Good tokens 2025-04-25
2025-04-25
Worth your time
New York State of Mind
Manhattan, 1931. A city without skyscrapers, save for a handful in the Financial District and the brand new Empire State. A city of 3-5 story buildings.
— đť–“đť–Žđť–“đť–Š đź•Ż (@atlanticesque) April 20, 2025
Yet more people lived there in 1931 than today. pic.twitter.com/yYKkXzIQaZ
I love Chris Ryan
Chris Ryan on The Press Box talking about the early blogosphere. Three things I loved about this:
- Chris’s natural creative energy
- What it was like for Chris when he didn’t know how his career would turn out
- Chris’s blog gave Free Darko its name 🤯
Things Brian Potter has learned
Number 30 was my favorite:
Whenever there’s a major bridge incident in the US we hear stories about the US’s crumbling infrastructure, but the worst bridges in the US are steadily getting fixed. Between 1992 and 2023, the number of US bridges in critical condition declined by more than 70%.
Read the whole list here.
AI bottlenecks
An exploration on where the value from AI will come from that also starts to articulate specific bottlenecks that (currently) AI faces in improving R&D work. Somewhat related to my reaction to Situational Awareness, I suspect that more of these bottlenecks exist than people think. Coding might be a unique application for LLMs: relatively closed loop, fast feedback, lower diversity of tasks.
Musings
Too online
From No Honor Among Mutuals:
Self-importance, contempt, and arrogance is rewarded online. Virtue rarely is. In this way, technology is inverting many of the incentives for developing character.
Bias hacking for progress?
“Once you put that first stake in, they’ll never make you pull it up.” — Robert Moses, from The Power Broker.
I’ve seen this same dynamic in all sorts of projects. Creating the impression that it is happening unlocks funding that is unavailable before it has begun. It occurs to me that this is a way of hacking peoples sunk cost bias to get things done.