Substack - A new economic engine for culture

Apr 24

Meet the California Progressives Trying to Cancel Affordable Housing. Plus. . .

Columbia goes remote. Google gets serious. And more.

Today from The Free Press, Google fights back against the activists, Biden does away with due process, and more. But first, let me pass the mic over to Ben Kawaller, who describes the latest installment of his video series, “Ben Meets America!” I have lived in or…

Oliver Wiseman ∙ 506 LIKES

Sydney

•

As a woman, I am continually flabbergasted by this administration’s policies against women. Title IX is a bedrock for us, for student athletes. They do not care for us or represent us.

Unsaint Finbar

•

If I had boys, I would not send them to a school filled with left wing idiots. They would go State schools in a conservative State.

This is a cliche, but how is it that left wing people break everything they touch, then lie and call it progress? Adulthood is in part about owning mistakes. It is about sincerity. It is about improving the mind, and improving the world. Why does this never happen once this zombifying virus takes hold? Thereafter it is roughly equal measures BS, patronizing moralistic postures, and steady decay in everything.

Trump is innocent with respect to all the charges in all of his trials. The current one in New York, as I understand it, is about campaign finance violations. The FEC already looked at it and found no wrong doing. The whole thing is a cooked up fraud that should embarass any lawyers still capable of embarassment.

And lets not forget that Hillary operated a server that itself was illegal, that plainly was intended to avoid compliance with the Federal Records Act (for the seemingly obvious reason that she was conducting illegal transactions), then deleted 40,000 emails, ran Bleechbit on her servers, and physically smashed both her hard drives and cell phones, to make any investigation impossible. This AFTER all this was subpoenaed by Congress.

If you do not understand that we have a two tiered system of "justice"--which really amounts to two tiers of injustice, in which one set of people is not charged for things they did do, and another IS charged for things they did not do--then all I can say is I assume you are wrong about nearly everything in your personal life too. I pity those around you, because you are out of touch with the currents of Life itself. None of this is complicated.

High Growth Engineer

Apr 28

Why reading whitepapers takes your career to the next level (and how to do it)

Guest post by L6 Staff Engineer & Tech Lead at Google

Hi everyone 👋, Jordan here. I’m excited to feature Micah Lerner , L6 Staff Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, and author of Micah Learns , a blog with recurring deep dives on technical topics. Micah attributes a large part of his growth to reading technical whitepapers. In today’s guest post, he will share the value he’s experienced and how you can see similar results.

Jordan Cutler and Micah Lerner ∙ 187 LIKES

Nicola Ballotta

•

Great advice, Jordan. I have to say, reading whitepapers is also a great way to learn more about writing. Thanks for the mention 🙂

Kalpak

•

Excellent points. Aptly put.

AI Supremacy

Apr 24

Google, Perplexity and OpenAI seek to mould Changing Consumer Behaviors

🔎 The Future of Search will be decided in the next five years.

Image: the geeks at Perplexity. Is the internet willing to change their repetitive behaviors? Hello Everyone, As OpenAI prepares to launch a search product that will utilize Bing and GPT-5 to directly compete with Google, something significant is about to happen

Michael Spencer ∙ 38 LIKES

The Free Press

Apr 30

When Silicon Valley Stopped Trying to Save the World

Four years ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was treated as a heretic when he insisted on leaving politics out of work. Now he looks prophetic.

In September 2020, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, did something unthinkable in Silicon Valley: he said ther…

Michal Lev-Ram ∙ 296 LIKES

Yuri Bezmenov

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Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot all claimed they were trying save the world. When the private and public sectors march in lockstep with DIE/ESG and the 2020 COVID/BLM hystetia, that is the definition of leftist fascism. Brian Armstrong was brave for taking a stand, but many were silenced or lost their jobs.

Google is fully demoralized. They fired James Damore for writing a memo in support of intellectual diversity. His words from 2017 are just as prescient as Armstrong’s from 2020: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/james-damore-google-diversity-memo-gemini

Bruce Miller

•

Yeah, nice try, no sale.

