0: I’m a new dad as of September! So that’s my excuse for combining three months into our. Somehow I have both way more time and way less time than before.
1: Reflections on Progress Conference 2025 - by Ben Thomas
My Progress Conference take: this is the "you can just do things *well*" crowd. (The progress studies et al community)
— Ben Thomas (@Ben_Thomas_o7) October 18, 2025
Not just "you can just do things", but actually you can do things with taste, craft, and thoughtfulness.
Regulation could make sense.
Housing and energy…
2: The United States is Starved for Talent, Re-Upped - Marginal REVOLUTION —
Overall, getting (approximately) one extra high-skilled worker causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect. Remember, these startups have access to a labor pool of 160 million workers. For most firms, the next best worker can’t be appreciably different than the first-best worker. But for the 2000 or so tech-startups the authors examine, the difference between the world’s best and the US best is huge. Put differently on some margins the US is starved for talent.
3: AI alignment, with Emmett Shear — Maybe AI is more like “writing” than “printing press GPT” — an abstraction layer above specific technologies rather than a specific tool itself.
4: Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain & Claudesidian — yes I’m using this and it’s a gamechanger. Also the limiting factor is blocks of deep work. There are really only a few ways around this: (1) productivity hacks in the workday to squeeze more blocks into a 9-5. (2) weekly rearrangement that gets you more blocks frequently (5-9a twice per week, or half day Fridays). (3) build a system that allows for deep work in short chunks. Is this now possible?
5: Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away - Dwarkesh Podcast | Podcast on Spotify — worth a listen and this one went viral. I like Andrej’s approach to learning from scratch, in particular.
6: WaterCube 10 | Genesis Systems — first time an X ad got me — long the exurbs!
7: PLANET (2025) | Official Short Film - YouTube — high quality, fun, and inspiring. Better in 4K!
8: I Bought a 200, Then Let Random People Control It - YouTube — ridiculously information dense. I watched this at like 2:30am and learned nothing. On a similar spectrum: I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone! - YouTube
9: Imagine trying to explain this to grandma!
Taylor Swift singing, “When I said I don't believe in marriage, that was a lie” might be the best thing to happen for the health and happiness of our country and our looming demographic crisis in a long time. https://t.co/iLAFkKdqIk
— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) October 4, 2025
10: On taste:
Evolution of the Scaling Era cover:
— Stripe Press (@stripepress) October 10, 2025
“It’s hard to find unique ways of visualizing AI without defaulting to the obvious,” says @pablodelcan.
“In our design process, we experimented with unexpected metaphors—flowers growing out of neural networks, abstract mathematical puzzles… pic.twitter.com/tmlBBJ4p3L
11: Prediction Markets Are Very Accurate - Marginal REVOLUTION — GPT-5.1 tells me there’s not enough insidee trading on prediction markets to trade the spread between Polymarket and the S&P but we’ll see…
12: Monologue | Effortless voice dictation so you can 3x faster — indispensable when I have only one hand free and can think. But that happens less than I expect
13: After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon - Ars Technica — I’d like to go to the moon.
14: Speaking of:
If people understood how close we are to radically improving progress...
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) September 28, 2025
To completing the mission of ten thousand generations...
To obliterating the last vestiges of our evolutionary inheritance of pain and torture *by default*...
I really think people would be nicer to…
15: Thanksgiving and the Lessons of Political Economy — Thankful for property rights.
16: Matt Clifford: LFG Make or Break — is there a vibe shift happening?
17: The most important pop stars of the future will be religious
The great stagnation is over. In the age of spiritual machines, enchantment may soon become too cheap to meter. What’s left to ask is: “How are we to make sense of it?” We’ll need artists who can hold the tension—between the earthly and the divine, the ironic and the sincere, the rational and the numinous.
18: The advice I would give on a mentorship call— go hoos!
19: Tales from Toddlerhood — wisdom.
20: Philosophical Field Notes: 11 Reflections on AI, Technology, and Ourselves — not through these yet but I’m excited.
21: From Moore’s Law to Market Rivalry: The Economic Forces That Shape the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry — also to read when I have time…
Disclaimer: Something something sharing a link is a recommendation but not necessarily an endorsement or a sign of agreement something something.