innovation culture

And I guess I don’t understand why anyone expects AI to make highly profitable quasi-monopolies even more profitable. How much bigger can the market for Office or Google search get? I understand that these companies feel the need to invest in AI for defensive purposes, to fend off potential competitors. But this need should if anything make them... See more

Those who are staying in the US, meanwhile, say they feel exhausted. "I've been in the US for almost a decade," a Chinese-born data scientist and UC Berkeley graduate told me. "Many of us left to escape that political environment, and are the most liberal-leaning Chinese you can find. We spend so much time going through the American education and... See more

What’s going on here is, fairly obviously, some combination of simple old-guy aesthetic NIMBYism (“those massive solar fields”) and right-wing culture wars. The latter has been caused by decades of Americans seeing energy technology as being fundamentally about climate , rather than about energy itself . In a post back in December, I wrote the... See more

When you expand a technology, you expand it towards both ends. The divine and the profane. With AI we receive breakthrough medical research AND waifu porn bots. With crypto we receive community owned infrastructure and endless memecoin rugs.

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking. But to make the content accessible? To

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I think there is a similar fallacy for how we consider engineering organizations. Many of today’s “best practices” have been drawn from long-established internet companies like Google. However, the problem with copying their current practices on the basis of their success is that most of those companies found near-invincible business models that... See more