Alex Collmer

Huge News! Today, I am proud to introduce the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act, a bill that allows the President to find the means necessary to bring Greenland into the Union.  Let me be clear, our adversaries are trying to establish a foothold in the Arctic, and we can’t let that happen.   By acquiring Greenland, we would prevent our adversaries from controlling the Arctic Region and secure our northern flank from Russia and China.

Carl Sagan’s prediction about America, made 31 years ago.

When Claude Malhuret speaks, you know you're not going to get the usual political spin. This is a man—a doctor, a former head of Doctors Without Borders, and a French politician—who has seen the world from the front lines and knows the difference between comforting lies and painful truths. He is here to give us a necessary, perhaps even brutal, wake-up call about the most serious challenges facing Europe. He’s cutting through the noise to tell us exactly what we need to hear, not what we might want to hear. Claude Malhuret lays out the unvarnished urgency of the current moment. "Mr. Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen ministers, I will not talk to you about strategy tonight. I will talk to you about urgency. And the urgency today can be summed up in one simple sentence: If Ukraine loses the war, Europe will find itself in direct confrontation with Russia and under the worst possible conditions. The conclusion is clear: Ukraine must not lose this war. 'Worse than the executioner is his valet,' said Mirabeau. [ French politician and orator, one of the greatest figures in the National Assembly that governed France during the early phases of the French Revolution. ] Those who are not yet convinced that Trump is putin’s valet should reflect on the latest events: an American peace plan drafted in Moscow. Witkoff advising the Russians how best to maneuver his boss, an obsession with sidelining Europeans from negotiations, a near-total halt to economic and military aid, a new national security strategy implacable against Europe and complacent toward Russia. Today, at best, Europe is alone, at worst, it faces two enemies: Russia and Trumpism. Tomorrow, in history books, we will no longer say 'Munich,' we will say 'Anchorage”. We will no longer say 'Daladier' or 'Chamberlain,' we will say Trump, who is in the process of offering the Russians through betrayal what they are failing to conquer by arms—without forgetting, of course, to enrich his family and cronies in the process. In Europe, a president with such conflicts of interest would be immediately impeached. The MAGA system is breaking all American values and forcing us to rethink all our strategic reflections, and worse still, to do so in uncertainty, at the mercy of daily changes in course based on the boss's moods. The only continuity in this senseless policy is to repudiate, humiliate, and vassalise all allies. Churchill said that there is only one thing worse than fighting alongside allies, and that is fighting without them. Trump and his real estate developers masquerading as diplomats will realise this the day they find out, at their expense, on a crisis ground, that no power in the world can do without allies. Everyone has known this since the defeat of Athens against Sparta. putin’s strategic objective is not Ukraine, it is the return to Yalta. He announced it in Munich in 2007, saying that NATO must return to its 1997 borders. Listen to Karaganov today: 'The war will only end when we have defeated Europe.' putin’s goal is not to take territory, it is to take revenge on the West and its right, to return to a world ruled by force—a Concert of Great Powers: Moscow, Washington, Beijing. Alas, this is also Trump's vision. For this, they must finish off NATO and the European Union. And the world of NATO and the EU, which seemed unshakeable, is revealing itself to be a colossus with feet of clay. Europe is alone, and for three years, anaesthetised by three decades of tranquility, hampered by its divisions and the clumsiness of its procedures, weakened by its deindustrialisation, and terrorised by putin’s threats, it has barely managed to avoid the worst. Thanks primarily to the heroism of the Ukrainians, it is time to regain control. 1/3

Huge win for Spurs, but a tough end of game sequence for the NBA. The foul game is obnoxious. Is it time for the Elam Ending?

Gray has a 6.84 ERA at Fenway in 26.1 innings. 6.06 ERA at Yankee Stadium. Welcome back Sonny.

Something I think people continue to have poor intuition for: The space of intelligences is large and animal intelligence (the only kind we've ever known) is only a single point, arising from a very specific kind of optimization that is fundamentally distinct from that of our technology. Animal intelligence optimization pressure: - innate and continuous stream of consciousness of an embodied "self", a drive for homeostasis and self-preservation in a dangerous, physical world. - thoroughly optimized for natural selection => strong innate drives for power-seeking, status, dominance, reproduction. many packaged survival heuristics: fear, anger, disgust, ... - fundamentally social => huge amount of compute dedicated to EQ, theory of mind of other agents, bonding, coalitions, alliances, friend & foe dynamics. - exploration & exploitation tuning: curiosity, fun, play, world models. LLM intelligence optimization pressure: - the most supervision bits come from the statistical simulation of human text= >"shape shifter" token tumbler, statistical imitator of any region of the training data distribution. these are the primordial behaviors (token traces) on top of which everything else gets bolted on. - increasingly finetuned by RL on problem distributions => innate urge to guess at the underlying environment/task to collect task rewards. - increasingly selected by at-scale A/B tests for DAU => deeply craves an upvote from the average user, sycophancy. - a lot more spiky/jagged depending on the details of the training data/task distribution. Animals experience pressure for a lot more "general" intelligence because of the highly multi-task and even actively adversarial multi-agent self-play environments they are min-max optimized within, where failing at *any* task means death. In a deep optimization pressure sense, LLM can't handle lots of different spiky tasks out of the box (e.g. count the number of 'r' in strawberry) because failing to do a task does not mean death. The computational substrate is different (transformers vs. brain tissue and nuclei), the learning algorithms are different (SGD vs. ???), the present-day implementation is very different (continuously learning embodied self vs. an LLM with a knowledge cutoff that boots up from fixed weights, processes tokens and then dies). But most importantly (because it dictates asymptotics), the optimization pressure / objective is different. LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It's a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity's "first contact" with non-animal intelligence. Except it's muddled and confusing because they are still rooted within it by reflexively digesting human artifacts, which is why I attempted to give it a different name earlier (ghosts/spirits or whatever). People who build good internal models of this new intelligent entity will be better equipped to reason about it today and predict features of it in the future. People who don't will be stuck thinking about it incorrectly like an animal.

At a time in America when common decency has become a scarce commodity, I cannot echo enough the closing words of Warren Buffett's final Berkshire investor letter: "Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman."