John Loeber 🎢

1 in 5 NYC public school students are Black, but at Stuy - our most prestigious high school - 3 of ~800 incoming Freshmen are Black. We urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process. A single test should never be only factor deciding who gets in & who doesn’t.

Couple of thoughts. The first is that prison is a very modern invention: ancient societies did not have the capacity for long-term incarceration, so the actions of their criminal justice systems had to be much more immediate. Second, Exile is interesting because it allowed the state to apply a severe punishment to the actor and permanently stop them from causing social problems, but not incur the political/legal controversy associated with execution. It offers a very flexible "middle ground" solution. Third, our criminal justice system processes many people who have a high propensity to reoffend or may never become productive, well-adjusted members of our society. This creates a moral quandary: what do you do with these people? We want to believe in their capacity for rehabilitation, but we incur a lot of costs for this belief. The middle ground of exile offered our ancestors a way out of this quandary: punishing while protecting the sanctity of life, allowing hope for rehabilitation... but not here. It's worth noting that our criminal justice system today has a bit of an identity crisis: is the point to punish? to rehabilitate? to remove? There's no strong consensus here, and pretty much everyone agrees that we don't do a great job at any of these. Exile offered an interesting way to thread that needle. It's not available anymore, but I do wonder whether we'll see it return in some shape or form: e.g. some countries are experimenting with rented prisons in foreign countries.

This is genuinely the best part of our entire planet

Russia Dear US National Security Apparatus: I owe you an apology. I was not familiar with your game. We are entering year 5 of the Russia-Ukraine War. One of the key points of this war has been an ongoing debate about aid to Ukraine, which otherwise would struggle to fight on its own. This aid is primarily from the US, so the last four years have featured a continuous, very public debate about whether the military aid should continue, what the US is getting in return, etc. -- with some folks in the administration advocating for the US to pull out altogether. This "will-they-wont-they" dynamic has always made it seem as though Ukraine could teeter on the edge of defeat if the US mercurially pulls out. And there have been peace talks -- from the Russian perspective, the end of the war could be just around the corner. Just as it was four years ago. This is a lure. And the US public "debate" has been very skilled Kayfabe. If the US had at any point seriously pushed back on Russia, stepped up its support, then decisive victory for the Ukraine could've been achieved. But this could have escalated the war in unforeseeable ways -- perhaps Russia would move to using nuclear weapons, or strike elsewhere. And there's a good chance that Putin's regime would've survived a simple we're-outnumbered-defeat. Instead, the strategy has been to bait Russia into thinking it can win the war, that it's a stalemate where just a little bit more effort can break it -- requiring continuous expenditure of lives and money. Four years later, the Russian state is looking pretty drained. They're fully tied up. They can't intervene anywhere in the middle east, and for Russia to pull out of the war would have terrible domestic optics. From my perspective, the endgame is coming into sight: the Russian state is being bled dry of its resources, such that it will eventually collapse from within -- and perhaps fracture into separate states. That's the end of Putin's regime, the end of Russia's sell-oil-to-wage-war strategy, and also the end of their unified military presence. It'll be not just victory, but decisive, total victory, collapsing the state and splitting it apart, while never risking nuclear escalation. Well played. And all it cost was a bit of public optics, with guys like me upset that the US would consider pulling out of Ukraine. Clever execution.

