Musings

Be more ambitious

Simon: Let’s talk a little bit about the human element. A lot of people are feeling a sense of loss now that so much of what they considered to be their role in building software is being subsumed by the models. How do you think about that? How has the past year and a half changed the way you think about your own craft and the value that you add? Thariq: Cat and Boris are such good reminders that you have to be more…

On the student protests in Delhi

What makes this moment fundamentally different is that the public is no longer appearing terrified. Despite heavy police deployment, massive surveillance cameras and the use of tear gas and force, the sheer volume of everyday citizens, broke the atmosphere of intimidation. People didn't just step out of their homes. They stepped out and converted individual isolation into a loud, collective voice. By refusing to be divided,…

Age of conspiracies

But what happens when history starts to resemble myth, when the inconsistencies reveal themselves not through deep study but in the most superficial scroll of our phones? The new age of political paranoia obviously reflects a toxic efflorescence of grass-roots distrust, not to mention the structural pathologies of a new information environment. But sometimes I wonder whether we’re putting too much emphasis on those structures…

It's hard work remaining true to your heart

We do not grow up learning to go against the tide. I grew up in an upper middle-class family in India being groomed to success by following the rules. Someone like Loulou Van Damme, who seemed to follow her heart, would surely have alarmed my parents. But the more I spoke with her the more I realised how much hard work it is to remain true to your heart. “I fought for living this life,” she said simply. “I have some good…

I got some links for you

Even if researchers could figure out exactly why chatbots embrace negative parallelism, there’s another factor that could make it very hard to fix: “When something gets into these models, it’s very hard to pull it out,” Masrour, the Pangram engineer, said. That’s because one of the main ways that AI models have continued to evolve is by training on text generated by other bots. That AI text is presumably replete with negative…

The act of seeing

The act of seeing is no small thing. To see something is to be possessed by it. Sometimes it carries off a part of you, sometimes it’s your whole soul. - Motojirō Kajii

India is now a one-party country

What has changed is not merely the balance of power overwhelmingly in favour of the BJP. It is the perception of permanence. A large number of opposition politicians now appear to believe that once their party loses power, especially against the BJP, the path back has become extraordinarily difficult. The BJP enters every election with advantages that no rival currently possesses. Its financial resources dwarf those of…

The internet is still good

The internet may be a dumpster fire. Much of it probably is. But there are still plenty of corners that haven't been engulfed by the raging wildfire that's laying waste to everything in its path. For all our complaints about the internet—and many of those complaints are entirely justified—it remains one of the…

A few thoughts on AI-assisted writing

She sat on the bench opposite, the wood damp through her wool trousers – the Jigsaw ones from three years ago, back when she still believed dressing like a senior partner might hasten becoming one. Fake it till you make it, they said. But her Nani had warned her once, in that quiet voice that meant listen carefully: Watch what face you wear too long, beti. It starts to eat the one underneath. -- From the essay.

AI will make the world more legible

I have a theory that AI will make a lot of things that are otherwise illegible or partly legible, and in doing so can have unpredictable consequences on our society. And anyway, that's a theory, and I wrote about it.

LLMs offer mundane utility

With each passing day, the dominant discourse about large language models continues to annoy me. On one side, you have the boosters. On the other side, you have the doomers. One side confidently asserts that this marks the twilight of the humans. The other side makes roughly the same argument, but in a doom-and-gloom…

We're all hydrogen atoms that learned how to talk.

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. Carl Sagan

Cheaper LLM models offer mundane utility

I was playing around with visualizing economic data, and I needed a cheap LLM to digitize or extract text from really old scanned PDFs. I experimented with Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite. It’s a small, ultra-cheap model, but I was surprised by how good it was at extracting clean, high-quality, well-formatted text from really…

A voice-first future?

Chinese AI developers are increasingly pivoting from general-purpose chatbots towards embedding voice AI assistants into daily applications in search of broader commercial uses for generative AI technologies. The growing industry focus on speech models reflects expectations that voice interfaces could become a key gateway for deploying AI across industries. As one of the most intuitive forms of human-computer interaction,…

The bullshit asymmetry principle

The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, also known as Brandolini's Law, states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to produce it. Coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, it highlights why misinformation and lies spread so quickly and are incredibly difficult to combat Google summary.

How well do you understand India??

I often wonder how accurate a lot of economic analysis and commentary about India really is, given the fact that India is not really one country. It is many countries in one. Some of our states are as big as other countries. Some of our states are bigger than other countries. Then there is the other problem. When you…

The Chinese AI subsidy

After launching V4 Flash and V4 Pro, DeepSeek was running a limited-period 75% discount on both models until May 30. Today, it announced that the discount is now permanent. The current pricing is kind of ridiculous. On the official "DeepSeek API pricing page" (https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quickstart/pricing),…

A few thoughts after watching the movie Train Dreams.

