flâneur

Mackay G

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on the atlas — 102

highlights — 310

  • Similarly, countries are creating a new web of regional and bilateral deals to manage financial crises. The International Monetary Fund continues to be the largest source of emergency financial assistance, but these other arrangements add to the safety net, protecting individual countries and making systemic contagion less likely. Importantly, regional and bilateral arrangements can be more flexible in their terms. Many have argued that since the US is the IMF’s largest backer and shareholder, austere loan conditions prioritize short-term repayment at the expense of long-term growth, often for…
    The New World Order Will Be More Dangerous and More Cooperative - Bloomberg
  • In public health, a more decentralized network for pandemic surveillance and vaccine development is taking shape.
    The New World Order Will Be More Dangerous and More Cooperative - Bloomberg
  • In an age of hyperconnectivity and distributed power, these divisions have broken down. Countries, now with more agency and more options, are fluid, opportunistic and contradictory in their relations. “Polyamory” is the new norm in geopolitics.
    The New World Order Will Be More Dangerous and More Cooperative - Bloomberg
  • Middle powers are major players in this new landscape. They can act as swing states, tilting the balance of geopolitical power, or pursue what Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney called “variable geometry...different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.” Though the withdrawal of the US constitutes a massive shock to the supply of international cooperation, the proliferation of cross-border problems means demand for shared problem-solving is higher than ever, and middle powers have the means to step up. Intensifying great-power coercion creates added incentive for…
    The New World Order Will Be More Dangerous and More Cooperative - Bloomberg
  • “Are there even any steppe nomads left?” “Definitely! Lots of people in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, stick to their traditional ways of life. All they need is a charismatic leader to unite them.”
    Every Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • “Exactly! With modern technology, the next time could be so much worse! Usually the steppe nomads are limited to a small fringe around the steppe where they can still graze their horses. But with modern logistics, you can get horse food basically anywhere. There’s no limit to how far the next steppe confederation could get. That’s why I think this is a true existential risk, not just another 5 - 10% of the world’s population like usual.”
    Every Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?” “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.” “I didn’t think they were still a problem.” “Oh yeah. You look at history, and once every two hundred, three hundred years they get their act together, form a big confederation, and invade either China, the West, or both. It’s like clockwork. 400 AD, you get the Huns. 700, the Magyars. 1000, the first Turks start moving west. 1200, Genghis Khan, killed 10% of the world population. 1400, Tamerlane, killed another 5%. 1650, the Ming-Qing transition in China, also killed 5%. We’re more than 50 years …
    Every Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • “So your thread of consciousness can never wink out of existence?” “Of course it can, that’s the whole point of Buddhism. You need to become nothing, gradually, naturally, in a way where each step is causally linked to the step before. Then, when you die, your consciousness won’t continue at all. It’ll just stay nothing. Nirvana! Seems pretty straightforward to me. I don’t know why everyone else keeps saying that Buddhism has ‘supernatural elements’ or parts that are ‘hard to square with modern science’.”
    Every Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • “Even in Buddhism, reincarnation isn’t a transfer of souls. It’s a transfer of karmic bundles. Suppose that you’re violent and greedy your whole life, and then you die. You ‘wake up’ in the consciousness of the most similar being you can find. Maybe it’s a wolf, or a praying mantis. But suppose you use your reason and really lean into the purely human virtues. Then you’re basically guaranteed to ‘wake up’ as another person. Not that they’ll have your memories or anything. They’re just whose qualia you’ll be experiencing.”
    Every Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • “Have you ever heard about the quantum suicide thought experiment? Suppose that there are near-infinite parallel universes. There are versions of you in some of them - people who are exactly identical to you and each other. It’s meaningless to ask which of them ‘you’ ‘are’” - she made the scare quotes with her hands - “because you’re all of them at once. ‘You’ are the mathematical pattern, not the atoms, anything that instantiates that pattern is you. So if you shoot yourself, you won’t die, because you can’t have the experience of not existing. You’ll just find your thread of consciousness ‘w…
    Every Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • Recommended Policy Actions • Ensure access to large -scale computing power for startups and academics by improving the financial market for compute. Currently, a company seeking to use large - scale compute must often sign long -term contracts with hyperscalers — far beyond the 6 National Institute of Standards and Technology, “ Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0),” (Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2023), www.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.100 -1
    America’s AI Action Plan
  • We are on the brink of a dark age, or have already entered one. The scale of art, music, and literature being lost each day as the World Wide Web shifts and degenerates represents the biggest loss of human cultural production since World War II. My generation was continuously warned by teachers, parents, and authority figures that we should be careful online because the internet is written in ink, and yet it turned out to be the exact opposite. As writer and researcher Kevin T. Baker remarked, “On the internet, Alexandria burns daily.”
