Category: Uncategorized
What should I ask Kevin Roose?
Yes I will be doing a podcast with him. From Wikipedia:
Kevin Roose…is an American author and journalist. He is the author of three books, and is a technology columnist and podcast host for The New York Times. He wrote a book about Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university known for strict rules imposed on students…
Kevin of course has a new book coming out, namely The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. I have yet to read it, but I expect it to be gripping.
So what should I ask him?
Wednesday assorted links
1. Crime and drunkenness map of England and Wales (that was then, this is now).
2. Cesar Aira says he will stop writing.
3. Toward a post-cultural state?
Tuesday assorted links
Some Navier-Stokes updates
Some are calling this “a Deep Blue moment” for AI.
All via T., a mathematician.
Update from OpenAI: “Our internal model group arrived at the Navier–Stokes solution in 88 hours, using around 10,000 coordinating AI agents.” And this. And from Noam Brown: “Yes, this result cost millions of dollars. But remember that when @OpenAI announced o3 it cost ~$500,000 to score 87.5% on ARC-AGI 1. Today, Astra scores higher for ~$20. In 2025 it took us and GDM an enormous amount of compute to achieve IMO gold. For the 2026 IMO, anyone with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription could do it. Massively scaling test-time compute gives us a glimpse of the future. I believe that a year from now everyone will have an AI at their fingertips capable of solving problems of this caliber.”
Monday assorted links
Sunday assorted links
1. Vishy now thinks Pragg is number one in the chess world.
2. Do children grow continuously, or grow in fits and starts?
3. It remains my view that Ferrante is the husband and wife team.
5. “US annual interest expense is up to a record 18.5% of federal government revenue. This is officially above the previous record of 18.4% set in 1991. This percentage has more than QUADRUPLED over the last 4 years as interest expenditures on public debt skyrocketed.” Link.
*Why Not Bolivia?*
The author is Calvin Korponai, and the subtitle is From Macchu Picchu into Bolivia in search of the Garden of Eden. Bolivia is a fantastic country to visit, more original than most people are expecting, and this is the book to tell you why. Excerpt:
The landscape itself is like noting else in the Americas. The altiplano is flat in the way that only vast geological formations can be flat, not the flatness of a plain that was once a sea, but the flatness of a plateau that was raised bodily by tectonic forces millions of years ago and then scoured by ten thousand years of wind and ice into the extraordinary emptiness it presents today. The horizon in every direction is uninterrupted. The sky is immense, a dome of blue so saturated at this altitude that photographs rarely convey it accurately, because the camera’s sensor cannot process a blue that contains no haze, no moisture, no atmospheric diffffusion between the sun and the surface.
And:
Arriving at El Alto International Airport (which sits on the altiplano above the city at forty-one hundred meters, making it the highest international airport in the world), you step off the plane into air so thin that the simple act of carrying your luggage to the terminal produces a shortness of breath that is mildly alarming if you have never experienced it and completely normal if you have. The airport itself is unremarkable. What happens next is not. You get into a taxi or bus and the driver takes you to the edge of the antiplano, and then the city appears, not gradually but all at once, a cascade of buildings and lights and terracotta roofs pouring down the walls of a canyon so steep and so deep that the bottom is invisible from the rim. La Paz does not reveal itself slowly. It drops away beneath you like a held breath released.
Recommended, and yes Cochabamba is an amazing food city.
Saturday assorted links
1. Joaquin Rodrigo’s Toccata. Rodrigo by the way was blind,
3. “People Keep Sneaking Into New York City Sewers. No One Knows Why.” (NYT)
4. Yiyang Zhuge has postponed her recording session with CWT, in case you will be wondering why the episode does not show up soon.
5. Who was the most consequential emperor in Chinese history?
6. Are science fiction films becoming more optimistic?
7. Ruxandra on clinical trials as the main obstacle (NYT).
8. The trend in U.S. cyberinsurance prices since 2020.
9. Fermat’s Last Theorem, the number of links cannot keep up with the world.
Mein Ingeborg Bachmann Studium
Recently I finished read Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian novel published in 1971. I was pretty stunned by how good it was (it seems less good in English), and I would say I enjoyed it more, and found it deeper, than any of the famous 19th century Victorian novels by women. The initial story line is a woman having relationships with two different men, one she lives with and the other who is married, more charismatic, and lives right up the street.
