via Om
Tech bans stimulate more than stymie China. They might slow down China’s tech development in the short term, but China has the talent, will, and, most importantly, focus to close gaps imposed by the west.
via Kottke
Voting for the mayor who promised to blow up the city doesn’t mean I approve of the major blowing up the city. Mike Drucker delivers a hilarious take-down of current events in this piece from McSweeney’s.
Before you rush to cancel me, try to remember the mayor made lots of promises, and I didn’t expect him to keep them all. Yes, he promised to turn our playgrounds to glass and take a blowtorch to the schools; yes, he said that he was going to use napalm on every grocery store, but, as I said, he also promised he was going to fix the old bowling alley.
Sometimes humor is about the only way to deal with the truth. Spoiler alert: The bowling alley never gets fixed.
Deepseek was inevitable. With the big scale solutions costing so much capital smart people were forced to develop alternative strategies for developing large language models that can potentially compete with the current state of the art frontier models. Simon Sinofksy writes:
The only unknown was who was going to do it. The choices were a startup or someone outside the current center of leadership and innovation in AI, which is mostly in the US clustered around trillion-dollar companies. It turned out to be a group in China, which for many (me too) is unfortunate.
While Sinofsky emphasizes market forces, the NVIDIA embargo that blocked China’s access to cutting-edge GPUs clearly played a pivotal role in precipitating Deepseek as well. Regardless, it’s clear that the constraints that people thought would be hard ones are no longer. The question is: how will this reshape the dynamics of AI innovation globally?
Talk to creators to understand the future. Om Malik has been tinkering with tools like Cursor and Warp and talking with their creators to better understand where the AI-enhanced development world is going. He quotes Zach Lloyd saying:
There’s a skill in how you use the AI… how you get it to give you the right answer and use it to save you time. The best developers are going to be the ones who can figure out how to use it to make themselves more productive.
One of the most valuable things I’m doing right now is seeing how other people are prompting AI in their day-to-day and getting ideas of how to approach my own work.
via Dave Winer
Rivian founder R.J. Scaringe isn’t too worked up about EV tax credits going away. He is, however, worried that legacy American automakers will pull back too far on their plans to build electric vehicles, saying: “Rivian, Tesla, the Chinese—we have a full-throttle focus on EV. And if you’re doing that as your 10% job as an [automaker], you’re going to be in rough shape in 10 years.”
Our capabilities are growing faster than our problems, writes Avery Pennarun on the Tailscale blog. Over the last twenty years, compute is 200,000x faster, web servers are at least 100x, we can put 12TB of RAM into a server, hard drives are 100x bigger and last longer, and the c10k problem is now the c10000k problem.
It’s the kind of thinking that injects optimism into one’s day, and I wonder if we’re doing enough to keep up with it.
Cameron Moll tells the story of the survivorship bias airplane. I think the most fascinating part of this story is that Wald’s original report from 1943 was un-illustrated. I had always assumed that the diagram was from the original work, and not something that came 60 years later. (Via Jesse Vincent on Bluesky)
I had a conversation last week with a friend about people in positions of power, and at some point I quoted the “power corrupts” adage. You know the one. It’s from a critique of the moral accountability of those in power by Lord Acton, written in 1887:
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
After half a laugh and then a brief silence, my friend looked at me seriously and said, “If you listen to the ancient Greeks, they had a bit of a different take: Power reveals the person.”
After that conversation, I went on a bit of a research spree. While there isn’t a direct quote to be found, the saying is often attributed to Plato’s writings, especially in the story of the Ring of Gyges in Republic. Aristotle also explored ideas about how circumstances, including power, test and reveal a person’s moral character. Power doesn’t create flaws or virtues. It magnifies what is already there, testing a person’s resilience, integrity, and moral compass.
This reflection feels especially relevant amid January 2025’s political transitions in Washington DC and how people are reacting to the shifting landscape, especially our titans of industry. But, the idea isn’t just a lens for observing the powerful. It can be a useful mirror for our own lives.
We reveal ourselves in how we use the power we hold, however large or small. Actions reflect character. We should make sure it’s the character that we want it to be, and that we are using our power in the best way possible.
Even then, we should constantly ask ourselves: for whom do we use our power?
The Bluesky 2024 moderation report illustrates the challenges of growth. The site went from just under 3 million users to almost 26 million. That’s an order of magnitude increase, and only an order of magnitude behind X. In the report, they write:
In 2024, Bluesky moderators took down 66,308 accounts, and automated tooling took down 35,842 accounts for reasons such as spam and bot networks. Mods took down 6,334 records (posts, lists, feed etc.) while automated systems removed 282.
Also interesting: The majority of legal requests came from Germany, U.S., Brazilian, and Japanese law enforcement agencies.
Blue Origin gets to orbit. It’s easy to talk about it now as a billionaire’s space race, but I remember one night at Foo Camp a couple of decades ago speaking to Jeff Bezos about his passion for rockets and how reusability was key. Even though the New Glenn booster didn’t make it back to ground in one piece this time (let’s see how many times it takes for them to stick the landing), it’s awesome to the result of perseverance and focus pay by thousands of people pay off because of the efforts of somebody who could carry the torch when the path wasn’t clear.