This is where I save interesting links.
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Trump Seizes the Means of Production at Intel
From Tyler Cowen in The Free Press.
If you are a major CEO, the message could not be clearer: Tread very, very carefully. Think again before you criticize this president or this White House.
And
The sad reality is that we are marching down a very dangerous road, the discourse surrounding the issue is an incoherent mess, and there is no improvement in sight. For the time being, the best we can do is to hope that the courts make this particular threat go away.
Bad week of news for rights and norms in America.
- This is a concerning event and whatever comes next will be telling
- The executive order on banning the burning of the America Flag and a year in jail for those who do
I think we are in a bad place.
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AI and the Detection of Gravity Waves
“It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”
From a Wired article via an Alex Tabarrok summary.
Really incredible stuff. Move 37 by AlphaGO might still be the most impressive thing to me in AI and this is now there with it.
Not just doing better, but seeing different.
I hope we get there with medicine soon.
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The Danger from Japan
As I’ve tended, recently, to find liberalism a useful model for my politics, posts like this resonate.
My message to Americans is to double down on America. Double down on immigration, entrepreneurship, innovation, building for tomorrow, free markets, free speech and individualism and America will take all new competitors as it has taken all comers in the past. The world should be more like America not the other way around.
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How AI, Healthcare, and Labubu Became the American Economy
From Kyla Scanlon. More good things on memes and the economy. Always feels very “ear to the ground”.
Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale. Like obviously the above example8 is wild and absurd, but it’s a very efficient form of communication. And when traditional institutions (media, education, political parties, local communities) lose credibility, people turn to markets for economic coordination and for truth discovery.
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Flounder Mode
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From Dollar Dominance to Slop Machine
Pt. 2 on attention and a bunch of topics that are funneling through it these days. I say topics, but really they are the things that impact the every day: trust, social safety, integrity, etc.
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Would live
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Are Cultural Products Getting Longer?
This is a great counterfactual to attention span narratives. It doesn’t speak to quality, but to attention span. Brain Rot seems to be a real thing (on the surface) but we don’t enjoy it.
It seems like we’re immunizing by consuming longer content.
I notice this with the kids. They’re more engaged with a movie compared to five twenty minute episodes of a show.
Anyways, good news on the attention front.
Now is a great time to be a (unalgorithmic) human.
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The AGI Economy is Coming Faster Than You Think
From Rohit Krishnan in Freethink (new to me).
If Pascal’s Wager can be applied the “when AGI”, and I think it certainly can be, it feels wiser to me to assume the kind of thinking below is more likely than not.
What to do about that? I have no idea. I don’t see myself rapidly “retooling” and “upskilling” my career at the moment – both feel mysterious as to how and in what direction – so if we are 1-5 years away from this massive upheaval it is currently coming at me and I’m not sure what I’m ‘doing’.
I continue to think that opting to be more human (analog vs. synthetic) is the smartest gamble. Perhaps now is the best time to do the oldest things that humans have always found interesting: Write a book, keep a garden, and see what the body is capable of (running for me).