YouTube:
Adam welcomes pop-up book designer Kelli Anderson to the workshop to learn about her latest book: Alphabet in Motion. Six years in the making, this book is an interactive exploration of the history of typography, and the engineering of its pop-up mechanisms is as elegant and beautiful as the letterforms they illustrate!
A M A Z I N G !!
The technology is coming, but we can't foresee the social and political consequences. Hossenfelder, however, is skeptical about the survival of current democratic systems, which she discusses about 7 minutes into the video. She doesn't think the European welfare system will survive.
Here's the content of a tweet by Séb Krier (you should check out comments to the original):
Yes, I've been saying this for a while now. See for example https://x.com/sebkrier/status/1968753358216302894 and Danzig's work here: https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Machines-Bureaucracies-and-Markets-as-Artificial-Intelligences.pdf
I don't think the predominant narrative of AI as a singular entity, a Sand God, a discrete moment in time, or a 'separate species' (as Tegmark puts it) is correct or helpful. As Danzig argues, AI is indeed "alien," but only in the same way a stock market or the DMV is alien: they are all reductionist, correlative intelligences.
They strip the world of context, reducing reality to standardized inputs like prices or tokens to process information at scales humans cannot. To me at least, this shared "alien" nature normalizes AI as the latest evolution in a lineage of artificial processors we’ve lived with for centuries.
So instead of a unitary being or species, AGI should be understood as a collection of complex systems, models, and products that functions similarly to (and integrates with) existing human macro-systems. An amplifier for the bureaucracies and markets that already govern us, not a discrete 'biological-style' agent. Its governance is a continuous sociopolitical struggle (insert always has been meme) that is shaped by many different forces, not a one-time mathematical proof of safety before a launch.
Relatedly, I feel like the current discourse also has a blind spot for the 'demand' side. We obsess over the supply (R&D, model scaling, 'the AGI') as if these systems are created in a vacuum. I think this is how people end up with scenarios where AGIs are just doing things for their own sake, completely detached from human preferences (who are usually described as 'disempowered').
But they aren't; they are pulled and shaped by downstream demand, cost constraints, and efficiency needs. This economic reality has implications for how the technology develops. See also Drexler's CAIS model (https://owainevans.github.io/pdfs/Reframing_Superintelligence_FHI-TR-2019.pdf) - Drexler anticipated much of this and the core intuitions remain true, even if slightly out of date. You won’t see one omniscient agent, but a proliferation of specialized systems, models of varying sizes, and distinct products rising in parallel because that is what is economically viable.
This is why the AGI governance conversation often feels so confused. If you view AGI as a singular biological entity, you make two mistakes: safetyists project human-like 'intent' where they should be looking at incentives, and policymakers reach for a singular 'FDA' when instead they need to look into different different markets, sectors, products etc.
You can’t have a single regulator or discrete safety rules for 'The Economy' or 'The Bureaucracy,' and you won't be able to have one for 'Intelligence' either. Models still matter of course - none of this means you shouldn't test, evaluate, and understand them better - but I think we overindex on this frame a bit. And as Dean says, none of this is to downplay concerns and risks: but I do think it has implications for how to understand and address them.
"Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify.
Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify."
Sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) November 16, 2025
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are…
At the very least, that’s the right way to think about the problem. Assuming stationarity is problematic for most real-world tasks.
— Masudur Rahman (@masud99r) November 17, 2025
An interesting conversation that refuses to indulge in speculation about the Epstein papers, while noting that Trump seems terrified off them and so is increasingly distracted, and moves from populism through peformativity and on the Marjorie Taylor Green as an odd sort of bell weather.
YouTube:
Robert Wright and Nikita Petrov discuss Trump 2.0, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist theory, Covid, the rise of “inner emigration” as survival strategy, normalized warfare in Russia, the reality-distorting effects of deepfakes, and more—all in light of invoking W. B. Yeats to ask: Are things falling apart?
0:00 Teaser
0:59 What is Bob doing in Qatar?
4:04 "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Why Yeats felt this way
7:37 Peter Thiel's Antichrist theory
9:46 Nikita: COVID was a weird time, and nothing has been the same since
14:57 Why Bob feels things are falling apart
18:28 Were things ever in order?
