PEPFAR to lose funding, Super Mario dharma, DeepSeek DeepSeek DeepSeek
PEPFAR is in danger of losing its funding in the midst of the DC reshuffling, which would be a profound tragedy and an unforced error. Please reach out if you have a line to any of the relevant decision-makers here; this is perhaps pretty easy to remedy but that won't happen unless people put energy towards making it happen.
A tracker of all of Trump’s executive orders.
Romeo recently wrote perhaps the best twitter thread I have ever read, on Psychocybernetics.
This was the week where we all tried to remember what the Jevons paradox implies...
A curation of good DeepSeek takes by Helen Toner. And here is Zvi's coverage.
On the founder of DeepSeek (a), Liang Wenfeng:
"When we first met him, he was this very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn’t take him seriously," one of Liang’s business partners told the FT.
"He couldn’t articulate his vision other than saying: ‘I want to build this, and it will be a game change.’ We thought this was only possible from giants like ByteDance and Alibaba."
A case for NVDA. I bought the dip (not investing advice, nothing is ever investing advice, investing advice is in fact a purely hypothetical phenomenon that has never been observed in the wild).
r1 has an existential crisis (I don't know if this is real but god I hope it is).
Reading this thread sparked my first real grappling with the possibility of "what if CCP-led China wins the AI race?" at a felt-sense level.
Frontier AI systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line. Sorta parallels gain-of-function research...
The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity.
I think these heuristics for evaluating performance in fuzzy domains that I thought up way back when have held up pretty well.
"Begging Claude to painstakingly construct mediocre clones of existing projects step by step is a remarkably low dopamine way of building software. Like babysitting a turtle that's running a race and poking it with a stick every time it starts to veer off course..." by the deliciously intricate Drew Schorno.
Doom running in a pdf. (How?! Why?!?)
Dharma lessons in Super Mario 64.
Don't ignore the bad vibes you get from people. (Good advice!)
Tips for an aspiring almost-trad wife.
Apparently my alma mater maintains a collection of radical works.
Replicating DMT geometry with AI.
Throwback: Powers of Ten