3 stars
Reflections on Palantir | Nabeel S. Qureshi
Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.
For long-time employees and alumni of the company, this feels deeply weird. During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office. Even among people who didn’t have a problem with it morally, the company was dismissed as a consulting company masquerading as software, or, at best, a sophisticated form of talent arbitrage.
I left last year, but never wrote publicly about what I learned there. There’s also just a lot about the company people don’t understand. So this is my effort to explain some of that, as someone who worked there for eight years.
Cleveland Got My Back | The Players’ Tribune
“Damn, I really did that s*** again.”
That was my first thought after I went down against Pittsburgh last season. When you get hurt like I got hurt, the weird thing is that you don’t even really feel anything. But you hear everything. You hear that weird silence in the crowd. You can sense your teammates kind of gathering around you.
You’re hearing a lot of “It’s gonna be alright, bro.”
That’s never a good sign. Once guys start getting down on one knee, you know it’s pretty bad. If it’s my teammates praying over me, maybe it’s just a bone bruise. Maybe I’ll be back by the playoffs.
But now I got Steelers praying over me?
That’s when you know it’s serious. The dark thoughts start creeping in.
“I really did it again, huh?
They might not be able to put me back together again this time.
2 stars
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference | Astral Codex Ten
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.
The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians already studying progress? Wasn’t business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study?
It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great.
It’s Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope | Palladium
Casey Handmer:
With the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space telescope. Such a telescope would peer deeper into the universe than any before it, answering fundamental questions: are we alone? What do Earth-like exoplanets around other stars look like? How did we get here? What weird stuff awaits discovery? Where is the limit on human ambition to know what is in our universe? The Monster Scope answers these questions. Monster, because of its enormous scale, grotesque in its ambition. Monster, from the Latin root meaning a revealed thing. And monster, because through it we may be able to study not just the rocks and land masses but possibly lifeforms, both monstrous and marvelous, on distant planets.
Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing? | Construction Physics
One industry that hasn’t yet gone far through this cycle is large commercial aircraft (i.e: jetliners), which remains dominated by Boeing and Airbus, even within China. But this isn’t for lack of trying. China has been attempting to manufacture its own commercial aircraft since the 1970s, and has been following the China cycle playbook to try and get there.
It’s not yet clear if it will succeed. So far China has spent decades and billions of dollars in its attempts to build a successful commercial aircraft. It hasn’t had much success, likely due to some combination of the complexity of commercial aircraft manufacturing, the reluctance of existing firms to give away their critical technologies, and the leverage foreign governments and organizations such as the FAA and EASA have over China’s aerospace industry. But China seems incredibly motivated to overcome these obstacles and make the industry a success. If it continues to push, there’s a good chance it will eventually succeed.
Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons | Stratechery
Bowles couldn’t see ahead to a world where SpaceX actually figured out how to reuse rockets by landing them on drone ships, much less the version 2 example of catching a much larger rocket that we saw this weekend. Wörner, meanwhile, can’t see backwards: the reason why SpaceX has so much more volume, both from external customers and from itself (Starlink), is because it is cheap. Cheapness creates scale, which makes things even cheaper, and the ultimate output is entirely new markets. […]
Of course Bowles was right in another way: SpaceX is a dream. It’s a dream of going to Mars, and beyond, of extending humanity’s reach beyond our home planet; Arianespace is just a business. That, though, has been their undoing. A business carefully evaluates options, and doesn’t necessarily choose the highest upside one, but rather the one with the largest expected value, a calculation that incorporates the likelihood of success — and even then most find it prudent to hedge, or build in option value.
A dreamer, though, starts with success, and works backwards.
Cargo airships are happening | Eli Dourado
In my article, I noted that freight service operates in three tiers—ship, truck, and plane, or basically, slow, medium, and fast. There are no bridges across oceans, so on transpacific routes there is only slow and fast. There was an opportunity, I argued, to introduce a medium-speed mode at truck-like prices. Airships could be that medium-speed mode with truck-like economics.
The problem is that today’s air freight service is not as fast as I had assumed. You can cross the Pacific in a plane in less than a day. You can pay for parcel service that will get you your package in 2 to 3 days. But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage.
Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.
This changes everything. Since airships are, after all, competitive with 747s on delivery time, you can earn the full revenue associated with air freight, not just the lower trucking rates I had assumed. Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.
The free world teeters on the edge of a knife | Noahpinion
This is not a post that I ever wanted — or, to be honest, expected — to write. I am an optimist by nature, and I am also not an expert on geopolitics. And yet the trends are so obviously dire, and so few people seem to recognize the danger, that I feel like I have to keep sounding the alarm and hoping that someone out there is listening.
Intensive Parenting Is Harming Parents as Well as Kids | Play Makes Us Human
My parents (mother and stepfather) are no longer around, so I can’t ask them. But I am 99% certain that they never would have described being a parent as a “job.” And they probably would have gagged if you described it as “sacred,” unless maybe you put it in the context of a philosophical or theological idea that all of life is sacred. Like most parents in the 1950s they pretty much let us (their four sons and one niece) be. They let us take charge of our own lives, ever more so as we grew older. They also expected us to help around the house, to get to places where we wanted to go on our own (by bicycle, walking, or public transportation), to take responsibility for our own schoolwork or deal ourselves with the consequences, and, by the time we were teenagers to earn our own spending money with out-of-home part-time jobs. They were not different in these respects from most other parents at that time.
I’m not sure to what degree my parents and their contemporaries thought about those policies as good for us kids or good for themselves, but the fact is they were good for all of us. Parents could focus on other aspects of their lives and we kids were allowed to experience the joy, pride, and developmental benefits of learning how to take responsibility for ourselves.