I had a few thoughts after watching the movie Train Dreams and instead of writing another cliched douchey review of the movie, I wrote about all the feelings that were swirling in my head as I watched the movie. As I was watching the movie and after I finished watching the movie.

Economic liberalisation is good for the environment

There is a large literature showing that liberalizations boost economic growth. Do these gains come with environmental costs? In this paper, we use 49 cases of large-scale liberalization – as proxied by large discrete jumps on the Economic Freedom of the World Index – to study the effects of liberalizations on greenhouse gas emissions (total, per capita and per dollar of GDP) and deaths from outdoor air pollution. Using…

China is NOT Japan

Despite these parallels, China is not Japan. The structure of leverage differs: Japan’s crisis centred on private banks and corporations, whereas China’s vulnerabilities are more concentrated in local governments and state-linked entities. China also retains greater administrative capacity to postpone loss recognition and prevent outright financial sector collapse. China also has other advantages that Japan lacked.…

Shower test

We’re socially conditioned to chase what we think everyone else wants. But your true heart’s desire can often be found in the thoughts you gravitate to while undistracted, such as in the shower. As Walt Whitman said, “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.”

Digg is back?

Kevin Rose is building Digg: https://di.gg/ai

AI progress continues

The future of Math is mathematicians and AI agents working together. Very pleased to introduce @GoogleDeepMind's AI co-mathematician: a multi-agent system designed to actively collaborate with human experts on open-ended research mathematics. Mathematicians testing the agent across areas as diverse as group theory, Hamiltonian systems, and algebraic combinatorics have reported impressive results. In autonomous mode evaluation…

AI as a your reading guide

I was re-reading Stephen Fry’s Mythos and A.C. Grayling’s Philosophy and Life, and both books reminded me of something I think is still underrated: LLMs as reading companions. Both books are filled with things I don’t know enough about. In the case of Mythos, it’s Greek mythology. In the case of Philosophy and Life,…

Your money beliefs are static. Your life isn't.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." That applies to money as much as anything.

Crypto is popular in Iran

Iran’s crypto ecosystem was valued at more than $7.78bn last year, growing at a faster pace compared with 2024, according to crypto transaction monitoring firm Chainalysis. But the data suggests it is not just Iranian citizens who have turned to crypto in a bid to offset the impact of rampant inflation and a weakening currency. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accounted for about 50 percent of on-chain activity in…

Loose Thoughts

I have a few loose thoughts swimming in my head. Each of them is probably a blog post unto itself, but I’m putting them here so they don’t keep rattling around and escape my brain through the ears. --- Thought One: Attention Reality is far richer than what our feeble brains can comprehend. Even paying momentary…

Prompting people

One thing I find fascinating about LLMs is that they reveal how much of the quality of our relationships comes down to our capacity to be open and prompt others in a good way. Here we have, for the first time, millions of people having conversations with the precise same entity (Claude, ChatGPT), and they are having wildly different experiences—some hate it, find it stupid and boring, others get it to say and do fantastic…

I wouldn't want to be a young graduate right now

- Graduate unemployment is close to 40% for young people aged 15 to 25, and 20% for those aged 25 to 29. - Between 2004-05 and 2023, India added roughly 5 million graduates to the labour force each year. Only about 2.8 million found employment. - Only 7% of young male graduates secure permanent salaried work within a year of being unemployed.

For fuck's sake, fuck around

Here I make the case for why you should fuck around more and find out.

Everything blended, nothing understood

Post type: In-the-moment reflection Epistemic status: Not very sure. I'm thinking this through out loud. This is more of a placeholder for future thought than a finished argument — something to return to with more reading, more perspectives, and more time. Treat it accordingly. How this was written: I dictated the…

The infrastructure to dream

I recently got to meet Vasanth, Ashok, and Shishir from Mundhe Banni (ಮುಂದೆ ಬನ್ನಿ). Such a wonderful name. In Kannada, Mundhe Banni means "come forward." What these folks are trying to do is support entrepreneurs who come from small towns and villages, places where there is no real support system for people who want…

Everybody should have a blog

Writing is easily one of the best forcing functions for learning about new things, thinking through them, and sharing your perspective with other people. And there’s a reason it’s a forcing function: the moment you start typing, your half-formed opinions tend to crumble. All the blind spots in your own thinking become immediately evident. You can have the most amazing take on something, and the act of writing it out will…

The profound pleasures of simple things

In a sentiment evocative of Kurt Vonnegut’s short poem about the secret of happiness and of Viktor Frankl’s hard-earned conviction that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” Berry adds: > In these times one contemplates it with the same sense of hope with which one contemplates the sunrise or the coming of spring: the…

Writing advice from Ernest Hemingway

He then returns to the psychological payoff of this trying practice: > Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to…

Use the damn tools

Good advice. This is a major regime change, you can do things in one evening now, that would take months before. I agree with the notion — even if nobody knows at this point where this goes — that it makes a lot of sense to invest a lot in knowing how to use these tools. Then the biggest bang for the buck will be conceptual ideas, posing useful question, the returns on investing in technicalities, and very specialized…

The tyranny of weak links

A good summary of some recent research papers and articles on AI by Andrew McAfee.