Saturday at last. 37 recent thoughts: 1. Coffee shops will play music. Bars will sometimes play sports games, or even TV or movies. But I've never been to any establishment that plays a podcast. 2. The 2005-onwards "fuel efficiency" era of cars has resulted in incredibly ugly vehicles. Regulatory standards and pressure for aerodynamics have turned everything on four wheels into giant bloblike hatchbacks. Take a good look at one of these things. Horrendous. Once we get electric power + EVs at scale, we can go back to having vehicles that look good. 3. I often think of J Robert Oppenheimer's retreat to St John's in the US Virgin Islands in the 1950s. Imagine you're the most important nuclear physicist on earth, you've gone through staggering political drama, and then you peace out to a little pre-industrial island with no telephone or radio and sit on the beach for a couple weeks or months at a time. Talk about a detox. 4. I saw an old clip of the Simpsons, where they visit a lawyer to execute a will. It's in-person in an office. Sign of the times: today this would be done over Zoom and DocuSign. (The more valuable the profession by the hour, the more it is done virtually!) Modern media struggles to capture a world in which your entire life happens on a screen. 5. It would be good for everyone to spend a few days working in construction, tilling a field, cleaning streets, or manufacturing garments to appreciate (1) what goes on in our economy and (2) the benefits of modern technology. People do not know how good they have it. (There are a lot of anti-capitalists romanticizing pre-industrial life; people need to be inoculated against these illusions.) The biggest item is to spend a week washing clothes by hand; you will never look at a washing machine the same way again. 6. Many places are named after some heritage (e.g. New York), a landmark, or a person. But a lot of places are just named after money. It's uncommon in English, but if you start translating, it's everywhere: Puerto Rico? Rich Port! 7. I suspect that a lot of AI applications are already subtly Infinite Jest machines, encouraging the user to use them more and more, hooking them on the *feeling of productivity* more so than on actual productivity. There's a big bill and rude awakening coming to some of these users. If you didn't like social media because it maximizes engagement, you've seen nothing yet. The true engagement-maximizer, vastly smarter than you, billed by the token, is just in its infancy now. 8. Demographic differences from one airport to the next are just crazy. I flew through Minneapolis recently and half the men looked like Will Stancil. (I'll let you guess about the other half.) Flying from SFO to Chicago-Midway was like teleporting into a higher-BMI parallel universe. 9. Nice hotels are like real-life Pinterest boards. At some point you're not paying for amenities but for curation and inspiration. Like paying an interior designer for a few hours to sample a fully executed vision for a feeling of living. 10. Reviews for nice hotels are funny because people are so religious about them. I was recently picking between a 1Hotel and an Edition and looking at the reviews on Reddit: half of them are "1Hotel sucks, Edition is the only way to go" and the other half is the exact opposite. As far as I can tell, these hotels are basically the same. The tyranny of small differences! 11. Cookie popups are so dumb. This is a real policy-meets-technology failure. Your cookie settings should be sent as a default browser header. But maybe that didn't get implemented because it'd make it too easy to reject them all. Economic-political forces at work... 12. I've tried reading the Odyssey a few times. I've always struggled with classical verse, I lose concentration too easily with it. I'm now listening to the Odyssey as an audiobook, and it's working a lot better. Perhaps unsurprisingly: the old epics are meant to be read aloud! 13. Hacker News has always been known for its negativity, but it's had a real uptick in anti-American and anti-corporate sentiment. Some of these threads feel like Reddit at this point. 14. There's nothing more annoying than motorized trunk hatches on cars. I want to throw in my bags and shut the trunk -- and so I put my hand on the license plate, and push -- it resists, starts beeping, and then the world's slowest motor begins whirring, it opens back up, i have to click some dumb small button with a hatch/door icon on it, and then it begins closing with a speed of maybe one inch per second. Pathetic. I have to stand there, waiting to make sure the damn thing is closing, feeling the seconds of my life leave my body 15. It is continuously amusing to me that the Bush family consists of the biggest WASPs there ever were, truly New Englanders incarnate, and then they decided to remake themselves as humble Texans 16. Sam Kriss is a talented writer but he's just so mean. I can't read his work. I'm already cynical enough, I don't need more of it injected into me 17. Looking back, it's interesting how "thin" the machine learning skill tree is now. LSTMs, Random Forests, SVMs, etc. etc. have turned out to be ~irrelevant. Depth along one particularly powerful set of techniques beats all breadth. 18. History is a strong quality filter for media: Herodotus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. were the best of their time, most other stuff simply didn't survive because it had to be manually replicated, and that's a high bar. Now we have a non-stop explosion of new cultural artifacts, not just due to AI, but internet-era connectedness in the first place. I wonder if (1) it's possible to measure the outputs on a relative scale, e.g. every year we produce more cultural media than we have remaining from 2000BC to 1900AD combined, and (2) if there's a similar filter in the modern day -- like, there's so much ephemeral output that the act of reviewing, recommending, or replicating something carries a huge amount of weight. 