Fodder #46
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Greetings from Vermont! It is very green and very mountainous, so the state has earned its nickname. But the world does not stop.
“Carthago delenda est.” This seems to be the question that fractures MAGA. Should we bomb Fordow with the Israelis or not? Are the Ayatollahs finished in Iran? Tulsi releases a docu-commercial on Hiroshima. Tucker says things and Trump doesn’t like it. Tucker was snarky with Ted Cruz and it was great. Love it or hate it, MAGA is such a popular slogan that they’re trying to pull it away from the original to get some energy. But it just won’t work. Meanwhile, there was a military parade in DC for the Trump’s birthday250th Anniversary of the Army, and bigger parades on every street corner everywhere.
The reason for the fracture is Israel annihilating the military of Iran. The only thing left is Fordow. The rest of the nuclear facilities are gone. The ballistic missile sites are gone, some from a secret drone base inside Iran. Air superiority is complete. Even their state-run broadcast was hit while they were live. Were we involved or not? Either way, Mossad is a beast. Trump’s call is unconditional surrender and the Ayatollah is tweeting from his bunker. It’s either WW3 or peace for the Persian people.
Meta buys teams up with Scale.ai to keep pushing open source AI, and Alex Wang will be leading it from the Meta side, which makes this one of the larger acqui-hires ever. But they’re also giving out hundred million dollar signing bonuses for OpenAI hires. And all this crazy hiring makes me highly skeptical of AGI. If it’s so close, why do we need such awesome humans?
The government gets an OpenAI contract. Claude talks multi-agent architecture. Saylor keeps buying Bitcoin and people keep saying he’s buying the top. Stablecoins get Congressional approval. Powell keeps rates the same and the markets can’t decide what’s happening. SpaceX blows up a Starship. All the passwords are leaked.
Now on to the reading!
Timely
The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman is back for another episode of optimistic superintelligence prognostications and, as always, it’s very worth a read. Somehow what he predicts sounds so ridiculous in part because all of a sudden it seems like it might be possible, even if the timeframes are way off.
Rewriting the Californian Ideology - A thinkpiece that seems to be an honest search for the frameworks and ideas that will propel the tech scene on the right. If Abundance is the newly-codified tech stance of the political left, this is journey through the search space of ideas mostly on the right.
How we built our multi-agent research system - On the other side, Anthropic gives us insight into just how to use agents and what these ecosystems are capable of. The idea of replacing most or all human work still feels foreign, but this is a glimpse into what it looks like. AI is still wildly sample inefficient compared to humans, and so we’re fundamentally tied to compute.
Scrappy - A fun little framework for making all those silly throw-away apps that are useful but aren’t worth more than a little bit of time.
Timeless
The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe - In case you missed it, the Department of State has a Substack now. While Israel-Iran has overtaken Ukraine-Russia or Taiwan-China on everyones minds, this dictates the need for common ground between the major parts of the traditional West.
On Car Seats as Contraception - One of the wildest examples of regulation producing impact you never expected, it turns out that car seat rules reduce the overall fertility of the country. Kind of mind blowing.
28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing - A delightful compilation of writing advice and thoughts, up to date with the times. “Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.”
If you aren’t using ChatGPT, You’re NGMI! - The world is changing. You need to be learning these tools. WAGMI. Also, we are so early.
Books
The Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty Is Wrong by Mauricio Miller - I tend to have my head in the clouds, which means I don’t pay enough attention to practical problems. Problems like poverty and social welfare systems and immigration. I also assume that political left and right perspectives on the solutions to these problems are fundamentally flawed. Mauricio Miller’s book on poverty and social service demonstrated a vastly different approach to poverty that is frightening in efficiency and devastating to the philosophies of both left and right. He constructed a very successful social service system where the social workers were forbidden to help people and were, in fact, fired if they did. They became simply observers. What happened wass that communities learned how to help themselves and then repeat it over and over. The concept of “positive deviancy” Miller illuminates is beautiful and requires a maturity and trust I’m not sure we’re ready for as a society, but I wish we were.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll
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The world is amazing. Cheers!