Paul Howard

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes looking at this issue or talking to abuse survivors knows that victims of domestic violence are desperate to feel safe, and they can believe (at least for some time) that appeasement works. Cooking. Sex. Professions of love. etc. All are tried to make the violence stop.

Get this man out of Congress.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

The US government now has around 30 equity stakes in private companies. How many were coerced like this?

[Anto Patrex @antopatrex1]

every robotics company is modeling unit economics per robot and nobody's asking who's gonna fix them when they break. there are maybe 200 people on earth qualified to maintain humanoid robots at scale. your deployment math is a fantasy if your maintenance workforce literally doesn't exist yet.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

I'm loving this.

The Iranian regime supplied Russia with attack drones and the technology that enabled Russia to scale up their mass production.

The North Korean regime openly sent troops to fight against Ukraine, while also supplying Russia with vast quantities of artillery ammunition, ballistic missiles, and self-propelled artillery systems.

The Belarusian regime allowed Russia to use its territory to launch the assault on Kyiv, handed over military stockpiles, and continues to host relay stations that help guide Russian drones striking Ukrainian cities every single day.

But GOD FORBID Ukraine strikes back and targets a single Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea as part of its campaign against Russian transportation infrastructure.

Now that's automatically WORLD WAR III!!!!!!!!!!!

[Paul Howard @pauldhoward]

@mattyglesias New parties, old ones are are tainted

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

For those keeping score at home*, this means the US government's equity portfolio now consists of THIRTY COMPANIES - up from ZERO just a year ago. (MP Materials was the 1st last July.)

Bonus: it's all coming from the guy fighting "communism."

*Don't worry bc @CatoInstitute is

[Valentin Ignatev @valigo]

I caught TDD virus at the start of my career, and this talk by Erik Meijer saved me!

As often the case with snake oil salesmen, they take a good core idea (write usage code first), and turn it into a parody to sell books and courses to people who don't know better.

This talk is 10 years old, but still relevant today. LLMs like writing A LOT of tests, but you must delete most of them and only leave integrational and e2e ones that test real system behavior.

[Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig]

I fear I am about to be the recipient of Baby's First Restraining Order after I gift this to my friend's child.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

@BradenBuchanan4 I discuss this in the next paragraph.

If you applied this argument to people instead of AIs, it would be the classic lump of labor fallacy.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

"Lab compute 3x-es year over year. For a lab to 10x revenue while continuing to only 3x compute, some combination of the following 3 things has to happen:

1. Lab margins have to increase,

2. The price of compute has to increase,

3. Labs have to spend a greater fraction of their compute on inference.

My understanding is that basically all 3 of these things have been happening..."

"Consider the price at which Google and Anthropic are renting compute from SpaceX.

Google is reportedly paying $900 million a month for 110K GPUs [at] ... roughly 2x the spot price per hour for those GPUs. And the current spot price is itself 40% higher than it was in February."

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

A series of fairly wild thoughts from Dwarkesh. I thought I was bullish but even I am not assuming that the price to rent compute continues to go up!

I will say that I am in SV this week and Dwarkesh is capturing the zeitgeist.

Net, net public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok/Cursor and Open Source numbers over the last 6 weeks.

And really good for anyone who has installed compute coming off contract and/or is bringing on compute that is not already contracted. And credit slowing down capacity adds - if it happens - only exacerbates all of this.

[SGM Mike Vining @ Blasting Through Official @BlastingThrough]

I’m sharing a link to an article published in “We Are the Mighty.” Did you know about these Medal of Honor recipients who became heroes after disobeying orders? They are reminders to all of us to do the right thing, no matter the risk.
https://t.co/w9ZUMEym4k

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

should be obvious by now, but OpenAI and Anthropic are just gonna keep cannibalizing all their biggest customers.

it’s simply too profitable for them to resist. and it’s already happening:

1. Figma partnered with Anthropic on AI design tools. then Anthropic’s product chief quit Figma’s board, and 3 days later Anthropic launched Claude Design to compete with Figma. CEO Dylan Field said Anthropic was “not consistently candid.”

