Michael Karbouris

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[Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman]

Are you feeling dread?

[Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv]

Ok I’m starting a thread of examples of AI copywriting I’m encountering in the wild

it’s spooky to encounter what feels like the same “person” seemingly following me around everywhere, speaking through a hundred different speakers, all in the same voice

[Tim Freke @TimFreke]

The Future Is Going To Be Amazing

The biggest problem we face right now is the endless negativity about humanity and the future.

We urgently need an optimistic, rational, inspiring vision for the next chapter of the human adventure.

The future won't just be new tech, it will a new type of human ... and we need future people now!

[Michael Karbouris @karbouris]

Into the impossible question
https://t.co/KetyphxgcL

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

If you ever get the chance to take the long way, take it. the short way was paved by dull meticulous cowards who cut every green unruly beautiful thing out of the path to make it quicker, and every man who takes it arrives on time with the same glazed vacant punctuality of cattle funneled through a gate. but the long way is still overgrown, and somewhere along it there is a stumbling stupid embarrassing moment that will crack you open like an old fevered egg that finally gives, and what comes out of it will be the dirtiest truest thing you have ever produced. take the long way, take the wrong turns, take the three hour mistake, take the road some sunstruck idiot built into the middle of nowhere, and then sit down in the first wretched forgotten place you find and see what happens

[Andrey Mir @Andrey4Mir]

Record-breaking news avoidance in legacy media was followed by engagement avoidance on social media.

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Social media is increasingly anti-social

Only 7% of Instagram time & 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers.

This is what happens when you condition algorithms on looking time rather than real social engagement. TikTok set the template; everyone copied it.

And over half of the long posts on Meta are written by AI. People are not engaging, or even creating the content on those platforms anymore.

Real human content and conversation has migrated away from these platforms to substack, discord, etc. https://t.co/qQzCIsxtPS

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

Every electron in the universe is identical. Not similar — indistinguishable in principle, and physics breaks if you assume otherwise.

[Guy @nosilverv]

Pissed off at science (and rationalists, nerds, spergs, an autist thing in general I believe) for chronically mistaking methodological visibility for ontological importance and then making big pontifications / sneering on others for that.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

If the world gets darker and dumber, and your response is to match it, to curse at it, to become obsessed with how right you are about how bad it is, you’ve already handed over the one thing it wanted from you. you don't protect your sanity by fighting the madness. you protect it by refusing to let it have your mornings, your sundays, the way you sit with a friend saying nothing. the world does not need your opinion about how lost it is. it knows. what it needs is somebody still saying grace before a meal while the kitchen burns

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

the past is a foreign country

[Teddy @WarnerTeddy]

i mounted a tiny microphone on my apartment balcony to listen for any birds passing by and built a site to collage them as they're heard

[Guy @nosilverv]

There is WAY more money in the world than interesting people. Only a tiny fraction of money has taste but it still dwarfs the supply of interesting people. Tasteful money is DESPERATE to bet on them. You just have to make yourself legible enough to be found.

[Michael Karbouris @karbouris]

What a model!

[shift @joinshift]

Today, we're launching shift. We're starting by cleaning your apartment in New York City, for free.

Here's how it works. Book a shift cleaning. A vetted shift operator comes to your home wearing one of our devices. They clean. They leave. You pay nothing.

In exchange, we record the cleaning. Robotics is being built on data about how people do daily tasks, and the value of that recording is what funds the service. Anything personal in it is anonymized before the recording is processed.

By now, you have heard about the shift to AI more times than you can count. About the shift toward you, the part where you actually feel it, you have heard almost nothing. Shift is what starts to make it concrete, in specific cities, with specific services.

Today, cleaning in New York. Soon, handymen, repairs, and errands across the globe. And this is just one side of shift, with more on the way.

Comment “shift” and we’ll send you an early access link.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

Every man that tries to figure out the world entirely on his own ends up building a small, stupid god to replace the one he rejected. it never fails. he drops God, picks up science or stoicism or some guy on the internet who read enough books to pass for a prophet, and within six months he's talking about cold showers and circadian rhythms with the same exact tone a priest uses on sunday. the need to worship doesn't go anywhere just because you decided you're too smart for it. it just finds smaller things to attach to, and smaller gods make smaller people. nobody quits God. they trade down.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

The scariest part of screen time is how invisible the transaction feels while your future is being liquidated.

[Balaji @balajis]

The digital divide has reversed.
Digital is cheap, ubiquitous, often fake.
Physical is the premium product now.

[Simon Sarris @simonsarris]

If you think you see the world specially, see through every artifice and power structure, it doesn't matter if you're correct or not. Your reward for this knowledge is the reward for all knowledge, which is that you keel over and die.

You are rewarded for action, nothing else.

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

the machine gods are discovering new sacred geometries and you're dooming?

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy

Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.

How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today?

I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it.

This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it.

(Link to full post in reply)