Friday Fodder #29
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Figure did some serious upstaging this week, demonstrating advanced robots with built-in LLMs capable of collaborative problem-solving. They’re so confident with it that they’ve ditched OpenAI and are focused on their own models. Microsoft released a huge advance in quantum computing, but they’re not satisfied with that so they claim it’s “a new state of matter” which might be overstating it just a wee bit. But I like the sound of topological superconductors. XAI released Grok 3 and it sounds pretty good, but not a step change over other models. Measles broke out in west Texas just as RFK Jr. is confirmed as the leader of HHS. The Department of Transportation ended NYC congestion pricing, which was working by the way. Elon and Trump continue their bromance, but Trump still somehow talks more. And among those many, many words are some alternative facts about Ukraine starting the war. Elon is still talking too.. to everyone except his baby mamas. And the whole thing is just getting old. What’s next on the chopping block, that bastion of free speech: CommunityNotes? Lame.
JD Vance gave another speech in Germany that pissed Europe off. Then he picked a fight with an actual, substantive historian and lo—! it wasn’t so easy. There were real points made amidst the ad hominem; it looked like actual honest to goodness public debate, not the nonsense swill we’ve had to sip over the last few years. Meanwhile 60 Minutes backed up Germany for their lack of free speech and let their lawyers explain how insulting someone is against the law, and also that it’s worse online. Xi met with Chinese business leaders to promote private enterprise and Jack Ma was present - looking skinny after his years-long re-education program. BABA 0.00%↑ is up 10% in the last 3 days.
Everything. Everywhere. All at once. What a world this is.
On to the reading!
Timely
We Live Like Royalty And Don’t Know It - Thomas Jefferson was one of my childhood heroes: a genius capable of solving any and every problem. What I never realized as a kid was that he was forced to solve most of those problems because his life was more squalid and poor than I could have imagined. We live like kings today. We don’t know how any of it works. And we don’t realize it.
Why Pubs Matter More Than Ever - An appeal for one of England’s lost institutions that holds the community and collective happiness of Brits in the balance. He quotes Belloc: “...when you have lost your Inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”
Three Observations - Sam Altman remains very focused on AGI. What is perhaps most interesting about this is that Satya just came out and dismissed AGI as a ridiculous side-quest compared to increasing GDP growth. (The entire Satya/Dwarkesh interview is absolutely worth it.) In this debate I trust Satya as a far more honest broker than Altman. But Sam’s writing are still worth reading not because you need to understand where things are going, but rather to keep an eye on what he’s doing and how he’s thinking.
The World's Largest Search Doesn't Want You to Search - Ted Gioia continues to be the best cultural critic around. His starting litany: “Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life. ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody. Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships. Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice—instead peddling products of dubious efficacy. Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.” This is Cory Doctorow’s enshittification but at the level of society.
Bonus: JD Vance’s Fighting Words— Against Me and Ukraine - First things first: Donald Trump said a bunch of jumbled and false things about Ukraine. Then Elon piled on. Niall Ferguson made an historical corollary and argument on X and JD Vance swept in to fulfill what is apparently his role in the administration: make more cogent and rational thoughts out of the incoherent slop coming from his boss. And, finally, Niall responds in this essay.
Timeless
Gen Z And The End Of Predictable Progress - Kyla Scanlon does an awesome deepdive — Jean Twenge style — into the different cohorts of the Gen Z generation, their incentives and environment, and where they go from here.
Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland? - A look back at our original offer to buy Greenland after World War 2, what happened, and why Denmark kept it.
The LLMentalist Effect - A credible look at some of the psychology behind LLMs eerie ability to get the right answer for us, like cold reading and the Barnum effect. Equally as good are the Hacker News comments, which do a great job of squashing the extent of the theory. All models are wrong, some are useful.
Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations - Anthropic has been able to leverage some pretty neat privacy-preserving tricks to analyze a large corpus of conversations with Claude and see how we’re using LLMs, statistically speaking.
Books
The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark - We think of social mobility as something that can be measured compared to our parents or grandparents, but Clark finds a fascinating method to measure it over ten generations and a couple hundred years. The results are striking: differences in status and income across many different cultures actually do persist over this time period. What does this mean? Lots of answers. And good Amazon reviews. This is a dense read.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
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The world is amazing. Cheers!