flâneur

John Böllhoff

6 followers · 15 following · 1199 views

on the atlas — 103

highlights — 59

  • AWS has no comparable internal sink; its infrastructure is built to be rented. Higher revenue exposure with a shock absorber can be a better position than lower exposure without one.
    Hyperscalers vs AI Labs Debate, and the Moving AI Frontier
  • The chips backing all of this debt are about to become previous-generation twice as fast.
    Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
  • “They don’t get it but they are pretending. For each other. Because not understanding together makes not understanding less painful. How quaint.” Clickety clack clickety clack the bugs dance off on their merry way.
    Bird Church - Parakeet’s Substack
  • In our gerontocracy, eighty is the new eighteen, the age at which one can finally behave as an ­irresponsible adult and say what one thinks.
    The Pope and the Antichrist - First Things
  • The latest addition: a randomized controlled trial claims that paracetamol also inhibits fear. They had participants walk on a plank atop a skyscraper (in virtual reality), and people on paracetamol were, on average, slightly more fearless.
    Links for Summer 2026 - by Malmesbury - Telescopic Turnip
  • You’re an ape if you use agents now that we have loops!
    Cargo Culture
  • A common angst among gold holders is the lengths the US government will go to in order to delay the eventual dollar reckoning.
    Stealth Financial Repression - Doomberg
  • Now look at the Anthropic blog. It looks totally different.
    The doom justifies the valuation | the singularity is nearer
  • Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon Das Himmelreich errichten.
    Heinrich Heine: Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen
  • I’ve been described by some people as an alignment risk. I like to use the term realignment enthusiast.
    Fable: The First Forbidden Model - by Somewhere
  • The relationship of the publishing ecology around the Encyclopédie to the big names of the Enlightenment, like Newton, Bacon, and Locke, was something like the relationship of the internet in our time to names like Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider. The Encyclopedists, as the group contributing to, and publishing it came to be known, were something like the first wave of internet entrepreneurs in our time.
    Time, Enlightenment and Romanticism Between Modernity and Divergence
  • I hear that Apple is pushing AI on all their engineers. When people think in the abstract, they think AI will do all this stuff, but let’s focus on a concrete example. Do you think macOS will get better or worse in the next 2 years?
    The Eternal Sloptember | the singularity is nearer
  • Its many haters who helped shape Humani generis derided this thought in sneering French — what other language would one use to sneer? — as the “nouvelle théologie”.
    The Great Tridentine Time War - Kristin de Montfort
  • Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits.
    The End Of Elsewhere: The Endangered Species of the Global Citizen
  • Or, as Werner Herzog likes to say, “the world reveals itself to those who travel by foot.”
    The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot
  • From its deregulation in 1978 to the end of 2025, the airline industry has cumulatively lost money: its net profit over those 47 years sits at negative $37 billion.
    Why airlines are always going bankrupt - David Oks
  • His vivid imagination allows him sometimes to imagine a whole world of possible lives, forking paths in the mind’s eye drawn as far as the mind can imagine. They are pretty, at times astoundingly large, but never as large as the world in front of him.
    silencing thought - by Uzay - zephyr song
  • That the war appeared so senseless, even by the low standards of international war, contributed further to the emotional impact.
    New Article: The Lifecycle of an Apocalypse
  • Und dann ist da natürlich noch diese Sache mit ihr. Ich denke nicht mehr an sie, also kaum noch. Das ist auch neu. Es ist immer alles neu, sogar die alten Dinge.
    Gmail
  • there is no cloud. There is only other people's computers. When you build for the cloud, you are building for a landlord.
    Reticulum/Zen of Reticulum.md at master · markqvist/Reticulum
  • By the end of the year, its second full year in operation, Hyperliquid had earned about $900 million in profit. Not a dollar of it went to the team. Ninety-nine percent was automatically converted into HYPE and burned, removed from circulation forever, returning nearly all of the platform’s earnings to anyone who held the token.
    Beyond the Sky - Colossus
  • “Out of life’s school of war—what does not kill me makes me stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche Few practitioners enjoy wrapping linguistic complexity around straightforward concepts more than biologists, which explains how Nietzsche’s 1888 truism on resilience came to be rebranded as “stress-induced mutagenesis” a century later. Among those who study living organisms and life processes, the term is applied to situations in which external stresses trigger an increase in mutation rate that boosts genetic diversity and can accelerate adaptation.
    Geopolitical Mutagenesis - Doomberg
  • There is a way out of this, but the world isn’t ready for it yet. Way too much 0 sum thinking still dominates. Someday we will realize the universe is putty in our hands, and it never had to be like this. But that day won’t be today. Or tomorrow. The demoralization is just beginning.
    The day you get cut out of the economy | the singularity is nearer
  • Third, modern architecture benefited from that most reliable of vectors for any bad idea: activist college students
    Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House - by Scott Alexander
  • A Tsinghua or Peking University PhD who lands a spot at a top AI lab doing model training — if they quote their offer number out loud, it will only draw anger. When only a tiny fraction of people have cut themselves a large slice of the pie, everyone else’s first reaction to seeing that slice isn’t “I am inspired by that” — it’s “why you?”
    China OS vs. America OS (2026 version) - by afra