    Century-Scale Storage
  • According to Amazon, S3 “holds more than 280 trillion objects and averages over 100 million requests a second. To protect data integrity, Amazon S3 performs over four billion checksum computations per second.” The total of human production under the stewardship of Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud is unfathomable. It is a black hole, a star so dense it has collapsed unto itself and is only getting heavier and heavier.
    Century-Scale Storage
  • America’s AI Action Plan has three pillar s: innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security .
    America’s AI Action Plan
  • “I actually find it lovely that Josh is centered and self-aware enough not to always be filling the air with words and opinions,” Ive concluded. “Who you are defines what you do and how you do it. Josh’s compassion and empathy, his values and concern about people, his gentle and quiet way. I see those things as, you know, who Josh is, which is also his professional practice. I love that there isn’t a division in him. He isn’t fractured.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • “It’s a boast to say we will be the next J.P. Morgan,” Nohria clarified. “We’re not there. But I think we will have the opportunity. With AI, data centers, the associated energy and chips, these are our equivalent of Morgan’s railroads and steel. Like with Stripe and OpenAI: You need a person and institution that can come into these complicated, momentous situations and find the path forward as the trusted party.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • “I keep coming back to J.P. Morgan,” said Nithin Nohria, the historian of American business history. “Morgan wanted to be a part of the financiers of his time, but also independent of them in an important way. His view was that you could be the trusted party, the person and institution that could be trusted to anchor the broader movement of capital across America at that pivotal moment in history. That idea is what drew me to Josh from the very first—his idea for Thrive was similar.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • A few months later, with the dust from the coup barely settled, Kushner delivered what the investor referred to as “probably a masterstroke.” After proving Thrive’s mettle in wartime, Kushner negotiated another $1 billion investment in OpenAI at a $150 billion valuation, then negotiated the exclusive right to invest an additional billion at the $150 billion valuation through January 2026—effectively a call option on the future of artificial intelligence that no one else received. By early 2025, OpenAI’s valuation reached $500 billion. “That option was grossly valuable then,” the investor said.…
    The New World - Colossus
  • In its process of discovery, Thrive concluded that the board’s accusations against Altman of failing to be “consistently candid” in his communications were baseless, and that the board had no day-after plan, or even a script for addressing hundreds of bewildered employees after voting to decapitate the company. They also learned that the board was trying to sell OpenAI to Anthropic, the competitor started by former OpenAI employees, in what appeared to be an attempt by more ideologically hardline Effective Altruists to capture the leading AI company. From Thrive’s perch in New York, to which t…
    The New World - Colossus
  • In early 2015, when Grimshaw was 23, he saw GitHub as a potential crown jewel in the portfolio, and began pushing it at an 11pm investment meeting. The company had bootstrapped for years, wasn’t seen as a fast grower, and had raised money only once; the next would be a growth round, which wasn’t exactly in the swim lane of Thrive’s $400 million fund. But Grimshaw was convinced it was strategic, on the theory, more or less, that “More infrastructure’s getting abstracted into code,” and that GitHub was the single most important tool in that ecosystem. “I said to Josh, ‘let’s go do GitHub,’” he r…
    The New World - Colossus
  • Many of Thrive’s earliest victories bear Kushner’s distinct imprint, such as its early $12 million investment in a growth round of Instagram, 72 hours before Facebook acquired the company for double its $500 million valuation—a ruthlessly competitive allocation the nascent Thrive only won as a result of Instagram founder Kevin Systrom’s belief that Kushner was harder working and more independently minded than other, much larger VCs fighting to get in.
