and profound advice I've ever come across.

fs.blog

On Not Writing

"A man may write at any time if he set himself doggedly to it."- Samuel Johnson You know you're something of a writer if you'll do anything to avoid writing. I've waged a lifelong battle against the craft going back to childhood.

boyle.substack.com

nabeelqu

Published: July 1, 2020 I. The smartest person I've ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he'd prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he'd go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing.

nabeelqu.co

Roger Federer as Religious Experience (Published 2006)

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K.

www.nytimes.com

Airbnb: The Disaster Artist

Airbnb in 1 minute That Airbnb is here at all is remarkable. Bludgeoned by the coronavirus, the hospitality platform has spent much of 2020 in a state of crisis, raising debt and cutting budgets. In the process, management demonstrated trademark resilience in the face of adversity, artistry amid disaster.

thegeneralist.substack.com

Chief Notion Officer

If we think about a company as an organism, then a knowledge management system is essentially the (collective) brain that keeps that organism alive and running. A corporate knowledge management system should contain every single bit of codifiable information within the company resulting in a library

julian.digital

Technology entrepreneurship and the disruption of ambition

There has been a great deal of analysis of how technology will disrupt life in the coming decades. Little of this, though, has looked at how technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition. What the most ambitious people choose to do with their lives has a profound impact on society, the economy and culture.

medium.com

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

I joined Stripe four years ago to make starting an Internet business easier, mostly by work on Stripe Atlas. This has been a series of adjustments for me: to working as an employee, to experiencing hypergrowth, to being closer to the Silicon Valley culture, and to some of the challenges in balancing career and other commitments during my life stage and the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

www.kalzumeus.com

Lunch with the FT: Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage has an adjective for the good things in life - "proper". Proper blokes, proper jobs, proper markets. And when we meet at The Lamb, a pub in London's Leadenhall Market, he clearly is in the mood for a proper lunch. "Have we got an order in?"

Rory Stewart on the cult of the hero (and how he got over it)

The only candidate for the Tory leadership that I can stand the sight of is Rory Stewart. He reminds me of something the documentary maker (and historian of the emotions) Adam Curtis said, that a new politics could emerge which uses words like love, and which sees politics as a noble vocation.

There's no speed limit | Derek Sivers

Whether you're a student, a teacher, or a parent, I think you'll appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and permanently change someone's life in only a few lessons. I was seventeen and about to start my first year at Berklee College of Music.

sive.rs

The New Social Network That Isn't New at All (Published 2019)

SAN FRANCISCO - My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web. That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.

www.nytimes.com

Having Had No Predecessor to Imitate, He Had No Successor Capable of Imitating Him | Fantastic Anachronism

It is against nature that he made the most excellent creation that could ever be; for things are normally born imperfect, then grow and gather strength as they do so. He took poetry and several other sciences in their infancy and brought them to perfect, accomplished maturity.

fantasticanachronism.com

Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won | The Spectator

Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people's money... Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the ...

blogs.spectator.co.uk

We Need a New Science of Progress

In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution. Recognizing the "daily increasing proofs of the happy influence of scientific culture on the industry and the civilization of the nations," and the growing importance of what he called "Industrial Arts," he proposed a new organization dedicated to practical knowledge.

www.theatlantic.com

What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers | Fantastic Anachronism

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Over the past year, I have skimmed through 2578 social science papers, spending about 2.5 minutes on each one. This was due to my participation in Replication Markets, a part of DARPA's SCORE program, whose goal is to evaluate the reliability of social science research.

fantasticanachronism.com

Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular?

He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention. Every morning of my Joe Rogan experience began the same way Joe Rogan begins his: with the mushroom coffee.

www.theatlantic.com

Does Palantir See Too Much?

Does Palantir See Too Much? By Michael Steinberger On a bright Tuesday afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. He wore blue Nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-framed sunglasses with red accents that inevitably drew attention to his most distinctive feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising skyward from his head.

www.nytimes.com

A Reductionist History of Humankind

In his Confessions , Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of how he became famous, which is also the story of how he became a philosopher. It involves a road-to-Damascus-style epiphany. Walking to the Château of Vincennes to visit his friend Denis Diderot, who was imprisoned there on the charge of subversion, Rousseau paused to glance at a newspaper he had brought with him to "moderate my pace."

www.thenewatlantis.com

Opinion | You Are Not as Good at Kissing as You Think. But You Are Better at Dancing.

We overestimate and underestimate our abilities in weird ways. By Spencer Greenberg and Mr. Greenberg is a mathematician; Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz is an economist. Do you think you are an above-average driver, as most people do? How do you compare with others as a parent? Are you better than most at dancing?

www.nytimes.com

Normal People captures all our growing pains

A couple of years ago I wrote a very earnest review of Sally Rooney's very earnest novel Normal People. The book, I announced breathlessly, had left me in a "state of emotional agitation", "unable to sleep", "stirred up inside" and determined to live more seriously.

www.thetimes.co.uk

How To Be Successful

I've observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success.

blog.samaltman.com