The Secretive Dynasty That Controls the Boar’s Head Brand | New York Times
In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.
“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
“Who do you believe to be the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” the lawyer persisted.
The executive, Steve Kourelakos, who had worked at the company for more than two decades and was being deposed in a lawsuit between owners, repeated his answer: “I’m not sure.”
It is odd, to say the least, when a top executive of a company claims not to know who his boss is. And Boar’s Head is no fly-by-night enterprise. The company is one of the country’s most recognizable deli-meat brands; it generates what employees and others estimate as roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people.
But anonymity and secrecy have been central features of Boar’s Head, a privately owned company run by two intensely guarded families, the Brunckhorsts and the Bischoffs.
“They’re as secretive as anybody I can think of in the industry,” said Tom Johnston, the editor of Meatingplace, a trade publication for meat processors.
That armor of secrecy has not cracked, even as the company is facing the biggest scandal in its history.
A better way to build a downtown | Noahpinion
In this post I’m going to distinguish between two types of mixed-use development. Shop-top development, which is common in dense cities all over the world, puts apartment buildings on top of restaurants and stores. Zakkyo buildings, which are a kind of development seen mostly in Japan, have stores on all the floors.
My argument, basically, is that zakkyo buildings are at least partly responsible for many of the features that make Japanese cities such a consumer paradise. But before I lay out that case, I want to show some pictures that demonstrate how the rest of the world currently approaches urban retail.
24 reasons that Trump could win | Silver Bulletin
This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is with the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose. I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you'll see that she’s battling difficult circumstances.
So, today’s newsletter simply aims to provide a laundry list of factors that favor Trump, with many links to evidence in previous Silver Bulletin posts and elsewhere.
When you give a Claude a mouse | One Useful Thing
There seems to be near-universal belief in AI that agents are the next big thing. Of course, no one exactly agrees on what an agent is, but it usually involves the idea of an AI acting independently in the world to accomplish the goals of the user.
The new Claude computer use model announced today shows us a hint of what an agent means. It is capable of some planning, it has the ability to use a computer by looking at a screen (through taking a screenshot) and interacting with it (by moving a virtual mouse and typing), It is a good preview of an important part of what agents can do. I had a chance to try it out a bit last week, and I wanted to give some quick impressions. I was given access to a model that was connected to a remote desktop with common open office applications, it could also install new applications itself.
The Thought Experiments That Fray the Fabric of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine
A constellation of puzzles suggests that the space-time continuum we seem to inhabit is not fundamental but an approximation of something deeper, and that the concept will eventually be replaced by more basic ingredients in physicist's’ next recipe for reality.
Scientists Document Lost Mountain Cities on Silk Road in Uzbekistan | U.S. News
In the mountains of Uzbekistan, archaeologists aided by laser-based remote-sensing technology have identified two lost cities that thrived along the fabled Silk Road trade route from the 6th to 11th centuries AD - the bigger one a center for the metal industry and the other reflecting early Islamic influence.
The fortified highland cities, located three miles (5 km) apart at around 6,560-7,220 feet (2,000-2,200 meters) above sea level, are among the largest known from the mountainous sections of the Silk Road, the sprawling web of overland trade routes linking Europe and the Middle East to East Asia.
1 star
Thinking Like an AI | One Useful Thing
If you’ve been following LLMs for some time, you might not find much new here — but it’s a good overview:
This is my 100th post on this Substack, which got me thinking about how I could summarize the many things I have written about how to use AI. I came to the conclusion that the advice in my book is still the advice I would give: just use AI to do stuff that you do for work or fun, for about 10 hours, and you will figure out a remarkable amount.
However, I do think having a little bit of intuition about the way Large Language Models work can be helpful for understanding how to use it best. I would ask my technical readers for their forgiveness, because I will simplify here, but here are some clues for getting into the “mind” of an AI.
Tim Urban: Why I Brought My Toddler to Watch SpaceX’s Flying Skyscraper | The Free Press
I can’t shield my daughter from negativity. But I can continually redirect her attention to the rocket—showing her all the ways our species is incredible.
Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback | Florida State University News
A new discovery in the area by Scott Evans, assistant professor of geology in the Florida State University Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, and a multi-institution team of paleontologists has identified an early marine animal from around 555 million years ago. The discovery helps answer how life evolved on Earth.
Quaestio simpsonorum is the first animal to show definitive left-right asymmetry, an important sign of evolutionary development.
There’s a wrinkle — or many — in the story behind an elephant’s trunk | NPR
It soon became clear to the researchers that the number of stripes — each one a bundle of nerve fibers — corresponded nearly exactly to the number of wrinkles in the elephant’s trunk. “You see every wrinkle in the brain stem,” he says.
Columbus probably Spanish and Jewish, study says | BBC News
Famed explorer Christopher Columbus was likely Spanish and Jewish, according to a new genetic study conducted by Spanish scientists that aimed to shed light on a centuries-old mystery.
Scientists believe the explorer, whose expedition across the Atlantic in 1492 changed the course of world history, was probably born in western Europe, possibly in the city of Valencia.
They think he concealed his Jewish identity, or converted to Catholicism, to escape religious persecution.
Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages in female intrasexual competition | Marginal Revolution
A female gossiper was preferred as a social partner when she phrased her gossip with concern versus maliciously. Moreover, concerned gossip harmed perceptions of the female target as effectively as malicious gossip. Altogether, findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets’ reputations, while also protecting gossipers’ reputations, indicating a viable strategy in female intrasexual competition.