What I read this week...Colorado Undermines Democracy in the Name of Democracy
"I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage." - John Stuart Mill
Me getting this out asap so I can return to the fam:
"Colorado Undermines Democracy in the Name of Democracy- I was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6. I think the court’s decision is shameful. Peter Meijer writes." Great piece. I'm sure this will get struck down by the Supreme Court, it's a stunt. But the hypocrisy is real. A candidate being barred from a ballot for crimes he was not officially convicted of sets a horrible precedent. This was a 4-3 decision in the Colorado Supreme Court, all democrat appointed judges. The vote was split among ivy league judges in favor of barring Trump from the ballot and non ivy league judges. Our elite schools continue to fail us. Also, this only fuels Trump and his base and only strengthens his argument that the system is against him. The hubris on the part of the court that the American people can't be trusted to make their own decisions is one of the many reasons trust in our major institutions continues to erode. Let the voters decide.
Great clip by Chamath Palihapitiya explaining why you need to "Get the fucking money." It's not so you can live lavishly or buy things, that's useless. Capital allows you to make shit happen. It allows you to leave your mark on the world. Reminds me of this JD Rockefeller quote in a letter to his son: "No force can stop me from lifting the ban on greed because I pursue success. Success achieved under greed is not a sin. Success is a noble pursuit. If you can achieve success with noble behaviour, you will contribute far more to mankind than what can be done in poverty. I did it!"
"The Road to (Mental) Serfdom & Misinformation Studies- In which I expand on my previous post about misinformation studies, argue there is no such thing as "inoculating yourself against misinformation" & warn against top down control. Instead of inventing new red herring fields, academics do have the option of actually fighting such brute misinformation in an efficient way. And that is by enhancing trust in our knowledge-generating institutions (academia & media) among the general public. If academia (for anti vax) and media (for stolen election) had higher levels of trust, these narratives wouldn’t have been so prevalent. The real threat to our informational ecosystem is the plummeting confidence in higher education institutions that we see in the American public, as illustrated for example by this Gallup survey."
"Delusion and Retreat- Obama’s foreign policy made a virtue of escapism and eschewing national interest, helping to create the growing global disorder we now face"
"A real cost-reduction agenda for the New Year." Great piece on actual policy moves that will lower costs for Americans e.g. lower barriers to teeth cleanings, remove stranglehold of dealerships on pushing cars, and some others. I love it.
"Diversity, Equity, and Delusion- These policies imply — have always insanely, and cruelly implied — that favored racial minorities and women are not capable of excellent work without the support of unfair assistance. This is just not, and has never been true. Nonetheless, thanks to the purported champions of racial minorities and women, this is now what most people believe." DEI is racism by another name.
"Waymo significantly outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7+ million miles of rider-only driving" Regulators will do everything in their power to hamper progress here. Many thousands will unnecessarily die due to the slow roll out of this tech.
"Why the U.S. steel industry is dying." In short, we just don't need as much steel as we used to. Which is sad. We need to be building MORE.
"Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals, Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich."
"Move Fast and Make Things, Critics want Silicon Valley to pause. These tech leaders have another idea: accelerate."
"Ten years from Snowden revelations – what’s next for Tor and privacy online?" I'm a monthly contributor to Tor and I think Snowden doesn't get enough credit. US was spying on its citizens. Glad he spoke up. Patriot.
"Native mobile apps are optional for B2B startups in 2024"
"The dream has come true. It’s now possible to build fast, modern web applications without transpiling or bundling either JavaScript or CSS."
"The Big Cloud Exit FAQ - Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
Because building is illegal in the US, especially in CA, billionaires are creating a new city that doesn't suck. God bless them.
"The US Navy confronts a new Suez crisis- Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping threaten global trade" There is one country in the business of making the world a better safer place, and that is the US of A. Talk to me when any other country steps up to lead a task force that attempts to keep global shipping on the rails.
"Google to pay $700 million and make tiny app store changes to settle with 50 states"
Los Angeles is the center of the space race and "hard-tech florence." Long LA.
"In some situations, it may even be more financially and energy efficient to put that generated energy toward desalination rather than store it in batteries for use later. Money can be saved by only producing freshwater when renewable energy production is high."
"David vs. Goliath in Semis. We also look at AMD's and Marvell's analyst events and AT&T's very odd deal with Ericsson."
