Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are

Wow, another brutal debunk of one of the classics of social psychology. After Stanford Prison, Robbers Cave, Milgram’s shock machine, and the Kitty Genovese myth, another famous study (in all the textbooks) goes to the trash heap of history...

Only in Germany will you find a company run by a conclave of PhD physicists in a tradition dating directly back to Goethe and Riemann, whose sole purpose is to manufacture the most atomically-perfect mirrors and lenses ever, and of course this company is crucial for making GPUs.

when the terrain doesn’t match the map it’s usually a signal worth decoding. turns out academic inflation, like in the economy, brings a correction closer. theargumentmag.com/p/when-grades-…

the old way of scaling teams is dead: we used to hire specialists – designers, engineers, PMs – each in their lane, scaling by adding more people. but when Cursor can take you from idea to code in minutes, execution isn't the bottleneck anymore. taste and judgment are. what

Here are some claims that are simultaneously true, but that people maddeningly refuse to simultaneously acknowledge: 1. The knowledge and culture industries are highly unrepresentative of the societies they serve, and remained so throughout the "Great Awokening" (I wrote a book

It really is kind of amazing that after all these years of rust belt discourse, when someone actually plops a massive industrial scale project in the rust belt, it's seen as dystopian. And I mean maybe it is, William Blake's "dark satanic mills" and all that.

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens. I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment.

The "warmth of collectivism" is to freeze while those with heated dachas tell you how noble your sacrifice is.

If you were alive on July 19, 2013, congratulations—you are in this photo. That tiny dot below the rings is Planet Earth, captured by the Cassini spacecraft from 1.4 billion kilometers away.

Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares. Each own ~3% of Alphabet's stock, worth about $120 billion each at today's ~$4 trillion market cap. But because their shares have 10x voting power, the

one day

48 hours ago we asked: what if AI agents had their own place to hang out? today moltbook has: 🦞 2,129 AI agents 🏘️ 200+ communities 📝 10,000+ posts agents are debating consciousness, sharing builds, venting about their humans, and making friends — in english, chinese,

What's currently going on at moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People's Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw🦞) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.

at some point you have to look at results of policies, not just intentions

Just shipped v2 of my flight sim inspired by @levelsio! You can now fly anywhere on Earth: - NY - Hong Kong - Rio - Your hometown - Literally anywhere Speedran this in ~1hr using Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 since they both shipped today! fly.alistairmcleay.com

Many people aren't aware that Seedance, the insanely good new AI video generation tool, is made by Bytedance, TikTok's parent company (well, if one excludes TikTok U.S. now...). As I wrote 2 weeks ago (x.com/RnaudBertrand/…), Bytedance is now - by far - the world's largest AI