james, the giant peach

Breathe on purpose

they should give Iran's uranium to Japan to power the new reactors we just announced of course

🇺🇸 🤝 🇯🇵 USA + Japan are a balanced breakfast their tenacity + conscientiousness + discipline, our bold frontier spirit + vast nature + generous wealth, our particular flavors of honor, great partnership makes sense our people are obsessed with each other

@hormeze Loofin mah ars af

@JimmyRis how do u say LMAO in dutch

What’s the fallacy called when a planning committee thinks installing lots of bike lanes will make their city an Amsterdamlike utopia of happy families commuting carbon-free when in fact it’s the being filled with Dutch people that does that

@rSanti97 Big moves!

Some professional news: I'm joining Anthropic's editorial team! I'll be leading the team's work on economics and policy, and working closely with the Anthropic Institute (about which more here: x.com/AnthropicAI/st…). Dramatic AI progress is coming in the next two years, and researchers+policymakers+the public alike will need the best information available about that shift. It's a big new challenge, and I can’t wait to get started. [Some important housekeeping: I’ll keep running Statecraft at @IFP as a Nonresident Senior Fellow! And will remain on the board at Recoding America/ as a journalist-in-residence at @johnshopkins School of Government and Policy. I start at Anthropic in a few weeks.] The move from frontier think tank to frontier lab is bittersweet. I’ve been at IFP for three years, and it’s been the most formative professional experience of my life. In a short period of time, IFP has become one of the most effective institutions in DC, generating a truly shocking amount of counterfactual policy impact (not all of it public). Being on this team has permanently raised my ambitions. I'm very grateful.

I've added Starcraft 2 Terran, Zerg, and Protoss hook packs tell your claude code to clone github.com/jamesrisberg/C… and read the README to hook up the pack you want :)

@skooookum don't worry about it kitten

I can explain backpropagation through an attention layer to a five year old but I can’t seem to commit to memory if US yields going up is good or bad

@orthodoxmason @AustinTunnell timeless :)

@AustinTunnell @JimmyRis Man, I must be getting old (what's lindy?) I'll take the badass for sure :)

Figured it's a good time to put faces to names. Here's most of the crew. From left to right - Will J., Yoshi, Saman, Patrick (myself), and Seth. Will L. and Joanna couldn't make it, and we now have James (@JimmyRis) on board! Many thanks to Lara Kimmerer for the photo!

@cognazor Oh this looks great! From between two ferns to between two rows of carrots :)

He went from hey gardening can be fun and quirky to "for human beings and for the world itself, the only future is agrarian" very abruptly. I'm not complaining youtube.com/watch?v=32kQ9N…

bro got claude to do his homework live on camera

@corsaren @PrinceVogel His "in simpatico" has always struck me as a wonderfully distilled shorthand for the sort of relative interactivity McLuhan was on about

@PrinceVogel I think he also managed to key in on the mechanism of action with only a few words despite the limits of the format. If he had just focused on, say, the speed of communication I’d kind of give him less credit (even though the faster media environment has had major impacts).

I think the most interesting thing about this clip is how empty Bowie’s claims are despite how incredibly prescient they appear. Here’s what he says about the internet: “The potential is…unimaginable” “Something exhilarating and terrifying” “It’s an alien life form” “The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can really envisage” “The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico” “It will crush our idea of what mediums are all about” Evaluated on neutral terms, with neither the skepticism of the past nor the hindsight of the present, these claims are basically meaningless. They say next to nothing! Saying “the internet will be big and different in ways you can’t imagine” is not a very useful prediction. One could even argue that his predictions are so vague that they fail to qualify as predictions. By casting such a wide net, such claims become devilishly hard to falsify. Moreover, these types of vague predictions are subject to horrible selection and survivorship biases, where not only do we as an audience only re-share the ones which, in retrospect, seem to have hit the mark, but even within a single prediction we are more likely to emphasize the highly prescient elements and ignore the parts that don’t resonate quite as well. We may even fill in the gaps with interpretations that the original author may not have warranted at the time. It’s just horoscopes and cold reading. And yet… I can’t shake the notion that Bowie is demonstrating genuine foresight. To even hint at the idea that the internet might merge the media provider and consumer, and in doing so reshape the nature of content is to touch upon THE fundamental force of change in the digital age. Can I fault Bowie for lacking specificity as to what content would look like as a result? How attention spans might be reshaped, or algorithmic ragebait incentivized, loneliness amplified or culture commoditized? I don’t think I can. To demand such specificity in the face of such monumental change, especially when the contemporaneous alternative was to predict no change at all, is to simply ask too much. Because sometimes, when the future is uncertain, when the paths before us are splayed out in all their infinite possibility, when the final form upon which we land is all but guaranteed to be shaped by the errant gestures of a thousand butterfly wings, there is little we can conclude with confidence except to reject the null hypothesis, to toss out the historicals and simply say “things will be different now.”

@simonsarris I find most people need encouragement even to move their own furniture around, much less alter things, but once helped into it the exhilarating effect of shaping your environment takes hold and can snowball into more

Broader question: Is using a drill manual labor? I didn't think so. I thought it was just a consequence of existing in a 3d world. Maybe high school kids don't. They exist in someone else's world. They're not, I guess, going to change their envbironment. x.com/markvalorian/s…

This just sounds so impossible but I've heard 2 anecdotes from teachers that suggest the same thing. Kids who never ever picked up a drill or a screwdriver before graduating high school.

I've been thinking about this paper from 2018 recently The Influence Machine, this guy was onto a lot: x.com/JimmyRis/statu…

really is the first real social media war: simultaneously - unprecedented access to on the ground and satellite footage and reports from official and unofficial sources - psyops, overreactive swarm dynamics, deepfakes, misinformation from all official and unofficial sources

@skooookum oh sorry forgot fun stops at 30

What do you mean it’s a themed party. I’m 31 years old

@sahill_og learn to code again

In 2020: learn to code. In 2023: learn to prompt AI. In 2026: learn to command AI agents. In 2027:???

@AaronKoelker @usbnorm receipts!

Here's another receipt printer #map; this time of the Boston Marathon and contained in an enduro route sheet holder. (Thanks Eric Seitz for the suggestion). The map includes distances, landmarks, uphill segments, and more.

Incredible first published code from @orthodoxmason, a super fun and informative tetris-inspired game that teaches you how to make a drystone wall Orthodox Labs makes its debut...

is this when the big corps start to hire PMCs and we cross into the next phase of cyberpunk?