What we eat influences how our society works. “Crucially, this labor cannot be delayed—if you miss the planting window or harvest late, the crop is ruined. As a result, rice farmers developed reciprocal labor exchange: neighbors help each other transplant… Read More »How Bread vs Rice Molded History
Freedom wins. “Nearly 90% of foreign immigrants settled in free states.” https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/climate-caused-the-us-civil-war
“Because the people at these labs made fortunes betting on ideas that once looked insane, the world now takes nearly everything they say on faith. That, I think, is a mistake. It is not a given that AI will solve… Read More »Intelligence is not the main bottleneck
Turning weaknesses into strength. “Why did it work for Dubai? A big reason was that it was weak. That weakness was an asset, not a liability: The port was not huge, the Sheikh was not powerful, so if he tried… Read More »Dubai
And more like this. “To reduce the dimensionality of the problem, administrators would often track the total tonnage of a few broad classes of steel tubes in the models, rather than using a more detailed classification scheme. While their models… Read More »Optimizing things in the USSR
The OGs. “The Phoenicians were thus the main vector of civilization and technology spread in the Mediterranean. The Greeks and Romans are simply their technological heirs, learning from them how to navigate and trade.” https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-could-lebanon-be-rich-but-is
They are bad at most stuff. So what is the secret?
Reading a lot of ACOUP, lot of issues with the video, but the idea of techno-feudalism has its logic.
It is not matter of if, but matter of how. “The failures change constantly because of changing technology, work organization, and efforts to eradicate failures.” https://how.complexsystems.fail/
Ouch. “We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. Software has not improved in quality, got faster, become cheaper to produce (when you exclude the mountain of poor-quality demoware that no… Read More »Why I remain a skeptic