Other celeb memecoins went to zero quickly, but Trump is Trump, and has the unique qualities of (a) 100M+ followers, (b) daily non-stop coverage, (c) presidential immunity, and (d) unprecedented control over the government.
Digital trade now makes up 25% of global trade— around $5 trillion—and is the fastest-growing segment.
What makes this absolutely revolutionary is how perfectly suited transformer models are for this exact problem. Think about it – transformers process sequences of tokens, and what’s DNA? It’s literally nature’s token sequence. Proteins are just strands of DNA wearing a fancy outfit, and transformers can read them like a master cryptographer breaking the simplest cipher.
If kids start using RN and it becomes cool, that’s a whole different level of social phenomenon.
Previously I thought the only bipartisan consensus in DC was for anti-China Cold War 2. But perhaps this can be moderated at the grassroots level.
Just a week ago videos showing techno-utopian Chinese cities or aesthetic cafes or bookstores were often mistaken for Tokyo or Seoul. Now people are getting the real picture.
His story also shows to me that it’s never to late to change your life. He did a hard fork towards health in his early to mid 40s I think. From my experience, if you’re radically unhappily with your life, it’s usually better to do a hard fork like this. Change your environment, identity, and become who you really want to be. Because you have decades of baggage that made you what you don’t want to be today.
The video will only stop getting new views if TikTok starts to fail in finding more people who engage with it properly. Regarding the engagement metrics, I think that watch time is the most important metric, because this is what keeps users on the app. Other types of engagement also matter, primarily shares and comments, but likes do not really make a difference.
Robin Hanson: For the 40 years we’ve been together, my wife & I have had a tradition of seeing most of the Oscar nominated movies every year. Has bonded us, & entertained us.
Reflexion utilizes a short-term sliding window to capture recent feedback and incorporates persistent long-term storage to retain condensed insights.
He explained that many of his friends with prestigious degrees are moving away from Shanghai and Beijing – Yes, the pay there can be twice as high as in second or third tier cities. But the competitiveness is insane. And in order to actually land the high skilled positions, they have to work truly insane hours (9-9-6 is not a myth).
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I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China – who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn’t exist there. Sure, there are viral Bilibili videos from professors talking about practical matters like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what’s happening in the world and what we should do about it? Not much going on.
Just as ancients held heliocentric views, we hold anthropocentric (human-centric) views. These must be altered in the face of LLMs, which can already defeat the Turning Test and demonstrate mere glimmers of the brilliance to come.
everyone — no matter how connected or successful — should be playing in at least one new arena at all times. The harsh truth is that arenas are never static. If they’re not new, they’re getting old. If they’re not growing, they’re dying. It’s not just opportunistic but also healthy for your mind.
Regardless, there’s not going to be a model moat that lasts longer than a year, bc labs swap researchers like baseball cards, and, perhaps more importantly, the researchers between labs party and sleep with each other. Plus I think researchers are too idealistic to not share information if things got out of hand.
Tom Brady is a 7x Superbowl Champion. He also holds the record for most passes intercepted in Superbowl history.
Serena Williams is a 23x Gram Slam Champion. She also holds the record for the most unforced errors in a single match.
Novak Djokovic is a 24x Grand Slam Champion. He also holds the record for the most tennis final losses in history.
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Whether you’re chasing championships or personal goals, the same truth applies. To double your rate of success, you have to double your rate of failure. The more you learn about what doesn’t work, the more you understand what does.Failure isn’t the enemy of success, it’s the foundation.
He seems to have this animal cleverness about him, probably due to all his NYC real estate skulduggery. He can see the EU/Russia relationship from the Putin side of the table in a way all the Ben Rhodes and Jake Sullivans can not.
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Another thing he understands is that strong, vital societies grow and intuitively, when you look at maps old empires, you know they’ve peaked when their territorial expanse does. America getting bigger is almost inherently greater in some fundamental way
In the past, IT has been responsible for deploying and maintaining software that enables the workforce; in a world of AI Agents, IT will increasingly be responsible for actually getting the work itself done. This has massive implications around how strategic IT becomes, and how this org more tightly coordinates with the company.
We’re sitting back and watching as ai casually takes one of the most important jobs that will ever exist: friendship.
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i think people imagine that talking to claude is replacing talking to humans – you guys have no idea how little i was talking to humans before this. it’s replacing doomscrolling and youtube and video games
It’s also important to note that at the end of November, U.S. stocks represented over 70% of the MSCI World Index, the highest percentage since 1970 according to another Cembalest chart. Thus, it’s clear that (a) U.S. companies are worth a lot compared to the companies in other regions and (b) the top seven U.S. stocks are worth a heightened amount relative to the rest of U.S. stocks.
