It's never been easier to figure out the best way to fund a specific R&D project! atlasofinnovation.org Government will put this to good use, but so should the "third wave" of philanthropy.

I decided to start writing more on substack! Curious to hear what you think :) open.substack.com/pub/frauke…

This is a major issue, I wish that it was debated more.

How to write a paper: 1. Think of the upside of the idea if true. Discard if not high 2. Try as quickly as possible to falsify the idea 3. If it survives, move quickly to the MVP 4. Present that paper, and iteratively respond to comments 5. Submit and respond to referees

Here at [famous scientist’s name].ai, we’re developing tools to accelerate science. Unlike academia, which has stifled the production of high quality scientific work by demanding it be correct, here at [fsn].ai, we know that you can just do (wrong) things.

This was a great episode! 2 observations that should inform the debate: - we observe a similar trend of less beauty on average in many other domains - the problem seems particularly strong with housing, e.g. modern churches seem mostly fine! fraukestehr.substack.com/p/o…

same argument

Inject it into my veins.

8 days to complete a 4 story, eight unit, courtyard building with timber prefab kit. That's one interesting detail I took away from a FASCINATING meeting today with an Austrian prefab company.

@matt_beard_ is on a roll, been very excited about everything he's put out recently

Gutenberg invented the most important technology of the millennium and immediately went bankrupt — and so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. Gutenberg could make a batch of 300 books for the cost of one, but there weren't enough buyers in his small, landlocked village in Germany. It it took the better part of a century of further innovations, social changes, and setting up of distribution networks before you could have a pamphlet like Luther's 95 thesis get from Wittenberg to London in 17 days.

Das wäre ein großer Fehler.

There are now more tech workers going from the US to Europe than the other way around

omg this title, this paper

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

I love that the EA/Progress intersection has such good design. Literally among the best on the internet - a kind of minimalist American Modernism, but not pastiche. Web native, for sure, but not "Squarespace nonsense". 1/2

Housing Theory of Everything strikes again

Ok which one of you got Jesse Eisenberg to donate a kidney?