Externalizing the cost of war

Iranian strikes have rendered two Amazon Web Services availability zones “hard down” in Dubai and Bahrain and the company expects them to be “unavailable for an extended period,” according to internal Amazon communication reviewed by Big Technology. Within Amazon Web Services, the strikes have rendered so much damage that employees have been advised to deprioritize both regions.

Code is cheap

2. Mid-career engineers are the most vulnerable—not juniors, not seniors. AI amplifies experienced engineers by letting them leverage decades of pattern recognition. It also dramatically helps new engineers onboard. Cloudflare and Shopify each hired a thousand interns because AI cut ramp-up time from a month to a week. But mid-career engineers who haven’t accumulated deep expertise and have already captured the beginner boost…

Alexis de Tocqueville on despotism

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of…

AI diffusion can't and won't be rapid

History shows that the process almost always takes longer than the inventors expect. Legal and regulatory hurdles slow things down. Companies have to retrain workers or hire new ones. Corporate leaders have to develop new processes and overcome resistance from reluctant managers and cautious information technology departments. “These conversations have been, in my opinion, overly focused on what the technology can do,” said…

Google Gemini 3 API Is better than I expected

Gemini’s web chat app is unusable and, to be honest, despite all the hype and hoopla, it kind of sucks. But surprisingly, my experience using their APIs has been really, really good, even compared to the likes of Claude and OpenAI in a lot of cases. For a lot of these high-volume tasks, I’ve been heavily using Gemini…

Feeling god up

To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of…

The pain of living with pain

The first time this happened, I jumped out of bed and ran to get an ice pack from the freezer. I pressed the ice pack to my face and—surprise!—this just made the pain even worse. I’m fortunate that the fire only lasted around sixty seconds, but if I tried to go back to sleep, it could happen again a few minutes later. My nights now became perilous. I found that the only way to sleep without risk was to remain absolutely…

Revenge of the real

The second lesson is that we are in an age when those “hard industries” matter. Yes, Big Tech stocks have soared in recent years amid excitement about AI. But the Iran war shows that countries are very vulnerable if they lack industrial processes, however old-fashioned. “The old economy begins to take its revenge,” Jeff Currie, analyst at the US private capital group Carlyle, recently noted. “You can’t print molecules,” even…

The internet gets shittier and shittier

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response.…

All the advice you need in life. Blake's Proverbs of Hell

Proverbs of Hell From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — William Blake (Project Gutenberg) In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plough. Dip him in the river who loves…

Violent spectacles

The attempt to enforce American primacy by military means led to catastrophe in Helmand and Fallujah, just as Wall Street imploded at home. What has emerged from that failure is something more dangerous than either the Cold War order or the unipolar moment. The US may still be hegemonic in Europe, where obedient satraps like Merz and von der Layen genuflect to Washington, but for the rest of the world, America has stopped…

Evaluating the success of China's solar industrial policy

China’s solar success gives hope for industrial policy, but it cannot necessarily be replicated in all sectors. Part of the success is likely because solar is a relatively young, high-tech industry, with more opportunities for learning than a more mature industry such as shipbuilding (Kalouptsidi 2018). These results tell us that China's solar subsidies worked for Chinese citizens. What they did for the world remains an open…

Large language models (LLMs) are index funds

In a sense, LLMs are like an index with a lag. Assuming that these models are constantly trained, the “intelligence” of LLMs basically represents the average internet of the internet from a (slightly) prior point in time. And this lag is super useful in not making it a zero sum game. As long as people use LLMs cleverly, the average quality of “intelligence” or “writing quality” can go up over time. Basically, if you consider…

Parody is now reality

Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin — a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar — are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how…

Chesterton fences everywhere

Readers might recall GK Chesterton's famous fence, a warning against the destruction of existing systems without first understanding their purpose: There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more…

An AI reading companion

A simple app to read eBooks with an AI reading companion by the side.

Normie AGI is here

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) for normal people is here.

