Arb on X: "A jaundiced thread on OpenAI's (broadly quite good) New Deal policies. *Most* of these ideas have massive unflagged conflicts of interest https://t.co/hD8twbdC7u" / X A jaundiced thread on OpenAI's (broadly quite good) New Deal policies. *Most* of these ideas have massive unflagged conflicts of interest https://t.co/hD8twbdC7u

x.com/ArbResearch/...

A jaundiced thread on OpenAI's (broadly quite good) New Deal policies.

*Most* of these ideas have massive unflagged conflicts of interest

ooh that's a hi-res one

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics
ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

I am not going to be able to latch onto the latest cool trend because several extremely clever people who I've known for years and respect immensely are currently producing very good work with AI. It would be more socially convenient if this wasn't true but it is.

New Anthropic paper on functional emotions

www.anthropic.com/research/emo...

i was really expecting this to be a property of multi-agent systems

but again, single-agent aping of a multi-agent system (humanity) goes further than you think

www.gleech.org/emobots

just a thought occasioned by visiting home and seeing the ol' stacks. There are many precursors, it turns out

I'm actually fixing this rn in my first serious hardware project

Crassus, For-Profit Fire-Chief or Speculative Property Developer? So I’m teaching the six day fire of Rome in the reign of Nero in 4 hours.  I thought I’d mug up a bit on the history of fire-fighting at Rome so that I could answer questions and contex…

literal fire sales, Crassus's for-profit firefighters (100 BCE)

livyarrow.org/2020/04/21/c...

Sumptuary laws (600 BCE): laws about permitted clothing per class

Guild closure of entrants to their professions (150 BCE)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Didius Julianus - Wikipedia

Didius Julianus won the emperorship at auction after the Praetorians murdered his precedessor.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didius_...

The condottieri, PMCs (1300). Sforza seized the city-state of Milan after his mercenaries were hired to defend it

> The word condottiero thus meant 'contractor'. Over time, however, in Italian usage, condottiero came to mean any commander

The East India Company (1850): megacorp administering 10% of world GDP, 300k soldiers

Dutch VOC even moreso: could declare war, mint currency, negotiate treaties, execute people.

Hot mixing: Mechanistic insights into the durability of ancient Roman concrete Ancient Roman manufacturing strategies provide insights for the design of modern self-healing concretes.

Roman self-healing concrete (200 BCE)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nose reconstruction for outlaws (600 BCE)

Opinion | Got $1 Million to Spare? You Can Buy an Ambassadorship (Published 2020)

The ongoing custom of letting people pay $1m to be a US ambassador
www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/o...

Roman slave CEOs to limit shareholder liability (200 BCE)

"steamcyberpunk": very old things which would seem futuristic/dystopian if they were invented now

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/n...

Willy Ley was a pioneer of rocketry who fled the Nazis. Last year they found his ashes in a basement in Manhattan, and there's some beautiful talk of scattering them on the moon

nitter.net/herbiebradle...

simonwillison.net/tags/pelican...

little test of Gemini 3.1 Pro:

"Output SVG as XML of a tiger riding a bicycle"
"Output SVG as XML of a pelican riding a tiger"
"Output SVG as XML of a pelican riding a bicycle"

Why All Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Are Historians SFF authors are the front-line practitioners who put the fruits of history’s craft into daily practice, sharing it in doses the public can consume, combining, treating, administering, customizing, …

At FHI I used to have a running debate with Nick Bostrom where he suggested I should read more history and I suggested he should read more SF. This great essay by @adapalmer.bsky.social gives a great argument for both.
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

you do you but unless your aesthetics are at risk I think the social stigma of releasing pre-alpha is over now no one has to read it

"current"