    The New World - Colossus
  • Everyone hates the man until they become the man,” Kushner concluded, in one of those moments in which he conveys an anxious resolve to rise to the miracles and mend the fractures in his name. “But it is like that C.S. Lewis line from The Inner Ring.” He glanced at the quote, which hangs framed in his office. “‘The true road lies in quite another direction.’”
    The New World - Colossus
  • “I have navigated many complex situations in my life. I have learned not to care too much about what the world thinks. Not because I am special, but because I have had a unique lens on what the world is and how people can act. People love you, and then they hate you, and then they love you. The only thing that ultimately matters is how you feel about yourself. Trying to appease others is never a winning game.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • “Their first album comes from love, heartbreak, passion, or depression. They have no expectation of how the world will respond. They write it from the heart, and if it catches on, they’re validated by the world. But then they start writing their second album, and they don’t necessarily write it based on love, heartbreak, or passion. They write the album they think the world will want.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • There are also other locations specifically within the San Francisco Bay Area where the federal government owns land which could be converted to a similar governing structure as the Presidio Trust, like the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard—most of which has not been transferred to San Francisco—or the remaining federally-owned segment of the defunct Alameda Naval Air Station.
    Build the Presidio Freedom City
  • The 1500 acres are governed under a unique trust structure created by Congress after the Presidio’s closure as an active military base in the late 1980s. The Presidio Trust Act instructs how the area is to be operated, under a board of directors which includes the Secretary of the Interior and six members appointed by the President of the United States.
    Build the Presidio Freedom City
  • This is reflected in economic figures, with the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area boasting a 2022 GDP of $1.383 trillion—surpassing the nominal GDP of entire nations, including wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands.
    Build the Presidio Freedom City
  • Implemented effectively, a San Francisco Bay Area Freedom City will launch a tidal wave of scientific and technological breakthroughs which can restore American economic dynamism and produce profound improvements in American life, while ensuring the United States remains the world’s innovation capital.
    Build the Presidio Freedom City
  • If you subject a large group of people, for example an entire generation of young students, only to these anti-hero approaches, you can demoralize an whole society. If history doesn't give us energy, but rather drains it from us, we may be witnessing the consequences of a deliberate, industrial-scale demoralization.
    The Classic Solution to Demoralization
  • History can be many things, and facts are important. But if history can't fortify us on the eve of battle, it has failed at its most important purpose - to inspire action in the present. When taking the "moral" approach to reading history, according to Nietzsche, we should be willing even to "do violence" to the facts in our own minds -- as long as this imaginative act brings out the best forces from within us. (He called it "monumental history")
    The Classic Solution to Demoralization
  • If we want to move into positions that require our utmost competence, we have to moralize ourselves. Not like a Sunday schoolmarm tut-tutting us with platitudes, but like Napoleon doing his pregame psych-up. Did Napoleon have anything more to learn about logistics, tactics, or battle strategy from reading Plutarch's biography of Caesar for the 37th time? No, rather, he used the story of Caesar to remind himself of who he was, by recalling to mind a man whom he always aspired to be like.
    The Classic Solution to Demoralization
  • Even Cato's attack on Murena, though it failed, got him a lot of attention. I think also of the early career of Teddy Roosevelt, as a junior member of the New York State Assembly, taking on huge tycoons like Jay Gould. When Cato took on Caesar, he had been in the fight for a long time already, it wasn't just his words, it was his reputation of taking on big, righteous causes, it was his character that spoke even louder than his words. Be someone to be reckoned with, it will sharpen you.
    on cate
  • Even Cato's attack on Murena, though it failed, got him a lot of attention. I think also of the early career of Teddy Roosevelt, as a junior member of the New York State Assembly, taking on huge tycoons like Jay Gould. When Cato took on Caesar, he had been in the fight for a long time already, it wasn't just his words, it was his reputation of taking on big, righteous causes, it was his character that spoke even louder than his words. Be someone to be reckoned with, it will sharpen you.