The world needs a ginormous amount of copper

“How much copper are we using? We’re consuming 30 million tonnes of copper a year, only 4 million tonnes of which is recycled. That means to maintain 3% GDP growth…..now listen carefully, with no electrification…this is with burning oil and gas. To maintain global 3% GDP growth, we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we mined in the last 10,000 years (combined). In the next 18 years, I’ve got to…

Electric vehicles are reducing pollution

For the analysis, the researchers divided California into 1,692 neighborhoods, using a geographic unit similar to zip codes. They obtained publicly available data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles on the number of ZEVs registered in each neighborhood. ZEVs include full-battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell cars, but not heavier duty vehicles like delivery trucks and semi trucks. Next, the research…

A short intro to Baruch Spinoza's philosophy

Baruch Spinoza: The Philosopher Who Saw God in Everything Baruch Spinoza stands as one of the most radical and influential philosophers in Western history, yet his ideas remain surprisingly relevant to modern concerns about meaning, freedom, and our place in the universe. Born in 1632 in Amsterdam to Portuguese Jewish refugees, Spinoza would eventually be excommunicated from his community for heretical views—only to produce a…

The fault in our precious metals

The way precious metals like gold, silver, palladium etc are trading is unreal. I have small gold and silver positions and the I haven't seen things move the way they have in the last 3-4 since COVID. Robin Brooks thinks precious metals are rising because of fears of debasement.

We are living in wild times

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

You don't know much

The more deeply I read, the less I have to say. It's funny how that works. I notice that my own thoughts, my own experiences, even my own relationships aren't as uniquely interesting as I want them to be. I still value the life I've built, but I recognize how much more it could be. By reading deeply, I realize how much more interesting I could be. That's worth passing on.

On AI regulations

To read.

The Bullshit job apocalypse

That’s because humans didn’t just sit on their hands; rather, entirely new kinds of work were created, which were valued dramatically higher. Much of this was in factories, and then, over the last century, there was the rise of office work. All of that could very well be replaced by AI, but the point is that the history of humans is the continual creation of new jobs to be done — jobs that couldn’t have been conceived of…

Small tyrannies

A couple of days ago, this phrase popped into my head: "small tyrannies." I was trying to name this idea, the tyranny of small things. I can't remember where I first came across it. I vaguely recall reading something along these lines in a Substack post. But anyway, it came up in a conversation with a friend. We were…

Best of times and worst of times for cognitive peasants

the timeline is full of people using Claude Code to generate ads, recover corrupted video, make landing pages, manage business texts… the narrow view of coding agents is that they primarily decrease the cost of software development the ambitious view is that almost any problem/solution can be expressed in software and this capability is upstream of all knowledge work

If you can describe it, you can solve it

The timeline is full of people using Claude Code to generate ads, recover corrupted video, make landing pages, manage business texts… The narrow view of coding agents is that they primarily decrease the cost of software development. The ambitious view is that almost any problem/solution can be expressed in software and this capability is upstream of all knowledge work.

All habits are hard work

We love saying that bad habits are easier to build than good ones. But I think that's wrong. Here's what made me realize it: I saw a man rolling his own tobacco outside a filter coffee stand. Completely absorbed in his work. Fully focused. The world around him didn't exist. He was practicing a craft. And this wasn't…

Code is now content

For most of its history, software has been closer to craft than manufacture: costly, slow, and dominated by the need for skills and experience. AI coding is changing that, by making available paths of production which are cheaper, faster, and increasingly disconnected from the expertise of humans.

AI and the compression of everything

This reflection was sparked by this tweet from Peter Steinberger, whom you should absolutely follow on Twitter and read on his blog. I came across his account recently and started reading his writing. For an amateur web coder, his blog is surprisingly rich with practical, thoughtful tips. I've also been poking around…

Reflections on Scott Belsky’s Predictions

The technology and models that ultimately elevate the craft will get lasting traction in Hollywood, while the prompt-based slop tools will focus more on social and content creator use-cases. Finally, the idea of personalized films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people favor shared experiences. People want to be inspired by craft – and they want a common experience to discuss (or even share, in…

Intellectual bacchanalia

When I created Claude Code as a side project back in September 2024, I had no idea it would grow to be what it is today. It is humbling to see how Claude Code has become a core dev tool for so many engineers, how enthusiastic the community is, and how people are using it for all sorts of things from coding, to devops, to research, to non-technical use cases. This technology is alien and magical, and it makes it so much easier…

Another lament for literature

It was P.B. Shelley who once framed this faith with prophetic clarity: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Literature, to him, was a subversive parliament of feeling — moving hearts, unsettling moral certainties, giving form to what was yet to be imagined. Today, that vision lies blurred. The poet, or novelist, or essayist is no longer a legislator but a content provider. What was once conjuration is now…

Self improving systems are not possible

Infinitely self recursively improving systems are impossible. It's impossible to make a system that can correct all its own mistakes when it is the very thing making the mistake in the first place. How do I know? Evolution hasn't figured it out in millions of years, why would we figure it out in two or two hundred? Your brain is a bunch of crude hacks. Wonderful hacks and amazing hacks but crude nonetheless. When you have to…

Claude Code is awesome, but terribly named

Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent. Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit. I find the potential applications of this trick somewhat dizzying. Just thinking about this with…

AI is overdelivering

tl;dr: AI is overdelivering. 55% of respondents say AI has exceeded their expectations, and almost 70% say it’s improved the quality of their work. More than half of respondents said AI is saving them at least half a day per week on their most important tasks. We’ve never seen a tool deliver a productivity boost like this before. Founders are getting the most out of AI. Half (49%) report that AI saves them over 6 hours per…

A dumb model of AI

Most of AI progress has this flavor: if you have a bit of intellectual curiosity and some time, you can very quickly shock yourself with how amazingly capable modern AI systems are. But you need to have that magic combination of time and curiosity, and otherwise you’re going to consume AI like most people do - as a passive viewer of some unremarkable synthetic slop content, or at best just asking your LLM of choice “how to…

We are a collection of particles but...