They're still left leaning clowns. Let's not forget the two leftists at Twitter who banned speech before Musk took over and ended their reign of terror. Google is among the worst offenders, toadying for the Biden Justice Department. And all the swooning for the grifters at BLM? Did these woke nitwits who run these corporations try to claw back the tributes that went into buying mansions for the fraudsters who ran that sting? No they did not. Our so--called "elites" who run these companies are mostly apparatchiks who were advanced to positions beyond their competence. Real leaders lead. They don't follow trends. And reward fraud and outright stupidity

Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends

May 1

Announcing the long-awaited Links relaunch

... are you ready for it??

Well, friends: Today is the day. The day I have long promised and threatened. The day on which Links, long a pro bono enterprise, decides to put on its big-girl pants and try to pay its (that is, my) mortgage. Today, after lots of research and thought and conversation with you — you beautiful, eclectic not-quite-strangers — I’m relaunching Links with a …

Caitlin Dewey ∙ 49 LIKES

Ellie G

•

Congratulations! Think there is a typo under ‘What will a free subscription include’, should it start Free subscriptions will… ?

Tom Pendergast

•

Good for you! You know I love your newsletter … and now I’ve got to look at all my subscriptions and decide if it’s time to swap one for yours or if my damned retiree budget can stretch to include another … One thing’s for sure: I’m not going back to work! I’m really happy for you; hope it goes well.

Lenny's Newsletter

Apr 30

How Perplexity builds product

Johnny Ho, co-founder and head of product, explains how he organizes his teams like slime mold, uses AI to build their AI company, and much more

👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:

Lenny Rachitsky ∙ 110 LIKES

Harshal Patil

•

17h

Love perplexity, use it every day, and Glad to read more about the behind-the-scenes.

Things Worth Knowing with Farrah Storr

Apr 17

The New Paris Experience

Paris has become a city of two halves- those who go with the Tik-Tok crowds and those who choose places that barely exist on Google

How many times have you seen something on social media- a plate of pasta, a candlelit corner of a restaurant, a giant croissant, and then travelled halfway across the world to go to that exact same place only to be well, massively underwhelmed? I thought so.

Farrah @Substack ∙ 159 LIKES

Jessica Miller

•

Apr 17

It’s happening in so many destinations. You can’t even have a reasonably good holiday in a popular city unless you go Jan-Feb. We just had a subpar experience in Italy and I agree that social media is to blame. I think I’ve entered my very chic road trip to beautiful sleepy villages phase of life.

Eleanor Cording-Booth

•

Apr 17

TikTok's ruining of decent places and even truly awful places is chalked up as one of my to-write-about topics. The utter MADNESS of it all!

Thank you for this! x

Business Blunders

Apr 24

Google This Billionaire

A Silicon Valley legend makes his dumbest trade ever

“We have witnessed the most educated, successful, and monied professionals in the country put their companies - not to mention their own liberty - at risk by engaging in flagrant and foolhardy illegal conduct.” – Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney, in 2012.

Al Lewis ∙ 3 LIKES

Terin Miller

•

Absolutely. Preet was "the man," a great US Attorney not concerned so much with reputation as results. I actually had the privilege of seeing him in court, at trials - not by being subpoenaed by him. And the Bankman-Fried FTX scam, and collapse of Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank, were further examples of the drive to 'cheat' and get away with it, believing yourself the smartest person in the room.

It's also why Bernie Madoff had so many wealthy victims. I'm always reminded of the Wall Street Journal reporter who was so awed by brokers he wound up convicted of 'insider trading,' and prompted the WSJ (and others) to put a 'code of ethics' in writing that all reporters annually had to read and sign off on having read. Because at the time the reporter's defense was: 'the policy wasn't written.'

The policy pertained SPECIFICALLY to what constituted 'insider trading.' Which so many people TRY to do, and only those with money for a settlement, or refusing to settle and willing to take jail time, like Martha, wind up 'getting caught.' When I was a reporter and people asked who I worked for and I told them, they frequently would 'innocently' ask me for 'stock tips.' I told them I might know a few, but I wasn't willing to go to prison so they could benefit. Just like believing yourself a 'market maker' when you're day trading, the 'little guys' never get away with anything. It's just not worth it. Unless you're a billionaire, apparently.

I also love when news of an SEC settlement comes out, almost invariably noting: without admitting guilt. So, why pay the fine? It's like being pardoned for a crime, then claiming you aren't guilty of committing it. If you didn't commit a crime, you don't need a pardon.

James Mills

•

Once again, it appears MONEY is resolution. Shame...

