Readings:

Wisdom on how to live a good life. Points I agree, points I disagree. Could be verbose at times, but overall, was great for the plane ride.

Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing [still reading]

Data and behavioral science to help you find love. [still reading]

Trillion dollar clusters, AGI will arrive by 2027-2028 through scaling and unhobbling existing models, the geopolitical implications, the importance of protecting AI research secrets, his criticisms of building AI infrastructure in Middle Eastern countries, his controversial departure from OpenAI, and his new AI investment firm.

Gwern Branwen, an anonymous internet researcher who was among the first to recognize AI scaling laws, discusses his writing process revolving around intellectual rabbit holes, his minimalist lifestyle living on $12K a year while influencing AI development through his essays, and his belief that AGI is just a few years away.

Dylan Patel: Complexity of the semiconductor industry, China's potential to centralize compute resources, and how massive investment in AI hardware could enable training runs with 10,000x more compute than GPT-4 by the end of the decade.

Professor Sarah Paine: How Mao conquered China by combining propaganda, peasant mobilization, and warfare tactics.

Professor Sarah Paine: How Japanese military culture, particularly the samurai code of Bushido, influenced their strategic decisions and battlefield conduct. Analyzes how Japanese values of honor, death, and willpower led to poor strategic choices, severe inter-service rivalry between the Army and Navy, and a refusal to surrender despite inevitable defeat.

Professor Sarah Paine: Geopolitical dynamics between Russia, China, India, and Pakistan during the Cold War, exploring how their shifting alliances, territorial disputes, and interventions shaped modern South Asia.

A clinical psychologist uses a (controversial(?) manosphere/red pill content) economic model to explain decision making in relationships.

Reflection on philosophy of 1) accelerate technology 2) prioritizing defensive capabilities and decentralization of power so people maintain maintain agency and freedom even as technological progress.

The optimal rate of failure is rarely zero, and if you never fail, you're likely being too risk-averse, which can be costly both personally and ethically.

1/3 whitepaper from angle.money. Technicals on how they manage a basket of assets with exposure limits and handle black swan events without requiring governance intervention.

AI competition between the U.S. and China parallels Cold War dynamics, with Chinese teams like R1 rapidly deploying models optimized for memory-efficient reasoning while American export controls and manufacturing limitations may prove ineffective as the bottlenecks shift from chip capabilities to engineering talent and energy infrastructure.

Multi-agent AI system built on Gemini 2.0 that generate novel, testable research hypotheses, as validated through experimental confirmation of its predictions in drug repurposing for acute myeloid leukemia. The elo system for eval is the same as the one that gens the hypotheses which I would intuit cause a ircular reasoning problem.

By David Deutsch

On average, you spend 80k hours in your career. This book is a guide to choosing a career with high social impact: strategic career choices can significantly improve the world. Some Effective Altruism arguments.

More von Neumann probes shenanigans. Still reading.

A Von Neumann probe's search for a massive megastructure built by an alien civilization, while dealing with conflicts within AI clones of himself.

Software engineer who dies and is resurrected as an AI in a von Neumann probe, leading to a galaxy-spanning adventure of exploration, self-replication, and existential dilemmas. Becoming a become a Von Neumann probe added to my bucket list.

Blockchain network for registering, tracking, and monetizing IP where users can set usage terms and receive royalties as their work is used across applications and AI systems.

Vitalik argues for defensive acceleration (d/acc) approach to technological development that prioritizes technologies that enhance defense, decentralization, and democracy while being more cautious about potentially dangerous technologies like AI, contrasting this with both anti-tech views and unrestricted technological acceleration.

Fornite battle royale with alien politicians held hostage by an AI system losing its shit. There’s a fine line between gritty determination and melodramatic edgelord monologues, more and more of this series is crawling (get what I did here?) towards the latter.

More of an edgy AI system in this book.

Series has been going downhill- but I'm still invested in the story. There's dinosaurs in this book.

Personal comment: Stablecoins have created a $160B market-driven system that strengthens USD by extending its reach globally and serving as dollar reserves in emerging markets - achieving currency dominance possibly more effectively than proposed government Bitcoin purchases.

Response to Marc's claim of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) systematically debanking crypto entrepreneurs and politically disfavored individuals, sparking debate about whether these are accurate and what role the CFPB actually plays in addressing debanking.

A floating fortress occupied by warrior gnomes. A castle made of sand. A derelict submarine guarded by malfunctioning machines. A haunted crypt.

I'm binge-reading the series now. This level takes place in an impossibly-complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems.

Carl and cat descends deeper into more dangerous floors where they face off against a murderous groups of people.

Carl and his ex's talking cat are forced into a Fortnite battle royal style dungeon-crawler gameshow broadcast across the galaxy.