2. Novo Nordisk uses Claude to help develop drugs. now Anthropic is developing drugs of its own.

3. Microsoft poured billions into OpenAI. now OpenAI is building a Jobs Platform to compete with LinkedIn, and reportedly a code repository to compete with GitHub. Microsoft owns both.

4. Harvey uses Claude to sell AI contract analysis, due diligence, and litigation tools. now Anthropic sells those same workflows through Claude for Legal.

5. Intercom used OpenAI’s Realtime API to build Fin Voice. now OpenAI sells its own voice-and-chat support agent through Presence.

6. Abridge and Ambience build clinical documentation products on OpenAI. now OpenAI sells ChatGPT for Healthcare directly to hospitals with clinical documentation built in.

7. Benchling uses Claude to power its biotech R&D platform. now Anthropic sells its own scientific workbench through Claude Science.

the frontier lab playbook is simple:

1. sell their models to the world’s most valuable businesses
2. help wire them into those companies’ most valuable and sensitive work
3. map the business from the inside and find where AI can take over
4. turn those capabilities into their own products and become the customer’s competitor

[Eli Albrecht @Elialbrecht]

When I was a lawyer at Gibson Dunn in D.C., we took our summer associates to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A survivor spoke to us and said something that stuck with me:

Lawyers need to know the holocaust did not begin with camps. It began when Jews were removed from institutions - above all, legal institutions. Judges stripped of their robes. Lawyers disbarred. Then, when law-groups were Judenrein, they codified laws that made discrimination systematic and "legal."

First, you remove the Jews from the institutions. Then, Jews can be discriminated against without representation.

On Monday, Mayor Mamdani announced his 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. The Committee was promised to be "truly reflective of New York City."

Not one of the 18 is Jewish.

Not one Jewish attorney, former judge, or law professor - in a city where one in eight residents is Jewish and even Justice John Leventhal, recommended by the State's Chief Judge, was rejected.

It is estimated that over 50% of the New York bar is Jewish. That means there is a 0.0004% chance of no Jews being selected to the Committee.

Mamdani’s marginalization of Jews has been ongoing, and few voices on the Left have spoken up.

On Day 1, Mamdani revoked the IHRA antisemitism definition (top priority); he changed the NYPD guidance protecting houses of worship, eliminated Jews from the City's immigrant-heritage map, called for the arrest of the prime minister of the only Jewish state, and now created a Judenrein Judiciary Committee.

My grandmother, Leah, survived Nazi Germany. Before the laws, before the violence, she told me how she was pushed out of her high school groups. Then, once excluded from all activities, she was bullied and marginalized.

We are already seeing Step 2 in NYC. Two weeks ago, on a Jewish Holiday, two men were stabbed outside Upper West Side synagogues - one wearing a kippah- and yesterday, Jewish students were attacked. Every 26 hours, there is a hate crime against Jews in NYC.

In NYC, there is a concerted effort to disappear Jews from public life and leadership.

No one on the Left is speaking out. If this discrimination was happening to any other group, the chorus would be deafening.

To be clear, Jews will find a way. Many are already taking their talents elsewhere. When white-shoe firms shut Jewish lawyers out, they built firms that now dominate. Cardozo, Louis Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all found a way despite discrimination.

But NYC will be worse off without us. A city government that is judenrein - cleansed of Jews – does not just hurt the Jews, but hurts the city.

The tragedy is not just that Jews were left out of the institutions. It is that the institutions were left without the Jews.

If you see this and have not yet spoken out, I encourage you to do so.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

It's war. It's also a world war, and the bad guys know it and act like it while the free world is still in denial.

[Mason @webdevMason]

How normal well-adjusted people become libertarians

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

“In different places over the years, I have had to prove that socialism, which to many Western thinkers was seen as a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology”. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion.”

[Sarah Adams @sarahadams]

We have a candidate in Michigan talking about beheading a sitting Senator. Completely normal.

[Naval @naval]

Every “save the world” scheme starts by handing the money and power to the schemers first.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Important piece by @SethAMandel