Future Media

Apr 18

Google goes after news sites on its doorstep as law closes in

Plus, a media scion predicts Google's era is ending, the UK Government goes after socials, Netflix profits surge, media lawyers make a killing, and more

Welcome to new subscribers from News Corp and News UK, CNN, The New Statesman, Vogue, Australia’s Nine Media, Amazon, Salesforce, US publisher group Digital Content Next, World Rugby, Germany’s Corint, and more. 👋 It’s been a big week so le…

Ricky Sutton

A Letter a Day

Apr 16

Letter #174/175: Gokul Rajaram and Eric Schmidt (2023/1999)

Early Operator at Google, Facebook, Square, and DoorDash and CEO of Google | How to Present | Novell 1998 Year in Review Presentation

Hi there! Welcome to A Letter a Day. If you want to know more about this newsletter, see "The Archive.” At a high level, you can expect to receive a memo/essay or speech/presentation transcript from an investor, founder, or entrepreneur (IFO) each edition.

Kevin Gee ∙ 9 LIKES

Glenn’s Substack

Apr 26

Education Apocalypse Now?

The Ivy League Hits An Iceberg.

Over a decade ago, I wrote a short book titled The Higher Education Bubble, which was followed by a much longer one called The New School, and a significantly longer and updated paperback version called The Education Apocalypse. In all of these books I explained, with increasing amounts of detail and examples, why I thought that the existing system of hi…

Glenn Harlan Reynolds ∙ 252 LIKES

Martin Hackworth

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Having sat inside of the bubble you describe for decades, incredulous at what was happening, I am willing to bet more than I can afford to lose that the people still in these bubbles do not and will not see any of this until one fall semester when no one shows up. Even then, they'll be dumbfounded.

Secrets of Privacy

•

Glenn was way ahead of this issue - kudos to him for that.

I suspect "elite" universities will retain prestige with foreign students a bit longer and they will keep those schools afloat. Domestic students will take Silver's advice and migrate elsewhere.

Similar to what we're seeing at a larger macro level in the US. Foreigners generally prefer legacy American costal metro areas while natives are moving to the south and interior.

Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg

Apr 26

A Big, Bold Clean Up Washington Agenda, Trump's Terrible April, Do More And Worry Less

Welcome New Subscribers!/Subscribe and Save Runs Thru April 30th!

Happy Friday all. Got a few things for you today: A Big, Bold Clean Up Washington Agenda - As part of our work to preserve our democracy, I think Joe Biden and the Democrats need to develop and campaign on a big “reform Washington” agenda that attacks the corruption of the Trump era. This has become far more urgent after yesterday’s Supreme Court hear…

Simon Rosenberg ∙ 272 LIKES

Ashley Montague

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I am so happy to see you outline a plan for dealing with the Supreme Court, which I now feel has a majority dedicated to legislating from the bench and destroying our Constitution.

Arthur Benson

•

There is nothing much more important than maintaining Democrats in control of the White House and the House while adding control of the Senate. We then need to abolish the filibuster, expand the Supreme Court and add DC as a state. Once those are accomplished, we can address voting Rights, gerrymandering, abortion, rights, and the climate crisis. Without expanding the Supreme Court, those legislative efforts could all be overturned by the corrupt court we now have.

Silver Bulletin

Apr 23

Go to a state school

The Ivy League and other elite private colleges are losing esteem — and they deserve it.

These days, I use Twitter in two ways: first, to blatantly shill for this newsletter and other things I’m trying to promote. And second, as a sort of staging area for takes. Sometimes those takes are intentionally trollish, while others contain the seed of something more serious.

Nate Silver ∙ 367 LIKES

•

Apr 23

If your ultimate goal is a Ph.D. in a STEM field, you can do what I did: Go to a big state university as an undergrad and then choose an elite, possibly private, school for graduate studies. Some advantages:

- Your undergrad degree will be inexpensive.

- Due to sheer volume, a big state school will have a critical mass of nerds for you to hang out with, even if the average student is a partying frat boy.

- If you're smart, you will stand out and get lots of personal attention from your undergrad profs.

- You will probably get to do research as an undergrad (I even got my own office!).

- Even at expensive schools, grad school will be free: you will be paid via teaching and research assistantships.

