Nate Foss

MIT '20, cofounder emeritus at @gather_town. too busy learning and building to tweet

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting in the last few weeks -- we've got everything from a universal operator to commuter rail to E&M to old Facebook lore to nanomachines

https://t.co/DV7R0tKYmr

[Kelsey Pool @_kelsey_pool]

Excited to announce the what I have been spending all my days (and nights) on for the last many months! Bullish on inexpensive and reliable robots built for general intelligence. If scaling thousands of robots sounds fun to you - please reach out :)

[David Ernst @dsernst]

As far as I know, the election we just ran is the first time an American elected office has been decided in a majority-digital vote, open to all registered voters, despite party affiliation.
Results were just announced: https://t.co/K9lXFNw2KU

Interesting highlights ⬇️

[Phillip Wang @flippnflops]

I’m excited today to share Grapevine, a system that makes it really easy for AI agents to search company knowledge across, Slack, Notion, codebase, and more. The first app we’re launching with it is a company GPT that works remarkably well, better than any alternative today.

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@patrickc but I agree with
- criticisms of the un-nuanced takes
- expertise/supply chains are very overlapping (though idk about stuff like pens, textiles, etc)
- it's *really* important to have some supply chains onshore, enough to sacrifice some wealth/GDP per capita

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@patrickc counterpoints
- if we don't import, we can't export (where will buyers get USD?)
- specialization makes you richer
- avg productivity of domestic jobs~=GDPPC~=QoL, & different industries have different prod

so prioritizing what you onshore matters a lot; security-wealth tradeoff

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@turboblitzzz @DrewPavlou The distribution of deeded vs leased land isn't great, but with federal gov support (namely BLM sales) this could be a decent spot to do it

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting in the past few months

some real bangers this month: media manipulation, megaprojects, strategy gospel, and great civilization cycles

https://t.co/UFvqtXUrMG

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@mattyglesias this doesn't change your conclusion, but fwiw: cities are agglomeration flywheels much more than transportation hubs. People/business want to move there overwhelmingly for the large markets induced by everyone already there, not transport costs

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

Alarmingly plausible timeline

I'd expect it to play out a bit slower than they do, but the overall trajectories seem pretty convincing actually?

[Eli Lifland @eli_lifland]

A year before ChatGPT Daniel wrote "What 2026 Looks Like" which foretold the rise of chatbots, chain-of-thought, inference scaling, and more. But it stopped before AGI.

Now I've worked with him to write a sequel. Read AI 2027 to see how AI takeover could actually happen.

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

bonus shoutout to the new @SentinelTeamHQ newsletter -- really high quality, better signal-to-noise ratio than any news publication by far

a massive public good I'm proud to do my part in supporting

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting in the past few months

quality takes on nuclear waste, construction costs, AI, individualism, DOGE, startups, energy, cults, sci-fi, cities, and catastrophic risk

https://t.co/8XtqiCMo0j

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@kave_rennedy @saulmunn right now federal revenues are way higher than state and local, eyeballing it ~70-18-12% fed-state-local, so maybe start there. Lots of that is passed through to be administered locally (e.g. medicare, education), but this may be desirable redistribution between rich/poor states

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@saulmunn @kave_rennedy I always figured the Federal government would just top-down decide the splits and everyone would argue about it constantly

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

@leilavclark There is No Antimemetics Division is great and has an extra unusual format which augments it https://t.co/3lliYouXMv

(also +1 Unsong)

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

I've been collecting these notes and ratings for four years -- and everything is in a nice, searchable table here:
https://t.co/swjKH9StRI

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting last month 👇

[Nate Foss @_npfoss]

7/7 - Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed - @RayDalio

best articulation of this I've heard; very important

https://t.co/i3BWOnl4zY