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

Nothing is original. We’re are always copying and stealing from others.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron:

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don’t have our own style. Don’t worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing. Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. (Location 1,281)

From Rob Henderson.

I was rewatching the tv show Vikings, and this part about lost knowledge stuck a chord: King Ecbert: Tell me honestly: What do you think of these works? Athelstan: I find them indescribably beautiful. King Ecbert: But they are clearly pagan! \[laughs\] King Ecbert: You are only a monk, Athelstan, and yet, somehow, I…

It might sound banal but I’m still amazed at how much good content is available for free on YouTube. Got example, here’s a list of curated channels about philosophy.

True dis. “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that…

Gemini summary: Here is a summary of the video based on the transcript. Video: How Charlie Munger Survive Life’s Hardest Moments... | Final Interview with CNBC 2023 Channel: YAPSS This video features a segment from Charlie Munger’s final interview with CNBC, where he discusses resilience, personal tragedy, and the…

This is just sad:

Both economists agree that growth is still possible, but the age of “hyperglobalisation” – with its extraordinary convergence of openness, technology, and trust – is unlikely to return.

“Growth miracles seem less likely because two of the key mechanisms – access to big, lucrative markets and willingness to share technology across borders – no longer seem to be here.” Goldberg

As global trade enters a new, more fragmented era, the challenge for policymakers will be to find fresh ways to generate dynamic gains – in a world where the rules, and the relationships, are shifting fast.

From: It would be wrong to apply Western theories of folk literature to India’s oral traditions, Kumar cautions readers. Local beliefs and worldviews seep into the songs and tales that evolve in any particular community. Moreover, in the telling of the tales and in the mode of singing as well, the local forms and…

From Autumn: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau:Thoreau) Nov. 13, 1851. To Fair Haven Hill. A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety; such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his…

A

I’m confident that AI is not going to wipe out anywhere close to 25M jobs on net over the next decade. If technological shocks caused net, long-run displacement, employment in the US would be 0. Instead, it’s among its highest peacetime age-adjusted levels. But… 1/2

…AI could absolutely drive gross displacement; think of automobiles displacing horse-related jobs even as they created new types of auto manufacturing & services jobs. That’s painful for workers, especially in the short-run & especially for workers in jobs more automatable.

Important to note however that even the amount of gross displacement from AI is highly uncertain; most of its use cases so far augment some tasks rather than replacing entire jobs.

I’m fascinated with “advice” and what counts as good or bad advice. Alex Imas said something interesting and I think I agree:

This thread by Simon is spot on. Most advice is dumb—it’s too general to be useful—and I always tell my students I have no advice to give unless it’s very specific (eg run this analysis).
But “live over your skis” is good advice.

It means aim for more than what you think you can achieve.

The quoted tweet from Simon:

Going through my mental Rolodex from 25 years of academia. The people who do great things were ridiculous tryhards, particularly early on.
Reaching further than they had a right to. As if something in their souls knew. If lucky, tutors and friends indulged this ultra cringe.

What if this version of “business as usual” reality comes true. Seems like a good frame to have in your mental toolbox when thinking about the future path of AI. in a post-AGI world, people will simply get used to the fact that computers can solve cognitive problems quickly, and beat us in any cognitive domain, just…

This is the most intellectually honest opinion to have about AI.

Philippe Lemoine

I think that if progress in generative AI continues, which I’m pretty sure it will (it doesn’t even have to continue at the current pace as long as decreasing marginal returns don’t hit too hard), cultural products will become massively diversified.

One factor that limits the diversity of cultural products is that they tend to have high fixed costs, so you need a large enough audience for them to be profitable.

But if generative AI massively reduces the cost of production, which it almost certainly will, then there should be an explosion of tailor-made cultural products.

I think this has the potential to have significant effects on society, though it’s hard to say what they will be exactly, because it means that people will have less cultural references in common.

Was watching this video and wanted to understand more so I asked Claude and Gemini: Denis Noble and Richard Dawkins represent fundamentally opposing perspectives on how evolution works, centering on what drives evolutionary change and how biological information flows. \\The Core Disagreement: Gene-Centrism vs. Systems…

A few thoughts on reading.

Timothy Gowers on using AI:

🧵 Full thread: https://x.com/wtgowers/status/1984340182351634571

I crossed an interesting threshold yesterday — one I suspect many mathematicians are now crossing. In the middle of trying to prove a result, I found a statement that looked true and would be useful if it were. Instead of proving it myself, I asked GPT-5, and in 20 seconds it produced a proof using a lemma I hadn’t heard of. I’m confident I’d have got there eventually, but it would’ve taken me about an hour. It feels like we’ve entered a brief but wonderful era where our research is greatly sped up by AI — but AI still needs us.

