Eshaan Moorjani
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on the atlas · 47
- Why (most) High Level Languages are Slow // A Random Walk Through Geek-Space1 savers
- How Would Iran Respond to a U.S. Attack?1 savers
- Challenge the dollar, and the battlefield finds you – Middle East Monitor1 savers
- Escalating Iran war pushes US dollar up and stock markets down - Cayman Compass1 savers
- The Real Reason Why the US Overthrew Venezuela1 savers
- Rebuilding our world, with reference to strong AI - Marginal REVOLUTION3 savers
- Clawed - by Dean W. Ball - Hyperdimensional9 savers
- The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.org1 savers
- Venezuela Attack: End of the Petrodollar?1 savers
- The Brand Age12 savers
- Reintroducing Sieve2 savers
- 3D as code | World Labs2 savers
- The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmann8 savers
- Neural network training makes beautiful fractals | Jascha’s blog12 savers
- Brave New Nudge - by Brendan McCord - Cosmos Institute1 savers
- cdixon | What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years24 savers
- Choose Good Quests - by Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner44 savers
- Modern Magnificenza - Not Boring by Packy McCormick4 savers
- The Last Temptation of Claude - by Harry Law4 savers
- How Much Does It Cost to Train Frontier AI Models? | Epoch AI2 savers
- Strategy Letter V – Joel on Software14 savers
- Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance — LessWrong2 savers
- The First Fully General Computer Action Model | blog37 savers
- On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau1 savers
- Josh Safdie on Marty Supreme: ‘One dream has to end for another to begin’ | Dazed2 savers
- Beyond Food and Alcohol: New Year with Nietzsche1 savers
- Stakeholder versus shareholder capitalism | Claude1 savers
- A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits - The New York Times2 savers
- Marty Supreme is an Existentialist Masterpiece1 savers
- COLD SUMMER - Bolex 16mm - Short movie1 savers
- David Foster Wallace and Democracy - Liberties1 savers
- ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza2 savers
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe | Poetry Foundation3 savers
- Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace50 savers
- Cities and Ambition47 savers
- I should have loved biology36 savers
- The Grug Brained Developer29 savers
- Perplexity AI: Ask Anything16 savers
- Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building8 savers
- The Egg8 savers
- [2404.01476] TraveLER: A Multi-LMM Agent Framework for Video Question-Answering5 savers
- Syllabus5 savers
- Yale Law Journal - Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox4 savers
- The Great Unbundling4 savers
- Wealth, shown to scale4 savers
- The Electric Typewriter4 savers
- The Little Prince2 savers
highlights · 182
Iran is likely to prefer a proportional response that limits regional escalation.
How Would Iran Respond to a U.S. Attack?The US-led economic order has traditionally criminalized, isolated, and eliminated those leaders who challenge this economic order or disrupt control over the resources.
Challenge the dollar, and the battlefield finds you – Middle East MonitorThe case of Venezuela is not a military threat in the traditional sense, but its alliance with China and Russia alongside its noncompliance with the Petrodollar system is a structural threat to the US hegemony.
Challenge the dollar, and the battlefield finds you – Middle East MonitorSitilides notes that US president Donald Trump has been very clear about the need to protect the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. “He previously warned that any country using a BRICS dollar replacement would face 100% tariffs.”
Escalating Iran war pushes US dollar up and stock markets down - Cayman CompassThe Chinese bond issuance and the Venezuela escalation are two sides of the same coin;quite literally. One demonstrates that economic alternatives to dollar hegemony are viable and attractive. The other tests whether the United States can still enforce dollar dominance through the threat or application of military power.
The Real Reason Why the US Overthrew VenezuelaEmerging market central banks have been accumulating gold at a pace not seen since the 1960s, with purchases reaching 634 tonnes in the first nine months of 2025 alone.
The Real Reason Why the US Overthrew VenezuelaThe historical pattern is unmistakable. Iraq in 2000 announced it would accept only euros for its oil; Saddam Hussein was removed from power three years later.[^9] Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed pan-African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions; NATO intervened in 2011.[^10] Iran has sold oil in currencies other than dollars since 2012 and faces continuous sanctions pressure and repeated threats of military action.[^11] The message couldn’t be clearer: abandon the petrodollar, face consequences.
The Real Reason Why the US Overthrew VenezuelaI encourage you to avoid the assumption that “democratic” control—control “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—is synonymous with governmental control.
Clawed - by Dean W. Ball - HyperdimensionalOne gets the sense that the people making these decisions at DoW are not acting with strategic clarity nor any respect for the basic principles of the American republic—not to mention in stark contrast to President Trump’s own stated vision of letting AI thrive in America.
Clawed - by Dean W. Ball - HyperdimensionalBirth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.
