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

From Citadel’s response to the Citrini piece:

Furthermore, it is well acknowledged that training and inference requires significant semiconductor capacity, data centers, and energy. Displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity than the current level utilization. If automation expands rapidly, demand for compute definitionally rises, pushing up its marginal cost. If the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labor for certain tasks, substitution will not occur, creating a natural economic boundary. This dynamic contrasts sharply with narratives assuming frictionless replication of intelligence. Even if algorithms improve recursively, economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organizational change. Recursive capability does not imply recursive adoption. The Citrini piece.

That humans—supposedly the smartest creatures in the known universe—splurge thousands of dollars on pointless baubles all to get the validation of strangers never ceases to amaze me: Even as luxury goods have become unattainable for those French and Italians meant to desire them, they have become near-ubiquitous for…

Saving this paper to read later: We tentatively conclude that the decline in fertility across recent cohorts in high-income countries is likely the result of evolving norms, expanding choices, and the role of broad social and economic influences. This multi-faceted cohort-based explanation contrasts with narrower…

I keep thinking about this quote:

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” ― Thomas Sowell

This is not from The Onion but from the Financial Times:

Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

The talks around introducing a stablecoin — a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar — are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could be introduced in Gaza remain to be determined.

I hate to agree with Altman but I think he’s right:

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman said

A few musings on self help.

Nate Silver has some prescient thoughts on the fallout of AI if all the advertisements about the tech indeed come true.

What a beautiful article. It captures two ideas that I often think about. First idea: The sheer extent of our ignorance. We go through life thinking we know a lot, but in reality, what we know isn’t even a drop in the cosmic ocean. Yet thinking we know more than we actually do serves an evolutionary purpose—it prevents…

India give about ₹54,436 crores to charity.

The US Supreme Court rules that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. Trump decides to double down.

Nic guide on navigating geopolitical volatility by Joachim Klement.

A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other.…

A simple app to read eBooks with an AI reading companion by the side.

Funny but probably true? A sign of things to come?

The anxiety is rational, which is why it sticks. Every week some new benchmark drops that makes last month’s workflow feel prehistoric. Codex ships overnight processing. Opus gets faster. Context windows double. None of it reduces the pressure. It multiplies it. You can do more now. And someone already is. The window to be first at anything feels like it’s shrinking by the day. Literally, by the day.

I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I’m unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says “something could be running right now” just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.

It’s an obvious, but underappreciated, fact that technology reshapes reality. But we don’t often think about it much less care about it. If you even spend a minute thinking about just how much of the shape of our lives is sculpted by the technologies we use and rely on, your mind will be blown, and I’m not even talking…

What the Epstein saga exposes.

Beautiful meditation on attention:

McGilchrist considers the way our attention constructs our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:

The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.

Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he writes:

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.

What a beautiful poem.

This post by Bruce Sorkin hit hard because I’m most often than not a tourist in the present, with permanent residences in the past and the future: Csikszentmihalyi talked about challenge, but I would also here invoke the Japanese concept of Beginner’s Mind or Shoshin. Derived from Zen Buddhism, and particularly…

I loved this interview of Daniel Radcliffe

Social media platforms are easy to ban but it’s hard to enforce the ban.

I was doing some research for a post and came across the great Simone Weil. I had heard her name and that’s about it. I just started listening to a few podcast epsiodes about her and I’m already becoming a fan of the remarkable life she led and the range and density of her thinking.

YouTube · youtu.be ↗Episode #172 ... Simone Weil - AttentionPhilosophize This! on YouTube

What we gain and what we lose when AI writes all our code.

Lorin Hochstein responds to people who worey that AI “generates” code that we understand and itll probably lead to disasters down the line:

Finally, Bucciarelli is right that systems like telephony are so inherently complex, have been built on top of so many different layers in so many different places, that no one person can ever actually understand how the whole thing works. This is the fundamental nature of complex technologies: our knowledge of these systems will always be partial, at best. Yes, AI will make this situation worse. But it’s a situation that we’ve been in for a long time.

Zena Hitz on great books.

We no long even pretend with the pretense of fairness.

Big spike in abandoned oil tankers.

Pranay Kotasthane as usual with a thoughtful take on the state of affairs:

Lastly, the general impression I take away from this budget is the realisation of a party in power which has figured out a way to win elections in India that’s not contingent on strong economic performance. So long as you don’t screw up the economy badly, a combination of emotional issues and timely welfarism (direct cash transfer just before elections is a new, powerful tool now) should see you through most elections. Therefore, a 6.5 per cent growth and a 4 per cent fiscal deficit in a world that’s volatile and unpredictable is good enough to keep the global investors mildly interested while keeping the winning machine going domestically. That may not be enough for us to get out of the middle-income trap or lose out on the narrow window of demographic dividend we had. But the willingness to take bolder bets to address such structural challenges seems to have dissipated. More of the same is what we have settled for.

In praise of solitude.