From a physicist’s perspective, no complex system is weirder or more challenging than life. For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a…

Preserving India's artistic heritage

t the end of the 1980s, a young woman purchased a slightly damaged print by the 19th century painter and printmaker Raja Ravi Varma for Rs 500. “I remember saying ‘this is a very beautiful image’,” she recalled later. “I’d never seen anything like it... I felt like looking out for more.” Given Ravi Varma’s status as a pioneer of mass produced imagery in India, it was a fitting introduction. In the following decades,…

Be human

Humans should remain smarter than their refrigerators. It is insane that we are living in a time in which people are trying to make refrigerators smarter, but are satisfied to dumb down themselves and those around them. All the evidence suggests that AI is bad for your brain. If you use it as a salve for social and romantic frustration, it also makes it harder for you to connect with others and less resilient in the face of…

LLMs as your reading partner

One area where I've found large language models to be remarkably useful is while reading, especially when I'm reading difficult, dense, or intellectually demanding books. Take Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, for example. It's an extraordinarily rich book, but also incredibly dense and abstruse. This was well…

Poor countries are not catching up with rich countries

The original story of divergence then convergence remains the same, despite the scope for the revised data to alter results. For the three decades leading up to the empirical literature on economic growth, the gap between developed and developing nations expanded. That all started to change around the fall of the Berlin wall, and poor countries went from lagging behind richer ones to maintaining pace with and then ultimately…

Ads everywhere

Here’s what I think will happen in 2026: AI platforms will start offering paid placement within conversations where clear purchase intent signals are evident. The ads will be clearly labeled as sponsored, and they will likely tie into direct purchase opportunities. Eventually, ads will also appear embedded in other types of interactions, such as inspiration (where should I take my family on spring break?) and research (what…

We're are all unoriginal

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron: We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present…

Monkeys are really good at predicting electoral winners

Why do monkeys look for longer at losers than winners? Jiang and team argue that it’s because winners tend to be more facially masculine, and monkeys have a built-in tendency to avoid staring too long at masculine faces. In monkey communities, sustained eye contact represents a direct monkey challenge. Monkeys therefore limit the time they spend looking at dominant or masculine individuals, to avoid incurring their wrath.1…

How to read more

I read somewhere that authors are voracious readers. I would imagine so. When I read, I also feel the urge to create something of my own. Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a writer who doesn’t read. Come to think of it, reading and writing are one and the same. Off the top of my head, I can already think of three similarities. First, unlike TV or video games, you don’t get instant gratification. That’s why you…

Virtue cannot be known without knowing vice

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the…

Learn some philosophy

It might sound banal but I'm still amazed at how much good content is available for free on YouTube. Got example, here's a list of curated channels about philosophy.

How much knowledge has been lost

King Ecbert: Tell me honestly: What do you think of these works? Athelstan: I find them indescribably beautiful. King Ecbert: But they are clearly pagan! \[laughs\] King Ecbert: You are only a monk, Athelstan, and yet, somehow, I begin to trust you. I feel you... You are a kindred spirit. King Ecbert: Who? Who painted these images? What race of man was ever so glorious that they filled our world with such, as you say,…

Charlie Munger on dealing with setbacks in life

Here is a summary of the video based on the transcript. Video: How Charlie Munger Survive Life’s Hardest Moments... | Final Interview with CNBC 2023 Channel: YAPSS This video features a segment from Charlie Munger’s final interview with CNBC, where he discusses resilience, personal tragedy, and the progress of civilization. \ \[00:00\] Marriage and the Iron Rule of Life The interview begins with Munger reflecting on his…

The future of global trade

Both economists agree that growth is still possible, but the age of “hyperglobalisation” – with its extraordinary convergence of openness, technology, and trust – is unlikely to return. > “Growth miracles seem less likely because two of the key mechanisms – access to big, lucrative markets and willingness to share technology across borders – no longer seem to be here.” Goldberg As global trade enters a new, more fragmented…

Oral traditions in India

It would be wrong to apply Western theories of folk literature to India’s oral traditions, Kumar cautions readers. Local beliefs and worldviews seep into the songs and tales that evolve in any particular community. Moreover, in the telling of the tales and in the mode of singing as well, the local forms and styles inevitably exert an influence. This is why alien norms and paradigms cannot be imposed on indigenous modes of…

Ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires?

