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

Chinese people aren’t worried about AI:

Driverless taxis roam more than a dozen Chinese cities, and service robots putter through hotels and restaurants. Chinese tech companies have rolled out medical chatbots to help users avoid long lines at hospitals. They’ve embedded A.I. assistants throughout popular apps, so users can ask A.I. in their mapping apps to help them decide where to eat, or in their shopping apps to help them choose between pairs of shoes.

That’s because Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.

In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)

What an inspiring man and what an inspiring story:

“I was facing this issue for a long time. The elephants were getting more aggressive. I lived in fear of them attacking the library. Finally, I decided that if I shifted it, I would also move my house. Protecting the knowledge the library gave was important.” He did not want the learning it stood for to be disrupted.

So he shifted the library a few kilometres, though still within the forested region of Edamalakudi. “The very week I left,” he says, tuskers “demolished the whole old structure in minutes.” But, he adds proudly, “I’d moved all the books out of there.” Being a forest dweller, he understood that something was going on with the great beasts. And bears no bitterness towards them. Moving, though, was a wise decision as they ravaged the entire structure. And Chinnathambi had no wish to literally discover the elephant in the room.

💯 China is quite aggressive and territorially self-aggrandising in its immediate backyard, but restrained beyond. Even occasional border skirmishes with India are basically fought with sticks and stones. Outside of the military build up triggered by the US during MAGA 1.0, China is not interested in projecting power…

Spotify is fucked, or so this piece tells me.

We don’t give a shit about anything anymore because we are bored, distracted and getting dumber by the second in the flickering shadow of the screen.

It’s kind of fun to watch many AI skeptics move from pure, unbridled skepticism about the usefulness of AI tools like Claude Code to becoming, if not outright boosters, at least genuine admirers of them. And this is just one example. Across many such cases, the pattern I keep seeing is that people often have a terrible…

This is a wonderful interview.

AI will make research a whole lot better.

The backlash against social media is gaining ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are widespread bans across the world in some shape or form in the next couple of years.

An interesting take on the issue:

China knows exactly what this does. Their domestic version of TikTok caps kids under 14 at 40 minutes a day, locks access between 6am and 10pm, and swaps the entire feed to educational content. Science, history, museums.

The version they export to everyone else? Unlimited, unrestricted, pure dopamine on demand.

When kids in the US and China were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, the number one answer in America was influencer. In China it was astronaut.

Macron calls this a cognitive war. Export what dulls young minds and keep what makes them intelligent for your own population.

This is the most effective weapon ever deployed against a generation’s ability to think.

Jeremy Siegel says there will be no AI apocalypse.

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 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.

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.…

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.

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.