— Timothy Gowers

Amen!

Markets change.

Businesses change.

Technologies change.

Human nature is a CONSTANT.

Read Shakespeare to grok people…

— Josh Wolfe

Reminds me of something I’ve heard Jim O’Shaughnessy say often:

“At the centre of all market pricing are human beings. I joke the Four Horseman of the investment apocalypse are fear, greed, hope and ignorance, only one of which is not an emotion. Fear, greed and hope have wiped out more money than any market downturn. Because of all the foibles of human nature that are well documented by behavioural research – and now by neuroloigical research – people are always going to overshoot and undershoot when pricing securities. A review of financial markets all the way back to the South Sea company proves this out. As long as human nature doesn’t fundamentally change, we can continue to arbitrage the pricing inefficiencies it creates.”

“As long as human beings price securities, we’ve got something to arbitrage.”

Today in learning Johann Fust financed Gutenberg: Johann Fust (c. 1400–1466) was a pioneering 15th-century German printer, merchant, and financier who played a crucial, though controversial, role in the history of printing in Europe. He is most famous for his association with Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the…

This is an interesting take by Daniel Rock:

I don’t happen to believe AI is going to take away all of the jobs. But it is possibly a blindspot-generating issue that the people studying AI’s impacts mostly love their jobs

Built a small site to collect links to Indian literary and historical works in the public domain. While looking for books, I realized the sheer extent of our cultural apathy. Also, there are some amazing books just waiting to be read.

Visit https://dhwani.ink

Nice reflection on history: Some months later, I joined a book club. Run by Venkatesh Rao, this year’s edition focuses on a simple idea that goes a long way: Maybe grand historical paradigms like modernity and postmodernity are not suddenly emerging monoliths. Instead we might see them as “history machines” consisting…

Interesting take by Like Burgis. This is stuck in my mental craw for some reason: I would also now add a surprising element to my 2024 essay: as the cost of cognition approaches zero, that which is repeatable will be replaceable—and will indeed be replaced—by AI (a favorite saying of Palantir Co-Founder Stephen Cohen)…

Interesting article in the Economist on how AI can help customers being ripped off: The extent to which AI truly eliminates rip-off markets depends on two things. First, consumers need to know how to use AI properly. Mindlessly repeating advice from ChatGPT is less effective than using the bot as a learning tool that…

I’m still reading through this brilliant and thoughtful post by Tom Cunningham, but it’s so thoughtfully written. 1. There is no standard definition of machine intelligence. There have been many attempts to give a definition or a metric of machine intelligence but most have been unsatisfactory. The lack of a common…

Interesting take on the institutional impact of AI by Will Rinehart: A lot of people are likening the advent of AI to moveable type. The printing press brought about the conditions for the Reformation, therefore significant institutional change is coming with AI. But when you look at how print changed cultures other…

Coffee is a miracle drug:

But these are not the only risks associated with drinking coffee. Many lace their cup with additives like milk, sugar, cream and syrup, chronic overconsumption of which can also cause harm. A study of over 46,000 adults published in the Journal of Nutrition in May is suggestive. The results showed that participants who drank between one and three cups of coffee per day were roughly 15 percent less likely to die during the next decade than those who consumed none. That said, the benefit vanished if they stirred more than around a teaspoon of cream or half a teaspoon of sugar into their drink.
To maximise the benefits, therefore, don’t overdo the cups and take it as black—and as bitter—as you like.

Aaron Orendorff:

When the cost of getting answers drops to zero, the value of asking the right questions compounds exponentially.

Hat tip to Sam Tomlinson.

This is hilarious and tragic. All of humanity’s knowledge is at people’s fingertips, and people are using it to fake invoices to scame their employers:

The launch of new image-generation models by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google in recent months has sparked an influx of AI-generated receipts submitted internally within companies, according to leading expense software platforms. Software provider AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for about 14 per cent of fraudulent documents submitted in September, compared with none last year. Fintech group Ramp said its new software flagged more than $1mn in fraudulent invoices within 90 days. Don’t show this again This text has been highlighted 8 times by other subscribers Add to highlights About 30 per cent of US and UK financial professionals surveyed by expense management platform Medius reported they had seen a rise in falsified receipts following the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4o last year.

Hat tip to Celine Nguyen. Brian Eno on being pretentious: Pretension is the dismissive name given to people’s attempts to be something other than what they ‘really are’…In the arts, the word ‘pretentious’ has a special meaning: the attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I’m very…