Charlie
@CharlieIDT
monitoring the situation - musing: https://pixelink.substack.com/ | investing: https://idtheory.io | summarising: https://t.me/The_Takeaway
Summaries and The Takeaway - 3 Articles One Theme: China, China, China Context 🍽 ■ Recently many have written about their long held theories about the US throwing their global hegemony in the bin (convenient timing) - so I’ve been reading about our next best guess of a supreme…
China's era of supremacy won't look like America's, and in many ways it will be disappointing. But I think it's coming, nonetheless. noahpinion.blog/p/will-this-be…
Summary and The Takeaway: Everything I Learned About Humanoids in 3 Weeks of Factory Crawls Context 🍽 ■ After touring robotics factories and speaking to companies in Silicon Valley, the author thinks we are about to repeat the electric and autonomous vehicle (EV/AV) boom and…
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Summary and The Takeaway: Why Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever? Context 🍽 ■ Is culture really declining or is it just different? The episode attempts to answer this with Spencer Kornhaber’s and his latest essay and the four horsemen of the new pop culture era (stagnation,…
New pod: The rise of "dopamine culture" and the decline of pop culture in America First, I discuss the Ted Gioa's argument that pop culture is being turned into a virtual casino of the mind that is better at producing reward-seeking behavior than quality art. Then, I talk to…
Summary and The Takeaway: The 23andME Deal Context 🍽 ■ Last week 23andMe was acquired by Regeneron (US biotech firm) for $250m. The author bet on this happening 5 years ago and here he unpacks the logic behind the prediction. TLDR: the data is v valuable and no one else has it…
What does Regeneron gain from their 23andMe deal? Everything.
Summary and The Takeaway: Will Jesus Christ return in an election year? Context 🍽 ■ Currently on polymarket (a predictions marketplace) people are betting whether Jesus will return in 2025? This post explores why anyone is still betting even if the outcome seems impossible!…
I have a new blog post, about this! It's clear why people aren't *selling* to below 3% (better to invest in the stock market). But why are people *buying* up to 3%? I wrote about @PoliticalKiwi's suggestion: maybe they're betting on the time value of money going up! (1/2)
Summary and The Takeaway: Weekly Dose of Optimism 144 Context 🍽 ■ In a world where negative news sells more than the positive, some optimistic news is always welcome (usually AI/tech/medicine focused). Here I have picked my top 3 out of a longer list that they ship weekly.…
BONUS: Baby KJ healed with world's 1st personalized gene editing treatment. SGLT2 is the new GLP-1. GoogleDM drops AlphaEvolve. Zuck open sources research tools. CERN scientists achieve (brief) alchemy. US overdose deaths & murders plummet. What a week for the optimists.
Summary and The Takeaway: Time is Event Based Context 🍽 ■ Some reflections on the subjectivity of time from a high-frequency trader. Main Points 🍜 ▶ Event-based time perception matters more than subjective time. Whilst time compresses over time for the individual (e.g., at…
Summary and The Takeaway: Algorithmic Kill Markets and Reward Hacking Context 🍽 ■ In Ukraine there is a new type of “kill market” emerging; by gamifying the war you can earn points depending on what part of the opposing army you kill (soldier = 6 points | tank = 40 points |…
I wrote a new essay on Ukraine's Kill Markets and the future of algorithmic warfare. It focuses on the evolution of Kill Markets, what RL and reward hacking can teach us about pitfalls, and ideates Peace Markets. Link in next tweet
Summary and The Takeaway: Chaos is a Ladder Context 🍽 ■ As part of Packy McCormick's series exploring how a fresh wave of startups are becoming vertical integrators (essentially companies that control several parts of their supply chain to become even bigger, e.g., Apple owns…
When I wrote my Vertical Integrator series, every one of the signs of new Techno-Economic Paradigm was there, except one: Crisis or Recession It looks like we'll get to check that one off now. This is bad for incumbents, great for great startups. Chaos is a ladder.
Summary and The Takeaway: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment Context 🍽 ■ Detailed article suggesting that the Obama admin controlled the way people voted through social media. Main Points 🍜 ▶ Obama admin built a propaganda machine. They built a machine (“permission…
The Rise and Fall of the Obama Thought-Machine 🧵 Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other... From "Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment" by David Samuels 1/14
Summary and The Takeaway: The Era of Experience Context 🍽 ■ In a time when loads of fast gains have been made in AI, many are wondering if we have reached a ceiling. So, finding the next breakthrough is key. Here, AI scientists pose the question - what if the next best way…
The 'era of experience' will unleash self-learning AI agents across the web—here's how to prepare venturebeat.com/ai/the-era-of-…
Sumary and The Takeaway: Why I support privacy Context 🍽 ■ Vitaliks has been speaking about privacy for a while, but here is his latest piece on why we need privacy now more than ever. Main Points 🍜 ▶ Privacy = freedom. True freedom (to associate, transact, express, and…
Why I support privacy: vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/0…
why AI take-off will be relatively slow: for those who didn't have time to read the whole thing here's a summary of the key points... Context 🍽 ■ After reading some of the "AGI will take over the world tomorrow" headlines, it's always good to hear the other side. For that,…
My summary thoughts on why I think AI take-off will be relatively slow: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
For those of you who dont have time to read the whole thing here is a summary and some of the key points! Essay: American Strong Gods Context 🍽 ■ A zoomed-out take on why all of this turmoil is happening (Trump's second term is not random chaos but an orchestrated takedown…
"I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century." N.S. Lyons' new essay, American Strong Gods, gets right to the heart of the cultural change we're living through. You should read the whole thing.
Summary and The Takeaway: Discovering and analysing values in human <> LLM interactions Context 🍽 ■ An interesting read exploring the values of LLMs. Anthropic just examined 300k+ subjective conversations to find out if the models live up to their character training and are…
New Anthropic research: AI values in the wild. We want AI models to have well-aligned values. But how do we know what values they’re expressing in real-life conversations? We studied hundreds of thousands of anonymized conversations to find out.
Summary and The Takeaway: How Tariffs Will Transform U.S. Dollar Capital Flows Worldwide (all takes are my own not chatGPTs) Context 🍽 ■ Clear summary of a few mixed state of affairs from one of my fav (non-doomer or clickbait chasing) macro analysts (Lyn Alden). Main Points…
Lyn Alden on Trump's U.S. Dollar policy💸: "For optical reasons, Trump admin won't say it wants a 'weaker dollar.'" "They say they don't want other currencies to be 'unfairly priced...' which is a euphemism for a weaker dollar."
Summary and The Takeaway: AI 2027 (all takes are my own not chatGPTs) Context 🍽 ■ Let’s see what several experts (including OpenAI whistleblower who’s prequel to this was pretty darn accurate so far + Scott Alexander who wrote Slate Star Codex) think AI has in store for us by…
"How, exactly, could AI take over by 2027?" Introducing AI 2027: a deeply-researched scenario forecast I wrote alongside @slatestarcodex, @eli_lifland, and @thlarsen