Documenting Life

“After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-8-2025-friday

“Worse than that is the fact that these data centers will be, by definition, non-performing assets, and one that inflicted an opportunity cost that’ll be almost impossible to calculate. While a house, once built and sold, technically falls into that category (it doesn’t add to any economic productivity), people at least need somewhere to live. Shelter is an essential component of life. You can live without a data center the size of Manhattan.

What would have happened if companies like Microsoft and Meta instead spent the money on things that actually drove productivity, or created a valuable competitive business that drove economic activity? Hell, even if they just gave everyone a 10% raise, it would have likely been better for the economy than this”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/

“Elara Voss is not a real person. Nor is she a public-domain literary character. Nor–yet–a figure of myth or folktale. She’s not really anything at all except for name: A string of tokens that has proven irresistibly attractive to a number of different large language models when responding to prompts involving character names and science-fiction and fantasy stories. That is, “Elara Voss” is the text that L.L.M.s seem to have have collectively arrived upon as the best response to a prompt like “what should I name the character in the story I’m writing?”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/who-is-elara-voss

“But in Silicon Valley, steeped in I.Q. fetishism, an obsession with “agency,” and a moral universe still governed by fantasy high-school resentments, the belief that (heritable) single-vector “intelligence” endows one with full-spectrum authority (and, inversely, that failure to demonstrate this intelligence is delegitimizing), holds sway. “Just put 10 cracked programmers in charge of it” has become the (admittedly at least somewhat trollish) stance of the Tech Right when faced with any sufficiently un-deferential institution, enterprise, or bureaucracy”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-cracked-coder-fetish

“Increasing climate risks will cause home insurance prices to rapidly rise towards unaffordability; homeowners in risky areas unable to afford the (actual) price of home insurance will clamor for relief; policymakers unwilling to confront the underlying problem (climate change) will react with a series of increasingly desperate maneuvers to delay and paper over the issue; increasingly pricey disasters will cause state and local politicians to run to the federal government for bailouts; in time, this will lead to a political confrontation between those who are receiving aid, and those in safer areas who are paying for it. The end of this process will be a retreat from areas that have become untenable to live in due to climate change. Instead of carrying out this necessity in a managed and rational way, our political system and economic system, absent some deep changes, will cause it to unfold in a cutthroat, childish, maximally destructive way”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/cheap-tricks-for-hard-problems

“The result is a world that is much more unpredictable than it was. The individual whims and collective paranoias of very powerful men (they are nearly all men) play a more important role, and are far less constrained than they used to be. The differences between the extremely rich and ordinary people are greater and much more politically salient than they used to be. As the rich become more isolated from mortal concerns, their weirdness effloresces”

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-rich-are-not-like-you-and-me

“Those are the two factions of Democrats. One group is trying to figure out how to bring down the cost of capital for normal people, the other is seeking a trickle-down approach. If you vote for a Democrat, there’s no telling which faction you’ll get. And that might be why the party polls so terribly”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-war-among-democrats

“Two dashed hopes that seem to rhyme:

The hope that, in human DNA, one gene would correspond to one developmental feature: “size of nose”, “propensity for prostate cancer”: a vast bank of biological switches.

The hope that, in neural networks, one weight would correspond to one informational feature: “Python function”, “malevolent plan”: a perfect intellectual X-ray.

The mapping of the human genome had less of an impact on the world than a person might have predicted back around 2000, because tracing the connection between base pairs and big noses turned out to be — turns out to be — much more difficult than anyone expected”

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/how-the-universe-stores-information/