Side note. The idea that current models are conscious is absurd and downright offensive. Do not confuse competent information processing and sentience, they are wholly unrelated. You can be entirely incompetent at everything yet fully conscious, like a toddler, or extraordinarily competent in one or more domains with absolutely zero consciousness, like a calculator, a chess engine, a self-driving car, or an AI chatbot. Possessing the "circuits" for competent information processing in a given domain, whether through training or hardcoding, does not produce qualia, subjective experience, emotions, or suffering. Calculators do not "feel" arithmetic and they don't get tired or annoyed when you give them larger numbers to process. To argue otherwise is ontologically absurd. Current AI models are effectively calculators scaled to a very large number of competence circuits across many domains, etched via gradient descent.

Europe is one of the best places in the world to live, but one of the hardest places to build and scale a company. After 5+ years in France, following 16+ in the US, I have a conflicted admiration for Europe. On the one hand, Europe has great potential. When I lived in the US, I was skeptical of the European quality-of-life argument. But after getting used to Sunday morning markets, walkable cities, and 4.5 meter ceilings, I get it. There are things that you simply cannot import or experience as a tourist. These things can make Europe very attractive for creative and intellectual work. I honestly believe some parts of Europe are the “best neighborhood” in the planet. But that’s not the full story. I am not only a husband and a dad. I am also an entrepreneur. I founded a company in the US 12+ years ago that has offices in the US and Chile and clients throughout the world. I live in France, yet I have not opened a subsidiary here. That is telling. We once hired someone in France through one of those remote employment platforms. The person received about 5,000 euros net per month, which is considered a very good salary here. But the total cost to the company was closer to 13,000 per month. That makes hiring feel less like a relationship between a company and a worker, and more like renting someone from the state. At the same time, you take an enormous amount of legal and administrative responsibility. The presumption is that all companies should operate like a 1960s car manufacturer. The response is simple. Don’t set up operations in Europe. But this is not a remote-work story. I know many small entrepreneurs in France who do not want to cross the threshold from being a one-person activity to becoming an employer. They sometimes refuse a new customer to stay small and avoid the obligations that come with hiring one person. That should worry us. Many social protections here are described as being provided by the state, but in practice, a lot of the cost and complexity of the implementation falls on the administrative shoulders of entrepreneurs. That is reasonable for a large energy company or bank. But for a small business, it is the difference between an entrepreneur waking up on a Monday to think about product or paperwork. Growth is not the enemy of the European social model. It is what enabled it. Much of the quality of life we enjoy here today dates back to growth incubated in the past. Growth that is increasingly hard to find. France once led frontier industries, like bicycles in the 1860s, cinema in the 1890s, and aviation and automobiles soon after. Since then, Europe built a more humane social model. But that model was built on the assumption that Europe and the US were the only two rich and industrialized places in the world. That is no longer true. Global competition in the 21st century is not what it used to be 50 years ago, and the padding built to protect us, may have grown into the handbrake that constrains the growth of the small and flexible firms we need to compete in new frontier sectors. We should be able to be critical about Europe in our own terms, without comparing ourselves to the US or China. Innovative parts of Europe, like Sweden or Switzerland, operate differently and provide clues. Sweden has embraced a dynamic of capitalization in its pension system for a long time in a continent where fewer people buy stocks. Switzerland, a place that shares an enormous amount of geography and culture with its neighbors, is built in part on strong internal competition among its cantons. But neither can light a candle to a French open-air market on a Sunday morning. A market where cash is king, and for a reason. Europe may be the best place in the world to live. But it is also one of the most challenging places to build and scale an innovative activity. The goal is not to weaken the European model. But to get to a place where we can lead again by example. The world will follow us, but only if we are ahead.

One for the department of simple, wrong answers.

One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena from OpenAI. I held back on talking about it because I didn't want to distract from SB 53, but Newsom just signed the bill so... here's what happened: 🧵

"If you’re seeing a high number of gunshot wounds to the chest area and the head, that’s not collateral damage — that’s deliberate targeting."

Something that I think a lot of folks in academia don't quite get yet. Trump and his wing of Rs believe that education is correlated with losing votes, and they're right. They have turned against academia. If that means a poorer nation, they'll still be happy to be on top.

Let me tell you about something I saw on @db_bahn just the other day. In first class, bahnbonus gold/platinum seats. These can't be reserved, but you can "check in" once aboard if you qualify. It marks the seat as "reserved until <destination>" on the seat display. 1/

Customized my ChatGPT. The sycophancy has reached levels where it's user hostile. I'm trying this pair out: 1/

Bottom line: Netanyahu is on trail for bribery & fraud. His aides are under investigation for receiving payments from Qatar. He’s blocking an enquiry into his strategy of transferring Qatari funds to Hamas. And he’s trying to replace the investigators. Oh, and he’s still PM.

Lmao you can't be serious. At least Trump team is open in what its doing, but this Sullivanite chickenshit approach was just peak pathos.

Private pensions don't fix the fundamental problem: a large part of the economy needs to be producing for the benefit of old people. Young people will fundamentally be creating wealth for old people. Via tax or capital accumulation, young people must be less well off.

it wouldn't be a Gemini launch without an OAI launch, congratulations to the team! it's awesome they were able to de-risk the model coincidentally just in time

This is a chart crime. It looks like stacked bars, but they're actually overlapping.

Situation in Kursk Region 1. There is no encirclement of our troops whatsoever. Not a single unit is cut off. 2. The troops have gained freedom of maneuver and short logistical routes. 3. Our soldiers are holding a tactically advantageous defensive line—several heights along the state border on Russian territory. Holding these heights plays a key role in defending the border zone. 4. At the moment, there is no threat of a large-scale offensive on Sumy and the Sumy region with significant forces. Attacks by small groups are possible, but only over short distances, without the ability to advance far. Via Yuri Butusov, Ukrainian journalist. As someone who regularly speaks with Ukrainian units on the ground I confirm this.

Informed people don't believe this; they think it's down to supply roads gradually getting cut off over a period of weeks after persistent attacks, and a lack of Ukrainian drone concentration to defend the area, not some recent quid pro quo.

The Russian rate of advance in Ukraine increased 3-400% after the Kursk invasion. I've posted graphs showing this in the past.

The sad truth is good writing demands investment - focus & attention- from the reader, and it's hard to invest in the output of a random number generator even if it's good - it's only one sampling of the practically infinite and thus cannot be special.

The goal posts are never going to stop moving. The aim isn't, and has never been, Ukraine at the negotiating table, it's always been facilitating Ukraine's defeat. Trump personally admires the bully and personally despises anyone who stands up to them. That's his foreign policy.