Ivan Fyodorovich

•

Apr 23

Three thoughts on declining value of Ivy degrees:

1. In Yglesias' post on higher ed today, he shows a chart on grade inflation on Harvard. At the time when he/me/Nate Silver went to college, Harvard had an average GPA of 3.4. Now it has risen to 3.8. At the time 3.4 was considered inflated, but if you have a transcript with 30+ classes and students are earning grades from B- to A, it's possible to discriminate stronger and weaker students pretty clearly. You'll have students with 3.9s and students with 3.1s and these will correspond to real skill differences. 3.8 is a different story. At that point most grades are A's and it becomes genuinely hard to tell how smart people are. That weakens the degree.

2. As a professor, I am horrified by the Master's programs offered by many elite American universities. They are insanely expensive, of little career value, and unlike with the Ph.D. programs the profs/university don't care how well the students do because they are paying customers. See for example (https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-the-elite-masters-degrees-that-dont-pay-off-11625752773). As far as I'm concerned they are selling degrees to dupes. That can be lucrative but it weakens the value of all degrees from your institution and makes the university look like NFT salesmen.

3. The student loan forgiveness movement, which is much bigger than it used to be, hurts the reputation of universities because it showcases that the degrees sometimes aren't valuable enough to justify the cost. Many of the highest profile people griping about their students loans are victims of 2. above.

Chadwick Moore

Apr 22

Fake Indian for sale

Elizabeth Warren goes from tech-buster to Google shill

Pocahontas is on the warpath against green bubbles. In a video posted to social media last Thursday, the senator from Massachusetts and former Democrat presidential contender scolded tech giant Apple for “ruining relationships” and overseein…

Chadwick Moore ∙ 9 LIKES

Michael Cross

•

Apr 23

Great. Another blonde Indian. Ooops, I mean Native American.

Henry Slack

•

Apr 22

I recently switched to Apple from Android for a number of reasons. There are many things each OS does well where the other fails. I have children, a father in law and many other relatives that won't switch to Apple and I was a die hard Android user until I wasn't. While there may be some smack talk among our family, nobody has been left our or ostracized because of what type of device they choose. there are many tech workarounds to send media and other files and if all else fails make a call. The things Elizabeth Warren frets about are the reason congress needs to be in session maybe 50 days a year and the rest of the time they need to find another way to bother people that is less intrusive and doesn't have state backing.

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter

Apr 29

There’s a Sniper on the Roof of the School Where I Studied Authoritarianism

On student protests and principled defiance.

There are snipers on the roof of the school where I got my MA. There are police beating students at the school where I got my PhD. At each school, I studied authoritarian regimes and how they brainwash people into believing that state brutality is not only expected, but deserved.

Sarah Kendzior ∙ 323 LIKES

Lisa H.

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Sarah, this is a brilliant, powerful, touching essay. Thank you.

Denny Cicak

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I'm a boomer who doesn't agree with the US government funding of genocide in Gaza either. Having lived during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and followed turmoil in the region of the our present shame since I learned to read, I see that war is the human industry that satisfies our lust for power and wealth. If we don't have to wield the weapons we make ourselves, all the better for the powers that be and those who look the other way while staying out of the bloody fight. Students who protest peacefully have my admiration, as do writers who enlighten as you do.

The Warning with Steve Schmidt

Apr 29

Politico journalist targeted by US Catholic bishop and Leonard Leo

PLUS: Kristi Noem shoots her dog

Why is Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic prelate with a huge social media presence, and Leonard Leo targeting an investigative journalist? I explain the strange story of why His Excellency is bearing false witness against Politico’s Heidi Przybyla after she spoke out against Christian nationalism. I warn that this is a demagogic attack. Politicians with …

Steve Schmidt ∙ 239 LIKES

Mike Hammer

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Kari strap on a Glock Lake, Marjorie Jewish space laser Greene, Kristi puppy murderer Noem. I’m seeing a pattern here.

Tom Stephenson

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Rather than comment on the North Dakota misfit governor, I have a dog related question for you, Steve (if you’re reading) A few days ago you wrote about your worries and concerns for Teddy and were waiting for word from the Vet. I hope his diagnosis was not dire; that you and Teddy have a long time left to enjoy and love one another.

The Free Press

Apr 30

The Tech Bros Who Banned Politics from the Office. Plus. . .

