kai

on enjoying the human condition

ml @amazonagi / cs @brownuniversity / human @earth

[kai @kaixkang]

@sporadica @PalmerLuckey China isn't a monolithic entity - frontier labs such as DeepSeek and Moonshoot have a short-term monetary incentive to deliver; the government has a long-term national security incentive to be self-sufficient.

Ref: https://t.co/VCQym1MKam

[kai @kaixkang]

@PalmerLuckey 🚀🚀🚀

[kai @kaixkang]

vox populi, vox dei

[Wall St Engine @wallstengine]

88% OF 232 NVIDIA $NVDA EMPLOYEES SURVEYED WANT JENSEN HUANG TO STAY CEO

[kai @kaixkang]

@BenBallerX good read

[kai @kaixkang]

the jensen debacle is still in the midst of unfolding; but, the timing is far too coincidental.

much can be understood from simply following structural incentives. who gains? who loses?

applies to much of life.

[kai @kaixkang]

@mytypefyi this largely reflects demographic composition rather than intrinsic differences in cities.

sf which is 35% East Asian will naturally select EA faces at higher rates due to in-group bias.

the cleaner design is to stratify by rater ethnicity, e.g. white americans in sf vs okc.

[kai @kaixkang]

@JoshuaBarzon love this chart; made a version where each polity's width corresponds instead to its relative share of world GDP + land. think it more accurately captures power projection & influence of any given state.

[kai @kaixkang]

graphs in the QT below have always irked me for a couple of reasons:

1. severely over-indexes on landmass and under-indexes on GDP as the fundamental mechanism behind power projection.

2. tend to be Eurocentric, in a Westphalian sense. assuming that distinct nation-states are equivalent actors (e.g., Iceland deserves the same width as, say, the USSR).

so, i tinkered around and rebuilt, assigning each polity's weight 50:50 by its share of world GDP × land. imo, it's significantly more representative of the geopolitical landscape at any given time in the world.

(p.s. built with Opus 5.5 in ~5 mins, as the marginal friction of doing increasingly n --> 0)

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

5,000 years of world history on a single timeline. Zoom in. You could spend 30 minutes exploring this.

[kai @kaixkang]

@signulll 2/ there's an underlying phenomenological paradox - the tension between autonomy and control. one demands liberation from administrative toil, but, in doing so, induces a form of alienation. i argue that the friction with capital, one's own treasure, is actually a form of joy.

[kai @kaixkang]

@signulll think there a couple of things to note:

1/ there's bound to be a first-mover disadvantage, especially considering the radical asymmetric downside of hallucination risk. nobody wants to be the first company servicing the agent when it transfers 10k to the wrong recipient.

[kai @kaixkang]

not right now kitten the walls are closing in on daddy

[kai @kaixkang]

@feelsdesperate pundits are calling these midterms a categorical repudiation of trump; i'd actually argue that, in a sense, trumpism has metastasized, taking root within the democratic party. been that way since 2016

[kai @kaixkang]

computah make my account go super viral and get me out of the permanent underclass