Nov. 13, 1851. To Fair Haven Hill. A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety; such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart, a day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. Now is the time to cut timber for yokes and ox-bows, leaving the tough bark on, yokes for your own neck,…

Take big shots

This thread by Simon is spot on. Most advice is dumb—it’s too general to be useful—and I always tell my students I have no advice to give unless it’s very specific (eg run this analysis). But “live over your skis” is good advice. It means aim for more than what you think you can achieve.

How many jobs can AI kill

I'm confident that AI is not going to wipe out anywhere close to 25M jobs on net over the next decade. If technological shocks caused net, long-run displacement, employment in the US would be 0. Instead, it's among its highest peacetime age-adjusted levels. But... 1/2 ...AI could absolutely drive gross displacement; think of automobiles displacing horse-related jobs even as they created new types of auto manufacturing &…

AGI will be business as usual?

in a post-AGI world, people will simply get used to the fact that computers can solve cognitive problems quickly, and beat us in any cognitive domain, just like we're used to computers multiplying large numbers quickly now, or kicking our asses in chess and go. software and math will lose all their scarcity. "pls create a MMORPG that is like Zelda: Breath of the Wild but with Pokémon instead, let me fly around the world as a…

Did we get evolution wrong?

Denis Noble and Richard Dawkins represent fundamentally opposing perspectives on how evolution works, centering on what drives evolutionary change and how biological information flows. \\The Core Disagreement: Gene-Centrism vs. Systems Biology\\ Dawkins champions the "gene's eye view" - evolution is fundamentally about genes competing for survival, with organisms as "survival machines" built by genes to propagate themselves.…

AI as a research partner

Timothy Gowers on using AI: 🧵 Full thread: https://x.com/wtgowers/status/1984340182351634571 I crossed an interesting threshold yesterday — one I suspect many mathematicians are now crossing. In the middle of trying to prove a result, I found a statement that looked true and would be useful if it were. Instead of proving it myself, I asked GPT-5, and in 20 seconds it produced a proof using a lemma I hadn’t heard of. I’m…

The guy who financed Johannes Gutenberg

Johann Fust (c. 1400–1466) was a pioneering 15th-century German printer, merchant, and financier who played a crucial, though controversial, role in the history of printing in Europe. He is most famous for his association with Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable-type printing press. Here are the key points about his life and work: ### 1\. The Financial Backer of Gutenberg Fust was a wealthy merchant and…

AI blind spot

I don't happen to believe AI is going to take away all of the jobs. But it is possibly a blindspot-generating issue that the people studying AI's impacts mostly love their jobs

Invention of modernity

Some months later, I joined a book club. Run by Venkatesh Rao, this year’s edition focuses on a simple idea that goes a long way: Maybe grand historical paradigms like modernity and postmodernity are not suddenly emerging monoliths. Instead we might see them as “history machines” consisting of components that developed on their own for a long time, before all of a sudden, things fall into place together, causing shock and…

Can AI eliminate information advantages

The extent to which AI truly eliminates rip-off markets depends on two things. First, consumers need to know how to use AI properly. Mindlessly repeating advice from ChatGPT is less effective than using the bot as a learning tool that allows a consumer to negotiate more credibly. In this regard, the results of a trial by Jan Biermann, then of the University of Hamburg, John Horton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…

Institutional impact of AI

A lot of people are likening the advent of AI to moveable type. The printing press brought about the conditions for the Reformation, therefore significant institutional change is coming with AI. But when you look at how print changed cultures other than Europe, the picture gets muddied. In China, the "bureaucratic authority absorbed the technological impacts of printing to enforce cultural and social coherence." Rather than…

Economic impact of AI

1. There is no standard definition of machine intelligence. There have been many attempts to give a definition or a metric of machine intelligence but most have been unsatisfactory. The lack of a common language makes work in this field difficult, but it’s also a big opportunity. 2. There is no standard model of AI’s economic impact. Economists have been using a wide range of assumptions to model AI’s impact, there is no…

The value of asking right questions

When the cost of getting answers drops to zero, the value of asking the right questions compounds exponentially.

