I think we may be seeing a new type of capitalism that maybe Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet hinted at: A business empire built around the outsized ambitions of a single charismatic individual. The valuations of Tesla and SpaceX only make sense if you attach an enormous premium to Musk the individual.

Apart from Palantir and Tesla, the other big companies are trading at what would historically be considered reasonable P/Es given their growth rates and profitability.

What's really changed in the last 20-30 years is the incredible profit generated by the tech industry, and the defensive moats the biggest companies have built.

People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder ones were almost impossible unless you did, like those 20 page Phys98 homework sets...

I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened.

The same laxness applies to academic research integrity. Universities rarely punish academics who are discovered to falsify data.

Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has to prove their worth, all the time. It's more egalitarian but it also creates a lot of stress.

Anthropic asking hypothetical questions in an interview doesn't seem like a very good signal. Everybody knows what they're supposed to say. If they want an unfakeable signal they should make offers with no equity component.

If a CEO feels that bending the truth, or outright lying, will advance the prime directive – then that is what they will do. Applying adjectives like "honest" or "untrustworthy" to them is a category error. Altman will say whatever benefits OpenAI, full stop. Musk will say whatever benefits his interests, full stop.

CEOs can't be good or bad people in a moral sense, or have the best interests of society at heart. (Despite what they may try to convey.) Better to think of them as automatons carrying out well-defined, and ultimately simple, goals.

In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people is that (a) other people have an origin that is objectively very similar to your own (genetic origin, embryonic development, birth, gradual acculturation, education, etc.), and (b) you have a firsthand experience of your OWN consciousness.

It would be remarkable if the very small differences (relatively speaking) between you and other people were enough to destroy the experience of consciousness.

Generalizing, the farther you stray from a "common origin story", the more a leap of faith consciousness becomes. Needless to say an LLM is quite a different thing than a human being.

Judging from online reactions to robot testing (e.g., engineers kicking the Spot robot "dog" to test its balance), we humans trigger on some fairly superficial cues when deciding how much to empathize. People express more sympathy for the robot dog than they do for the chicken they ate for lunch – despite the fact that the chicken has a far better claim to consciousness than the robot.

This then is how I interpret "do not anthropomorphize": We should try to ignore the superficial cues when judging the similarity of other beings to ourselves.

In an effort to make Bitcoin a reasonable medium of exchange, various businesses arose to act as intermediaries/market makers. But this violates the trust-free model – and many of those intermediaries have proven to be outright scams. It turns out that trusting an intermediary to handle your cryptographically untraceable asset is not a wise thing to do.

So that leaves Bitcoin in a similar category as gold. You're either a paranoid type for whom the high cost of holding and transacting the asset is a price you're willing to pay for an asset that could survive a global meltdown. OR you extend trust to various intermediaries (gold ETFs, bitcoin ETFs for example) and treat it as just another tradable financial asset.

Bitcoin is undeniably the cleverest way anyone ever became a billionaire. Nakamoto's sole contribution was posting an anonymous 9 page whitepaper to the internet and voila, today he (or she, or it) is worth $80+ billion.

A number of digital preservation standards are emerging (Wasm, MAME/MESS, EaaSI, Olive, ...) and I would like to see a legal requirement on OS vendors that platforms that are no longer supported must be made available to archivists.

Google did this for several years in the early 2000s – snapping up talent and data center capacity from the casualties of the dotcom bust.

There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more realistic possibility is that AI is a fundamentally different type of intelligence that may never be fully human-like.

EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.

No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.