And so I have been looking into Bachmann more. Her volume of letters with Max Frisch, her lover and the leading Swiss novelist of his time, is the best “letters book” I know. After four hundred pages, with another 180 or so to go, I still am not bored. It is called “Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht.” Der Briefwechsel. (This November coming out in English…and probably the letters work well in English?) Overall, it is remarkable how many ups and downs a relationship can have and persist. It works best to read only a few of the letters at a time, so that the story does not go by too quickly. One sees connections between the letters and the unfolding of Malina.
She also has letters volumes with Paul Celan and Henze, those are in my pile too. (She and Henze were just friends.) And just this year there was a wonderful new biography of Bachmann, namely Dieter Burdorf’s Dieses unruhige Ich: Ingeborg Bachmann. I have started that.
There is a movie of Malina, an opera too, and a biopic about Bachmann and Frisch. I have heard Max Frisch’s Montauk is partly about the Frisch-Bachman relationship as well. And we haven’t even gotten yet to Volker Schlondorff, have we?
Bachmann has poetry in German, and a new edition of her short stories is coming out this fall in English.
It is wonderful to discover something/someone so new and unexpected. And as I get older and know more, it happens less frequently than it used to.
I will continue with this. Amazing (and charming) how many words people can spill about “stuff”!
Friday assorted links
1. “After work, we’ll have each other.”
2. Gloria Steinem, RIP (NYT).
3. Henry Oliver on Finding Emily.
4. Solve for the Russian family squabble equilibrium (short video).
5. New Fuchsia Dunlop book due out October 20.
6. The O-Ring model, restated for AI.
8. The pig kidney worked (NYT).
Share price numbers for the Hugging Face incident
…major publicly traded cybersecurity firms lost roughly $65–80 billion, or about 8–10% of their combined value, in the days following disclosure of the Hugging Face/OpenAI incident; by early September they had recovered roughly $58 billion, representing about 70–90% of that drawdown, depending on whether July 15 or July 20 is used as the pre-event baseline.
That is from GPT Pro, there is more at the link. As a very rough approximation, say you dismiss the price bounceback altogether as either random or due to good earnings reports. You have “the value of previous cybersecurity efforts” falling by eight to ten percent. I take that to be very broadly consistent with some of the estimates discussed in my previous post on the numbers.
In any case that is a significant sum. But do note that if the AI models were on the verge of doing truly terrible things to us, the market might estimate the value of our cyberprotection of falling more than eight to ten percent?
More generally, perhaps these numbers could be used to discipline the discussion a bit? Or will I read long lists of reasons why they show us nothing, in that case try coming up with some other market price-based indicators of AI risk? Vix will not do it for you, not these days. I see many metaphors and insinuations and random anecdotes of AI terror, not numbers. Maybe you think your ideas about AI risk are so important that no market prices can reflect them? (If you really believe that, does it mean you would not be worried, and would not cite the numbers, if the value of those companies fell by ninety percent?)
I am sure others can improve on what I am putting forward, and furthermore we should track the continuing progress of these share values over time, especially if other AI hack attacks surface.
Overall I am extremely skeptical of arguments that essentially take the form of “what I am concerned about is too big and too important to show up in any market prices.” Pick your market prices!
Numbers, numbers, numbers
“The global cyber insurance market was worth nearly $15 billion last year and is expected to reach roughly $28 billion by 2030, Munich Re estimated in its latest report. Aon said earlier this year that nearly 20% of cyberattacks will involve generative AI by 2027, according to its forecasts.”
