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Joined December 2015
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junaga retweeted
One of my pet theories is that political leaders are more willing to kill their own populations in wars if they’re foreigners without real affinity to the people dying. Napoleon was Corsican who spoke French with an accent. Hitler was an Austrian who knew multiracial Vienna better than Prussian Berlin. Stalin was from Georgia, and sent millions of Russians to death.
It is not a good idea to let anyone who isn’t rooted at least 3 generations deep anywhere near political power.
junaga retweeted
Russia makes NATO blind in space
Russian military satellite Kosmos 2612 recently executed precise maneuvers to enter the same orbital plane, altitude (~555 km), and path as ICEYE-X3, as twin.
ICEYE-X36 is a Finnish-US synthetic aperture radar satellite providing all-weather imaging support to Ukraine’s military.
The Russian satellite is jamming (sending garbage at the same frequency) from the same location. This renders the NATO satellite unusable.
What a pity.
junaga retweeted
BREAKING: Russia and the US are discussing building US data centers running on Russian nuclear power, per Putin's economic envoy Dmitriev.
"We are discussing joint projects in the field of Russia-USA data centers, including with the use of our nuclear power plants," Dmitriev says.
He says Putin and Trump are discussing a wide range of projects. "I think we will be announcing some important initiatives in the near future."
"We have previously said that there is a very large synergistic effect between Russia and the United States in the Arctic, in the LNG sector, and in other energy projects," Dmitriev adds.
junaga retweeted
I cannot let a steam engine analogy go by without bringing up John Wilkinson, perhaps the most underappreciated engineer of the Industrial Revolution.
Watt had figured out how to dramatically improve the steam engine, but he spent years struggling to actually manufacture one. The problem was embarrassingly simple: nobody could make a sufficiently round cylinder.
The casting and machining tolerances were atrocious. Watt complained that one 18-inch cylinder was out of round by as much as THREE-EIGHTHS OF AN INCH. Steam leaked past the piston. He tried packing the gaps with cork, oiled rags, paper, and apparently even old hats. Nothing worked particularly well.
Enter John Wilkinson, a British ironmaster whose immediate concern was manufacturing better cannons.
At the time, iron cannons were commonly cast around a core, introducing defects and misalignment that could make the barrels inaccurate or dangerously weak. Wilkinson developed a process for boring cannons from solid castings, and in 1774 patented a vastly improved boring machine.
The key innovation was almost comically mechanical: a massive, rigid boring bar, supported at both ends, that could cut a genuinely straight, circular hole instead of following the irregularities of the casting.
He adapted this technology to Watt's cylinders. By 1776, Matthew Boulton was boasting that Wilkinson had bored a FIFTY-INCH cylinder accurate to within the thickness of an old shilling.
Suddenly, the steam engine was a commercially viable machine.
And the story gets better. Wilkinson became one of Watt's first customers, buying an engine to drive the blast machinery at his own ironworks. The steam engine was now helping manufacture the iron that made more steam engines possible.
I find this whole episode absolutely extraordinary. The Industrial Revolution was, for a critical period, bottlenecked on the ability to make a sufficiently round hole.
We remember Watt, and rightly so. We remember the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent development of thermodynamics. But the man who made the machinery that made the whole thing possible is practically a footnote.
I think we consistently underestimate how much of scientific progress is actually downstream of advances in tooling, measurement, and manufacturing precision. It's not just that technology precedes theory. Sometimes the decisive breakthrough is that someone finally figures out how to build the thing the theorists have been talking about for twenty years.
