Jan derk Brandenburg

financier interested in markets, econometrics, machine learning, bio-informatics, complex systems & (economic) history

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

@MartinShkreli @toobaffled I hear that people who receive chemotherapy also die of cancer at alarmingly high rates.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

If you are on the verge of AGI or ASI, why isn’t your model smart enough to recognize espionage distillation in real time? You say “cure cancer in a few years.” Isn’t sniffing illicit distillation quite a bit easier than curing cancer? Why write letters to DC? Just use AGI.

[Jarvis @jarvis_best]

Been brushing up on the discourse and I’ve decided that every single person is richer than me is a greedy bastard and every single person poorer than me is a loser. I and only I have the exact right amount of money.

[Jan derk Brandenburg @BrandenburgDerk]

@naval Feels sloppy

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

No amount of fast thinking will ever add up to slow thinking.

[Daniel Wortel-London @dlondonwortel]

It’s not just new, it’s newspeak

[Paul Graham @paulg]

In fact programming is particularly good at teaching you how to think. Programs are literally built out of ideas. Which is one reason it's still a good idea to study CS in the AI era. It's still important to be able to think well.

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

I think about this often

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Jensen Huang: The companies laying off due to AI have leaders who lack imagination

“Do more with more”

[Stefan Schubert @StefanFSchubert]

There are now more tech workers going from the US to Europe than the other way around

[Bo Wang @BoWang87]

Prof. Donald Knuth opened his new paper with "Shock! Shock!"

Claude Opus 4.6 had just solved an open problem he'd been working on for weeks — a graph decomposition conjecture from The Art of Computer Programming.

He named the paper "Claude's Cycles."

31 explorations. ~1 hour. Knuth read the output, wrote the formal proof, and closed with: "It seems I'll have to revise my opinions about generative AI one of these days."

The man who wrote the bible of computer science just said that. In a paper named after an AI.

Paper: https://t.co/juSOmK9vOt

[Jan derk Brandenburg @BrandenburgDerk]

@sama How does OAI check if US government does or doesn’t work on the said autonomous weapons - does OAI have backdoor insight? Is there a one-sided exit for OAI if government doesn’t uphold their end or bargain?

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock

my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive

when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost

what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise

I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily

the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…

China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally

so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine

the gap is ARCHITECTURAL

it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks

it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…

and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now

BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee

I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one

Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name

it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

[David Bessis @davidbessis]

For what it's worth, here is my private mental model of cognitive inequality... I know it's not perfect, but at least it's not as biologically absurd as "von Neumann had a crazy fast brain" https://t.co/gQP8nbjomr

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

Over the past 50-60 years the scientific practice has become the exact opposite of this quote.

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

I would go even further than this. A VERY large proportion of even white collar work has never been codified, and relies heavily on experience and tacit knowledge. This is just one of the reasons why even the knowledge economy will take a while to be truly disrupted.

[Zack Kanter @zackkanter]

Tips for increasing IQ, based on the latest science:

- If you’re planning to get a PhD in comms, switch to astrophysics (causes much higher IQ)
- If you like working with your hands, become a neurosurgeon instead of plumber
- Get a higher-paying job (lots of data on higher earners consistently have higher IQ)
- If you’re really optimizing for IQ, consider winning a Nobel Prize.