flâneur

Victor Truong

16 followers · 37 following · 2516 views

on the atlas — 106

highlights — 957

  • it’s American companies that are keeping tight control of their technology rather than releasing it as openly as possible. This is in stark contrast to the strategy behind US government support for the open internet, for example.
    American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.
  • Open technologies can be used permissionlessly and therefore can be at the center of more innovation.
    American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.
  • the moat is in the enterprise services that sit around them: the deals and contracts, connectivity with enterprise systems, and quality of life features in an enterprise context.
    American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.
  • For a culture to evolve, it needs a lot of different kinds of people—stubborn, nutty people with outlandish proposals. The weirdest people around are almost always children.
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • we never know which genetically enhanced baby might at last invent a functional warp drive
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • Ultra-low fertility meant far fewer babies, which meant far fewer people to have babies, or even to know babies; this feedback loop could even shift cultural norms so far that childlessness would become the default option.
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • In an economy biased in favor of highly skilled employees, a protracted education followed by a long career apprenticeship seems like the only way to secure a dependable income. But the longer people wait to try to form a family, the less likely they are to have one.
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful.
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • Augustus Caesar grew fixated on the decadent urban élite’s apparent refusal to perpetuate itself. The patrician class, he said, was betraying the country “by rendering her barren”; to deny their ancestors the immortality of their lineage was an act “worse than murder.”
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • “A hundred years from now there won’t be one sad fuck to look at any of this. What keeps you going?” The man responds, “I just don’t think about it.”
    The End of Children | The New Yorker
  • protein bars make a good on-the-go snack, and “women are better planners than men.”
    Inside David Protein's Playful and Provocative Billion-Dollar Playbook
  • He prefers to educate consumers indirectly and let fans defend the brand in online comment sections.
    Inside David Protein's Playful and Provocative Billion-Dollar Playbook
  • Most low-cal alternatives reduce the calories by adding more water or air to the formula, both of which affect the taste and texture. EPG allows David’s products to retain the taste and feel of full-fat products, but fewer calories are absorbed because, like fiber, EPG passes through the body without being fully digested.
    Inside David Protein's Playful and Provocative Billion-Dollar Playbook
  • any whiff of regulation will make America immediately lose the race with China and spend the rest of history as a CCP tributary state
    AI 2040: Plan A
  • getting rid of tipping isn't as simple a solution as it seems. That pay raise would have to come from somewhere—most likely, the price of your meal.
    The Troubling Origins of Tipping Culture
  • In a 1916 anti-tipping study, The Itching Palm, writer William Scott likened the dynamic between tipper and tipped to that of a "master and slave" relationship. And it wasn't just a matter of opinion: several states, from Georgia to Iowa, even attempted to ban the practice in the early 1900s. But, alas, restaurateurs fought back, and those efforts to outlaw tipping failed in the end.
    The Troubling Origins of Tipping Culture
  • The practice eventually made its way into the States in the 19th century, imported by wealthy Americans returning from Europe who saw tipping as a sign of sophistication.
    The Troubling Origins of Tipping Culture
  • early versions of tipping stretch back to medieval Europe, when servants would receive a few extra coins for good service.
    The Troubling Origins of Tipping Culture
  • AI has made it so much cheaper to create that there’s a selection effect where most of the slop you see will be AI-slop, even if the determining factor in it being slop is not that it uses AI. AI just makes it easier to make more of everything and most of everything that gets made is crap.
    God help me am I about to change my view on AI-assisted writing?
  • Slop and AI-assisted are not the same, this I already knew. Maybe there’s a distinction too between AI-assisted and AI-generated.
    God help me am I about to change my view on AI-assisted writing?
  • a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it.
    Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
  • People are worried about AI because they correctly perceive that its risks are real,
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation.
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • public hostility to datacenters as largely a symbol or outlet for broader economic anxieties about AI
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • we are unlikely to get good policy if we cannot accurately measure what is happening on the ground.