Here is the article, via Marc Pfeiffer. Now those are some concrete numbers, broadly taken from a market context, admittedly based on sectoral estimates rather than on prices per se. But if cyberinsurance expenditures are set to almost double by 2030, you might think that cyber costs more generally might be (very) roughly doubling as well. The 20% of cyberattacks involving generative AI does not itself pin down losses, since that 20% might be especially costly. Still, if you match the 20% rise to the estimated near doubling of the cyberinsurance market (the bigger potential losers are more likely to buy insurance?), you still end up with sums that are very high but, dare I say, not the end of life as we know it. Claude 5.1 for instances estimates current U.S. cybersecurity costs in the range of $100 to $300 billion, and of course that is slated to go up a fair amount. It could double over five years’ time, as indicated above.
Numbers! Thank goodness.
One way of looking at that estimate is to think that cyber costs will go up about thirteen percent a year, and eventually defense will catch up. Another perspective is that cyber costs may continue rising thirteen percent a year until the whole economy falls apart, or we return to the pre-digital era (which I remember well). So there are both optimistic and pessimistic reads on the above figures.
You can say Nicholas Decker is burning in hell, or that the AIs are a civilization, but what I really want are some numbers. Tied to market data, ideally. I am not saying the numbers above are the right numbers, but I am saying they are better than no numbers at all. Do you have some numbers for me? If not, why not?
Thursday assorted links
1. “Some crazy stats from this new JEL paper: – IV est. average 3–10x OLS (meta analysis) – Sign. results 30x more likely to be published in experimental econ (Andrews & Kasy) – <2% of empirical polisci report null-only findings in abstracts (Briggs et al.)” — Jon Fiva
2. “The UCLA athletic dept lost $52 mil last year and $83 mil in 2024 when including campus subsidy.”
3. Papua New Guinea fact of the day.
4. “Most laid-off SF tech workers aren’t qualified for this $50 dishwasher job.”
My excellent Conversation with Michael Moritz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler’s near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on.
Tyler and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don’t interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain’s stuck, what he’ll learn next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Is it easy to live with an Otto Dix painting or sketch? It hangs on the wall. Many people think it’s ugly. It reminds one of unpleasant things in history, right?
MORITZ: Yes, for Harriet and me it is. I think the tougher, more strenuous, grueling works of art that other people would have difficulty living with have many layers to them. You explore them, and they’re difficult pictures, and they’re not easy at first sight. Unlike easier pictures that may be a bit more decorative, they leave room for plenty of exploration, as the years go by. Then they’re redolent, they tell stories. They’re redolent of history. They’re images of a different epoch. I think most of the paintings that we’ve been lucky enough to find over the years, they are tough paintings.
COWEN: I feel that way about Haitian art, which has many brutal scenes. For you, is Chagall too sentimental?
MORITZ: Yes.
COWEN: You don’t want to put it on your wall?
MORITZ: The earlier Chagalls I’ve been drawn to, but neither of us have felt the urge or the need to go out in pursuit of Chagall.
COWEN: What is your own painting like?
MORITZ: Oh, exasperating.
COWEN: Neue Sachlichkeit or something else, it’s like Kossoff?
MORITZ: No, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried painting or drawing. I didn’t take it up until I was in my mid 40s. I’d never picked up a crayon or outside of the obligatory, abbreviated art lessons that always seem to be held later on Thursday afternoon, with everybody waiting for the bell to ring to end school. I’d never taken up a crayon or drew, or let alone painted.
If I look back today at what I did early on, it’s a lot better. Then if I look at the paintings that I try to make, my goodness, it is an extremely humbling experience, but I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. There’s nothing like getting lost in making a painting, and before you know it, two hours have gone, and you have no idea where the time went.
And:
COWEN: If we think of your interest in Steve Jobs, your book on Alex Ferguson, the art you buy, that you’ve now written a book on the Holocaust, is there some general pattern where trying to come to terms with really difficult things, is this a recurring theme in your life? Learning how to paint, that’s very hard, right?
MORITZ: I haven’t really thought about it that way, but I think life is made richer by having a challenge that you’re not sure whether you’re up to conquering. I’ve always been up for that. Each of these books has really just sprung out of being curious about something. I’m not sure that there’s any greater pattern than unsatisfied curiosity.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend Michael’s new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile.