Ginger McGinn - e/acc
2.3K posts
He’s right btw. The single most exaggerated global phenomenon in the world today is the supposedly terminal decline of Europe.
Deeply moved by this pair of lions in the Assyrian frieze in the British Museum. There is more in the eyes and the expressions than there is in most art made today.
The supposed brilliance of silicon valley titans is really just monopolists who've made marginal improvements to our civilizational technology stack, but reaped disproportionate profits from the techoilliteracy of regulators. I'm glad to see an expansion to hardware.
That's just it, scale is the only potential moat, which can then be used for monopolistic anti-competive behavior. Software VCs entire premise is taking advantage of the newness of the internet to seek and maintain monopolies.
“They have no0n0n0 moat” *another multi-$100bn round*
Farmland isn't pristine nature. That is the last thing I need to be convinced of. But that doesn't mean 4,000 acres corn/soy to 4,000 acres solar is an improvement. Policy should push solar onto rooftops, parking lots, and brownfields first. Farmland can be more than silicon.
To me, the opportunity here is not greco-or-techno-futurism. It’s to create a regionally inspired form that settles into the land rather than stand in defiance of it. Conceptual renderings for Sydney, Denver, and Columbia Basin as examples. Landmarks, not eyesores.
There's an unfortunate game theory to a large civilization in that it requires hard work, ethical behavior, and deferral of gratification to build. But then eventually people start to forget that and think "why would I work hard when theres all this stuff here already? I should just be hedonistic". Slowly, the civilization starts to decay causing it to take care of people less, which causes more people to defect ("why should I take care of a system that doesn't care for me? Especially when there's so much fun to be had by neglecting it"), until eventually it collapses because everyone has defected.
I love this line of reasoning because I have actually lived outside of the US, not just visited, and the rest of the world views our liberals as left, and our far left as incredibly stupid and self sabotaging. 🙃
xAI has launched Grok 4.3, achieving 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with improved agentic performance, ~40% lower input price, and ~60% lower output price than Grok 4.20 The release of Grok 4.3 places @xAI just above Muse Spark and Claude Sonnet 4.6 on the Intelligence Index, and a 4 points ahead of the latest version of Grok 4.20. Grok 4.3 improves its Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score while reducing cost to run the benchmark suite. Key Takeaways: ➤ Grok 4.3 improves on cost-per-intelligence relative to Grok 4.20 0309 v2: it scores higher on the Intelligence Index while costing less to run the full benchmark suite. Grok 4.3 costs $395 to run the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, around 20% lower than Grok 4.20 0309 v2, despite using more output tokens. This makes it one of the lower-cost models at its intelligence level ➤ Large increase in real world agentic task performance: The largest single benchmark improvement is on GDPval-AA, where Grok 4.3 scores an ELO of 1500, up 321 points from Grok 4.20 0309 v2’s score of 1179 Grok 4.3, surpassing Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Muse Spark, Gpt-5.4 mini (xhigh), and Kimi K2.5. Grok 4.3 narrows the gap to the leading model on GDPval-AA, but still trails GPT-5.5 (xhigh) by 276 Elo points, with an expected win rate of ~17% against GPT-5.5 (xhigh) under the standard Elo formula ➤ Grok 4.3’s performs strongly on instruction following and agentic customer support tasks. It gains 5 points on 𝜏²-Bench Telecom to reach 98%, in line with GLM-5.1. Grok 4.3 maintains an 81% IFBench score from Grok 4.20 0309 v2 ➤ Gains 8 points on AA-Omniscience Accuracy, but at the cost of lower AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Rate of 8 points, so Grok 4.20 0309 v2 still leads AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Rate, followed by MiMo-V2.5-Pro, in line with Grok 4.3 Congratulations to @xAI and @elonmusk on the impressive release!
SpaceX IPO valuation: ~$2T Amazon Valuation: ~$2.8T Amazon revenue: $715B SpaceX revenue: $15B
