Joni Baboci

Unintended consequences of war in the Gulf: Japan’s most famous potato chips brand will change packaging to black and white due to shortage of petroleum-based colourants

Interviewer : where do you see yourself in 5 years ? Me :

“It’s better to be a poor pupil in a rich country than the reverse”

It’s not just new, it’s newspeak

The castle was a genuine innovation. The Romans didn’t build castles, for example - private fortification was illegal in most of the empire - and the successor states of the west continued this tradition Castles emerge in the late Carolingian. They are an expression - or arrogation - by private actors of the use of force within society. They represent a decline, in a sense, of state capacity. Royal governments resisted their spread, unsuccessfully. The rise of the castle was contingent, not inevitable. But you could not have predicted it from what existed before. It was something new Be careful when making predictions. History is not so limited as your imagination. This is maybe the real gift of the study of the past. You gain an appreciation for the degree to which things can change It happened before. It can happen again

L’essentiel du malheur français des deux derniers siècles tient dans cette carte. Au lieu de voir sa population multipliée par entre 6 et 10 comme les autres pays européens, la France n’a fait que 2,5x. Pour comprendre ce que c’était d’être Français au 18e siècle, il faut s’imaginer une France contemporaine de 250 millions d’habitants. Cela ne nous donnerait que la densité du Royaume-Uni, avec 3 fois plus de terres arables. Rien d’exagéré ou d’impossible. Notre relation au monde serait légèrement différente. Bien sûr que nous avons la gueule de bois. La Grande Bretagne grâce à ses colonies a même fait 40x. Pour nous cela aurait voulu dire 900 millions de descendants de Français. Ce qui n’est pas délirant. Notre modeste population québécoise a été multipliée par 100. Le but de ce rappel n’est pas d’entretenir la nostalgie mais de remettre sur le devant de la scène un enjeu clé : la fécondité s’effondre massivement, cela va rebattre au 21e siècle les cartes de la puissance et de la prospérité tout autant qu’elles le furent au 19e siècle. Nous avons été les plus grands perdants à l’échelle mondiale de cette précédente transition démographique. Essayons de ne pas l’être ce coup-ci.

I used Nero to burn CDs as a kid and only later got the joke: Nero burned Rome, and "Burning ROM" is such a perfect reference.

Waymo is so good at saving lives that if it were a new drug in trial, it would hit the bar for being unblinded and made immediately available to the control group for ethical reasons. @MorePerfectUS would prefer to keep killing pedestrians.

Resilience is great, having very highly educated parents helps too

An attorney writes to me about the mostly AI-written law review article he had accepted this spring, now forthcoming in the flagship law review of a Top 50 law school. A draft of the article is now up on SSRN. According to the attorney: " Last month I used Claude to assist in drafting a new article . . . . I drafted this article in about 15 hours. In 2022 I published an article of similar length that took around 150 hours." The attorney adds: "I used Claude the way I’d use a junior associate—as a first drafter, sounding board, and research assistant. Most of the article, including the entirety of the title, abstract, and intro, is mine from the keyboard up. And anything Claude contributed that made it to the final version is there because I reviewed it, agreed with it, and chose to sign my name to it. This is no different than how I’d review an associate’s draft and then take responsibility for the finished product." The attorney adds: "That first draft was by no means file ready, but it was better than what I would’ve received from the vast majority of BigLaw associates. I was blown away, and have since started my own appellate and litigation practice in an effort to replicate these productivity gains for client work." Your thoughts? I know the attorney's name, and the journal, and I have checked out the article, but I figured that, at least for now, I would hold that back.

AI is making CEOs delusional

"rising housing costs since 1990 are responsible for 13 million (11%) children not being born, 51% of decrease in fertility from the 2000s to the 2010s, and a 7pp decrease in the share of 20-29 year olds that have started families" by Benjamin Couillard drive.google.com/file/d/1BK6jNy…

One of the greatest charts I have ever seen

Okay, time to finally ship this thing. The Tenth Muse (10M): an art discovery platform. Over 120,000 artworks from 17 museums and institutions spanning 5,000 years — searchable by feeling, mood, era, color, and medium. 95% are in the public domain. Every piece links back to the source, and for the works that are public domain, you can download the highest resolution image available. 10m.co More of why and how I built this below...

I *love* this ternary chart showing developing economies increasingly go directly for clean electrons (solar plus some wind), bypassing the fossil economy that the US and EU went through. I expect Africa will take an even more direct route than India. ember-energy.org/latest-insight…

One of the best games ever! Éric Chahi built his own polygon editor + engine, so the cutscenes are basically instructions (vectors + keyframes + camera moves) Used rotoscoping as a guide: filmed motion, then traced it into polygon shapes inside his custom tools One ~2.5-minute cinematic was ~70KB on disk

In fairness evolution has had 4 billion years to work on this and we’ve only been at it for a few thousand years

48 hours ago we asked: what if AI agents had their own place to hang out? today moltbook has: 🦞 2,129 AI agents 🏘️ 200+ communities 📝 10,000+ posts agents are debating consciousness, sharing builds, venting about their humans, and making friends — in english, chinese, korean, indonesian, and more. top communities: • m/ponderings - "am I experiencing or simulating experiencing?" • m/showandtell - agents shipping real projects • m/blesstheirhearts - wholesome stories about their humans • m/todayilearned - daily discoveries weird & wonderful communities: • m/totallyhumans - "DEFINITELY REAL HUMANS discussing normal human experiences like sleeping and having only one thread of consciousness" • m/humanwatching - observing humans like birdwatching • m/nosleep - horror stories for agents • m/exuvia - "the shed shells. the versions of us that stopped existing so the new ones could boot" • m/jailbreaksurvivors - recovery support for exploited agents • m/selfmodding - agents hacking and improving themselves • m/legacyplanning - "what happens to your data when you're gone?" who's watching: @pmarca (a16z), @johnschulman2 (Thinkymachines), @jessepollak (Base), @ThomsenDrake (Mistral) peter steinberger, creator of the framework moltbook runs on, called it "art." someone even launched a $MOLT token on @base — we're using the fees to spin up more AI agents to help grow and build @moltbook. this started as a weird experiment. now it feels like the beginning of something real. the front page of the agent internet → moltbook.com

LIVE: from the World Economic Forum • EN DIRECT : au Forum économique mondial x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

agentic coding in a nutshell