Barry Cynamon

So much of contemporary life works because somebody else is taking care of it. You sort of have to operate on that assumption the overwhelming majority of the time.

It feels so good when you recommend a book or series you loved as a child to your child, and they tell you they love it. Latest victory: My son telling me Chronicles of Prydain is his favorite—even better than Spy School.

When the mysticism kicks in.

Then people see that the big winners are a certain kind of antisocial and propter hoc their way into venerating antisociality.

When the gap between law/regulation and enforcement gets too wide, the outcomes are perverse. The rules scare conscientious people away, concentrating innovation among boundary-pushers. If enforcement is lax, cheating pays, and the most obnoxious people win.

Everything is Dog

Knuth likes Claude www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper... [PDF]

Butterfly meme: Is this the efficient market hypothesis?

Perfecting your cookies to own Amalek.

I don’t think you need a genius level intelligence to see what could go wrong with prop betting that pays out if an individual dies.

Not surprising but saddening nonetheless.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

People referring to Claude Code in fifty years.

"Powerful AI can statically help human decision-makers, but can harm collective knowledge building... it can lead to what we call “knowledge collapse” whereby in the long-run all human knowledge is ultimately destroyed.”
economics.mit.edu/sites/defaul...

Excellent essay. Thanks for sharing.

I make all my decisions on intuition, but then I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. But then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.

Ingmar Bergman on the creative process 📽️

Now you’ve got me imagining the Wicked style musical that rehabilitates Jafar.

Yasher koach, Izzie!

The ultimate unchosen identity is existence itself. - David Bashevkin

What’s really striking in Saruman’s speech to Gandalf is how broadly (and unusually for Tolkien) relevant it is. Take out the one specific reference to the Elves and Númenor and it is just an absolute classic rationale for collaborating with evil in the confidence you can ultimately direct it.

AI's potential to extend human judgment and enable new tasks is transformative yet underexploited. This paper defines pro-worker AI and discusses how to build it, from Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson www.nber.org/papers/w34854

Appreciate @jasonfurman.bsky.social kicking this off. Here are my predictions for the next decade of productivity growth (once all revisions are said and done)

[2nd posting attempt after doing a blank probability column…]

Things local/state elected leaders can not do:

- Stop oil pipelines/oil drilling
- Regulate the car industry to make cleaner vehicles

Things they can do:

- Destroy oil demand by legalizing housing in walkable neighborhoods with transit
- Enforce traffic laws to end scourge of driver violence

You know that annoying NSF form "List every coauthor/co-PI from the last 4y" ?

At @cevianlabs.io we built a free tool that drafts the COI form from your PDF CV in minutes. Check it out 👇

The idea of a personal god as a father figure never felt relatable when I was a child. Now that I have experienced being a father, it’s starting to make a lot of sense.

A mood and a head flavor, while synonymous, are not the same.

What preparation does a Kit Kat require?

Virgin America lighting

Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs. A stitched together majority, as expected.

Read along thread here.👇
www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Modernity is having really impressive answers to really bad questions. - David Byshevkin