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“No price too high” stands out to me in particular. When you can’t imagine any flaws in the argument and are terrified that your officemate/golf partner/brother-in-law/competitor will own the asset in question and you won’t, it’s hard to conclude there’s a price at which you shouldn’t buy.
TikTok will continue to drive culture: 13 of the 16 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 Songs of 2024 were linked to TikTok trends.
Here are the highest-grossing movies of 2024. Only one of the top 10 isn’t a sequel—and it’s Wicked, a film based on the best-selling Broadway play in history. Not exactly an original film. You have to go all the way to #15 for an “original” film, and that one is based on a best-selling book.
So personally, I like to use 2x the ongoing federal deficit as my hurdle rate I need to target to stay ahead of inflation over the next 30 years
With deficit current running around 6.5%, that means I need investment returns >13% to expect to actually accumulate wealth over the long term
This isn’t exactly new. Every decade, a different figure becomes the face of the anti-aging movement. Twenty years ago, it was Ray Kurzweil with his supplements or Dave Asprey and his butter coffee. The names change, but the obsession stays the same.
AI interactions like casual reminders (“When are we killing Diablo tonight?”) had a 20% retention rate.
More intimate, narrative-driven engagement (“When are we getting married?”) spiked retention and click-through rates to 70%.
The 60/40 allocation has peaked. If there is an unwind as I suspect there may be, demand for gov bonds globally would plummet causing treasury rates to spike further. Global carry trades could accelerate the unwind and make things even worse. Governments (Ala Nixon) would blame traders as opposed to decades of irresponsible borrowing.
Before then, Lego only sold original themes. It started in the late 1970s, when Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen—who became CEO of The Lego Group in 1979—pushed the company towards an structured-play idea he called Legoland. He described it as a “system within the system,” organizing Lego products into three distinct themes to enhance the coherence and storytelling potential of the sets: Town (1978), Castle (1978), and Space (1979). These quickly became big hits in Europe and the United States.
Everyone wishes they’d bought Amazon at $5 on the first day of 1998, since it’s now up 660x at $3,304.
* But who would have continued to hold when the stock hit $85 in 1999 – up 17x in less than two years?
* Who among those who held on would have been able to avoid panicking in 2001, as the price fell 93%, to $6?
* And who wouldn’t have sold by late 2015 when it hit $600 – up 100x from the 2001 low? Yet anyone who sold at $600 captured only the first 18% of the overall rise from that low.
No government has ever been able to sustainably collect more than ~20% of it’s GDP as tax revenue
I don’t want to knock anyone’s hard work or effort, but just pointing out that compared to real human conversation, none of what I’ve seen from character ai comes anywhere close. But for many – over 2.1 million from reddit alone – this is more than fine. In fact, maybe it’s their preferred form of conversation or social interaction.
However, the whole world’s need for software engineers might go up bc the world can def use 10x more quality software. So I think we’ll see a golden age of applications from leaner companies. Personalized microapps for every person and business.
What’s a good way to give money to kids without spoiling them? My idea: For every dollar they earn, give them $N. That way they have to work, but they don’t have to work a repulsive yuppie job to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.
The goal of GPS was to allow precise placement of bombs by the US military. That was the expectation for it. The first operational use in that regard was in 1991 during Desert Storm, and it was promising. But during the nineties there was still much distrust of GPS as it was not delivering on its early promise, and it was not until the early 2000’s that its utility was generally accepted in the US military. It had a hard time delivering on its early expectations and the whole program was nearly cancelled again and again.
Legend has it that the Buddha woke up at 35, and this seems about right — by your mid-thirties, you have probably been productively disillusioned by at least one serious personal disappointment.
Patient shareholders: 4/5ths of “large Nordic companies have long-term ownership, compared with 3/5ths in Europe and only 1/5th in America”, which allows for long-term thinking (private business families — Ikea, LEGO, Maersk, Wallenbergs — are also prominent in region and stymie foreign takeovers)
I have rarely seen a new technology that is less than ten years out from a lab demo make it in to a deployed robot. It takes time to see how well the method works, and to characterize it well enough that it is unlikely to fail in a deployed robot that is working by itself in the real world. Even then there will be failures, and it takes many more years of shaking out the problem areas and building it into the robot product in a defensive way so that the failure does not happen again.