"Google Loses Antitrust Case to Epic; The Differences Between Apple and Google, Revisited; The Tying Question"
"Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger"
"Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here's why"
"on the flip side, if the AI GF convinces one loser to not do a mass shooting, it will have been worth the seed round, and if mass shootings trend down over time it will have been worth more than all gun control efforts combined"
"OMG, the AI Winter Break Hypothesis may actually be true? There was some idle speculation that GPT-4 might perform worse in December because it "learned" to do less work over the holidays." Even if it is not actually true, the fact it might be true beautifully illustrates that we humans have built something we don't fully understand. I'm not aware of any other tech like this. I suppose drug discovery maybe? But this feels different. It's awesome.
"One of the main regulations I actually feel comfortable supporting wholeheartedly is banning deepfakes altogether. Upside is incredibly meh and the downsides are truly reprehensible." Countered by: "I sympathize, but there’s no way to create such a ban without a one world government in charge of all compute & surveilling mathematical operations above a certain threshold. Even with technology it’s not clear existing *US* constitutional law would permit a ban." One of those things where the cure is worse than the disease. Legalize all compute.
The logical endgame of intense categorization is treating everyone as their own category i.e. an individual. So let's just do that.
"Middle class Chinese citizens are fleeing the country for the USA. And, having been blocked by long US visa backlogs, they're increasingly looking to enter illegally via Mexico (and the burgeoning business to help them)." The USA continues to be unstoppable.
"Last week, @bhorowitz posted about how @a16z will become more active in supporting pro-technology candidates across the country...As I’ve spent more time with lawmakers, it has become more apparent that the only way to counteract the lobbies of the big banks and big tech is to show that crypto and blockchain can be a force, too." Love it. Your average government toad HATES technology. We must flip them.
"The US needs a new psy op division that just makes edits like this, I found this gem this morning..." Epic video of US military looking badass. Yes we are the good guys. Yes without a military the free world would be destroyed by evil countries who do. Long USA.
"Only 66 years from first flight to landing on the moon, but now half a century has passed since the last moon landing. That cannot be our high water mark as a civilization. Humanity should have a moon base, cities on Mars and be out there among the stars!"
"This is your country on Deceleration. Deceleration is inflationary. Harms the working class. Acceleration is deflationary. Erodes top-down power. We need to accelerate tech progress and drive costs down throughout the techno-capital machine. AI and robotics will lead the way."
"In 1990, only 5% percent of Americans had a passport. Today, that number is 48%."
"Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years"
"So many are lured by the romantic illusion of Power as a potential means to do good. But power has only the capacity to destroy; its potential to do good is limited to the choice not to use it. Power cannot be wielded to repel destruction."
"When I think of existential risks to large parts of humanity:
* The next pandemic
* Climate change→massive depopulation
* Another asteroid
AI will be a key part of our solution. So if you want humanity to survive & thrive the next 1000 years, lets make AI go faster, not slower."
"Freedom of religion, except we pass a law that requires you to open your store during your holy day of rest somehow" on NY bill that would require Chick-fil-A to stay open on Sundays.
"Do we think the world is better off with more or less intelligence?" is the AI-specific version of the general tech Q "Do we think the world is better off with more or less material abundance and higher standards of living?" Should be slam dunk, and yet."
"Good morning with good news: Solar and wind were 92% of India's generation additions in 2022. It deployed as much solar in 2022 as the UK has ever built. Coal also was down 78%."
"Your regular reminder that "living paycheck-to-paycheck" surveys are complete made-up garbage"
"In AI, the ratio of attention on hypothetical, future, forms of harm to actual, current, realized forms of harm seems out of whack."
"It’s been proven for many years now: building a committed relationship with one person and then raising children in that nuclear two-parent family contributes more to creating healthy, happy adults and a well functioning society than anything else (ie wealth vs poverty, health history, zip code, race). "
"Hispanic Democrats being more hawkish on immigration than white Democrats is not something I would've expected even a few years ago"
France and Italy GDP growth is basically flat over the last 15 years. Germany barely anything. US economy exploding. EU can continue to regulate their way into irrelevance. And GDP matters. Downstream of that is our ability to pay for social services and median household income, which trounces the EU socialists.
From the woman who had her work plagiarized by Harvard president Claudine Gay:
1. Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism.
2. Fire Claudine Gay posthaste. She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated.
3. Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders.
4. Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity. Appeasing the Marxist identity politics mob should not be a consideration. The person for the job might be a middle to older age white Jewish man who believes in classical liberalism.
