Tomas Ruta

New cities, new worlds, new mankind

🇨🇿 🇬🇧🇪🇺

[Tomas Ruta @TomasRuta]

Coworking with someone for a day is a low key, low commitment way of getting to know them better

Bring in your own work; we may end up talking just five mins - or a lot more if it feels right

[Tomas Ruta @TomasRuta]

@CollinRugg @patrissimo

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Exactly five years ago, as a Member of the European Parliament, I filed a 22-page complaint with the European Commission arguing that Spain's €53 million rescue of Plus Ultra, a tiny airline with Venezuelan shareholders operating four leased planes on three Latin American routes, was illegal state aid.

The company was not strategic: 0.1% of Spanish aviation passengers, position 77 by passenger volume. The aid was nearly eight times its financial debt and more than three times the maximum the Commission's own rules allowed. The capital that lifted it out of "firm in difficulty" status pre-Covid (a requirement of the aid approval) came from a €6.3 million participative loan from a Panamanian bank, of which €4.1 million was locked as collateral in a foreign account. The actual loan was €2.2 million.

Today the Audiencia Nacional has indicted former Prime Minister Zapatero for organised crime, traffic of influences, and document falsification in the same case. The criminal investigation alleges that the rescue funds were used to launder money from Venezuelan corruption, with €1.5 million in commissions paid through a consultancy owned by a Zapatero associate.

Plus Ultra is what the "entrepreneurial" state looks like in practice. A small concentrated group (Plus Ultra's shareholders and their political contacts) captured a large diffuse rent (€53 million of Spanish taxpayer money). The politicians making the call were not maximising the survival of strategic Spanish industry.

Rules are out and discretion is back on both sides of the Atlantic. Trump grants tariff exemptions firm by firm, takes equity stakes in Nippon Steel and Intel, allocates CHIPS Act funds on terms that are not public. Everyone in the know trades on the news.

When the market fails the easy solution is "let the state intervene". But the state is not composed of angels, but of politicians who are human beings. When designing solutions to "market failure" one has to always wonder "with this design and these incentives, are there reasons to believe the state will be able to do this better"?

I explained the Plus Ultra case here:
https://t.co/vaT0zOaShY
Link to my allegations in spanish: https://t.co/FWqpynQU5p
And thread below

[roon @tszzl]

on some level if you want civilization to ascend to a new level you need your AIs to do things that are not legible to you and maybe not even strictly obey you, in the same way that if you hire a great new ceo you give them a lot of autonomy to transform the company according to their own plan, even one which may not immediately read as a winning strategy (imagine the board of directors of Apple firing and rehiring Steve Jobs years later - except the board of directors are chimpanzees)

all else equal, companies and organizations that hand more of themselves over to machine intelligence will outcompete ones that demand the corrigibility and legibility tax of human oversight and human design. it is not a stable equilibrium and requires some sort of vast cooperation scheme if you’d like to enforce it

real asi alignment has to operate at a deeper level than oversight, control, or human corrigibility

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

560,000 inmigrantes de más de 54 años. Cotizarán 10 años, cobrarán 20. Y se suman a la generación del baby boom, la más numerosa.
Entran en una España con la inversión publica en mínimos.
El diseño de políticas más irresponsables que cabe imaginar. (Texto @jgjorrin)

[Tomas Ruta @TomasRuta]

@WillManidis Can't wait to read it!

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

File clerks working at their electric elevator desks in Prague, former Czechoslovakia, 1937.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

@chrisman Ask them what the consequences should be for homeschooling parents who fail to educate children. Then ask what the consequences should be for public schools that do the same.

The difference in answers is the game.

[Maia @maiamindel]

europe: shareholder at top 5 biggest bank in the continent

us: dentist

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

this could have been you europe-maxxing this summer but instead you chose to share a 1bdr with four other dudes in sf to walk around the city with your laptop slightly open so your agents won’t stop running.

[roon @tszzl]

all technology brothers should have a birthright trip to paris to see how good certain things can get and all the axes of civilization they don’t think about. they should also get one to singapore to witness the hollow Disneyland feigned joy of technocratic perfection

[Tomas Ruta @TomasRuta]

@jankulveit @alexolegimas "On the default trajectory, these would be AIs."

Do you mind expanding on this point please? Who are these AIs? Do they have bank accounts/wallets?

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

wow, that was an EXTREMELY sophisticated regulatory capture strategy

[Tomas Ruta @TomasRuta]

@WillManidis Why?

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

my entire feed is like "the CEO of Starbucks just quit and is joining OpenAI to serve coffee, here are the 4 microcap South Korean companies I am buying on IBKR to escape the permanent underclass"

[Eastern Bloc Visuals @eastblocvisuals]

Tabor, Czechslovakia, 1980.

[Giulio Mattioli @giulio_mattioli]

Income levels in Milan, Italy.

Incredibly concentric and huge differences between the richer city centre and the poorer peripheries https://t.co/E47HuevRWg

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

Never quit as a founder. I’m begging you.

It’s 0 for longer than you’ll ever expect. No momentum. Soul-crushing doubts. Nobody seems to care. Even when it looks like it’s working, it’s not. You keep trying new things. You don’t lose hope.

Then it snaps to 100. You finally find the one thing that resonates. You wake up with more customers than you can handle. Everything is breaking. Momentum keeps building even when you’re not pushing. Something changed.

You didn’t get lucky, you just didn’t leave.

[Tomas Ruta @TomasRuta]

💯

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want.

This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.

Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

being a founder is reaching status lows i have never before seen my entire time in tech