Clawed - by Dean W. Ball - HyperdimensionalUnderstanding the monetary root cause clarifies why efforts to address issues like endless wars or carbon emissions often hit a wall: the prevailing system is built to expand itself, not to prioritize peace or planetary limits.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.org“American empire is inextricably linked with fossil fuels, and to mitigate climate change, it must come to an end”.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgThe result is a vicious cycle: debt drives growth, growth drives fossil fuel combustion, and fossil fuels exacerbate climate change and ecological harm.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgCritically, the monetary growth imperative undermines efforts to transition to sustainability. As Bendell observes, our debt-based monetary system “does not allow a steady-state economy” – it literally “prevents effective climate change mitigation…without monetary reform”
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgThere is a well-documented 1:1 coupling between global GDP and global energy use, particularly fossil fuel use .
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orglocked in a fossil-fuel-dependent global economy.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.org2022 paper from Hickel et al, between 1990-2015 alone, resulted in a wealth drain from the South totaling $242 trillion
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgUnder the current system, countries in the Global South are pressured to extract and export commodities (oil, minerals, cash crops) to earn the foreign currency needed to service debts and pay for imports – effectively subsidizing affluent lifestyles elsewhere at the cost of local ecosystems.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgThe result is a geopolitical landscape where U.S. military supremacy and currency supremacy reinforce each other, often at the expense of smaller nations’ sovereignty.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgNotably, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein switched to selling oil in euros in 2000, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency – moves that preceded U.S.-led military interventions that removed them from power
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgThis dynamic has fostered a financialized economy where speculation often outranks production.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgThis recycling of oil revenues back into American markets propped up U.S. budget deficits and helped finance Cold War expenditures.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgIn return, the U.S. provided military protection and lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi leaders would recycle their oil revenues into U.S. Treasuries and American investments.
The Petrodollar - The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World - CounterPunch.orgDig deeper, and you’ll find something more fundamental: Venezuela represents an existential threat to the petrodollar system, and by extension, to American global power itself.
Venezuela Attack: End of the Petrodollar?If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems.
The Brand AgeWhat a golden age feels like, at the time, is just that smart people are working hard on interesting problems and getting results.
The Brand AgeThat's the business an elite watchmaker is in now: carefully managing a sustained asset bubble.
The Brand AgeBranding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.
The Brand AgeBranding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.
The Brand AgeThat's the thing about minimalism: there tends to be just one answer.
The Brand AgeBut that is a strong assumption that requires either a shared model or at least a shared latent space.
3D as code | World Labsneural graphics functions like a programming language.
3D as code | World Labsrequiring simplified geometry and often hand-authored assets
3D as code | World LabsThe equivalent of asking an LLM to “be the program” would be discarding structured world representations and simulation engines, and instead relying purely on a black-box entanglement of state and measurement, such as models for action-conditioned pixel or state generation queried frame-by-frame.
3D as code | World LabsCode can be stored, versioned, tested, and run independently of the models’ transient context window. It separates reasoning, representation, and execution: you think about the algorithm, you write down a program as text, and then you run it.
3D as code | World LabsThree-dimensional representations allow people and machines to communicate about space, collaborate on designs, and create new environments.
3D as code | World LabsBecause the role of a scientist is to work on the solvable
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmannthey should be seen as one of several early attempts at identifying a scalable pre-training objective for perception–action learning
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannTraining a finite neural network to approximate this complex process could lead to useful representations that could hopefully be used as a basis to be fine-tuned into policies with useful know-how. However, this remains speculative: to date, I am not aware of any clear demonstration that video models can easily be fine-tuned into policies, though there are some early signs of life.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmannit also implicitly encodes a vast amount of information about not only physics and how the world works, but also human knowledge about skills, tasks, and their structure.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmanncurrent algorithms are far too sample-inefficient to be deployed on real robots.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannAs for the final step—manufacturing the artifact—in the near term, we will similarly fine-tune models on 3D printer APIs or mesh file formats. In the very long run, I note that a 3D printer or excavator is essentially a robot: A physical machine that we seek to automate via AI. Hence, I find it plausible that we will eventually solve these challenges of 3D manufacturing in the same way in which we will solve embodied intelligence more generally, by yielding direct control of the actuators of the machine to the AI.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannOnly after such a model has been trained should it be fine-tuned to interface with whatever representation or toolchain we humans like to use.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannInstead, our goal should be to train general-purpose physical intelligence models directly on raw data, allowing them to learn their own internal, task-relevant structure.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmanntrain models that will ultimately help us automate 3D design tasks.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannIn that context, inferring ego-motion is trivial compared to the complex control problems a general-purpose agent must solve.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannTo see why, try a thought experiment. Look at the room you are currently sitting in. If I gave you a perfect 3D reconstruction of this scene—a NeRF, a point cloud, whatever you choose—what real problem would you be able to solve with it?
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannYet, surprisingly few apply the same logic to representations.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent SitzmannAn agent has succeeded at perceiving the world when it can map present and past percepts to actions that accomplish its goals, especially when exposed to new and unseen environments.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmannargue that the future of computer vision is as part of end-to-end perception-action loops.
The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision - Vincent Sitzmann