konrad

rave against the dying of the light

[konrad @praeterproptr]

It's so tragic that universal love is all you need and it's already right there but you also need to proactively defend against those who don't believe either of those claims to be true.

[Fergus @F_McCullough]

European nations are the finest builders of cities in the world, combining efficiency and liveability with atmosphere and beauty. But today, despite huge demand, Europe is building only half as much housing as it did at its peak. What's gone wrong?

Well-intentioned EU environmental directives are part of the problem, creating a legal straitjacket on growth.

- The 2005 environmental impact statement for the Dublin City Centre light railway extension was 176 pages. Twenty years later, the report for the extension to Finglas is… over 7,000 pages.
- Lack of clarity over goose feeding sites in Dublin has led to permission for 1,200 homes being refused.
- Major infrastructure projects from Galway to Antwerp, and the Baltics to Germany, have fallen afoul of environmental rules.

What's the solution? Today @ProgressIreland has published a report showing how targeted changes to environmental directives can deliver the housing and infrastructure we need -- without costing the earth.

Our specific recommendations include move from a reactive regime to strategic protection, restoring the original purpose of directives, updating tests for public interest, and more.

You can read about them in our report (link below), which we're launching tonight in Brussels.

[konrad @praeterproptr]

Another exemplary thread of productive discourse across "bubbles"

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

@KelseyTuoc wow I feel great about where we landed this lol

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@chrisfabian Much appreciated niche post

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@aliceisplaying C for silence please alone :D

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@davidmanheim @cremieuxrecueil

[Sam Elliott @samelliottsam]

@AnthropicAI @AltimeterCap @Greenoaks @sequoia prayers go out to any reasonably scarce resource in san francisco

[Bill Bishop @niubi]

Trump wants to be an 二百五. This is so perfect it is almost like whoever gave him this idea is trolling him

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@AngularOcean I've been thinking of myself as part of an intergenerational process akin to the intertemporal process described in The Egg and it's already a crazy trip

Makes me wish we would have started this whole journey a decade earlier tbh

[konrad @praeterproptr]

I would just like to thank Grimes' baby daddy to have managed not to ruin this site, and potentially even have saved it. This kind of discourse does so much good. These people would not be speaking to each other without social media piercing the bubbles

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@AngularOcean Thanks that makes abstract sense. The portal is in sight 🫡

Also wasn't thinking just of psychedelics -- festivals, mass, dancing, loving, high intensity sports, meditating, building, painting, accompanying a death, etc

But yeah, I expect little of it to be very telling

[Delicious Tacos @Delicious_Tacos]

“It’s my honor to announce that the true pope is working with us from Avignon”

[konrad @praeterproptr]

I sometimes giggle at the times when I thought that people should be doing multi criteria decision analysis way more. What would realistically help is to do anything legible at all that is easy to comment, like a list of pros and cons.

[Scott Kennedy @KennedyCSIS]

Must-read essay by @jjding99 on the highly questionable assumptions underlying Anthropic's approach toward US-China tech competition.
https://t.co/5gtjuq8jrr

[Logan Graham @logangraham]

A lot of people have been wondering about Mythos, Glasswing, and the vulns we / our partners are fixing. Today, I’m excited for us to start sharing more. (For context, I lead Glasswing @AnthropicAI.)

Two independent evaluations this week—from XBOW and the UK AISI—confirm what we've been seeing internally: Claude Mythos Preview is a step change in autonomous cybersecurity capabilities. We need to start preparing fast for a world of models with this level of capabilities.

The UK AI Security Institute tested the model we shipped at the launch of Project Glasswing and found Mythos Preview is the first model to solve both of their end-to-end cyber ranges, including one (Cooling Tower) which no model had ever cleared. But attackers (and defenders) have sophistication & cost constraints – Mythos is also the only model that clears every one of their tasks estimated over 8 hours under their deliberately low 2.5M-token cap.

XBOW tested it on their offensive security benchmarks, finding "token-for-token, unprecedented precision." It's the only model to succeed at subtle V8 sandbox work.

Other Glasswing partners shared similar stories. In a few weeks of testing, Mythos Preview has helped them find many thousands of (estimated) high + critical severity vulnerabilities, sometimes double what they'd normally find in a year.

I don't share this to boost Mythos. In fact, this is not about Mythos. It’s about preparing for the coming world of models being better, faster, cheaper, and more creative than some of the best human experts at dual use capabilities. Clearly, we need them supporting defenders as widely as can be done safely – and especially the least resourced ones.

Within a year, Mythos will probably look quite dumb (relative to other new models). And others may release openly available or unguardrailed models of Mythos-level capabilities.

We started Project Glasswing because capabilities like Mythos Preview's won't stay rare, or stay in careful hands. We are bringing it to defenders as fast as we responsibly can, while working to figure out, for example, the right safeguards and patching & disclosure processes.

Also, to be clear, compute has never been a limiter in our rollout.

Expect a fuller update on our Glasswing work in the coming days.

XBOW report: https://t.co/Mumtbf3kE3

UK AISI report: https://t.co/vBgqz0AeKJ

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@gptbrooke @yearning_slav and @chiaragerosa's writing residency @Casa_Tilo https://t.co/fEkksB4EgC

[konrad @praeterproptr]

Somebody needs to read Anton's newest essay. Compute is the scarcest good in the equation.

But also, you can do everything useful in the CLI fairly easily imho and I'm really not technical

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

@coderabbi @chiefclawofficr You have literally no idea what you're talking about but go off king.

I pay $40k per month to Anthropic. T3 Code users pay even more. I make them money. I just want Claude Code users to have a better (open source) ui.

https://t.co/7eInGBkgza

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@exgenesis Please do it, we all need the same and the more of us do it the better

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States.

The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi.

Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe.

1. The growth numbers

Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000.

But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled.

Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe.

2. Is it all the tech industry?

Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices.

This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued.

His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails.

Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat.

Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit.

A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity.

The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025.

This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!).

3. What about inequality?

Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy.

But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries.

The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman.

4. What about hours worked?

Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000.

The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more.

5. Is America not a bad place to live?

Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter?

American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities.

Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today.

The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans.

Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000.

There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor.
https://t.co/VOpQ32R5tg

[konrad @praeterproptr]

@ohabryka @j_jason_bell @sebkrier I understand the CEV omission gripe but what is the issue with "In practice..."? - what is being done on positive alignment by MIRI/ARC/Redwood that I'm not aware of?