Happy to see @paradigm name this as the billion-dollar algorithm and cite the 2018 paper. paradigm.xyz/2021/05/liquidi…

Americans bash EU recently, but what are the facts? 🔪 Murder rates: US 6× higher 🎓 Student debt: US 12× higher 🏖️ Paid vacation: EU 20 days, US 0 days 🤰 Maternal mortality: US 3× higher 🍔 Obesity: US 2× higher (40% vs 19%) ⛓️ Prison population: US 5× higher 💰 Government debt: US 121%, EU 82% 💊 Drug overdoses: US 15× higher 👶 Paid parental leave: EU 14 weeks, US 0 weeks 🏥 Medical bankruptcy: 530k US families/year, EU ~0 🚄 High-speed rail: US 80 km, EU 9600 km ⚡ Renewable electricity: EU 47%, US 22% 🌍 CO₂ per capita: US 2.5× higher 🚗 Road deaths: US 2.8× higher 🏗️ Workplace deaths: US 2× higher

Summer is ending and the building season is starting!

AI demonstrates the sunk-cost fallacy perfectly: Just one more "this doesn't work!" prompt, you think, and it'll fix it!! But often it won't, and now you've wasted 30 minutes begging that you could have spent learning how to actually fucking do it yourself.

As someone who spent a few years in payments: 1. Stripe takes this much for small businesses. For large companies it’s less! It’s why eg Amazon uses Stripe vs building their own credit card processing! 2. Building *just* credit card processing is very expensive (cont’d)

How do we ensure we ll have a personal AI assistant that does things online for us, and that is really considering our own interest (versus the interest of AI assistant provider)?

If you studied algorithms, I'm sure you've heard of Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the shortest paths between nodes in a weighted graph. Super useful in scenarios such as road networks, where it can determine the shortest route from a starting point to various destinations. It's been the most optimal algorithm since 1956! Until now. The O(E V log V) complexity just went down to O(E log^(2/3) V) for sparse graphs. It would be amazing if this kind of breakthrough came through AI that can code but I guess we're not there yet..

Excellent essay on the future of education in the age of AI and social media.

Plus Norway (1.02%) and Sweden (0.99%) spending 4x % of their GDP compared to US.

Shutting down USAID is not about efficiency—it’s about undermining America’s global leadership. USAID counters extremism, fights diseases, and creates more markets for U.S. exports. This is reckless and dangerous.

Europe has its strengths and if it plays them well we could see it at least reducing the gap to US

VC STARTUPS - odds of IPO for VC startup: 1% - avg time spent on VC startup: 8.5 years - market cap avg @ IPO: $5B - avg % ownership @ IPO: 15%* $5B = $750M - avg 2.5 cofounders = $300M - payout = odds * $$$ = 1% * $300M = $3M - payout per year = $3M/8.5 years = $352,000/year

Arrived at @EthCCweek in Bruxelles and started the day with a run through the city center. Heading soon to Open Source AI Summit.

How the Dutch leave power…. On two wheels. Mr Rutte ends his premiership of 14 years on a bike

I'm attending EthCC in Brussels in a few days - see you there!

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Europeans, remember to vote today for a free and democratic EU!