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I remember reading this brilliant piece of reporting when it first came out. The author, Sarah Zhang, since wrote two more pieces for The Atlantic:

May 2025: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/screwwor...

June 2026: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/06/screwworm-proble...

> Many of the world’s leading researchers believe that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers.

> “A.I. is code. And now, A.I. can code,” a veteran researcher, Richard Socher, said. “The ingredients are there.”

> Dr. Socher recently founded, with seven other researchers, a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called “recursive self-improvement.”

> His start-up, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including Google Ventures and Greycroft and the chip-making giants Nvidia and AMD. The six-month-old company, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has fewer than 30 employees. But it is now valued at more than $4 billion.

Marc Andreessen would beg to differ :)

On a recent a16z podcast, Andreessen said:

“It's possible that [being a VC] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."

Interestingly, his justification is not that VCs are measurably good at what they do, but rather that they appear to be so bad at what they do:

“Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]. There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis."

The podcast in question: https://youtu.be/qpBDB2NjaWY

(Personally, I’m not quite sure he actually believes this - but watching him is a certain kind of masterclass in using spicy takes to generate publicity / awareness / buzz. And by talking about him I’m participating in his clever scheme.)

The author is Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy (as well as Humanities, Political Science, and Law) at Stanford.

He’s the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (about which Peter Singer wrote: “Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world, but Blood Oil is such a book.”)

Wenar studied philosophy at Harvard with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and was Karl Popper’s research assistant.

(2015)

According to web.archive.org this is from Nov 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151108010026/https://playbook....

If you're on a Mac, you can find the exact processor model number by opening Terminal.app and entering

  sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string

this will return something like

  Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4650U CPU @ 1.70GHz

(Found on http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/15/get-cpu-info-via-command-line... )

Don Stewart has given possibly the best answer to this question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6398996/good-haskell-sour...

@liuliu - in the last graph, there's quite a jump from epoch 26 to 27. I'm curious to find out what might be causing this.

According to the reporter, this abandoned theme park is a harbinger of doom for China's economy. But couldn't it instead be viewed as evidence of entrepreneurial risk-taking activity? Taking risks, by definition, involves projects that don't pan out.

Imagine if, every time a silicon valley startup abandoned 100k lines of code to pursue a better idea, reporters swooped in and pointed this out as evidence of impending doom.

(Note that I'm not addressing, and certainly not condoning, China's societal/governance problems, e.g. whether the land was taken unfairly from the farmers, etc. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.)

The threat of prison is supposed to make people more likely to pay back their debts.

Steelcase makes motorized desks. Joel Spolsky uses them at Fog Creek. His article on them is here (with links to steelcase)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/06/06.html

Is it just me, or does this look uncomfortably similar to the celebrated iA3 template for wordpress, designed by Information Architects?

http://store.informationarchitects.jp/product/ia³-template http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/100e2r/

Yes!

1. Steve Jobs studied calligraphy. At the Stanford commencement address he said:

"I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

(Reference http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html )

2. Paul Graham studied painting at RISD

(He writes about art here: http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html )

3. And, closer to home for me: my co-founder's first degree was in economics, but he still felt something missing, so he got a second degree which started in painting but ended up in design. He ended up with a completely unique ability to think in a both left- and right-brained way simultaneously.

So, if you feel that both programming and painting reside within you, then you are rare, and my evidence strongly suggests that you find some way to nurture these parts of yourself.

I vote to remedy imbalances:

  valuable && low points => upvote
  valuable && high points => read, no need to upvote

Does anyone else do this?