Sam Liebeskind

On day one, they define a political institution as “a socially created constraint on human action.” That definition has always stuck with me. This means that we can make them and remake them. But it also means that whatever institution we create, people are going to use those institutions strategically to try to achieve whatever ends they're trying... See more

In preparing for change, many of us talk about decentralisation (or "decent" for short) but that's an abstract word that fails to evoke just how thoroughly political a project it is. There is no technical solution that can produce decentralisation on its own; decentralisation cannot be technosolutionist and succeed at the same time. The "decent"... See more

In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

The two-tower era: efficient but static

The two-tower architecture has been the workhorse of modern recommendation systems, and for good reason: it’s elegant, scalable, and remarkably effective at learning patterns from massive amounts of data. Here’s how it worked for us once we deployed it in early 2024.

The system had two neural networks working... See more

For example, social scientists see there are strong preferences for friends to be loyal, trustworthy and warm. Additionally, researchers find there are preferences for friends who help you solve specific kinds of problems and are generous and caring with you instead of others. These preferences help people navigate making friends, given limited... See more