Adlerian psychology: free you from seeking others' approval, helping you take charge of your own life by focusing on what you can control while accepting that not everyone will like your choices

By Viktor Frankl. Even in the darkest circumstances - drawn from his experience in concentration camps - one can find purpose and meaning in life through choosing one's attitude toward suffering.

They didn't even use Cuda- rather parallel thread execution. The Chinese Quants are cracked. Anyways key take aways: Achieved strong performance with just 33B parameters and $5M training cost through an efficient reinforcement learning approach that skipped supervised fine-tuning and used group-based optimization instead of a critic model. Focused on deterministic tasks (math, coding) using rule-based rewards rather than expensive neural reward models or human annotation, significantly reducing costs. Rather than relying on massive scale, they achieved efficiency through iterative fine-tuning, high-quality data curation, and model distillation to create smaller versions (1.5B-14B parameters) while maintaining reasoning capabilities.

Gen Y young professionals are unhappy because their reality can't match their inflated expectations, which were shaped by their parents' optimism, being told they were special, and constant exposure to peers' curated social media success.

Still reading: a self-help book for societies.

Life is finite, and when you measure it in discrete units - whether days, activities, or relationships - you realize just how limited our remaining experiences truly are.

Guide that reframes career decisions from rigid, high-stakes tunnel choices into a series of experimental dots to be connected over time, emphasizing the importance of understanding both your authentic desires and the reality of what's possible while being willing to adapt as you and the world change.

Re-reading book my prev manager wrote. Essential principles covering risk management, strategy clarity, technological advantage, and continuous improvement in the context of decision making.

Collection of philosophical aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that examines human nature and modern life.

Exploration of how AI could improve human well-being across health, neuroscience, poverty, governance, and meaning in the next 5-10 years, arguing that with careful development and global cooperation, AI can usher in an era of unprecedented progress.

Analysis of the stablecoin landscape, examining diverse viewpoints from policymakers and academics. Stablecoins are a transformative financial technology with significant implications for the dollar, global payments, and individual liberty.

Stablecoins offer small businesses lower transaction costs, faster access to funds, and more predictable cash flow by enabling real-time domestic and cross-border payments while reducing reliance on expensive intermediaries.

Prediction markets, like Polymarket, are not just for betting on elections—they’re tools for gathering information by aligning incentives. This idea, called “info finance,” uses markets to extract useful predictions and insights, with applications in governance, science, and public goods funding, and it’s now practical thanks to blockchain and AI.

The most intresting thing I'm thinking about here: Unlike traditional game AIs with straightforward victory conditions, modern AI agents often have ambiguous success metrics, but combining real-world economic incentives (e.g., increasing a crypto wallet’s balance) with the ability to visually interact with interfaces via an API moves closer toward more tangible and practical win conditions. Web3 companies will begin with the end (-user experience), instead of letting the infrastructure determine the UX. As Nassim Taleb observed, “Over-engineering breeds fragility. Simplicity scales.”

How distributed systems reliable communicate with malicious actors using cryptographic signatures. [Technical]

Still reading

I was born poor and miserable. I’m now pretty well-off, and I’m very happy. I worked at those. I’ve learned a few things, and some principles. I try to lay them out in a timeless manner, where you can figure it out for yourself. Because at the end of the day, I can’t quite teach anything. I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember.

Scaling laws, AI Safety Levels, AGI timeline, meaning of life, programming advice for non-technical people.

Scaling large language models can lead to AGI, debating data limitations, generalization, and synthetic data/self-play: 70% likelihood of transformative AI by 2040 if scaling succeeds.

Pretty political podcast on Trump, Crypto, DOGE, and startups.

Companies are constantly calculating the lifetime value of a customer. We can increase the L. The longer someone lives, the greater your LTV will be, no matter what.

Lots of smart people go into VC, investment banking, and product driven by 1) status 2) lack of conviction from endless optionality.

Developing good taste requires intentional engagement, balancing instinct and aspiration, to resist the flattening effect of algorithmic curation and cultivate deeper meaning and joy in a world of overabundant, passive consumption. Reminds me of the PG article on good taste.

“Today, however, capital seeks to exploit our sociality in all spheres of work. When we all become ‘human capital’ we not only have a job, or perform a job. We are the job.”

Looking for a better understanding of the tech, business, and startup worlds? A primer on the history and future of the internet? A crisp explanation of the crypto and blockchain movements, and why they matter?

How companies use demand curves and proxies for willingness-to-pay to maximize revenue—sometimes in ways that defy logic.

Bundling flattens demand curves, allowing sellers to maximize revenue while benefiting buyers with lower prices and more surplus, making it a win-win strategy for taste-based goods like media.

Marc Andreessen champions technology as humanity's greatest tool for progress, abundance, and freedom, rallying against stagnation, bureaucracy, and pessimism.

Vinod Khosla envisions AI as humanity’s ultimate tool for abundance, reshaping work, creativity, and governance while emphasizing the need to outpace China.