The NYT vs. Joe Biden. Frank Bruni on why everyone became a complainer. Columbia tries—and fails—to close the encampment. New merch! And more.

Welcome to The Front Page. Today from The Free Press: Frank Bruni on why everyone is complaining. Columbia tries—and fails—to close its encampment. Our immigration debate on Honestly. New Free Press merch. And more. But first, for our lead story, Michal Lev-Ram

Oliver Wiseman ∙ 353 LIKES

Unsaint Finbar

•

I determined this morning to challenge everyone who works at the Free Press to watch 2 Prager U videos this week. On anything. Absolutely anything. Here is the link: https://www.prageru.com/series/5-minute-videos

I think many of us were attracted by the semi-family vibe of a small, shall we say boutique, publication with a public and largely sincere commitment to truth telling.

And I will grant all of you the virtue of being less crazy than the crazies. But I think all of you do not REALLY understand what conservatives think, and why we think it. Not really. You seem to be still viewing all of us through a lens of distaste that was introduced at some point when you were in Kindergarten. It's emotional. It is a feeling tone. And you have it, and have never gotten over it.

But the proposition needs to be seriously considered by all genuinely well intentioned and sincere people that our ideas actually ARE better than those proposed even by traditional Democrats. We had good arguments in the 1960's, too, that were ignored then, too, by what became Big Government.

It's time to rethink everything. The only two possible directions for the seemingly inevitable coming social changes are complete decay and destruction, and a revolution of thought in the direction of actually useful economic and social policies.

The point of Prager U is not necessarily to convince people of a specific position, although that of course is one goal. To my mind, the MAIN value of those videos is that they show normal human beings, articulating reasonable ideas, and who plainly know what they are talking about. They humanize conservatives, for people who have been taught to view us as Untermenschen. That is an inherently valuable activity.

Give it a shot. All you have to lose are ten minutes and some bad or incomplete ideas.

NCMaureen

•

Someone posted on X a photo from 1938 of Nazis blocking Jews from entry into Univ of Vienna.

Who are the Nazis now?

Will the Nazis at Columbia U. start constructing mock gas chambers on the quad?

Uncharted Territories

Apr 26

Why I Don’t Invest in Real Estate

Real estate has been a great investment for so long that people think it always will be. This is a mistake. I don’t think it will. Powerful forces have been raising housing prices for decades. But they are now petering out, even reversing. As time passes, housing prices might shrink.

Tomas Pueyo ∙ 221 LIKES

Corrado

•

Good article for a generic warning but there is a lot missing in your analysis.

First, real estate is really local. Since buildings cannot be moved (generally), they cannot be considered as a commodities. Living in Manhattan is not like living in new Jersey for a multiple reasons although the two locations are only few miles away. Making general statements on the entire world cannot be precise.

Second, real estate is not just residential. Hospitality and logistics are booming, office market is shrinking and retail is softly recovering after 5 years of collapsing. Any sector have different cycles which follows different pace and direction.

Third, you ignored innovation, renovation and conversions. Old buildings cannot be converted often into modern space so they will lose their values unless in extraordinary locations while more modern products will preserve their intrinsec value. On the other hand, in some specific locations old resi building can be demolished and converted in something else. So again, it depends on the (micro) location.

Fourth, the analysis pre WWII is difficult to compare to our next future. Before the 1940 in most of the world there was no need for a permit to build a house. You could be bulding everywhere, you did not need any connections with sewer, eletricity network, etc. Developing today is getting harder for several reasons amongst which environmental impact valuations, longer planning procedures, political willingness, physical constraints, etc especially in the most demanded (again) locations.

As someone said in the past, do not forget the 3 most important elements in real estate: location, location and location.

Jonas Hummler

•

Recently was pointed to another great post about this. Works in progress, "the housing theory of everything". Expensive housing has some really bad, often unexpected, downstream effects on the economy. This provides another huge incentive for governments to tackle the crisis.

Should be obvious that housing is a bubble, growth on the order of 100 of % are not an indicator of a sustainable model. In terms of rent, people are already paying like 40-50% of their net income for rent, can't go much higher than that without inciting a revolution...

How They Make Money

Apr 5

💡 Insights You Might Have Missed

From Google charging for AI search to Disney's proxy fight

Greetings from San Francisco! 👋🏼 Over 100,000 How They Make Money subscribers turn to us weekly for business and investment insights. Glad you're here.

