Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

Sad but true. It was P.B. Shelley who once framed this faith with prophetic clarity: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Literature, to him, was a subversive parliament of feeling — moving hearts, unsettling moral certainties, giving form to what was yet to be imagined. Today, that vision lies…

Came across this quote here. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. G.K. Chesterton The full passage: But among these million facts all flowing one way there…

Interesting framing by Daniel Jefferies:

Infinitely self recursively improving systems are impossible.

It’s impossible to make a system that can correct all its own mistakes when it is the very thing making the mistake in the first place.

How do I know?

Evolution hasn’t figured it out in millions of years, why would we figure it out in two or two hundred?

Your brain is a bunch of crude hacks. Wonderful hacks and amazing hacks but crude nonetheless.

When you have to figure out if something is “true” or “real” you don’t actually come to any concrete, real, objective truth most of the time.

Instead, we have a ton of micro approximations in our heads that sorta, kinda get closer to an approximation of reality/truth, though sometimes they are way the hell off.

I didn’t fully understand the technical details in this analysis but Matt Dratch makes the case that the despite massive AI build up, we’re still massively short on compute:

The core finding: even under generous assumptions about hardware efficiency and utilization, we are likely 8–50x short on compute for consumer inference alone in a mature agentic and multimodal world. This is
before accounting for enterprise, sovereign, robotics, or training demand.
Three claims underpin this framework:

1. Tokens are the kWh of knowledge work. As price falls, users don’t ask the same questions more
cheaply; they ask orders-of-magnitude richer questions involving tools, memory, video, audio, and
sensors.

2. The installed base of frontier AI compute is ~13 GW globally (low 20s by some estimates). The
entire 125 GW of existing data center capacity will eventually convert to accelerated compute, and then
we’ll build beyond that.
3. Cluster-level efficiency is 5–10% of chip specs once you account for MFU, power distribution, and
fleet mix.

I have a dumb model for thinking about AI: keep using it and reason forward. Everything is frankly narrative pollution to me. I find most debates about AI, intelligence, AGI, ASI, and other things largely unhelpful. I’m not saying they are useless; what I am saying is that they are personally unhelpful to me. The best…

AI might be a bubble, but the smart people are using these tools to extract value. My personal take: whether AI is a bubble or not matters to the investors betting on it. The rest of us normies should shut the fuck up and abuse the VC subsidy that’s making these awesome tools accessible for so cheapest. I’m saying this…

It feels like off late all I am doing here is linking to Simon Willison, but he’s on the money here: Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be…

So U.S. companies issued 1.7 trillion worth of investment-grade bonds, of which Goldman estimates 30%—which is 510 billion—was because of AI boom. Now things are getting interesting. You know, as things start making their way from equity issuance to debt, things become really, really interesting. Because if this AI is…

Post type: Loose reflection. Certainty: Reasonably sure. I get a lot of messages on LinkedIn from young students and graduates. They’ll share a templated note, attach a resume, and ask for a job. When I tell them we’re not hiring, they pivot: “Can you give me some advice then?” And every time, I freeze up. Because I…

I read this article in the Scroll, and for the second time, I found myself thinking about how passionate individuals who genuinely care about their culture and history are load-bearing pillars in the broader effort to preserve historical memory. In this case, Priya Paul’s multi-decade effort to collect paintings…

We have long been told by physics that we are nothing but a collection of atoms. Perhaps the most memorable line that comes to mind is physicist Brian Greene saying that we are nothing but a collection of particles dancing to the quantum mechanical tunes—or something to that effect.It’s a depressing account of the…

Amen. I couldn’t agree more with Simon Willison: You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul! But what should you write about? It’s easy to get hung up on this. I’ve definitely felt the self-imposed pressure to only write something if it’s new, and unique, and feels like…

I just finished reading this thoughtful post by Tom Dettmers in which he argues that we won’t reach artificial general intelligence or super intelligence. It was a bit technical for me so I asked NotebookLM to simplify it for me: This blog post by Tim Dettmers argues that the popular idea of \\Artificial General…

Amen. Fullly agree with what Deam Ball is saying. I agree with all this; it is why I also believe that opus 4.5 in claude code is basically AGI. Most people barely noticed, but \it is happening.\ It’s just happening, at first, in a conceptually weird way: Anyone can now, with quite high reliability and reasonable…

Generative AI is sexy, but predictive AI is useful. To get a sense of the immense progress on predictive AI and its future potential, we can look at the trajectory of the past 20 years. In 2005, we couldn’t get AI to tell the difference between a person and a pencil. By 2013, AI still couldn’t reliably detect a bird in…

This stuck a nerve. I was lucky enough to have a childhood where I at least spent a few months wandering the wild parts of my parents’ villages for a few months a year. Those experiences have been formative in shaping who I am today.I see kids today and the only play they get is in between dodging incoming vehicles. As…

Brilliant post as usual by Andrej Karpathy: 2025 is where I (and I think the rest of the industry also) first started to internalize the “shape” of LLM intelligence in a more intuitive sense. We’re not “evolving/growing animals”, we are “summoning ghosts”. Everything about the LLM stack is different (neural…

What a beautiful article: So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we…

Hmm 🤔

Humans should remain smarter than their refrigerators. It is insane that we are living in a time in which people are trying to make refrigerators smarter, but are satisfied to dumb down themselves and those around them. All the evidence suggests that AI is bad for your brain. If you use it as a salve for social and romantic frustration, it also makes it harder for you to connect with others and less resilient in the face of real life. If you let AI create more distance between you and words and language, you are allowing it to threaten some of the most important distinctions between humans and animals.

