Joe

Aspiring Abyss Domain Expert

[Joe @alpha_convert]

The Next 700 "The Next 700" Papers

[roon @tszzl]

the frontier labs don’t have “comms problems”. reality right now has a comms problem. what is happening is a little scary and there’s no nice words anyone could say, especially not those profiting from it, that’ll make it feel that much better

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

@lion_tender What’s HPMOR?

[Joe @alpha_convert]

“Physics Package” is an all-time great euphemism

[Joe @alpha_convert]

what even is economics

[Alexander Berger @albrgr]

Hilarious QJE paper: societies in places where it’s more likely to rain after a dry spell are 47% more likely pray for rain (bc it seems to work for them)

[Joe @alpha_convert]

@garvvee @littmath Get paid to prove lemmas on the blockchain??

[Joe @alpha_convert]

@Rafi3AK The fake bags

[Joe @alpha_convert]

The wildest thing about the guys selling shit on the sidewalks on Canal is how much tourists love it

[Joe @alpha_convert]

Wild that I’m a guy who goes to reunions now

[Ilya Sergey @ilyasergey]

New blog post: On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Property-Based Testing for Validating Formal Specifications.

https://t.co/Lfrjyao3sY

The gist: randomised testing can validate formal specs. It's very cheap and powerful: we found bugs in specs of VERINA and CLEVER benchmarks.

[Joe @alpha_convert]

DOTA coffee.

[Joe @alpha_convert]

Behold: joy being thief’d by comparison

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[Yaron (Ron) Minsky @yminsky]

We gave @dwarkesh_sp a tour of one of our new GPU-filled data-centers. Much fun!

https://t.co/WpmrVd46bf

[Joe @alpha_convert]

Why did they get on a ship called the MV Hantavirus anyway

[zeynep tufekci @zeynep]

Epuyén outbreak was NOT self-limited.

Even though it was in a remote rural tiny town, it kept spreading. After four turns of human-to-human transmission, including to people merely in the same room, the authorities imposed a strict quarantine for a whole month. Then it ended.

[Joe @alpha_convert]

I’ve seen this movie somewhere before

[Joe Veyera @JoeVeyera]

Local health officials say three King County residents were potentially exposed to hantavirus, including two people now monitoring for symptoms at home after sitting near an ill passenger on board an airplane who was removed prior to takeoff and later tested positive.

[New York Times Opinion @nytopinion]

“Public health officials, from the W.H.O. to U.S. officials, would be more helpful if they stopped constantly reassuring people about the likelihood of future events they can’t accurately calculate,” Zeynep Tufekci writes about the hantavirus outbreak. https://t.co/7f5zgZVNmf

[Joe @alpha_convert]

Speaking personally, I think this is as likely as not to be a monthlong problem with many thousands of cases

[Joe @alpha_convert]

:( there is probably community spread we do not yet know about

[Jacqueline Sweet @JSweetLI]

Radio New Zealand reports an American citizen who is a “hantavirus contact case” flew from San Francisco to Tahiti to remote Pitcairn Island on Thursday without telling anyone and has now been quarantined there after authorities became aware she arrived.

[Joe @alpha_convert]

@mxemilymode @sadvalueinvestr Delivery drivers love doing 30mph over the pedestrian side of the Manhattan bridge

[Joe @alpha_convert]

@Mr_Cuddlesz Paesano’s

[Joe @alpha_convert]

Some people think Philly is about the eagles or the liberty bell or cheesesteaks

Philly is really about roast pork