App Economy Insights ∙ 27 LIKES

Rick

•

Apr 5

Thank you very much for this summary post!

TheSequence

Apr 28

Nobody Likes a Know-It-All: Smaller LLMs are Gaining Momentum

Phi-3 and OpenELM, two major small model releases this week.

Next Week in The Sequence: Edge 391: Our series about autonomous agents continues with the fascinating topic of function calling. We explore UCBerkeley’s research on LLMCompiler for function calling and we review the PhiData framework for building agents.

Jesus Rodriguez ∙ 24 LIKES

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Apr 23

Welcome to Where We Let You Eat...Everything

I’ll show you around. It’s lovely here!

Hello from the depths of my Google Drive, where I’m sifting through pages of interviews and notes for two fairly complicated stories-in-progress, both of which I’m planning to publish over the next few weeks. But first, we reached a cool milestone this week:

Virginia Sole-Smith ∙ 139 LIKES

Sara Petersen

•

Apr 23

Yay! Love seeing you ons the NYT but clearly I have FEELINGS about the framing and the lack of nuance or focus on the incredible community you've built here. This is truly one of the most lovely places online and my world is bigger, clearer, and more interesting because of you and all of your invaluable work. HEART EMOJI and BurntToast4Life.

Connie C

•

Apr 23

I loved the piece…reading the NYT and running across your article was like running into an old friend in the grocery store. “Oh! I know you!” Damn, though, the comments were a bummer. As a longtime NYT subscriber, I should have expected it. The level of priggish self-congratulation in the comments on anything health related is through the roof. Fatphobe City. Oh, well…screw ‘em. And welcome to the new subscribers!

Noahpinion

Apr 22

At least five interesting things to start your week (#34)

Woke capital, university rigidity, social media toxicity, SUVs and pedestrians, and crime and urbanization

Hi, folks! A big and important national security bill just passed the House, containing aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, as well as a demand that TikTok separate from its Chinese parent company. This is big news, but the bill still has to go to the Senate on Tuesday. I’ll write about it if and when it passes the Senate. In the meantime, today’s list…

Noah Smith ∙ 211 LIKES

The Lone Ranger

•

Apr 22

It's not just in teaching that universities suffer extreme allocation inefficiencies. It also shows up in the difficulties they have in organizing even very basic cross-field or cross-institutional research collaboration. A couple of examples from recent years that stick in my mind:

1. Public health researchers recommend extremely destructive policies, then turn around and say "you can't expect us to think about the economic impacts of our suggestions/demands, we aren't economists". Alternatively, profs like Ferguson write code full of bugs so it doesn't model what they think it's modeling, and then say "you can't expect us to write working code, we aren't computer scientists". Imperial College London even said to the British press "epidemiology is not a subfield of computer science" in defense of Ferguson's crap work.

If you say, but you work down the hall from economists/computer scientists, so why didn't you talk to them ... well academics just look at you blankly. The thought that they might go build a team with the right mix of specialisms to answer a specific question just doesn't seem to occur to them, even though they easily could. This is a big driver of the replication crisis too, because universities are full of "scientists" who struggle so badly with statistics and coding that they produce incorrect papers all the time, and it becomes normalized. They can't recruit professionals to help them because they don't pay enough and they don't pay enough because they allocate their resources to maximizing quantity (measurable) over quality (not measurable).

2. In computer science it's not all roses either. Billions of dollars flow into universities via grants, yet when it comes to fields like AI they constantly plead poverty and that it's too hard to compete with corporate labs. Why don't they pool resources, like the physics guys do in order to build particle accelerators? Again, cultural issues. There's a limited number of names that go on a paper, a limited amount of reputation to go around, and pooling resources means most researchers will toil on unglamorous work. So they prefer to split up their resources over gazillions of tiny teams that mostly produce useless or highly derivative "me too" output.

The result is that universities *appear* to be highly productive and important, if you measure by their preferred metrics like paper production. If you measure them by actual real world impact of implemented research outcomes, they are well behind and falling further.

China is no better by the way. They produce more papers than America does now but nobody reads them, not even in China. Way too much outright fakery.

