It is a linkblog and digital garden for the weird, wonderful, and unexpectedly useful things I find on the internet. Read what I have kept below, wander through a subject, or visit Small Web, my directory of independent blogs.
Looking at all the online discourse, it might feel like everybody is using AI. But that's really not the case. Contrary to all the proclamations that AI is overhyped, if anything, I'd argue that AI is still underhyped. And I think the best available data is broadly on my side. If you look at surveys of AI usage,…
keep reading — 4 min ↗keep reading — 1 min ↗Expensive to produce, expensive to store... so what’s the solution? Government intervention — and lots of it. All along the supply chain, the US has stepped in. It has bought stakes in several US rare earth producers, struck offtake agreements with some of those producers to ensure a minimum price for their products, and pledged $10bn in debt backing for Project Vault, a stockpiling initiative designed as a backstop against…
keep reading — 1 min ↗The fact that a 17GB file can do all of this stuff on my home machines is a miracle. Once again, I’m delighted and amazed at how much progress local models have made this year. A year ago this would have been competitive with the best and most expensive of the proprietary models—today it can run on a capable laptop. The only thing holding this back from being a daily driver is performance. It feels pretty slow on both the M5…
keep reading — 1 min ↗I keep being asked. How long can France go on with budget deficits and increasing debt until we get a crisis? The answer: I cannot tell. Not because I am particularly dumb (this is a separate issue). But because there is a potentially large danger zone, where the crisis may or may not happen, depending on the whims of investors. Given our debt and our deficit, we have probably entered the danger zone. If investors continue to…
AGI for normies is already here. I completely agree with Derek Thompson on this—in fact, I’d go so far as to say that even back with Sonnet 3.5, it had already arrived for the rest of us. The first time I heard a similar take was from Tyler Cowen, who pointed out that AGI, for most normal people, is already in our…
keep reading — 1 min ↗One older leaf, brought back into the light.
keep reading — 6 min ↗Take readers’ opinions seriously, but not too seriously. I’d say 1/6 have real spiritual-angst resistance. Ignore them. Another 1/6 will never get past attachment to gleegloom over the not-X-but-Y “tell” du jour. Ignore them too. Counterintuitively, at the other end, 1/3 of readers will be delusionally committed to declaring any and all AI writing “good” (similar to how committed feminists might insist that any work done by…