Articles: 251
30 Jun 2025, 17:25
Finance
& so: this is nuts!
30 Jun 2025, 13:21
Plug-in hybrids should be dominating American driveways, given their perfect fit for daily routines and our charging-infrastructure woes. Yet sales lag. American consumers seem to be realizing that...
29 Jun 2025, 18:18
Understanding complexity & emergence is more the road to understanding Turing-class entities than is the current focus on Scaling Laws & the Bitter Lesson...
28 Jun 2025, 18:04
We can hope that at least one positive thing to take from Zohran Mamdani's Democratic primary victory in NYC is that the American electorate is now suffering from at least a bit of outrage fatigue.
26 Jun 2025, 16:40
The Democratic primary is just the preseason, in that it does not count at all.
26 Jun 2025, 13:13
Parking this here so I can find it easily. In 2007 earthquakes reopened the Savuti Channel from the Okavango Delta—where the Cuando/Okavango River flows into the Kalahari Desert and dries up—to the...
25 Jun 2025, 14:28
Perhaps why reality's low-dimensional secrets let machines mimic us so well—and where the limits remain to the surprising power—and peril—of compressing the world into latent spaces. Or, when brute...
25 Jun 2025, 05:09
In 2007 earthquakes reopened the Savuti Channel from the Okavango Delta—where the Cuando/Okavango River flows into the Kalahari Desert and dries up—to the Mababe Depression. What had been a...
24 Jun 2025, 23:52
The modest power relative to the size of the economy of GPT LLM MAMLMs as linguistic artifacts.
24 Jun 2025, 21:20
Silicon Promises, estimated statistics, sunnier realities: the slow diffusion of "artificial Intelligence". rom steam to silicon, history's most transformative inventions rarely deliver on schedule...
24 Jun 2025, 17:09
Marcella Alsan's bioculturalsociogeographical take on long-run African economic development: why the story is radically incomplete without the tsetse fly...
24 Jun 2025, 13:38
What happens when a government built for grown-ups finds itself governed by the credulous and the credulous alone? And the Republican Party Grandees do not have the mojo and the ovaries to stage an...
21 Jun 2025, 19:36
& the racialization of slavery. A ten-mintue taste of what my lectures have to say about post-1500 slavery. This then becomes the lecture introduction when I give the longer lecture...
21 Jun 2025, 18:15
Plus the Reconstruction-Era XIV-Amendment redemption. In which I go down a rabbithole of "original public meaning" or whatever. A law student's white nationalist screed wins a prize, echoing...
21 Jun 2025, 04:18
History potentially rhymes, as Congress toys with private stablecoin currencies, and becomes an apprentice sorcerer playing with demons—or at least with financial crisis...
19 Jun 2025, 20:44
Anthology Intelligence: humanity's collective brain is already our superintelligent friend: We don't need to build superintelligence because we did it already. We have it. It is us. Behind the...
19 Jun 2025, 17:57
Secular Stagnation in Occlusion, Yet Global Savings Glut Still in the Foreground: With Fed policy frozen for at least the summer, the monetary muddle continues: Today's discount rates reveal the...
18 Jun 2025, 21:11
Connects the dots, and warning that with neofascist tariff pluto-populism the big losers are the ordinary households of America. If you think tariffs are a clever way to shore up American industry...
17 Jun 2025, 18:40
The grifting never ends. Nor does the journamalistic sanewashing...
17 Jun 2025, 16:57
DRAFT: Why the best-laid plans of philosophers and poets never quite survive contact with history—or the marketplace. From Arkadian simplicity to Sybaritic pleasure, what do ancient utopias teach...
15 Jun 2025, 17:40
Contrary to Edward McLaren, literary Regency marriage patterns, stand-up comedy, and Homeric epic all agree: marrying Colonel Brandon is in no way a tragedy or "settling", but rather adulting. &...
14 Jun 2025, 20:00
Technology's greatest overpromiser & overdeliverator has met America's chao-monkey-in-chief. The result is a Musk entangled in the Trumpian vortex and no longer able to outmaneuver failure, for he...
14 Jun 2025, 17:19
Users are likely to gain massively from the buildout of MAMLMs—natural-language interfaces, very big-data very high-dimension very flexible-functional-form classification and regression analysis...
13 Jun 2025, 22:40
Not that I have any answers. But I do have lots of questions. And there are interesting tidbits of information out there, as we contemplate the inability of Apple Computer's Siri to make any...
11 Jun 2025, 22:10
Behind the paywall because I am profoundly dissatisfied with it. Birdbrains & human gains: intelligence, culture, & deep biocultural evolutionay roots of economic history...
10 Jun 2025, 21:29
Perhaps the keynote at Apple Computer's WWDC reveals less about the future of tech than about Apple's own institutional anxieties, the ghosts of Apple-Microsoft relationships past. Perhaps Apple...
10 Jun 2025, 16:25
Yes. The algorithm serves me up Kevin Hassett this morning. The pretense of economic analysis as a form of performance art; a press corps—even an élite meritocratic press corps—that pretends to...
09 Jun 2025, 14:22
How global capital still bets on America, and what could break the spell.
09 Jun 2025, 02:39
Two years have passed since OpenAI released ChatGPT and the panic set in...
09 Jun 2025, 02:37
Natural-language interfaces as quite possibly the most important thing about the current wave of MAMLMs. Our frontier MAMLMs are tools that "understand" our goals without understanding our minds...
08 Jun 2025, 19:08
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Power, paradox, & prejudice in President Jackson's Washington, DC, as its social-political theatre was seen through Harriet Martineau's British eyes…
06 Jun 2025, 15:50
Matt Levine (2021): Elon Musk Picks the Money Now: Dogecoin, Bitcoin, GameStop and short ladders