Anyway, I think John Wilkinson deserves considerably more credit for modern civilization than he gets.
a few thoughts:
1. pretraining science is kind of like how people built quite good steam engines before they understood thermodynamics. “Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.”-(L.J. Henderson). if nick is right, which i am pretty sure he is, progress points in the direction of more interpretability, and pretraining was "slouching towards monosemanticity". my guess would be that major breakthroughs in interp also advance capabilities
2. nick is a good friend of mine, safe to say my origin story at openai wouldn't have happened if i hadn't met him, and it's fascinating watching him operate and seeing the early drafts evolve into this. he's the most profoundly happy guy I know- not driven by guilt, activism, or religious terror, but by fascination. he of course understands the stakes of understanding neural networks, but it doesn't seem like the core reason he does it: he just loves the neural nets. afaict he's posting this from some beautiful hideaway in tokyo. there's a lesson in there for all the +EV maxers. i feel very grateful to have met him
3. i do think it's crazy how few people across the world were staring at neural nets growing: most have moved to a different level of behaviorist analysis, thinking about reward functions and test scores and whatnot. it does not bode that well for the major model companies, oai included, that fundamental breakthroughs like this are coming from outside. we've become too much of a pressure cooker focusing on local incentives, studying narrow tracks under old paradigms, mostly doing engineering, rather than fundamental research, and implicitly hoping the next model will figure it out
does he know what stage 3 vaccine means?
junaga retweeted
We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
junaga retweeted
OpenAI have proven that matrix multiplication can be done in O(n^2.25) operations, which is a massive improvement. It is especially concerning because these AIs themselves run on matrix algebra.
The previous record was O(n^2.37), which had barely moved from O(n^2.4) in 1990.
OpenAI blew it away.
But... it is a nonconstructive proof. No algorithm was found, only a proof that it must exist.
junaga retweeted
Charlie Munger (2022) warns capitalism is auto-catalytic, speeding up in booms and busts until it endangers the whole civilization
"The process of capitalism automatically speeds up in both booms and depressions, and the thing feeds on itself for a while."
"So it's like autocatalysis in chemistry. It's just automatic that you get this speed up in both directions, which makes it very, very dangerous, not just to the individual investors, but to the whole civilization."
"I am not being casual when I say that Hitler's rise came in part because of the Great Depression. He never would have been chancellor of Germany without that."
"The Great Depression came from excesses, which in many ways aren't as bad as those we have now."
_______
Link and takeaways to one of Charlie's last great interviews: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
David Einhorn says there's a big bubble in tech-sector corporate profit, because a chunk of it is just a price transfer that creates no new economic value
"Right now there's a big bubble in corporate profit within the tech sector, and it's driving all of the returns and the excitement."
"And you hear, I mean, Morgan Stanley's probably calculated how fast earnings growth was this quarter and so forth. But if you think about how that's being constructed, some people have talked about the mark-to-market gains and the private investments, take that out."
"But think about another big source of profits, which is the capital spending boom that's happening in AI, where say memory prices have gone up five times."
"If memory prices have gone up five times, it means the memory provider is selling to the hyperscaler at five times the price."
"Now, no new economic value is being created. If they sold it at the previous price, just as much memory would be going back and forth, just as much compute capacity would be created. The increased price just reflects a transfer from one corporation to another."
"So the hyperscaler is paying to the memory provider a higher price, and that higher price shows up as profit today for the memory provider, and it's booking 85, 90% margins on stuff that traditionally is a commodity...and that flows right on through to NASDAQ earnings."
________
For key memory-architecture lectures from the Father of HBM: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
junaga retweeted
Fun to think how this actually works
Sundar tells his Chief of Staff, who tells the SVP of Platforms, who pings the VP of Google Play, who escalates to Trust & Safety…
and 6 org layers later some guy called Kevin hits “Approve”
IT HAS BEEN LIKE THIS FOR 6 MONTHS
junaga retweeted
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn't just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
The AI didn't just give the students answers. It used strict pedagogical guardrails. It guided. It questioned. It forced the students to do the cognitive work.
It offered perfect, one-to-one tutoring, personalized to the exact moment a student misunderstood a concept.
That level of attention is mathematically impossible to scale in a physical lecture hall.
For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education.
Now, it’s the bottleneck.
If AI can double your learning speed for a fraction of the cost, what exactly are students taking on decades of debt to pay for?
