Fodder #48
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
It’s official, we’ve moved to a new name. Furious Opposites is in. Brains Are Plastic is now a lowly redirect, relegated to the trash heap corner of the DNS system where worn out dotcoms go to dieretire.
Why the change? As the ideas around here have matured, I’ve realized a lot of the core thesis was less about the malleability or changeability of humans. It’s more about retaining a philosophy of Both/And, of Dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), of Nassim Taleb’s barbell approach, or — and yes it’s my favorite of these related ideas — Chesterton’s Furious Opposites:
“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.”
There will be more on this soon, I promise.. in the meantime, tell your friends!
In the meantime, Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 We’re 249 years old and still going strong. Next year is going to be big. It’s going to be YUUUUGE. How huge? Think Colosseum. Think Gladiators. Yes, we’re going to have a UFC fight on the White House lawn apparently. That tells you where we are in the arc of history I guess. There will be lots of writing. But that’s next year. 250 is the Sestercentennial, or even better, the fancier Semiquincentennial. It gets all the news, but as anyone married will tell you, each year is a milestone. Your 9th anniversary is just as great as your 10th even if the traditional gift is pottery versus, err, tin. So celebrate 249 too! It’s the Novemquadragintaducentennial! Enjoy the fireworks!
There was big solar system news this week. The third ever interstellar object was identified traversing inside of Jupiter’s orbit. 3l/ATLAS or, for those who know it better, A11pI3Z, is trucking along at 66 km per second and is expected to actually come inside Mars’s orbit. This is not as cool as Oumuamua, but still cool.
Closer to home, all those rumors about Meta signing bonuses were true. We have a roster now and it’s stacked. Nat Friedman has reported to work. So has Alex Wang. I have to believe there’s a Zuck/Sama standoff going on reminiscent of the killer recruiting email Steve Jobs sent to Adobe.
And all the talk is about Superintelligence. AGI is so 2024. We’ve moved on. Or we already have it. It’s here, you just didn’t realize it. Neither does Dwarkesh apparently. But that’s what Meta is focused on now. Superintelligence. An AGIbilliondollars isn’t cool anymore, you know what’s cool? An ASItrilliondollars. Who will get there first: the new Meta wunderteam, or Ilya?
Tech had another moment this week, and discovered Soham Parekh, who apparently had up to 15 simultaneous remote work jobs at once. The memes have been good. The Cluely CEO even interviewed him and should probably hire him, actually.
And the Big Beautiful Bill was signed just in time for Trump to get a PRO-AMERICA (All Caps of course) bill signing ceremony right on July 4th. Funny how that works. Elon thinks the bill is big but not beautiful. Apparently more money will be spent on Republican primaries next year. And maybe Elon will start a new political party? Also maybe he’ll learn the full “Vox populi, vox dei” quote, which suggests something quite different than his version.
There were some wild last minute Congressional machinations. We learned what a Senate Parliamentarian is. Murkowski still likes Alaska. Ted Cruz inserted an AI Moratorium Moratorium that states couldn’t produce AI regulation for 10 years. Then it was stripped. Biden responded with language written by an AIby his assistant using AI.
Markets are bumping along excitedly, even if Zohran doesn’t like billionaires. Inflation is down. FOMC meetings are coming. OBBB tax cuts are settled. And July has a record of being green. Bitcoin is chugging along too, right below the ATH, steadily consolidating. Second half of the year fireworks are expected.
And yet, the dollar is also down in value 10% this year. What will tariffs do to buying power when they take effect? What does the BTC price mean if the dollar is trending down too? Expect breakouts. Own assets. Diamond hands.
What else? Google releases a super small, super good model. Thomas Sowell turned 95. X has a new Head of Product and he is the most Gen Z of Gen Z startup founders, who shitposted his way to the job, self-described. He got right to work. The first trailer for Project Hail Mary was released and it has me excited for a movie for the first time in forever. Cursor releases 1.2 and it looks awesome. Peter Thiel is asked if he’s the Anti-Christ, and it turns out to kind of be a valid question.
Now on to the reading!
Timely
In My Zombie Era - It’s hard to encapsulate Sam Kriss. His writing is wildly opinionated and sometimes a mess, but when it hits, it really hits. This hits. Using zombie movies as a retelling for what has gone wrong in our post-modernity modernity, he shows that attention isn’t actually the problem.. it’s something else.
Why I Don’t Think AGI Is Right Around The Corner - Dwarkesh takes a look at the idea of continual learning and the things humans do well and why there will still be room for us for awhile.
Why Every Modern Woman Is Secretly Bored - Social media sucks. Dating sucks. Safety is boring. Is this completely over the top? Yes of course. But that’s why it works. “Go do something dangerous, unapologetic, and so vividly alive it makes you unrecognizable to yourself.”
My summer project: using AI to help every kid achieve today's top 10% academic results - Austin Scholar is a freshman in college and has a very modern, top 1% performer outlook on her own schooling and where we should take education for everyone.
Timeless
Is It OK For Your Kids To Rot All Summer? - Leave it to the NYT to repurpose some Gen Z Language Rot— err, slang and use it to describe what was very normal up until very recently. Yes, it’s ok for kids to chill out and not do much during the summer. This is a part of what being a kid is all about.
How Long Contexts Fail - This is a fairly tactical article with a great breakdown of different problem types. But it’s a reminder that even in a world of AI, scaling up brings a different set of problems and different solutions. Know what level you’re operating at.
Expertise As Software - A brief but brilliant look at how our taste and experience is getting wrapped directly into software through prompts and other tools.
The Road From Serfdom - A look at how institutions change, how long it takes, and what it means to enact reform, all through the lens of class hierarchies in Russia.
Books
Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell - Sowell is a fascinating character, Milton Friedman-esque but focused on culture instead of economics. Sowell focuses on problems of culture and explains such things as how poor whites and blacks from the South inherited the cracker culture of the North Britons and Scots. This is a compilation of essays that all get seared into your brain and leave you wondering, why did I never think of things like this before?
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll
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The world is amazing. Cheers!