Category: Blog Post
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On the Folk Theory of Scaling
In 2019, Rich Sutton argued that the most effective methods in AI were and will be those that leverage computation. Instead of trying to design better heuristics that more closely approximate human intelligence, Sutton thought progress would come from models that could improve with scale as greater computational resources became…
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Communicating Like a Computer
We were recently looking at a new crypto protocol at USV. As we were discussing it as a team, we realized we didn’t totally understand how the protocol worked. Even worse, we found it hard to precisely articulate our questions about the protocol to each other. After some discussion in…
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The Three Kinds of “Deep Tech” Startups
Something that’s frustrating about investing in non-purely-software companies is the poverty of vocabulary. People talk about “deep tech”, “hard tech”, “frontier tech”, “atoms”, and so on. Sometimes they just mean to distinguish hardware from software companies, sometimes to distinguish technical moonshots from more immediately commercial ventures. Despite the linguistic fuzziness,…
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Blixt
(Crossposted to the USV blog) Existing electrical infrastructure is ill-suited to our current needs. It was developed for a world where we simply sent firm AC power from centralized power plants to end-customers. Today, however, electricity flows multi-directionally, as both AC and DC, and more intermittently. As we continue to…
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Self-Mythology & Authenticity
At the end of his recent interview with Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh asked … what really strikes out to me about you… is just how broadly you think of your job description. To the extent that you think of if science is slowing down and civilization is stagnating, that’ll be bad…
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Nietzsche and Niceness
My friend Johnathan recently delivered an excellent lecture on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. He rightly noted how underrated Nietzsche’s ideas are today, showed how they could be usefully applied to the contemporary world, and offered some fair criticisms of the Nietzschean perspective. After I left the lecture, I…
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Synchronous Digital Experiences
Synchronous digital experiences feel underrated. As life continues to move increasingly online, they’re our best path to sustained opportunities for collective effervescence. The baseline argument for their power is the appeal of watching sports. I’m not a big sports fan, and even I feel the magic of watching the Super…
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Touro Synagogue / President’s Day
I visited the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island this weekend. It’s the oldest synagogue in the United States, and Washington delivered his “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation” to the community in 1790. Reading his letter was a stirring reminder of the unique greatness of the American project. Happy President’s Day!…
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Underrated Internet Communities
What are the most underrated internet communities today? The rationalists and effective altruists were underrated in the 2000s and 2010s. I stumbled on lesswrong in high school (through reddit) and got a kick out of the quirky perspective over there. It felt interestingly orthogonal to debates I was exposed to…
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AI and Art Demo Night
I recently published a post on the USV blog about AI and art. I’ve been reflecting on how intimately connected technology and art are. The art we make is mediated by the tools at our disposal, and the visions technologists pursue are often downstream of the stories artists tell. Since…
Matthew Mandel 