Category: Blog Post
-
AI Aesthetics
(Crossposted from the USV blog) The word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, which refers to an art or skill or practice. Plato writes a lot about the concept, often making reference to artists such as flute players as canonical examples of those engaged in a techne. Though today…
-
USV AI Roundtable #1: AI and Search
We’re kicking off a new lunch series at USV. We’re going to host monthly roundtables on topics in AI with investors, operators, and researchers in the NYC community. Our first roundtable will be on January 31st on AI and Search. Search engines have been the portal to the internet for…
-
Making Energy Programmable
(crossposted from the USV blog) We’ve previously written about the storage gap. The proliferation of solar has led to an abundance of energy when the sun is out and a dearth of energy when it’s not. Batteries help address this gap by storing excess energy in times of plenty and…
-
Decoding the AI Debate: A Philosophical Perspective
I had a great time speaking last night on a panel with Brendan McCord of the Cosmos Institute and Zoe Weinberg of ex/ante about venture capital, AI, and philosophy. I was really impressed with the group that convened. People were urgently excited to discuss philosophy of mind and language, technical…
-
Sociology of NGDP Targeting
What’s the right sociological explanation for the wonky transpartisan takes that have become identity- and community-forming memes online? YIMBYism was maybe the first of these. NGDP targeting seems to be a more recent one. Is the internet just so vast and politics so polarizing that there’s an online community for…
-
Towards a Theory of Decentralization
One force that drives centralization is comparative advantage. If I’m sufficiently good at making clothes, it might be mutually advantageous for me to focus on making clothes all day and to free up the person who’s good at making food to do that and the person who’s good at building…
-
Intimate Social Networks
Why haven’t big consumer businesses been built around the Find My Friends’ (FMF) location-sharing primitive? Lots of people my age share their location with as many as tens of people. The behavior has caught on despite no marketing or real productization from Apple. Location feels like a powerful piece of…
-
*Killers of the Flower Moon*
(spoilers below) There’s a criticism of some of Martin Scorcese’s movies that he makes the behavior he’s trying to condemn look cool. Scorcese’s Jordan Belfort may be insane scum, but he also oozes charisma. I think there’s a case to be made that Scorcese’s doing a Miltonian thing to show…
-
Friday Links
“You must never lose gratitude for this privileged position that you put each other in.”
Matthew Mandel 