19. With respect to the Midjourney scanner, a lot of people were commenting on the danger of "False Positives" in medical science. This seems incorrect to me: false positives just need better science. They should be a forcing function for more accurate diagnostics. It seems foolish to say that we shouldn't test because of the danger of false positives -- no, we should develop better tests and apply them more frequently. 20. Some people obtain US citizenship by birth ("anchor babies") but grow up abroad, moving to the US only as adults. There was a lot of recent debate about this and other aspects of birthright citizenship. Question: are these people paying taxes? US citizens living abroad are required to pay taxes; not filing them is a crime. If you are worried about abuse of anchor baby dynamics, then you may want to start by just enforcing the tax code. 21. If you're sending an email to ask someone for something, the probability of getting a reply is far-and-away maximized if you only ask for one thing as clearly as possible. 22. I would like to stop hearing about taste. Enough. 23. I keep a lot of notes on things to write about, but it feels like many of them are rapidly becoming irrelevant under changes due to AI. Just as parents often raise their children for the prior generation, writers publish for a world that has already disappeared. It takes great discipline to write for the present or the future. 24. I loved Wisprflow, and it taught me that dictation can be really effective -- speedy and lowering barrier to entry for outputting lots of thought. But Apple makes it inconvenient to use Wisprflow on mobile -- so I've resulted to using Apple's voice dictation, which I never would've used previously. Turns out it's good enough. (Just barely.) There's an interesting corporate-competitive dynamic here, where you start with the better, third-party tool, it teaches you the pattern, and then you use the worse, but more accessible built-in tool because you've learned the value of the pattern. Distribution is everything. 25. It appears that PPT slideshows and PDF decks are going away, in favor of AI-generated HTML websites. Just as good to present, and way more flexible. Interesting how AI means more centralization on the most common standards. 26. What exactly is "affordable healthcare"? What standard of care are we really talking about? All the politics and debate, and I'm not sure if people even agree on a definition here. 27. The great challenge with dentistry is that any operation removes all evidence that the procedure was necessary. You can see how this creates misaligned incentives. 28. Graham Platner and Palestine: if the contemporary Democrats weren't enthralled by antisemitism, they might not have not run the Guy With The Nazi Tattoo. But they are, and they did, and the non-stop cavalcade of failure and embarrassment was entirely deserved. 29. All things considered, it is surprising that the Nazis picked a Buddhist symbol as their flag. 30. Nvidia is only up ~50% since late '24. Given all the discourse, you would've expected it to be more. It's interesting how this was a great AI exposure derivative early on and appears more saturated now -- and most critically, hasn't kept up with the latest boom in frontier lab valuations. (Memory has been the new exposure trade.) 31. Sometimes I wonder about the difference between history and fiction. In many cases, our understanding of past events is probably way off. Does it matter? Being able to tell a grand narrative of humanity is important to our sense of identity and philosophical self-actualization, but to what extent is truth important to that narrative? It matters if we want to use the narrative to understand ourselves today. But beyond that, I want to say that there is intrinsic value in truth, but I struggle to make a really persuasive case to myself. 32. DFW writing Infinite Jest in response to (fundamentally) cable television of the '80s and '90s -- stuff that we would consider simply dull today -- is just incredible. To him this was already a colossally overwhelming force of entertainment, shaking the very foundations of what it means to be a human being. If he could see what we have today... 33. Under Trump's second term, the concept of a "First Lady" has almost entirely disappeared. 34. I continue to think that Bitcoin and LLMs feel like they were switched in the order in which they should have arisen: AI provides abundance, eliminating scarcity. What's scarce, and thereby valuable, in that AI era? Well, Bitcoin provides one thing: provable scarcity. Perhaps it arriving fifteen-plus years before its time and then languishing is like the 2010s all over again. There may come to be a rhyme to this history. 35. Sometimes I think about the 100 Prisoners Problem. This really blew my mind when I encountered it over a decade ago: it feels magical that there can be mathematical order like this in the world, that you wouldn't see at all unless you have the training. Like a secret hidden in plain sight. 36. Honor Codes That Work always feel remarkable to me, like a pinnacle of civilization. There is great comfort in being able to trust the honesty of others, that people will do what they say they're going to do. This may be a big part of our story: humans have been successful in part because they bias toward cooperation, even when defecting might be more rational. Conversely, I feel great unease when I see these honor/trust-systems weakened, and I suspect there is much more loss there than appears at first glance. 37. I am continuously surprised that restaurants don't copy each other better. For example, why do cafes serve bad sandwiches? It's easy to learn how to make a good sandwich! And ingredients are obviously a readily available commodity. "Efficient Markets" hypothesis blown out