Don't want to die? Drink coffee

But these are not the only risks associated with drinking coffee. Many lace their cup with additives like milk, sugar, cream and syrup, chronic overconsumption of which can also cause harm. A study of over 46,000 adults published in the Journal of Nutrition in May is suggestive. The results showed that participants who drank between one and three cups of coffee per day were roughly 15 percent less likely to die during the…

AI-powered invoice fraud

The launch of new image-generation models by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google in recent months has sparked an influx of AI-generated receipts submitted internally within companies, according to leading expense software platforms. Software provider AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for about 14 per cent of fraudulent documents submitted in September, compared with none last year. Fintech group Ramp said its new…

The value of education in the shadows of AI

The Question We Can No Longer Dodge If AI can already produce an A– college essay in 30 seconds — on demand, at scale — then what exactly is college for? Is it certification? Content delivery? A rite of passage? Social sorting? Because if a machine can now flawlessly mimic the outputs we’ve long treated as evidence of learning, then the value of higher education can no longer rest on product. It must rest on the formation of…

Brian Eno on being pretentious

Brian Eno on being pretentious: Pretension is the dismissive name given to people’s attempts to be something other than what they ‘really are’…In the arts, the word ‘pretentious’ has a special meaning: the attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I’m very happy to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as ‘pretentious’ – I’m happy to have made claims on…

On having a philosophy of money

A few thoughts on people doing dumb shit with money.

AI is kicking your butt; just accept it

During the Q and A after his talk, Cowen said that LLMs are already “kicking our butt” at many things, including poetry. In fact, Cowen insisted, LLMs already write poems that are as good as the median poem by Chilean Nobel Prize-winner, Pablo Neruda. “Now, ex post, you can read one, read the other, and say, oh, only the real Neruda poem is meaningful to me because he’s a flesh and blood human, or was one. Like, fine. But ……

Fun is a skill

Everyone agrees that fun is good. Yet I’m sure we can all agree that most people do not seem to be having fun the majority of the time. This is because having fun, or at least having a balanced fun portfolio, is a skill. Most people tend to default to easy dopamine: scrolling Tiktok, online shopping, playing video games. Because they associate fun with guilt and a lack of productivity, they split their lives into two:…

Rousseau on reflection and reason

A century later Jean-Jacques Rousseau urged a different approach, one of trust in feelings and intuition, and of looking to the inner self for answers: “All the evil I ever did in my life was the result of reflection,” he wrote. “And the little good I have been able to do was the result of impulse.”

Here come the robots

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to…

The prerequisites for scientific progress

Mokyr has long argued that Europe’s Republic of Letters encouraged broad scientific and technological innovation by providing a setting where new ideas could be evaluated and disseminated. For him, Europe occupied the ideal midpoint between political fragmentation and cultural unity: enough polycentrism to prevent the suppression of ideas by heavy-handed rulers, but enough common ground to sustain serious dialogue and a deep…

On ritual

Han Byung-Chul says that ritual is repetition without purpose, a way of founding community through shared uselessness. Performance seeks applause; ritual seeks duration. In the performance culture of the West, even grief must be productive, posted, monetised. In the ritual culture of the East, continuity is its own defence: the temple rebuilt, the porcelain recast, the festival repeated until memory becomes weather. Between…

Naked without values

This deterioration in the practice of politics can be attributed to many causes. One of the most important may be found in the deterioration in how economics is practiced. Economics is often described as a scientific discipline, which studies “if-then” propositions without reference to morals and values. But scientific findings do affect our values and normative judgments, and claims of “scientific objectivity” can be used to…

China is playing long games

Beijing also is building a national innovation system — linking academia, industry and defense — designed to bolster China’s military and technological strength. In recent years, dozens of China’s top 60 universities have established an expanding array of labs and research centers dedicated to pushing forward technologies with dual civilian and military uses, according to our research. Some of these initiatives were jointly…

On hope and despair

There are many reasons to be a Doomer, to be blackpilled, to decide that nothing matters or, even worse, that things do matter but that there is nothing to be done about it. On top of that, it is cool to be a Doomer. You feel like you are above it all. You understand the magnitude of the world’s problems, and so you can rest assured that you are correct in your assessment that we are all doomed. Climate change,…

On billionaires and the ultra-wealthy

The Hollow King, wired for insatiability, cannot pause. Acceleration itself has become a drug. Sufficiency is inconceivable. Each breakthrough is only a threshold toward the next. Competition becomes an arms race: if I don’t do it, someone else will. This logic justifies dragging the entire species into irreversible experiments. And all of it is underwritten by a messianic ego, the conviction that they alone were chosen to…

Tools for thinking

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (sometimes shortened to ECREE),\[1\] also known as the Sagan standard, is an aphorism popularized by science communicator Carl Sagan. He used the phrase in his 1979 book Broca's Brain and the 1980 television program Cosmos. It has been described as fundamental to the scientific method and is regarded as encapsulating the basic principles of scientific skepticism. The…

Where death is cheaper than life itself

Dying from adulterated or fake drugs is quite common in India. Only when you have a high number of cases from a single cluster does it catch the attention of the media or of the authorities. Otherwise, it is just another statistic of dying unnecessarily in India. Human life is cheap in India. Almost 70 years ago, the famous poet Sahir Ludhianvi wrote this about life in India: यहाँ इक खिलौना है इंसाँ की हस्ती ये बस्ती है…

A beautiful line from Camus

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Henry Oliver on how to have good taste