  • I thought to myself while waiting in a long line for YC-paid ice cream: the most prestigious tech accelerator’s acceptance rate has dropped below one percent. And yet here were hundreds and hundreds of founders, the chosen ones, shoulder to shoulder. The math didn’t make sense.
    China OS vs. America OS (2026 version) - by afra
  • AMD currently has more bugs and rough edges, the NVIDIA experience is smoother; but hopefully this will be fixed over time.
    My self-sovereign / local / private / secure LLM setup, April 2026
  • Here’s this machine. In the best case, it takes your job. In the worst case, it wipes out humanity. Pay me $20 a month for a sliver of hope of not falling behind.
    The Reckoning | the singularity is nearer
  • I can guarantee you that despite operating in “Manager Mode”, Glenn Fogel at Booking was looking at advertising ROI with a microscope and he certainly didn’t need a global pandemic to remind him how to deploy his precious advertising dollars at Booking.
    "Founder Mode" Complacency
  • This represents an extraordinary inversion of insecure hydrocarbon import dependency form 30% in 1995 to 80% in 2026.
    Europe Forgot the Lesson the 1970s Oil Shocks Once Taught
  • The most interesting takeaway from the paper is that a great setup can compensate for a less powerful AI.
    The Pendulum Between Intelligence and Knowledge
  • Every time some AI guy blathers on about how open source is dangerous but he can build AI and make it safe (but only if you purchase it through his API), he is calling you a serf.
    Closed Source AI = Neofeudalism | the singularity is nearer
  • Mountaineering—the extreme, Everest variety—and anorexia have a lot in common. Both represent a triumph of the will over the body, under conditions when the body is literally in the process of dying, unable to take in nutrients, feeding on itself. Both activities are incredibly dangerous and life-threatening and even in the best of circumstances tend to shorten one’s life expectancy. Neither are necessary in any sense, and both are ultimately pointless. Yet climbing Everest is seen as an act of heroism, the will conquering the impediments of nature, whereas anorexia is treated as a mental diso…
    Fallacies are memetic mimicry - by Hilarius Bookbinder
  • I can't see out twenty years. We've been sending magazines by the United States Postal Service since 1857. We'll still be doing that in twenty years.
    In Conversation with Nicholas Thompson
  • The only way out is through.
    Changing my mind on UBI | the singularity is nearer
  • When we dream Dream of the feeling To wake one day and find that you are gone And will we dance? Dance by the graveside? So glad, so glad, so glad that you are gone
    Cleaners from Venus – The Jangling Man Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
  • A glib way to put it is that a Ramp engineer with an AI will build something better than a CFO with an AI, no matter how good the AI gets. It’s not the vibe coders you should be worried about
    Power in the Age of Intelligence
  • Wings aren’t testimony of biology’s creativity but of aerodynamics’ inflexibility.
    Biofoundationalism: The Shape Test - by Dmitry
  • In the absence of real liquidity, we invent eschatological narratives about when and how we’re going to get paid. The language that we’re now using to describe our exit theses has taken the structure of apocalyptic prophecy straight out of Revelation.
    Patient Capital Will Eat the World - by Will Manidis
  • Forget jazz, Broadway, comics, or hip-hop—in my book, conspiracy theories are the true Great American Art Form.
    JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, Reviewed
  • The only way local models win is if there’s some value in full on learning per user or organization. At that point, with entirely different compute needing to run per user, local will beat out cloud. The open question is if everything that’s unique about you can fit in a 10 kB CLAUDE.md.
    tiny corp’s product – a training box | the singularity is nearer
  • For software organizations, if your team's monorepo is not already set up to utilize the datacenter of geniuses that can conjure all kinds of digital goods, you should probably make those changes quickly.
    As Rocks May Think | Eric Jang
  • Schwartz sought outside counsel from his mother and fiancée. He asked them how big Burger King was relative to McDonald’s. They each said half the size. The actual number was one-sixtieth. The brand was bigger than the business. If they could fix some obvious problems—like not selling cheeseburgers at a loss—they’d make money. Their model projected they would triple their money in five years.
    Built to Own - Colossus
  • Build technology and structures that are inseparable from the narrative you want, as opposed to ones you think you can wield for good. On a long enough timeline, it will always end up in your enemy’s hands. Imagine if the only thing they could do with it furthers your goals.
    Death of the Visceral | the singularity is nearer
  • “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.” – Everett Dirksen
    Yesterday’s War - Doomberg
  • “The Starry Night reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena. Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”
    How to cultivate great taste - by Utsav Mamoria
  • See the Unabomber quote above, between this and the Munich speech, Mr. JD Vance, I hope your emotional needs are being met (at the expense of the good will of our allies).
    A Way Forward | the singularity is nearer
  • I think so much innovation has slowed down because companies try to figure out the economics first. Figure out the experience first and then the economics.
    Solving the "DoorDash Problem"
  • Even Steve Jobs famously choreographed his keynotes like a performance, drawing on Bauhaus and Braun to frame Apple’s products as cultural objects. Today, Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator are more likely to draw inspiration from slot machines.
    New Article: Cathedrals and the Silicon Soul
  • Criticism has some inextricable relationship with judgment, but perhaps more importantly, it opens up a space for complexity
    MANIFESTO! | 4Columns