Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

A platform built for writer–reader relationships now has to survive venture capital, discovery algorithms, and AI intermediaries in a world of frictionless payments, neo-Nazi edge cases, TikTok brain-melt and ad-driven outrage brain-hacking feeds…

Just a couple of bits from an interview SubStack honcho Chris Best gave a couple of weeks ago.

To summarize:

Chris Be...

Reading, arguing, & prompting as different ways of making absent minds speak, from Machiavelli’s study to the fan‑whir of an M5 Max., for it is a fact that black squiggles on the page and linear algebra behind the screen both become voices in our heads—and that has meaning for teaching, ritual, and thought.. To what extent is there danger not just in forgetting that LLMs “on...

Soaring semiconductor orders are supposed to signal a bright future for investment and jobs; but I cannot help but suspect the AI unicorns and those donning AI-unicorn clothing sprinting to IPOs are sending a very different message…

We have Apollo’s Torsten Slok:

“Not much of the kinds that we are used to”, says Noah Smith. His subhead: probably a lot, but not necessarily the kinds people have made money on so far. It is not that scaling laws are nearly exhausted for the machines. It is that the scaling law by which the machine’s being able to do more meant that it was worthwhile to let it command our attention and take over our...

Digital Gods, real costs: why a rational world would see the doom of the foundation‑model-builder IPO, because the AI labs are highly unlikely to ever get profits, let alone hyperprofits. Inference never becomes sufficiently cheap, AI-entity judgment stays bad, and durable quasi-rents flow to NVIDIA & company—not to the model‑makers…

I have no idea whether...