A historical collection of our writing.
By now, if you are in tech and haven’t been on an extended Techmeme and Twitter break you have heard about GPT-3 a new and massive language model developed by OpenAI. I have played around with it a bit myself and its capabilities are impressive. Here are some thoughts. The model perfectly […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Earlier this week I wrote a post about Trump’s fascist actions which need to be vigorously opposed. In the post I predicted that people would show up with excuses. The comment section delivered on this in spades. I will save anyone the pain of wading through the mess and provide a summary here. […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I was born in Germany in 1967. Growing up my friends and I used to wonder why our grandparents hadn’t resisted Hitler’s rise to power. We were young and full of bravado and oh so sure about how outraged and courageous we would have been. But the sad truth of course is that we most […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
My Twitter feed these days is full with back and forth on “cancel culture.” Much of it quickly reduces to bickering with each side assuming the worst possible interpretation of what the other meant or what their motives are. The latest exhibit here is the Harper’s Open Letter and the reactions to […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
ICE announced yesterday that foreign students at schools that only instruct online this fall (which includes my alma mater Harvard) must leave the US. I was a foreign student on an F1 visa and would have been distressed by this. More importantly there are quite a few foreign students for whom there […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
In my book World After Capital , I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
