Donald Mitchell

You should read this just to understand how silly these tech guys are when it comes to politics. Balaji thinks that if shit hits the fan in the USA, tech people can save themselves by fleeing to…the internet.

U.S. intelligence indicates Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is hiding in an undisclosed location with limited access to the outside world, relying on a network of couriers to receive and send messages, CBS News reports. U.S. officials say the arrangement has made it difficult for Iranian negotiators to communicate with the leadership, causing delays in responses to U.S. proposals on a potential deal. Khamenei has not been seen or heard publicly since before the war and is reportedly taking extreme precautions after U.S. and Israeli intelligence helped locate and eliminate much of Iran’s senior leadership. Officials said many Iranian leaders are spending weeks in fortified bunkers and avoiding direct communication unless necessary.

I’ve taken to using a simple interview question with folks. It’s surprising how much people seem to struggle with answering it. Tell me how you would efficiently sum a large array of numbers on a GPU into a single accumulated value. Don’t need to see code, just explain it conceptually in relation to the hardware.

Tanzania's forced collectivization under Julius Nyerere killed more people per capita than Stalin's agricultural disasters, yet Western intellectuals still romanticize ujamaa as "African socialism." Between 1967 and 1975, Nyerere's government forcibly relocated over 13 million Tanzanians—roughly 80% of the rural population—into collective villages called ujamaa. The state promised modern amenities, shared prosperity, and liberation from "capitalist exploitation." Instead, they delivered mass starvation. Agricultural output collapsed by 50% within five years. Food imports skyrocketed from 50,000 tons in 1970 to 400,000 tons by 1974. Rural villagers who had fed themselves for generations suddenly couldn't grow enough grain to survive winter. The mechanics were predictably Austrian. When you destroy private property rights and eliminate price signals, you obliterate the knowledge that makes agriculture work. Farmers knew their local soil, rainfall patterns, and crop rotations. But central planners in Dar es Salaam decided that "scientific socialism" trumped centuries of accumulated farming wisdom. They forced communities to abandon fertile ancestral lands for designated plots that bureaucrats selected from maps. Villages that resisted faced military force—troops literally burned homes to drive families into the collectives. And the damn tragedy continues reverberating today. Tanzania remains one of Africa's poorest countries, importing food despite having some of the continent's best agricultural land. Per capita income in 2023 sits at $1,192—lower than Bangladesh. You can draw a straight line from ujamaa's destruction of property rights to Tanzania's persistent poverty. But mention this at any development economics conference and watch professors explain how Nyerere had "good intentions" and the real problem was "insufficient implementation." Lesson: Collectivism fails equally hard across race, language, geography, population size, education level, continent, or any other possible metric you can dream of.

Back in 2018 Google’s AlphaZero chess engine defeated Stockfish (the best chess engine at the time and again now last I checked) after training itself in a few hours. It didn’t have any human inputs - prior engines had been given opening variations and databanks of games from people. AlphaZero just trained itself in a few hours by playing millions of games against itself - and played very differently from people (attacking style with willingness to take on great risk) and won. That was when I knew this was going to be a real thing.