When we prioritise our own reaction to art, we assume that those reactions are about the art. But if you are misreading a piece of writing, without knowing it, your feelings will be more to do with you than with the writing, and thus not a response to the writing at all. When we misunderstand what we read, our feelings make us pay more attention to what is familiar in the writing than to what is unfamiliar. Thus believing…

On pursuing things

You’re more likely to get what you vaguely and subconsciously want than things you try to pursue with explicit targeting and pumped-up motivation. Focus inevitably wavers. Motivation eventually slumps. But subconscious, barely acknowledged dispositions and tendencies tend to drive steady compounding effort over years, through peaks and troughs, and automatically account for energy constraints and take advantage of defocused…

On nostalgia

Nostalgia has long been progressivism’s favourite straw man. To dismiss something as “just nostalgic” is to pass sentence without hearing the case. Architects do it when they wave away Neoclassical or Gothic revivals as unserious. Politicians do it when they cast anyone who remembers “the good old days” as fearful, backward, or selfish. And to be fair, there is a shallow kind of nostalgia abroad on the Right—a yearning for…

C.S. Lewis on reading old books

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done…

Zero Sum thinking is ruining the world

The deepest divide in today's world, whether in economics, politics, investing, or even religion, seems to come down to those who view society as a zero-sum game and those who believe in shared growth. This is increasingly showing up everywhere, from relatively benign issues like tariffs and tax policy to more consequential debates over social rights and aid (and even territorial ambitions). Decisions being made seem shaped…

How Americans use AI and what they think about it

Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives. Far larger shares say AI will erode than improve people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships. At the same time, a majority is open to letting AI assist them with day-to-day tasks and activities. Most Americans don’t support AI…

We are borrowed stardust

I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is…

A hopeful view of large language models (LLM)

Yet a paper posted on February 10 (opens a new tab) left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo (opens a new tab), just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. “We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar…

Social media is a funhouse mirror

Social media is destroying our civilization. Foreign trolls and malignant attention-seekers are ragebaiting us into extremism. We need a Great Firewall.

The solar revolution

Hot take: Solar “scaling laws” will ultimately prove more impactful on humanity than the AI version

How fiber optic cables work

in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of…

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

So, I was asked to come and explain AI again at SuperAI. I always think a good place to start if we want to understand this is to ask, "Well, what is it that we mean when we say AI?" This is a really important observation from 1970 from Larry Tesler, who was an AI scientist. He said, "AI is whatever machines can't do yet, because once it works, we say, 'Well, that's not AI anymore. That's just software.'" AI is the stuff that…

Vibe Physics? Not Yet

So, my verdict is: GPT top. Then there's a big gap. Then there's Grok, followed by Gemini 2.5, which might well be right that it's impossible. Gemini DeepThink, which really isn't worth the money, and at the very bottom, there is Claude. I think this illustrates what the current models are good for and what not. What they are good at: they're really good now at digging up related work and explaining it, which is good for…

The weight of telling stories

Mo Amer: But no, if there is a scenario, if there's a world that would take place, then sure, we would explore that, considering that the show ends on October 6th. Like I very deliberately ended it that way at Tel Aviv airport when the camera pans over, whether people catch it or not. It ends in that way. But I do feel like it's important to, you know, be a part of the solution rather than be a part of the problem. I think…

On AI-assisted writing

AI-assisted writing allows you to have your cake and eat it too. The pleasure of the creative process, and the pleasure of reading. That’s in fact a test of good slop — do you feel like reading it? My understanding of what’s going on here is in my other AI-assisted-essay-about-AI from last week, about LLMs being similar to index funds for language. This essay could be considered my first modest AI-assisted viral hit. A lot of…

All knowledge is my province

Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded…

The cost of collective apathy

That led me to the following question. I avoided unpleasant conversations with people who absolutely did not care nor know anything about world affairs, and I had uncomfortable discussions with those who cared; what was better? For me personally, it was better to avoid unpleasant topics. But was it good for the world—and was it even pleasing to myself who from Titoist Yugoslavia inherited a huge interest in world affairs—to…

Welcome to the age of weaponized interdependence

There is a common trope in the literature on globalization that suggests that greater economic exchange has fragmented and decentralized power relations. We, in contrast, argue that these economic interactions generate new structural conditions of power. Complex interdependence, like many other complex systems, may generate enduring power asymmetries. This observation allows us to bring the literature on security, which has…

The world won't end with a bang but with a shrug of indifference

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments. While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem…

The death of silence and the loss of contemplative spaces

An essay about how the loss of contemplative space is robbing us of our humanity.

Universities in the age of AI

So I am proposing something even more radical: unbundle general education from universities entirely. State legislatures: this is for you. Contract with AI firms to handle standardized content delivery for the general education content you’re mandating. Do it at the high school level, better yet. Let universities focus exclusively on educating students directly, with mentorship and community. The “magic dust” of a college…