Gödel: "[Austria] was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship." Examiner: "Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen in [the USA]!" Gödel: "Oh, yes, I can prove it." Gödel's Loophole en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6...

I joined the Oxide and Friends annual predictions podcast episode this week - here are my 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for AI and LLMs (and Kākāpō parrots) simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/l...

When I wrote two years ago about how vital it will be to ensure that multinational tech platforms are securely on your side in advance of a conflict, I confess I was thinking in terms of conflict with China, not with the United States. www.chathamhouse.org/2023/12/russ...

"There is a whole financial system built on moving gold around in which the gold doesn’t actually move. The gold is heavy. Just the electronic database entries move. The gold sits there. Its shininess is abstract and potential; it is dark in the vaults." Inside @matt-levine.bsky.social is a poet.

Wild. Seems like the teflon on #trump is not impenetrable after all. www.natesilver.net/p/trump-appr...

I will never forget having to edit Jamal’s final, posthumous piece for the Washington Post, after he was murdered. He was calling for free expression in the Arab world. You can read it here : www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/glo...

"Greatness doesn't come about through accumulating great amounts of [money, fame or power]. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless." Final throughs from the #OracleOfOmaha www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/nov1025...

It's not new, but I do think we shrug it off a little more than we should

EU–INC is the single best thing Europe could do to catch-up in the AI race A simple unified pan-European startup structure, with modern employee ownership and simple access to capital, able to tap into Europe’s full talent pool. ‼️ but it’s at high risk of not seeing the light of day. You can help👇

The future is electric (drones, robots, EVs). #Chips, #batteries & #magnets will be the components on which it's built. Demand will drive #innovation, so the US turning back to fossils is a future-sized foot gun. Deep dive on the "Electric Stack" (well worth 4hrs) www.notboring.co/p/the-electr...

"The absence of natural hedgers in #predictionmarkets ends up being its Achilles heel. Everyone in the market is either a noise trader or a sharp [...] [They sustain themselves] on the back of new gamblers willing to lose money to the sharps." reducibleerrors.com/prediction-m...

#SF is probably something like early-XX century #Vienna: a locus for a furious, anxious, and madly creative energy. Much of our future is conjured in the minds of the men living there, and, it turns out, they are not alright... www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-revie...

Seems true: 1. This generation of AIs got us something that feels 99% right, but the last 1% (incl. error correction) will take OOMs more effort: de facto, a wall. 2. Pattern matching on language doesn't touch the world-as-is, so LLMs can never truly reason. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjB6...

"ATProto's frictionless, cross-platform portability contains within it the threat of creating a negative competitive environment, a classic Moloch, that could drive the online conversation into more extreme trenches." erasmus.github.io/2025/bluesky... @noupside.bsky.social @jay.bsky.team thoughts?

In this blog post, I argue #ATProto and its "platform fungibility" may inadvertently create a commercial environment, where we'll "race to the bottom of the brain stem". ➡️ erasmus.github.io/2025/bluesky... Please tell me all the ways in which I'm wrong.

convened a group of people working on open source software that is intentionally designed to give people more power. i took notes.

Minimal and shade “Road of lightness” #photography #streetphotography #cinematic #japan #streetphoto #shadow #dark #tokyo #minimalism #silhouette #street #fineart #fineartphotography

This report from Lund University's Psychological Defence Research Institute lays bare the structure of a large-scale disinformation campaign. All the tricks of the trade: meme floods, lookalike websites, Telegram influencers, etc. Wild. www.psychologicaldefence.lu.se/article/beyo...

Wonderful portraits by balloonist/photographer #Nadar of #Liszt, #Hugo, #Dumas, #Sand, #Baudelaire, and some samurai. worldhistory.substack.com/p/there-are-...

A plane is not a bird, but the search for methods to mimic our wetware thought producer in silico is probably worth the while. And stimulating. pub.sakana.ai/ctm/

Copenhagen morning mist

If you're around Berlin after the conference, check out this fun community-organised event: User Agents Berlin - two days of space for hanging and hacking with friends you met at Local-First Conf! Register here: lu.ma/v457jxp2

this pitch for an open protocol for payments on the web using HTTP 402 is smart in being quiet about the crypto part, the word Coinbase doesn't appear anywhere www.x402.org

Just out in @politiken.dk: My interview on why Europe must urgently reclaim democratic control over its critical digital infrastructures from tech oligarchs. We need real digital sovereignty, not dependency. #Eurostack #DigitalSovereignty

*bird noises* We heard from many developers and organizations that even finding open source tools that can be used for online safety is a challenge. Our first baby step is putting together this curated list of awesome safety tools. We welcome contributions and feedback! github.com/roostorg/awe...

why bluesky "feeds" don't work, a thread

#Google seems to be getting their shit together. AI was, of course, theirs to lose: they had talent, TensorFlow, data, etc. The foot guns went off due to anxiety.

"If there was interest, the government could know exactly who placed these trades. But the call (options) are coming from inside the house." Top comment on the Hacker News post: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366... data-and-politics.ghost.io/70-million-i...

These are strange days. One day, it seems that superhuman AI is just around the corner, the next, that LLM-based AIs are indeed just stochastic parrots.

...but the idea of a massive global town square with top-down centralized control didn't work. It can't. But: this is a new opportunity for users to shape their experience! What I love about the profile is Jay's emphasis on user agency & anti-authoritarian values. www.noemamag.com/the-great-de...

It’s so fun reading Yarvin’s newsletter the last few months. He’s moved from “here’s why having singular power and exercising it is AWESOME and NECESSARY” monarchist cockgobbling to “oh shit but not like that that’s not how capitalism works oh noes” so fast. Speedrunning GoT Littlefinger

Another chapter in AI biting the hand that feeds it: Wikipedia’s bandwidth surged 50% since January thanks to AI crawlers. Unlike search engines, they send no traffic back so no new users, no new donors. Just rising costs and a shrinking audience. A raw deal for a cornerstone of the free web.

Silicon Valley is about to kick out the old guard in the military-industrial complex, and the business models will be clear: more conflict, more profit. ➡️ Leighton Woodhouse in conversation with Razib Khan: www.razibkhan.com/p/leighton-w...

In order to achieve #digital #sovereignty, European states should embrace open source. A mandate to make all government software open source would spur enormous growth. $4.15B invested in #OSS unlocks $8.8T of value ($1 :$2,000) ➡️ www.hbs.edu/ris/Publicat...

wrote up some thoughts on how our interfaces are getting flatter, and how we might design with 💃 our bodies 🤸 in mind. 🧶 went ham on little yarn worlds wattenberger.com/thoughts/our...

new saddest six word story just dropped

Great interview with the people behind Twitter's Community Notes. It's not a panacea, but part of making a social media platform more robust. Is #Bluesky planning something similar? @jay.bsky.team www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dgy...

I just donated to help Ukraine on their official page. You can choose to which program. I chose Science and Education. war.ukraine.ua/donate/

Probably this whole newsletter is from a position of insecurity. www.bloomberg.com/view/article...

I was peripherally aware of #pigbutchering scams, but was unaware of their industrial scale and just how dark they are. This podcast by @suelinwong.bsky.social for the @economist.com is well worth a listen. 🎧 www.economist.com/audio/podcas...

DeepWait

@jobs.bacalhau.org hotdog?

@jobs.bacalhau.org hotdog?

Can’t really say that I have been there open.substack.com/pub/roonscap...

I suspect the always lucid @kaiserkuo.bsky.social just outlined a book on the Sino-American relationship