dwarkesh.com

Blog prize for the big questions about AI

Compelling answers about the big questions about AI can inform the most important economic and foreign policy decisions that will ever be made, the deployment of (at least) hundreds of billions of philanthropic dollars, and the training and governance of superintelligences.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The secretive wealth adviser to the rich & the $10B startup training AI to take our jobs

For many, it's a lucrative side hustle born out of job insecurity; for others, it feels like monetizing their own obsolescence.

ftav

It's quiet. Too quiet

But it is hard to find much sign that it is doing so. And Gillian Tett: [I]nvestors need to get better at imagining — and pricing — once-unimaginable disasters. This is hard. No business school teaches students how to model something like a presidential threat to wipe out a civilisation.

wired.com

A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

The Gulf's water system is built with layers of backup, but it relies on continuous operation to hold.

3quarksdaily.com

War on Iran

The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.

wired.com

Your Vape Wants to Know How Old You Are

Companies hope that biometric age-verification tech in cartridges could put flavored vapes back in business. But it's unlikely to solve the real problems.

stratechery.com

An Interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas About Selling Chips

Robin Saxby put out a goal to make the ARM ISA the global standard for CPUs. And if you go back to early 1990s, there were a lot of CPUs out there and also there was not an IP business, there really wasn't a very good fabless semiconductor model, and there was not a very good set of tools to develop SoCs. So in some ways, and this is what I love about the company, it was a bit of a crazy idea because you didn't really have all the things in place necessary to go off and do that.

noahpinion.blog

The future isn't what it used to be

The future is a blank wall of fog, rushing toward us at top speed, and nobody knows what to do.

ftav

Oil markets are not prediction markets

Price volatility is a measure of how difficult it is at any given moment to suppress the knowledge that no one knows anything.

dwarkesh.com

I’m glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian surveillance state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.

ftav

Everything is stonks

Volatility is suppressed until it's not. You can't choose which chart you'll get. There's no BTFD without YOLO and FUD.

upstartsmedia.com

A Startup's Guide To The Anthropic Vs. Pentagon Showdown

Potentially ripping out months of code if a resolution isn't reached soon would be a "big risk" for Williams' startup, which has its own aspirations to sell directly to the government soon.