The American mind cannot comprehend.

"Shareholder value" is the wrong consideration. I can create shareholder value by lobbying for a regulatory moat that keeps my competition away. I am benefitting myself and hurting society, because I am taking something valuable that was cheap and plentiful and making it expensive and scarce. Conversely, I can destroy shareholder value by investing in biotechnology under a legal environment where IP protection is weak. I might end up curing cancer, but under conditions that allow my competitors to copy me, such that I make no money. I would by hurting myself (and my fellow shareholders), and yet benefitting society immensely, by creating something extremely valuable that was previously unavailable (or infinitely expensive) and making it available (and cheap). People work best under a selfish motivation, so shareholder value is a carrot or reward that we have to build into (or allow to exist in) our economic system if we want people to use their time, energy and capital to create real economic value. That's why, in the area of medicine, we need to intervene on the system with special government rules (enforceable patent protections) to ensure that people's innovations are able to generate a sufficiently high profit for a sufficiently long period of time to make the whole proposition worth it (with the frequent failures included). Just as we sometimes have to intervene on the system to make profits (and shareholder value) higher than a free market would produce, we also have to sometimes intervene to prevent them from becoming excessive, in areas where competition fails or is unable to occur. There are many of these areas, and as a society, we're not very good at building the consensus to fix them. Buffett is a specialist in finding areas of the economy where market competition is broken or impaired or hindered, leading to unusually high profits and rents that never get competed down, but where the government is not able to do anything about it, or decides not to, given political gridlock, or (often valid) concerns about collateral effects, or because the rent extraction is not so high that the intervention is deemed worth the trouble. This allows the business to extract abnormally high rents indefinitely. There's certainly value for shareholders in finding and investing in those businesses (or engineering them from scratch). But the value for society as a whole is highly exaggerated. Musk isn't playing the same game. He's trying to create innovative things (like space travel to save the species) because he thinks those things are important in themselves, separate from and in addition to whatever profit they generate for him. Maybe it's all a gimmick, and he's just playing the same "maximize my monetary number" game that the rest of us are playing. But what cannot be denied is that, so far, in his efforts, he has created orders of magnitude more value for society than Buffett could ever dream of. And that would be equally true whether Spacex IPO'd at the value of its paid-in capital (say ~$12B), creating no millionaires or billionaire shareholders, or at ~150x of that value, creating literally thousands of them, as it actually did.

Facts

guy who faked-it-until-he-made-it but was starting to get in over his head can’t believe his luck when llms launched

We're all held hostage by extremists.

We are being held hostage by a true fringe

Marco Rubio finding out he has to be the CEO of Anthropic after it gets nationalized

none of this happens if they called it opus 5 and didn’t engage in the day 0 propaganda

Tips on how to fall asleep in a living room chair 1. be old 2. sit in a chair

Chromatin shredding sounds awesome innovativegenomics.org/news/…

"An electron can be sourced from coal, gas, sun, wind, or uranium; a combustion engine is married to a single fuel that must cross chokepoints. Electrification is the purchase of optionality, and China bought more of it than any nation in history." ft.com/content/2f13778e-5946…

Experts predict that Yann LeCunn will develop a good name to refer to advanced AI with as early as 2028. something like "advanced human-niche-fluent computational intelligence (AHFCI)" or "hyper adaptable machine supercognition architecturing" (HAMSCAR) we'll have to wait though.

They expect us to believe these results and not ask questions 🙄

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

RT @HFI_Research: Are they really going to start during market hours ahead of the 4th largest crude draw in US history? Trump must’ve boug…

New York has a new slogan….

btw insane amounts of alpha in telling claude code to "review my code for issues" on Fable rn while it is not pay per use be prepared to be in abject horror that you shipped anything to prod without a Fable Check™ first

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.

Export controls work.

What a possession here. Four different dribble penetrations into the paint, all feeling the presence of Wemby, the patience, and eventually: the look.