This was a quiet week. There were no major geopolitical events. No tech changes or releases. No dramatic confrontations or fund raises.
Psyche!
This week Trump manages to get on board with Ukranian victory. Europe warns Russia not to violate NATO airspace. Lavrov complains about NATO borders and says they mean war. Canada and Australia and England and France and Portugal all declare Palestine a state. Netanyahu delivers remarks at the UN and others walk out.
A sniper at an ICE facility goes for the agents and instead kills two immigrants and then himself. Erika Kirk delivers a remarkable statement in this political environment. Others, maybe not so much. Tim Allen follows Erika’s lead.
Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI. And if you’re not sure, a whole lot of that investment will go towards.. GPUs. Which makes a nice little circle with Oracle. Probably nothing. And of course Sam warns we must do this because otherwise we have to choose between curing cancer and free global education. Not short on ambition or confidence, that.
Apple cancels a show. Jimmy Kimmel is back. YouTube did censoring. Meta releases Vibes. Tylenol is now bad. OpenAI releases Pulse.
On to the reading!
Timely
American Students Are Getting Dumber - The question is why? We’ve reduced the friction in our lives to such a degree.. as Matt says, “you have to do things that are difficult or you don’t get any better.”
Abundant Intelligence - In the spirit of keeping up with what Sama says.. we will keep up with what Sama says, and then decide what he actually means by saying it.
Rage of the Falling Elite - Rob Henderson argues that downward mobility is the lens through which to understand the political machinations of our time.
The Bluesky-ization of the American left - Bluesky is a place lefty people hang out. The kinder, gentler Twitter.. except it’s full of rage and angst. This isn’t a fundamentally left-oriented thing, but it’s current manifestation seems to be.
Timeless
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup - Scott Alexander at his very, very best before people knew who Scott Alexander was. A treatise on the nature of intolerance, virtue, and performance.
The Algorithm Will See You Now - AI is better at radiology than humans, and yet the average salary for a radiologist has skyrocketed. What is the job of a doctor and how do tools help?
The dawn of the post-literate society - As people stop reading, how does society change? Can we still think? Short video is the lingua franca of the internet.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - Names are simple right? You have a first name and a last name. Sometimes a middle. Oh no, no, no, they are not. And this serves as a reminder that the fixed rules of the world you think you see around you are harder to generalize than you think.
Books
More From Less by Andrew McAfee - For the last three hundred years, growing our economy meant using more natural resources, which is bad because there’s a finite amount of those. But over the last several decades, that trend has decoupled and growing the economy now seems to need less resources - sometimes much less. Andrew McAfee describes why economic growth will not continue to be a net negative for the natural world. Buckminster Fuller called this idea ephemeralization way back in the 1930s. It was the idea you can do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” And this idea has mostly proven right, but it’s called dematerialization by the economists.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!