Andrei Stoica

THE DARK MODE SHIFT I've written about the 'return of opulence,' but after watching the past few months unfold and reading Sean Monahan's (@8ghtb4ll) The Boom Boom Aesthetic, it feels more like a shift from 'light mode' to 'dark mode.' For the last 15 years, there’s been a cultural push to... See more

Serendipity, that essential urban amenity, requires friction: If you never stop moving, and if everyone gets the hell out of your way, you’re less likely to have any unexpected encounter, although you will check off your to-do list more quickly. Paradoxically, the internet, which has eliminated so much friction from the physical world, has also... See more

In other words, China’s real estate era may have ended in tears for some developers and local governments, but it left behind the physical edifice of a very futuristic-looking country. When people go to China and see the future, what they’re really seeing is the country’s recent past.

Whereas philosophers, psychologists, and the like search for models of human cognition and behavior, the field of artificial intelligence aims to take such models and turn them into useful tools in reality. As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural... See more

And, above all: I started having more fun! When I got stuck on bugs, it felt like I was getting stuck in interesting, essential ways, not on dumb mistakes. I was able to get an intuitive grasp of my interpreter’s operation, and then hone in on problems. As a bonus, the visual aesthetic made debugging feel more like a puzzle game than a depressing... See more

To be clear, there is nothing wrong in making things that are interesting to other people. But, to borrow an insight from Brian Eno, the best way to do that is to follow your curiosity and then build a frame around the result so it makes sense to others afterward .

Their methods are a bit unorthodox, but Dyevre (2024) uses more standard methods and obtains broadly similar results:

Using a novel firm-level dataset...covering 70 years (1950-2020), I estimate the impact of the decline in public R&D in the US on long-run productivity growth. I use two instrumental variable strategies...to estimate the impact of

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