    on cate
  • Cicero didn't expect him to prosecute Murena, Caesar probably didn't expect him to do a hit campaign against the Optimate Profiteers from Sulla's reign of terror... you want to keep even your own party kind of guessing, wondering what you're going to do.
    on cate
  • if you want to be truly distinctive, put principle above party politics.
    on cate
  • People would laugh at Cato behind his back, at nice parties, sure. Cato knew it, and he didn't mind, he could roll with it. And the way to do this is to know his principles and stick to them. When people make fun of you, and you change course, they'll just make fun of you more. Cato could shrug it off: "What a droll consul we have".
    on cate
  • "Cato willingly shared the tasks which he imposed upon others, and in his dress, way of living, and conduct on the march, made himself more like a soldier than a commander, while in character, dignity of purpose, and eloquence, he surpassed all those who bore the titles of Imperator and General. In this way, without knowing it, he produced in his men at the same time the feeling of good will towards himself. For a genuine desire to attain virtue arises only in consequence of perfect good will and respect for him who displays virtue; those, on the other hand, who praise good men without loving …
    on cate
  • Your reward for this is that you have a chance to be an example others will either imitate, or at least admire.
    on cate
  • If you're in a life track where likeability is more important than respect, then there's a good chance you're on a sinking ship, or at least one dead in the water, and you should probably look to get out of there if you can.
    on cate
  • Seneca advises you to sort of imagine a little Cato on your shoulder saying "Hell no, Hell no," and Plutarch talks about how you can harness the energy of a man like that to fortify you against Cringe ... against "the kind of shame or concession making that is a vice".
    on cate
  • Cato's distinctive attitude made him stand out, and made people think of him constantly ("how are we going to do this while Cato is watching") - you'll leave an impression, and people will talk about you. It doesn't mean be quarrelsome, because you could get along with Cato if you were willing to do the right thing, the hard thing.
    on cate
  • "It is a real weakness to want to be liked."
    on cate
  • "Sorry, Cato won't allow it." His own moral courage, his willingness to be disliked, gave other people cover to do the right thing.
    on cate
  • “An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity, a physicist tries to make it simple, for an idiot anything the more complicated it is the more he will admire it, if you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it he's gonna think you're a god cause you made it so complicated nobody can understand it. That's how they write journals in Academics, they try to make it so complicated people think you're a genius”
    The science of simplicity - Biohacker
  • the relative twist angle between two layers has been the primary tuning parameter for a given choice of constituent crystals
    Moiré straintronics: a universal platform for reconfigurable quantum materials | npj 2D Materials and Applications
  • Large-scale two-dimensional (2D) moiré superlattices are driving a revolution in designer quantum materials. The electronic interactions in these superlattices, strongly dependent on the periodicity and symmetry of the moiré pattern, critically determine the emergent properties and phase diagrams
    Moiré straintronics: a universal platform for reconfigurable quantum materials | npj 2D Materials and Applications
  • we observe superconductivity near a flavour-symmetry-breaking phase transition
    Superconductivity and strong interactions in a tunable moiré quasicrystal | Nature
  • By twisting three layers of graphene with two different twist angles, we form two mutually incommensurate moiré patterns. In contrast to many common atomic-scale quasicrystals2,3, the quasiperiodicity in our system is defined on moiré length scales of several nanometres. This ‘moiré quasicrystal’ allows us to tune the chemical potential and thus the electronic system between a periodic-like regime at low energies and a strongly quasiperiodic regime at higher energies, the latter hosting a large density of weakly dispersing states.
    Superconductivity and strong interactions in a tunable moiré quasicrystal | Nature
  • Because of their unique properties, quasicrystals are both durable like metal and brittle like glass. In metals, the atoms are stacked on top of each other in organized layers, allowing for malleability. If pressure is applied, the atoms can “slip” between each other instead of cracking.
    A journey through the history of quasicrystals » MIT Physics
  • Regular crystals exhibit two-fold, three-fold, four-fold, or six-fold symmetry at the atomic level. This means they can be divided into equal halves in two, three, four, or six ways. Quasicrystals can additionally exhibit five-fold, ten-fold, or twelve-fold symmetry.
    A journey through the history of quasicrystals » MIT Physics