I know that people really and truly cannot read your mind. It’s easy to think that people are ignoring your wants or emotions because they don’t care about you. But it’s likely that they have no idea what those are.
Netflix, so the essay argues, has perfected the art of designing content for “casual viewing”. Something you can have on in the background while cooking, playing a game, or doom-scrolling.
Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”
The only moat that chains have today is in the apps they support. It is apps who kingmake the chains, not chains who kingmake the apps.
code that is committed into Bitcoin Core and eventually rolled into a release is not deployed out onto the network of nodes by any centralized organization. Rather, each node operator must make a conscious decision to update the code they run. Bitcoin Core deliberately does not include an auto-update feature, since it could potentially be used to make users run code that they didn’t explicitly choose.
Another factor that increases the overall size of the Solana blockchain is the inclusion of vote transactions in the block. Validator vote transactions sit in the block alongside user transactions, which leads to a misleading transaction throughput as other blockchains generally do not include consensus operations in their block execution payloads. Ethereum, for example, isolates consensus in a completely separate consensus layer and other ecosystems also have dedicated chains specifically for consensus actions among validators.
“Consciousness is nature’s algorithm”
Here’s my core thesis, which for some reason almost nobody is talking about: the truly impactful AI agents will be software engineering agents.
Negative rules work because they align with how humans have structured behavior for millennia. Think of kosher or halal dietary laws, they don’t tell you what to eat; they tell you what not to eat. The Ten Commandments is the same idea. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t kill. These interdicts endure because they’re clear and enforceable, rooted in something bigger than individual willpower.
Long-term successful franchises are generalist funds. Survival as a VC means constantly reinventing your brand and staying on the bleeding edge of the industry. After all, VCs are paid to frontrun the next big narratives.
While some physicians argued cycling was healthy others linked it to insanity, deformities of the spine and even a cause for appendicitis. One insurance company even refused to insure avid bicycle riders, while one army recruitment office rejected applicants who were avid cyclists because it was assumed they had a weakened ‘bicycle heart.’
While the network, like its predecessors, is a neutral tool, I believe it creates a slightly more free world. Strict hierarchies meant that people were stuck in castes and bad luck. The assembly line reduced people to cogs in a giant machine. While the network affords people more freedom to self organize and choose which networks to affiliate with.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
– Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms.
Renewables are suboptimal because data centers require a steady stream of electricity that doesn’t depend on the wind blowing or sun shining. And nuclear, while promising, is in no state to scale up 10x any time soon. The obvious answer, at least for the US, seems to be natural gas.
We’re witnessing post-human eroticism.
While stone dildos (technology!) are 28,000 years old, the anthropomorphism of our sextech is a bit newer.
It’s an uncanny sexy frontier — one which speaks to our human isolation and one that can be wholly programmed to our personalized tastes.
“This is why I double downed on shitposting last few years, no joke,” wrote indie hacking legend Pieter Levels with 500k+ followers making $2M+/year on software. “AI right now is agreeable, politically correct, socially acceptable, consistent, responsible, way too normie to ever be a famous influencer (for now),” he continued here. “Being spicy and based online is now the main way to prove one’s humanity,” wrote Extropic founder Guillaume Verdon, better known as Beff Jezos with 150k+ followers.
the famous case of Hugo at SeaWorld, an orca repeatedly rammed his head into the side of his pool until he had a brain aneurysm and died. This phenomenon (known as “Zoochosis”) describes the unnatural coping behaviors that arise when you cage a wild animal.
“Creating a brand in a commodity space is a winning formula”
Everyone thinks AI is going to make us not have to work, but the opposite is already becoming true. I’m working more than ever. Same with my friends. Because we have so much leverage and what feels like infinite opportunities to make money, it’s getting harder and harder to put away the phone.
Young men are (too) often seen as the only consumers, and therefore drivers of porn. This is changing. Worldwide, women now account for 38% of all Pornhub visitors, up from 14% in 2015. And while 18-24 year-olds make up 27% of all traffic, and 25-34 year-olds make up 24%, the rest — near half of all visitors — are 35+ (35-44 = 17%, 45-54 = 14%, 55-64 = 11%, 65+ = 7%.) We should be mindful of this demographic diversity.
Like a Black Mirror episode, we’re seeing an increase in the absurd shit people will do to get attention on the internet—and the exponentially higher returns on investment every year (what exactly is the ROI of sucking 1,000 dicks????).
So yes, I think a pornstar will fuck a Tesla robot and she will make millions doing it.