In honor of Generals serving who were forced to listen to an awful speech, here's an awesome speech from General Mark Milley. “We don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution... ...and we're willing to die to protect it.”

Also she is the most difficult person to sing "Happy Birthday" to.

Indiana Jones is a fantasy about being a professor not having to submit itemized travel expenses after every adventure.

A friend of mine always said the best way to keep the seat next to you free is to nod and smile at people while gesturing to the seat making clear you’re excited for a long conversation!

"So you worry about a variable that you don't know whether it's exogenous?" "Yes, Dave" "So to claim causality, you use another variable that you also don't know whether it's exogenous but it requires 3 other assumptions that you are unsure about?" "Yes, Dave"

I'm just one person, and my programming needs are somewhat unusual (building various kinds of statistical forecasting models). But I'm just not seeing the consistent productivity gains from LLMs that I would have expected if you'd asked me 6 months ago.

OK, so as someone who works on this stuff daily, here's my take on LLMs for coding: There are some things they're really good at and some things they're really bad at, and knowing where to draw the line on how to use them is the key. I remain astounded by how incredible LLMs are

The deeper you go into the semiconductor supply chain, the less believable it becomes. > TSMC, a company on a small island, produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips > TSMC relies on dutch company ASML for EUV lithography machines > ASML depends on German Company

Ahem. Labor market, institutions, education… and MANAGEMENT.

Do incumbents buy startups to scale innovation or to stifle it? New research covering 60 countries finds that acquired startups were highly innovative before their acquisition, but their patenting drops sharply afterward, while acquirers' innovation doesn't rise.

My friend and classmate Will Carrington wrote "Lucas, by contrast, was the most elegant smoker I’ve ever seen, lighting his match with a single swing of his arm and holding the cigarette in a way that conveyed authority and power.  The use of a cigarette to punctuate speech is a

Doing the rhetorical slight of hand of the AI cargo cult. No could possibly have worked with LLMs and dismiss the civilizational transformation they represent. Don’t bother looking at all the recent working papers showing modest gains from AI adoption.

Best analogy yet.

This was bound to happen, but when? machine learning has passed the human error rate in driving! (see I’m not knee jerk anti ML just sick of exaggerated claims for the path to agi).

Same story every time: build something brilliant (Channel Tunnel), then wreck it with pointless, badly organized, bureaucracy (Brussels Midi customs/security/ticket contro). The tech is not the bottleneck! Will AI change that?

This was a great essay and tribute by Will: open.substack.com/pub/subgameper…

It's pretty funny that we are converging on the reality that will upset the maximum amount of people: LLMs are pretty good. They're not transformative, and also not useless. There are some tasks where LLMs will save you a lot of time. And that's it

It's hard to exaggerate the insane galloping stupidity of Republican energy policy. It's like trying to work out at the gym while hitting yourself in the balls with a tennis racket

6yo: What’s the biggest number? Me: There are an infinite number of numbers so there’s no biggest one. 6yo: What’s the biggest number you know the name of? Me: A googolplex. 6yo: Which is bigger, a googolplex or a googoobazillion? Me: There’s not a number named a

dying