AI: Another few decades of Big Tech dominance or open source wins. Neckbeards, destroy them.
"Plagiarism if a student does it. 'Duplicative language' if a university president. Please someone make it make sense." NYT using a new term to defend Harvard president who plagiarized 40 times.
"Too many colleges have become jobs programs for anti-American radicals."
"Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what's most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.
This describes Americans today. In middle school, we're encoyraged to start hoarding "extracurricular activities." In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive-to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball."
"The New York Times describes the 100% Democrat-appointed Colorado Supreme Court that banned the GOP frontrunner from the ballot, disenfranchising a huge number of Republican voters...notably nonpartisan" NYT continues it's long decline."
"It's just kinda crazy to me how obviously and self evidently partisan some of these "misinformation reporters" are, in ways that cause tangible harm to journalism." Reminder, anyone who says "misinformation" or "disinformation" is a censor.
"A teen hacked Nvidia, got arrested, was released on bail under police supervision. Police confiscated his laptop and put him in a motel room. He then used the Amazon fire stick connected to his motel room TV to hack Rockstar and steal GTA 6 clips"
"America brain-drains China's AI talent."
"Not gonna dunk on a kid not getting into college. But as a former tutor I’ll say this: the scandal of elite college admissions is not middle/upper-class white kids with a 1460 SAT not getting into Cornell. It’s dirt poor Asian kids with a 1560 SAT not getting into Cornell."
"The wealth of the world is not a fixed lump. Countries create wealth through technological ingenuity, hard work, good policies, strong institutions, and openness to foreign technology and investment."
"The cookie moral panic was training wheels for the AI moral panic."
"Imagine if Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Cervantes, Milton, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky etc. had to pass through peer review. The surest way to incentivize mediocrity."
"Research by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University indicates that the accumulation of rules over the past several decades has slowed economic growth, amounting to an estimated $4 trillion loss in US GDP in 2012 (had regulations stayed at 1980 levels). [1] The accumulation of regulation has disproportionately disadvantaged certain groups, such as unskilled workers and low-income households. Unless Congress and agencies pursue substantive reform, [2] regulatory accumulation will continue to stifle economic growth."
"When your example of bad technology is an incident likely caused by technology being outsourced to China because there was a "pause" instituted for doing that work in the USA."
“You can think of [excessive regulations and laws] like Gulliver’s Travels…If the nation is Gulliver, it’s being tied down by one little regulatory string at a time. Eventually you have millions of strings and then the giant can’t move. So I think there needs to be something where we delete rules, regulations, and laws. If all we do is add them, eventually we will be able to do nothing”
"someone starts talking about saving the planet and i instinctively adopt this stance while mentally trying to figure out whether they want to take away my car or give me a nuclear reactor"
"Congratulations to Peter Park, who passed the California bar exam at 17 years of age!"
"Average monthly light-duty electric vehicle sales in the US have increased almost 50% from 2022 to 2023"
"Many kids have the capacity to learn much more much faster than they would in schools normed for the median student and waste years of their lives being babysat so that the rest of the class can acquire basic skills (that increasingly they aren't acquiring at all anyway)"
"Apple is a real bully. Apple + Maximo met for partnership/acquisition talks but Apple had a secret plan (Project Everest) to steal the tech without paying. They even recruited 20 of Masimo’s team, doubling their salaries…. Apple paid their CTO $4M to come over, and in his 1st 2 weeks he filed 12 patents for sensors at Apple that were Masimo trade secrets… the worst part is that Apple fumbled the ball and the product doesn’t really work and Apple didn’t get FDA approval like Masimo did."
"Congratulations to China on reaching a level of GDP per capita PPP today that the US reached in the 1940s"
"Fascinating Yougov poll on misestimating small populations"
"Matteo Pasquinelli says that with AI is not about replacing workers but taking over microtasks, which will lead us to work more, not less"
"europeans after writing sweeping regulation for software they can’t create that runs on hardware they can’t afford that will improve services they will soon be buying from the rest of world at a markup"
"On violent crime overall, the picture is even more grim. D.C. has seen the largest increase of any major city in America and it isn't even very close."
"States that have historically dealt with budget deficits by raising taxes are going to need a different plan going forward, else they risk starting a doom loop as companies move away."
"Disinformation" is the lepers bell of a censor. Long freedom of speech:
EU bureaucrat championing the destruction of innovation. Someone ask this jackass to make a graph of market cap of EU tech companies vs others. Long USA:
