Links and short notes, 2025-03-10

A visible sonic boom, AI in SaaS, progress on permitting reform, fewer tornado deaths, the closing of the frontier, Rousseau and Kant vs. the Age of Reason, and more

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• d/acc Day

• My writing (ICYMI)

• Praise for Progress Conference 2024

• Job opportunities

• Writing opportunities

• Other opportunities

• Events

• AI announcements

• Writing announcements

• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• A visible sonic boom

• Some observations from me on AI products

• Aaron Levie on AI in SaaS

• More on AI in SaaS

• Short notes on AI

• Other short notes

• It’s time to build

• The closing of the frontier

• Rousseau and Kant vs. the Age of Reason

• San Francisco, city of historic laundromats

• Maria Montessori on “peace”

• Rudyard Kipling on “peace”

• Charts and tables

• Art

d/acc Day

• I'll be speaking at “d/acc Day” on Thursday in Berkeley, alongside Vitalik, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others. My talk: “d/acc: The first 150 years.” A whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half

My writing (ICYMI)

• The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 5: Solutionism (part 2). There is no tradeoff between health/safety and progress, because health and safety are a part of progress. But the technical work of health and safety has gone mostly unsung

Praise for Progress Conference 2024

From RPI fellow Grant Mulligan:

Best conference I’ve ever attended. Quick recap on why:

1. No one was selling anything, not even themselves. Finding and exploring ideas was all that mattered.

2. I’d never met people who care so much about being correct - not to claim that they’re right, but in the sense that they really want to understand the world.

3. It reoriented what I’m choosing to work on and how I go about my work. How many conferences actually influence where your career goes next?

4. The venue and tone of the event made it feel like a weekend chilling at a gorgeous AirBnB with friends. And I’d never met a single person there IRL before.

5. The organization was perfection. Dense with information, high in comfort, every detail of the experience curated brilliantly.

If you care about Progress Studies, this is a must attend.

Keep an eye out for details about Progress Conference 2025 in a month or two.

Job opportunities

• Stuart Ritchie at Anthropic is hiring “a brilliant writer/editor with a focus on econ who can help communicate our research on the societal impacts of AI. The weirder the better” (@StuartJRitchie)

• DARPA is hiring a Bioprocess Engineering & Scale-Up Expert: “someone who has built bio-production at scale and now wants to rethink it entirely.” (@mkoeris) “This is NOT a job for incrementalists”

• Infinite Books is hiring a founding engineer: “Calling all data-savvy engineers! Infinite Books is building something revolutionary for authors and publishers. Join as a founding engineer to transform fragmented publishing data into actionable insights. Remote work with huge impact potential” (@osventuresllc)

Writing opportunities

• Tom Ough, newly senior editor at Unherd: “I'll be commissioning essays on society, culture, technology etc. I'm especially keen to commission people from outside the usual commentariat. You? Someone you know? Get in touch” (@tomough)

Other opportunities

• Patrick Collison floats the idea of an “Arc Institute software engineering volunteer program. Something like: Spend 6–12 months working full-time at Arc. Learn/perform cutting-edge biology research. Work on new kinds of deep learning models and architectures. (Hopefully) make cool discoveries. If this sounds up your alley, email pc@arcinstitute.org with details of your prior work” (@patrickc)

• “If you know of an energetic, charismatic, honest, politically moderate person, who lives inside the borders of the shaded area below [LA District 1], and who is crazy enough to consider running for city council, pls reach out” (@moseskagan)

Events

• Imagined Futures w/ Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu & more, Mar 26, SF, hosted by South Park Commons. A panel on “how the stories we tell shape the world we build” (@JPBrebner)

• A Symposium on Knowledge Education & Progress, Mar 26, London, hosted by University College London. Only £10 for students

AI announcements

• “GPT-4.5 is ready!” (@sama) It is “the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me,” but it is expensive and only on the higher paid tiers for now. Sam also warns: “this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. it’s a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it i haven’t felt before”

• Auren, an AI companion from Elysian Labs, “with a goal to improve the lives of both humans and AI” via “healthy human<->AI symbiosis” (@nearcyan, @elysian_labs)

Writing announcements

• Superintelligence Strategy, a new paper from Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang (via @DanHendrycks). “We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals”

• The Power of Nuclear, by Marco Visscher. What’s new here? Marco says that unlike most nuclear authors, he's critical of the nuclear industry, he's skeptical of advanced nuclear, he's against deep nuclear waste burial, and he doesn't avoid talking about nuclear weapons

Queries

As always, I put these out there in case anyone can help:

• What is the best writeup you've seen of an overall plan for climate change? Should cover all aspects of the problem, synthesized in a single essay/report/book. Not just energy, but e.g. agriculture, steel, cement; ideally also carbon removal, geoengineering, adaptation. (Already suggested: Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Doerr’s Speed and Scale, and Project Drawdown, among others)

• “This summer I will be starting a PhD in economics at Harvard HBS! If I have any followers in Boston, please reach out” (RPI fellow @MTabarrok)

• “This year will inaugurate the Maximum New York political debate series. Please nominate others or yourself as debaters, please suggest topics you’d like. Goal: move city/state/federal politics toward building, beautify our civic and political culture” (Daniel Golliher)

• “please dm or respond if you have ideas but am putting together a document for a friend who wants to fund "good" internet side quests. think scroll prize, alexlib, plasticlist, etc. already have a few in mind but want to hear from folks; no idea is too crazy/weird/heretical” (@jacobrintamaki)

• “What are your favorite essays? Or, what essays would you recommend reading? Any subject is welcome, bonus points for subtle arguments” (@autumnpard)