Postmillenial 🥑

things i’m into

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

it's hard to make sense of so much overperformance in the past few years coming from the largest Co's in the index -shouldn't these be the most crowded trades?

but if you think about it the sheer size of the companies creates a sort of paradoxical state whereby active managers doing portfolio management are more likely *underallocate* (gotta dIveRsifY!!) and the index holders capture all the leftover alpha

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

Ohhhh nooooo it’s not a sharp edged glass box that is only concrete walls at street level next to a wind swept plazaaaa what are we gonna dooooooo 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[Katherine Boyle @KTmBoyle]

Never. Give. Up.

[Alex Rives @alexrives]

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun.

Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology.

Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier.

With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

It feels like progressivism is post-ideological at this point, that they no longer have a narrative for why they should hold power, it’s just degrowth nihilism like this which is functionally more akin to a mood disorder than a legitimizing rationale to govern.

[frankie @FrankieIsLost]

the year is 2028. claude infers whether you’ve ever even thought about gradient descent and silently routes your queries to Claude Sisyphus, a model RL’d to maximize engagement while avoiding task completion. you spend your entire UBI token allotment on it without ever realizing.

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

@SemiAnalysis_ @zephyr_z9 My hypothesis is they shift to a Ferrari/Hermes/Rolex business model of frontier access conditioned to spend…

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

@TMTLongShort It’ll be like the Rolex/Ferrari/Hermes customer relationship on steroids. Want access to Mythos10? What’s your current token bill then? Companies will overspend (on the commoditized models with chinese clones) to get access to the frontier on Day 1

[bubble boi @bubbleboi]

The commodity thesis is half right, and it’s the half that’s doesn’t pay.

Yes, tokens at the “good enough” tier are already a commodity open weight models from DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama have crushed pricing for mid-tier intelligence, and that tier is now a brutal cost-per-token knife fight. But that’s also where margins go to zero, winning it is like winning a refinery, not an oil field.

The frontier however behaves very differently because the demand isn’t for tokens, it’s for completed labor. When a model is doing agentic coding or multi-hour knowledge work, a model that’s 10% better doesn’t only earn a 10% premium because it completes tasks the cheaper model fails at entirely, and the buyer on the other side is comparing the token bill to a salary, not to another token bill. That’s why the quality-price curve at the top is so inelastic.

And being “Good enough” is a moving target every time capability jumps, the set of economically valuable tasks expands, and the frontier model captures the new tasks before the commodity tier catches up 12-18 months later. The moat isn’t the weights, those depreciate fast, it’s the compounding loop of capital access, RL environments and post-training data, product surfaces that generate proprietary feedback (coding agents especially), and increasingly co-designed silicon and inference infra.

Even worse the argument for commodity models as gotten weaker in recent months. We’ve seen pre-training plateauing but the scaling axis only shifted, it didn’t end. RL/test-time compute is arguably worse for commoditization, because it’s harder to distill and replicate than next-token pre-training was. The recipes, environments, and reward engineering are where the secret sauce lives now, and they don’t leak through a weights release.

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

@karaokecomputer It’s always the cursed filthy looking subhumans with the most hateful views. And of course a communist -the religion of god’s rejects

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

this is my personal singularity moment

this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread?

anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience

first of all, all my pet prompts are solved.
→ λ-calculus puzzles
→ bug questions
→ one-shot apps
all are trivial to it.

I don't have anything harder other than my
ongoing work

so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop.

after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly.

I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file.

I then asked Fable to optimize it.

2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100%+ in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude.

that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches

but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written.

... wait, what?

so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction!

that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this?

just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster.

oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do

I don't know what to say anymore

this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change.

receipt below . . .

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Imagine the levels of propaganda it took to make you more comfortable with random beheadings and gang rapes than being called racist.

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

It’s upper-class inbreeding and you will see it anywhere in the world. The things you don’t see are family prestige/heritage, the (same) social circles they grew up in, who their friends are, what country club they’ve been a member of since birth. That her dad went to summer camp with his uncle. That they spent the same summer ar the same beach town in 2011. That her best friend’s cousin is his fratmate. In their social milieu everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows someone who does. Bodycounts and cheating are difficult/near impossible because the word WILL get around. There’s no amount of money that can buy that or into that, and unless you come from the same background you simply do not exist.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

@demian_ai Why was this writen with AI 😖

[Postmillenial 🥑 @shady_vc]

@Codie_Sanchez Smb

[Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj]

A Spanish La Liga club (likely Osasuna) facing potential relegation placed a bet against itself on Kalshi, hedging the financial hit of dropping down a tier.

They survived on the final day. Susquehanna was on the other side of that bet and pocketed over $1M.