Friday Fodder #36
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Markets kept diving this week. Then they were up! Then they weren’t. According to our President, it’s A GREAT TIME TO BUY! (4 hours before he paused tariffs.) Trump starts up the Panican party. And remember that manufacturing is really important. Which is why it’s literally been dropping since World War 2.
China is limiting rare earth mineral exports and shows off flying cars at the same time. Europe is ready to make a deal. Vietnam is ready to make a deal. Lesotho is ready to make a deal.
And we’ve got memes of the whole thing! All courtesy of China. Here’s Americans sewing in factories. And Americans making shoes and Teslas. Even Chamath got a meme. Xi and Trump are reading books (which I think never actually happens). And a Japanese anime of America being.. made great??
Most important of all, this week the pesky regulations limiting my showerhead to a measly 2.5 GPM were pulled back. American Showers Are Great Again!
On to the reading!
Timely
A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System - The current administration is split between the Art of the Deal haha-tarrifs-are-a-negotiating-tactic crowd and the equally perplexing tariff true believers. If you want the most comprehensive explanation of the Trump tariff believers, this is it.
An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip - Something, something copyright. But also! Here’s the tension: you know you had that exact image in your head too, so shouldn’t a good LLM be able to get what you want?
The Colors of Her Coat - A remarkable explanation of the power of wonder as described through the use of ultramarine blue dye in the Virgin Mary’s cloak in the middle ages, and also Ghibli.
AI 2027 - 2027 is just two years away. This is insane. Off the wall. Totally crazy. Also, possible. Scott Alexander and a team of superforecasters (including ex-OpenAI-er Daniel Kokotajlo) put together the most comprehensive set of potential predictions about AI since Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness. If you think this set of predictions sounds crazy, change the timelines to 10 or 50 years instead of 1 or 2 years and then see what you think.
Welcome To Our Weird And Wild Century. It’s A Lot Like The 17th. - Tyler Cowen is now writing for The Free Press, so expect a link occasionally. TC compares our time today to the arc of 17th century England where LLMs mirror the printing press, space mimics the exploration of North America, and GDP increases compound in a credible way. Also wars, extremism, and chaos.
Timeless
Power to the People: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion - Andrej Karpathy writes an X essay (a thing, now, apparently) on how interesting and novel it is that LLMs are available to the masses and not being disseminated down slowly from the top of the class/aristocracy/whatever hierarchy.
Suzanne Delage - Just who is Suzanne Delage? It’s an eponymous short story by the weird and wonderful Gene Wolfe. It makes hardly any sense until, that is, Gwern solves the riddle and exposes it as an inverse re-telling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I don’t know which is wilder here: the original story by Wolfe or the hermeneutics Gwern undertakes to make sense of it.
Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren - If you’ve never read Keynes original essay from 1930 that suggested 15 hour work weeks and the end of money-as-status were only a generation or two away, now is the time.
Books
Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan - I’ve read all of Zeihan’s books, but I think this one is the best. He’s a geopolitical analyst who, in easy and simple prose, breaks down complex geopolitics and history to explain why the world is how it is and where it is going in the next few decades. Books on geography and geopolitics always leave me surprised how much of our modern, connected world is still underpinned by geography and demographics. If you want to know why the U.S. Navy is so important, what will happen as globalization reverses (which he predicted quite a bit ago), why Argentina, Turkey, and France are all resurgent, and the ways in which China or Saudi Arabia can fail, this is the book for you.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
🤣
The world is amazing. Cheers!