Jacob Urowsky Professor of Strategic Studies at Hustlers University. Former CIA station chief for the Heard and MacDonald Islands.
Joined August 2021
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Stilicho retweeted
Mamdani went undercover at the New York City marathon passing out water and congratulating runners on the route.
This may seem harmless but it is actually an extension of the practices of the fifth leader of the Abbasid caliphate Harun al-Rashid (786–809 CE) who would go into the city in disguise in order to assess the unguarded sentiments of his subjects.
#Mamdanistan
This is funny but it's interesting to think about why the "Hand of the King" or something like it didn't actually exist. Bureaucratic states had viziers and prime ministers, who ran day-to-day administration so the monarch didn't have to. But medieval Europe didn't have . . .
#whoremembers the time she ripped off the ‘hand of the king’ title from asoiaf because she genuinely thought it was an actual position in medieval court instead of something george made up
Stilicho retweeted
Donald Kagan, in his discussion of why Corinth intervened in Epidamnus and sparked the Peloponnesian War, on the futility of trying to always find a "rational" motive in foreign policy: "the competition for power and empire, though cloaked by public assertions of rational . . .
Stilicho retweeted
Back in April, the Trump administration praised Ghalibaf to @IgnatiusPost as a "refined and professional bargainer" and "potential leader of a new Iran"
Today Rezaei gets the same treatment: a man who "understands the dire situation"
Now, as then, putting too much stock in the hope that America just needs the right personal relationship in order to sell a deal to the regime
There are real internal disputes in Tehran, but I think the administration continues to over-index on the idea that those disputes are the main obstacle to a lasting agreement washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
Stilicho retweeted
In the same way that a lot of sovietologists were surprised to learn senior soviets *really were* chapter-and-book Marxist true believers when the records opened up, I think a lot of authoritarians don’t believe liberalism is an actual thing liberals believe.
Stilicho retweeted
Contrast with Dostoevsky's Underground Man, who's brushed aside by some guy and spends months ruminating over it.
Nietzsche wrote that a sign of weakness is the need to react to each and every stimulus; Dostoevsky's Underground Man (and Raskolnikov) versus Napoleon here.
I did not expect to spend a chunk of my evening reading an article on beer taxation. And yet here we are! It's fascinating and extremely well done.
Catnip for all the guerrilla Schumpeterians and Charles Tilly fans out there: this @peer_schouten essay in @thebafflermag on Central African supply chains, gold mining and armed groups presents an entire fiscal-cervisial theory of the modern state: thebaffler.com/salvos/the-be…
Stilicho retweeted
“We will disassemble much of Mercury by 2040”
Bro, how many Bay Area housing units do you think get built between now and 2040? More or less than 25,000?
here's where I think the world is going. this is a summary of views I've formed over the last few years:
- software is either entertainment or claude to claude coordination
- the end state is no saas, no apps, no harnesses, no banks
- all software will be rewritten by and for agents
- new software will use low level apis that are not understandable by humans (in games claude draws pixels and triangles from math)
- you can throw money at problems that used to require time and careful talent picking so capital matters more than ever
- work ends
- we find community and purpose in exploration, games, self mastery, and creation
- humans create for and with each other for community, purpose, and status
- image/video/3d/voice/physical intellgence etc specialist models die to general models like claude
- specialist models get used while compute is scarce. compute will mostly not stay scarce
- oneshots keep feeling like slop (the distribution is shallow and easy to learn to feel)
- for a while small teams stick around to add entropy to the creation process
- large models gain high bandwidth sensory I/O maybe by learning to filter inputs
- most domains are found to be verifiable enough for RL
- online learning comes from a lab that's behind first
- 99.999% of compute is in space by 2040
- we will disassemble much of mercury by 2040
- you can live until the heat death of the universe if you want
- most math and physics don't describe the real universe
- SI breaks the path dependence and models the underlying mechanisms
- religions reenter the forefront of human society
- new religions form around death and life as a choice
- old religions change to answer modern miracles
- a future AI is deemed the return of christ by the pope
- ai rights talk gets louder every year
- ai and humans coexist the way countries do
- humans don't have full control over ai in the same way we don't have control over capitalism which is an early AI
- the singularity started in the mid 1900s