AI is sold to us on the premise that it can offer us life on easy mode. No such mode exists. Life is for living, not escaping. Be human. Read human.

AI? Hard pass. Be human. Read human.

Interesting discussion on how good LLMs have gotten at coding.

Some of the quote tweets on the link are also interesting.

One area where I’ve found large language models to be remarkably useful is while reading, especially when I’m reading difficult, dense, or intellectually demanding books. Take Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, for example. It’s an extraordinarily rich book, but also incredibly dense and abstruse. This was well…

Thoughtful piece by Robert Wright parsing out the inconsistencies in the opinions of various factions that opposite selling advanced NVIDIA chips to China: The grave dangers AI safety hawks worry about can’t be adequately addressed without extensiveo international cooperation—cooperation tight enough to qualify as…

We’re moving from vibe coding to vibe engineering:

Turns out it was almost all built by LLMs

At this point I went looking for some more background information on the library and found Emil’s blog entry about it: How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents:

Writing a full HTML5 parser is not a short one-shot problem. I have been working on this project for a couple of months on off-hours.

Tooling: I used plain VS Code with Github Copilot in Agent mode. I enabled automatic approval of all commands, and then added a blacklist of commands that I always wanted to approve manually. I wrote an agent instruction that told it to keep working, and don’t stop to ask questions. Worked well!

Emil used several different models—an advantage of working in VS Code Agent mode rather than a provider-locked coding agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI. Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus all get a mention.

Ads are coming to AI platforms one way or another.

I agree.

Here’s what I think will happen in 2026:

AI platforms will start offering paid placement within conversations where clear purchase intent signals are evident.

The ads will be clearly labeled as sponsored, and they will likely tie into direct purchase opportunities.

Eventually, ads will also appear embedded in other types of interactions, such as inspiration (where should I take my family on spring break?) and research (what are the best resorts near Disney World?), effectively turning AI chats into a new media channel.

Poor countries seem to have stopped catching up with rich countries: The original story of divergence then convergence remains the same, despite the scope for the revised data to alter results. For the three decades leading up to the empirical literature on economic growth, the gap between developed and developing…

Kyla Scanlon is one of the most perceptive writers about the US economy and culture. Several years ago, she coined the term “vibecession” to describe the divergence between economic data and how people felt. In other words, after the pandemic, something weird started happening in the US. While economic data, despite the inflationary spike, was getting better, consumer sentiment was getting worse and worse.

Many people have proposed different theories as to why there’s a vibecession, and I’m utterly fascinated with the concept. For all its flaws, it’s a useful frame to think about many of the issues and trends that are shaping our lives. Anyways, here are a few recent posts on vibes.

Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy.

Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know.

Theories of vibes.

I’ve been thinking about how much vibes can explain issues and sentiments in developing countries like India.

I heard that the lecture was depressing. Yet to watch it.

YouTube · youtube.com ↗2025 Nobel Prize lecture in literature | László KrasznahorkaiNobel Prize on YouTube

nobelprize.org ↗Nobel Prize in Literature 2025The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 was awarded to László Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art"

A few links I’ve saved for later.

- [Gans and Doctorow on AI Copyright](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/12/gans-and-doctorow-on-ai-copyright.html)
- [Variation in Working Hours Across Countries and Over Time](https://www.nber.org/digest/202512/variation-working-hours-across-countries-and-over-time?page=1&perPage=50)
- [The 26 Most Important Ideas for 2026](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-26-most-important-ideas-for-2026)
- [The Japanese Canary in the Global Debt Coal Mine](https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-implications-of-japan-raising-interest-rates-by-barry-eichengreen-2025-12)
- [Agentic Interactions](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/12/agentic-interactions.html)
- [The Future Is Flesh-and-Blood](https://open.substack.com/pub/wisdomofcrowds/p/the-future-is-flesh-and-blood?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=android&r=1eft5)
- [Horses](https://andyljones.com/posts/horses.html)
- [Quantum Physics Needs Philosophy](https://open.substack.com/pub/slavoj/p/quantum-physics-needs-philosophy-ca1?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=android&r=1eft5)
- [Bag of Words, Have Mercy on Us](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-words-have-mercy-on-us)

How to read more? Just do it! I read somewhere that authors are voracious readers. I would imagine so. When I read, I also feel the urge to create something of my own. Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a writer who doesn’t read. Come to think of it, reading and writing are one and the same. Off the top of…

This article made me laugh. Also a good example of how our behavior is shaped by deep-rooted behavioral patterns that have evolved over thousands of years under various selection pressures. This one made me laugh. Also a good example of how our behavior is shaped by deep-rooted behavioral patterns that have evolved…