Nicholas Weininger

•

Apr 22

Former Googler here. Competition is definitely part of the picture, but scale- and corporate age-driven culture change is also part of it and would have happened anyway.

Google in the 2000s and 2010s had a very, very university-like culture. That was partly because the founders came out of grad school and hired a bunch of academics, partly because the smartest and most productive people of that time appreciated the non-material returns of a collegiate atmosphere, so pairing that with a fat paycheck made for an exceptionally good recruiting pitch. And as we know, collegiate culture has upsides and downsides. Allowing for open-ended exploration that can lead to amazing innovation is part of the upside; tolerating full-of-BS entitled activists is part of the downside.

In the late 2010s senior execs began systematically eroding the good parts. 20% projects got less respected and less common, internal informational openness got restricted in response to leaks, and the performance review/promotion cycle led people more and more to do box-checking things instead of innovative things. Pressure from competitors (and poorly executed fear responses to competitors) was indeed a major motivator for these changes, but I think some change like this was probably inevitable as the scale of the company went from ~10K to ~100K. It's just too hard to weed out freeloaders, rest-and-vesters, leakers, and other abusers reliably enough at that larger scale to maintain the extraordinarily high level of trust that made the "good parts of college" work so well before. I'm amazed they did it at 10K; Google ~2010ish was the most astonishingly functional and humane institution I've ever been a part of and one of the best I've ever known to exist in history.

Anyway, the point is: once the good parts went by the wayside, there was no longer any upside to keeping the bad parts. The activist clowns were no longer a price that had to be paid for letting people think and explore freely, because people weren't allowed to do those things anymore anyway. So the ROI balance tipped in favor of a crackdown.

Big Technology

Mar 29

Can Demis Hassabis Save Google?

The DeepMind founder has a track record of insane AI breakthroughs. Can he do it within the Google mothership?

Demis Hassabis stares intently through the screen when I ask him whether he can save Google. It’s early evening in his native U.K. and the DeepMind founder is working overtime. His Google-owned AI research house now leads the company’s entire AI research effort, after

Alex Kantrowitz ∙ 75 LIKES

Jacob Radke

•

Apr 2

Fantastic read! Thank you for sharing.

Wide Left

Apr 24

2024 Consensus Big Board: The Top 300 Players in the 2024 NFL Draft, According to 101 Analysts

The 2024 Consensus Big Board is live. 300 players are ranked using data from 101 draft analysts. What makes this consensus board unique? What can we learn from it?

This is the Consensus Big Board for the 2024 NFL Draft. As often as possible, I’ve tried to provide it free, without subscription, to as many people as possible. To that end, this piece is free to everyone, as is the data. [Updated as of April 25, with five new boards added]

Arif Hasan ∙ 45 LIKES

Corey H.

•

Beautiful data formatting Arif! I really appreciate the cleanliness of it. I use this data to compare Vikings picks against the consensus board. If anyone is interested my link going back to 2012 is below:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wcAVJKEVnQNeT4WFK9peg-yq0w14e4WK9xQnH1R4LVE/edit?usp=sharing

RobertK

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Apr 23

Nice compilation which doesn’t reflect the hours put in (and $) to formulate. Thank you

Simplicius's Garden of Knowledge

Apr 27

SITREP 4/27/24: U.S. Admits Top Weapons Failures to Superior Russian EW

A relatively scattered update today more as a filler piece and addendum to the last SitRep for which there have been a few interesting topical updates. Firstly, last time I had posted Ukraine’s head of aerial reconnaissance support, Maria Berlinskaya, stating how Western systems in Ukraine have proven worthless because of the power of Russian EW. In fac…

Simplicius ∙ 544 LIKES

Yuri Bezmenov

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Blackrock is the East India Company of the Globohomo American Empire.

CrazyElf1

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It is slowing sinking into even the most delusional supporters of Ukraine that they are badly losing and that there is nothing that they can do.

After being wrong for years and calling everyone who disagreed with them "Putin propagandists", I think that the Ukrainian supporters are going to have to eat some humble pie.

More significantly, this is a major strategic defeat for the West. As some have predicted, maybe even the end of NATO as a functional organization, although it will likely stay in name (too many corrupt high paying jobs at stake). It just will remain an ineffective organization at nation state war, just a swindle for taxpayers to make a few corporations and wealthy people even richer.

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