19:53 "Inner emigration": tuning out the world as self-care
22:38 A reaction to a drone strike: "Loud noises don't wake me up"
25:57 Young people are turning away from social media
27:05 When Spain lost all power and cellular coverage
30:36 War as a "major inconvenience"
34:22 Bob's prediction about Ukraine's future retaliation for Pokrovsk
38:56 Nikita's impressions from Europe
42:07 Nonzero Reading Club THIS SATURDAY: Norbert Wiener's God & Golem, Inc.
47:08 Deepfakes and the future of news
52:04 Russia's first humanoid robot falls down
Note that Wright was born in 1957. At roughly 16:23 he notes that:
I grew I kind of came of age entered adolescence amid the the turmoil of the late 60s and was in fact in San Francisco uh the epicenter of it in the US kind of when I was 12 13 years old. Um and so I don't know I you would think that would kind of have anured me to it. Um, for whatever reason, this seems a lot worse than that did to me, at least at the time. I mean, where the US is, the degree of polarization, nature of the polarization, and so on. Um, but it isn't just that and different people talk about different things when you ask them if things are falling apart. I mean, there is the whole international thing with uh Trump really almost making a point of establishing that the rules just don't apply.
I'm a decade older that Wright and so arguably have lived through more of the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s (though I was not in San Francisco). By the time he was in his teens the war in Vietnam was over, as was the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, but I experienced those, not to mention a steelworkers' strike the shut down the steel industry for four months. I agree with his observation that the current period seems more chaotic than things appeared back then. Is this an illusion of some sort, or are things currently more disordered? I'm not quite sure.
Wright's written a Substack post on this theme: Are Things Falling Apart?
Gavriil tries Tchaikovsky's "At the Church" - "В церкви" Чайковского - Гаврилушка пробует разучивать
YouTube:
The brand new oil rig, West Bollsta, worth $500 million, travels from manufacture in South Korea to Europe. Although self powered, the rig still needs a specialised high powered ocean tug, the ALP Striker, to assist with the long trip.Mega Transports look at the vehicles that transport exceptionally large and demanding cargoes across the planet; these journeys require precise planning, which can only take place with special safety precautions and for which large teams plan months in advance.
New Harvard study shows AI companion apps use emotional farewells to stop user exit.
— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) November 3, 2025
These messages produced up to 14x more engagement after goodbye.
An audit of 6 top apps captured 1,200 goodbyes and coded the immediate replies.
6 tactics emerged, premature exit guilt, fear… pic.twitter.com/omEdFIh11T
Nick Corasaniti and Tracey Tully, 6 Takeaways From Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s Victory in New Jersey, NYTimes, Nov. 5, 2025.
The race was expected to be close. In fact, it was a blowout.
Representative Mikie Sherrill beat Jack Ciattarelli by a wide margin, becoming the second woman to be elected governor of New Jersey.
Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, made her opposition to President Trump the cornerstone of her campaign against Mr. Ciattarelli, a Republican who crisscrossed the state with fervor, trying to replicate the inroads Mr. Trump made with Latino and Black voters in New Jersey last November.
Mr. Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump in May, had gambled that his new alliance with a president he once called a charlatan would help him run up the score, even in a left-leaning state.
Here's why:
As you may know, Trump has decided to stop work on the Gateway Tunnel project, which involves creating a new rail line between New York City and New Jersey. As this video should make clear, that affects not just New York City and New Jersey, but the whole Northeast corridor of the US (see video starting at roughly 31:01).
“If this system of transportation collapses, the Northeastern economy and the economy of the country collapses, so why be so shortsighted?” Governor Hochul said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday night.
* * * * *
00:00 Intro
03:19 The Northeast Corridor (NEC)
06:55 B+P Tunnel
12:36 The Frederick Douglass Tunnel Programme
16:01 Susquehanna River Rail Bridge
23:08 Philadelphia's 30th Street Station
25:20 The Portal North Bridge
29:28 New York's Hudson Tunnel
33:49 What it All Means
35:15 Staying On Track
