Friday Fodder #12
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Timely
Jensen Huang Interview - This is a must watch. Jensen walks through the current and future of AI, the moat and vertical that makes up NVDA 0.00%↑ and the way he thinks about the architectures, the problems, and the surface of future products. Jam-packed with stuff to learn. “Intelligence is the single most valuable commodity the world's ever known.”
Claude Computer Use - Apparently Anthropic has moved from super safety conscious to “sure, give an LLM control of your computer, what could go wrong?!” The idea of tuning a model on (effectively) screen capture and movement is genius. Vision is 90% of most of our executive sensing, so it makes sense that this feels so agentic.
Welcome to “Uptober” - The next 3-6 months are going to be very interesting in the crypto world. $BTC is sitting within a few % of all-time highs and gazillions are consistently flowing into the Bitcoin ETFs. This is a short primer on the status of the asset from someone who isn’t really a crypto-bro, just to get started.
Memento Mori - “When I was young, I assumed I would eventually do everything I wanted to do.” I still feel like this. Nothing is guaranteed. Do it now.
Timeless
Who Had The Most Kids In History - In the world of weird Wikipedia pages, this one is fun. An interesting take on population bottlenecks, luck, and what it means for us all to be a part of the same species.
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility - Seeing Like A State is a tough book to read. It’s definitely not fun. But it’s a transformational work, one that changes the way you think about a lot of the systems around you. Central to the book is the idea of legibility: that a system wants to flatten agents into controllable and understandable units. This is an intro to legibility and some of its effects. It’s an idea, much like mimesis, that you can’t help but start to see everywhere.
Why Everything Is Becoming A Game - What does the Unabomber have to do with BF Skinner? Turns out, quite a lot. This is a terrifying question: “When God is dead, and nations are atomized, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?”
Beware Value Capture - We all know that modern online systems change our behaviors and make us care about things like hearts and retweets. Trung talks about the how, leveraging academic papers, more references to legibility, and incentives. We all live in the systems built around us, is it helpful to feel the walls around you?
Books
Seeing Like A State by James Scott - Since we’ve mentioned legibility a few times, let’s talk about the book. Scott (he died a couple months ago) gives example after example of how government or states or kings have tried to better understand and metric their citizens. By and large, all of these systems have failed or had deleterious and unintended consequences. Scott is an anthropologist first, and so the examples span cultures and continents, but this is also one of the best academic cases against socialism specifically.
Tweets
The old World’s Largest Prime had a book, so you could bask in 420 pages of indivisible goodness. The new biggest known prime is almost twice as long.
Cheers!