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if you do not batch together many users, the cost and the economics you get can be a thousand times worse than if you do batch many users together.

Reiner Pope
4h ago

Azure had a real competitive advantage thanks to being the only hyperscaler able to offer OpenAI models, but this also hindered OpenAI, particularly once it became clear that many enterprises cared first and foremost about accessing models on their current cloud of choice; I've been noting for a while that this was a real competitive advantage for Anthropic.

4h ago

The biggest difference is not that OpenClaw can answer questions. Plenty of systems can do that. The more interesting difference is that it can carry context forward in a way that feels less disposable.

12h ago

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar encumbered with rich but cumbersome and never to be used articles.

18h ago

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? The appetite grows with eating; the more one has, the more one wants.

20h ago

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and we see only with our eyes open to the world; blindness is not the absence of sight but the refusal to look.

20h ago

It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.

20h ago

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness.

20h ago

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem that he can spend his life working on.

22h ago

Gray literature's high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else's water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious.

1d ago
lennysnewsletter.com
Your Couch-to-5K for AI

When people say they want to do something but are too busy, there is almost always something else standing in their way. This is the root of procrastination. At its core, you are waiting for some external force to change—like your endless to-do list magically disappearing, or your calendar suddenly opening up—rather than making a change in your actions, which is hard.

1d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Romantic Education Edition

Reflecting on these efforts, it strikes me that in much the same way I would fill in all the action in a comic book between the panels, I was reaching to understand adult relations—an unchartered land of intrigue, heartbreak and some little thing called "love". There was no guide, there was no chatbot to inquire of.

1d ago

Its power, like that of Bach's series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment. By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations.

1d ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore the rest. The immediate fact which the science of logic has to take account of is that certain material is presented, certain aspects of this material are noted and emphasized.

1d ago

The more exposed we are to an Internet of AI slop (AIS) and even the potential of career ladder disruption, the less happy young people are starting to be with regards to their trust and hope that AI will bring a better world.

1d ago

I conceive a man's body as a sort of fiery mist enmeshed in the cage of the skeleton, and mostly resulting from the circulation of the blood.

1d ago

The need for sense-making is greater than ever, but due to a half-decade of layoffs and shuttered publications, there is less and less journalism to make sense of.

1d ago

The best ideas are often dangerous ideas. You're not supposed to think them. And if you do, you're not supposed to say them. But the truth doesn't care about your comfort.

1d ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is in the process of reinventing us.

1d ago

For RPS, I'm really reading everything. Local papers in Montecito and Palm Beach and Nantucket, British tabloids, big papers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Financial Times. Glossies like Vanity Fair. Newsletters, Substacks, all of it, including Air Mail, The Love List, The Stanza, Feed Me, Trademarked, and whatever else is floating around.

2d ago

We tend to conflate power-seeking AI and superintelligent (in science and tech) AI. I'm not denying that AI can be power-seeking. Whatever skills and drives Donald Trump has could be embodied in a digital mind. I'm simply pointing out that the way we're currently making AI systems smarter (training them to be really good coders, thought partners, and general coworkers) is not that strongly correlated with power.

2d ago

The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you'll never know whether other people are really conscious, you'll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they're conscious.

2d ago

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we lose the sense of being conscious at all, when the instrument becomes so perfectly attuned to its object that subject and object merge into one continuous act of perception.

2d ago

The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding the incentive structures and constraints that will shape decisions.

2d ago

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole.

2d ago

The primary cause of failure in leadership is that men do not think enough. They trust to their memories and their passions, and act from them, when they ought to consult their understandings.

2d ago

Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don't know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by.

3d ago

I was just appalled at how absurd the entire ecosystem is. And not just the technology, which is a big part of it. There are also just terrible incentives that make every broker push plans that pay them more.

3d ago

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

3d ago

The best investment is in yourself. But the second-best is almost always in a business that does something you understand, run by people you trust, at a price that makes sense.

3d ago

I conceive a man's body as a sort of fiery mist enmeshed in the cage of the skeleton, and all that I conceive the whole universe to be; and the body's nerve and blood as rivers or streams of this mist, and all the mind's relations as a congeries of symbols of the body's relations unto the body itself.

3d ago

The great majority of us are not in a position in life to choose our work in the sense of selecting a particular job. We find ourselves in a particular situation, born into a particular family, in a particular town, with particular talents and disabilities. And our duty is to make the best of it.

3d ago

Showing films in theaters is good for audiences, because it's the best possible way of experiencing cinema. Showing films in theaters is good for filmmakers, because it amplifies the artistry and grandeur of the idiom. Showing films in theaters is good for communities, because it supports the local creative ecosystem and provides jobs in the neighborhood.

3d ago
themarginalian.org
The Bird That Is Your Life

We don't know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.

4d ago

Fashion moves faster than commerce, which moves faster than infrastructure, then governance, then culture, then nature.

4d ago

The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. "It's like the jaws of life," Cobb said. "If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut."

4d ago

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past, all the future, all the possibilities of existence.

4d ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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