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • We risk ending up in a world where the economic tradeoff dial is stuck on the hypergrowth, hyper-inequality setting, and is potentially very hard to unstick from that setting. The key challenge in such a world won’t be incentivizing growth, but finding a way for everyone to share in the benefits.
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • It is difficult to predict what the economy looks like if human labor stops being competitive.
    When AI builds itself \ Anthropic
  • these trajectories may actually turn out to be S-curves
    When AI builds itself \ Anthropic
  • The engineers who wrote that code are among the best in the world at building these systems. Claude is now catching the mistakes that they missed.
    When AI builds itself \ Anthropic
  • I started leaning hard into Claudifying about a year ago. That’s been a crazy adventure and it’s now been ~5 months since I last wrote any code myself.”
    When AI builds itself \ Anthropic
  • Japanese cities let restaurants cluster in mixed-use buildings where people live, work, and transit. A 20-seat ramen shop near a station sees hundreds of potential customers during lunch rush.
    America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan—but our zoning laws make them illegal
  • Japan’s population is declining, younger people are urbanizing, and nobody wants to inhabit old homes.
    Why Japan has millions of abandoned houses
  • If a large portion of the candy is actually the batch from the previous day, and that is done every single day, then there’s a probable chance that original ingredients from the 1800s are still being incorporated into the candy today.
    The 130-Year-Old Secret Inside Every Tootsie Roll You Eat Today | The Kitchn
  • you will probably need to intentionally write in a very different style than you usually do (or to have AIs rewrite all your prose for you
    I can never talk to an AI anonymously again
  • You should expect that, if you leave a detailed anonymous review on Glassdoor after leaving your job, within a year or two it will be possible for companies to paste that text into an AI and learn exactly who wrote it.
    I can never talk to an AI anonymously again
  • We pick up style tics from our subculture, and that makes our text deeply identifying when we wouldn’t expect it. It can get weirdly close off weirdly little information, and this is the least powerful that AI models will ever be.
    I can never talk to an AI anonymously again
  • You’d have to succeed here, for there was no further West to go.
    Ando: Building Slack from Scratch — New Ontologies
  • the passive ones (scrolling, consuming) and scattered ones (I know well the perils of the man of multiple projects) and instead replace them with active and focused ones. They encourage me to make decisions, and give me crutches to rely on towards regret minimization.
    Do Thing, Do One Thing
  • Should I go to this social event, even though I'm feeling tired? (1) says yes. I don't trust my tiredness — I'm wary it is a low set point of sadness that my mind is overcorrecting towards — so I overrule it by biasing towards action.
    Do Thing, Do One Thing
  • In the black markets of Lisbon, men in gloves opened first editions as if handling unstable explosives. Buyers did not ask, "Is it true?" but "Is it still there?"
    Playing Catch-Up
  • "Avoid attractors" — that, for example, it was really hard to get a little monster animal that was not Pokemon, because that was so present in the training data.
    Playing Catch-Up
  • Are you prompting it for answers? Or is it prompting you for questions?
    Playing Catch-Up
  • Now I can read all the best verifiably-human written best books, because those started back in 2100 BCE and ended in 2022 CE, with the release of ChatGPT. For everything written after that date… you can never be sure.
    Playing Catch-Up
  • You merely express it, leaving execution for someone else. Science fiction writers describe a future they can't build, but would like to see. Someone else gets inspired by it and builds it. Borges just took it further by simulating writing the books themselves.
    Playing Catch-Up
  • He just had too many ideas to execute on in a lifetime and, thus, instead of executing on them left instructions and trailheads for the future.
    Playing Catch-Up
  • I was starting to see the world as potential prompts.
    Playing Catch-Up
  • There is something deeply human we lose when we disconnect from our roots (childhood) and neglect to think about our future (seniorhood) and live exclusively in an unrooted “right now.” It can make things wildly bland. The richness of a long, beautifully wrinkled and grey life-lived juxtaposed with the colors and screeches of the child who just arrived is a beauty hard to capture. The “village” mentality of our ancestors, where generations are mixed together, is a way of life we have to maintain with effort if we want to experience it.
    Getting Your Zest for Life Back - by Jenna O'Brien
  • it was often simple repetitive work with my hands that could put my mind at ease when no additional “thinking about it” could do. I remember the morning after I lost a loved one, I sat on the floor and assembled small boxes for my tea brand silently. Coping with it. My suggestion is that you rapidly find a way to get into an assembly line.
    Getting Your Zest for Life Back - by Jenna O'Brien
  • Give away what you feel you do not currently have.
    Getting Your Zest for Life Back - by Jenna O'Brien