Dispatches from District 48
I am not an expert in AI, but I have seen a lot of waves software-based productivity innovations in my lifetime, and have developed some intuition as to how fast or slow they can penetrate corporate America. I think the impact of AI over the next 5 years, particularly on productivity, has been exaggerated. Which [ ]
I saw this while doomscrolling Instagram the other day Pretty sure the tradwife folks are targeting something more like the 1950's than the 19th century, but it could be funny -- though not at funny as, say, sending the housewives of Orange County or the Kardashians back to a pioneer home. But I have a [ ]
I am not going to say I told you so on Iran (in the first days of the conflict here and here} because there is not much reason anyone would trust me on foreign policy. Nobody should necessarily listen to me but everyone should listen to history. History is a laboratory where we can test [ ]
I am not going to get into some of these more recent twists and turns, but I do want to shatter the mythos that the word "non-profit" is somehow equivalent to "charitable" or "well-intentioned". I know of many non-profits that do good work and for whom we should be grateful, but many many more do [ ]
I have been recuperating from some health issues and have not been writing much, but I really don't want to miss out on putting my oar in the water prior to the SpaceX IPO. As background, I love to watch what SpaceX is doing in launch and believe they have made a huge contribution to [ ]
I posted a draft of something I am tinkering with on viral ideas and intellectual immune systems by accident. It is an idea I am playing with but still have not organized in a way I am happy with. It was unfinished because I hit publish instead of save draft like a moron. A new [ ]
I am probably more knowledgeable about 20th century military conflicts than most, so perhaps it is useful to remind everyone of this -- I can think of no country in history that ever capitulated or initiated a favorable regime change in response to air attacks alone. The closest I can think of is the Netherlands [ ]
Back in the first heady days of the attacks on Iran I cautioned that it was relatively easy to kill a few leaders and bomb a bunch of stuff, but harder to understand how a liberal democracy was to magically eventuate in Iran. The US has a history of removing one bad leader and getting [ ]
I am not going to get into any ethical or legal arguments about the decapitation raids on Iran. I don't have the time or the heart to do it right now. I couldn't be more thrilled to see the leadership of Iran eliminated but the legal basis for all this is slim. Of course every [ ]
I will preface this post by saying I know exactly zero about AI companies and what they are working on. But I wonder if they are working on the right thing. First, a digression. Anyone who is more than a casual user of Microsoft Word understands that there are fundamental bugs in the core of [ ]
