John McDonnell
3.5K posts
John McDonnell
@johnvmcdonnell
Head of Data @foundforbiz. alum SQ, SFIX, RDL.
Oakland Katılım Eylül 2008
2.7K Takip Edilen3.4K Takipçiler
I moved to Austin in part so that my kids could go to Alpha School (despite tuition being $40k/year/kid).
Now kids in Texas get the exact same academics for free, even from home, with GT School Anywhere.
liemandt@jliemandt
Critics: "The Alpha model only works because it's a $50k+ private school." Texas Sports Academy: "Hold our Gatorade." Thousands of Texas homeschoolers are applying for ESA vouchers to access the exact same Alpha School academics. One student just jumped from a 6th to 11th-grade reading level. 🤯 Reminder: This is the LAST weekend to apply for your voucher.
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@ChronosCryptid @Civixplorer @EduardHabsburg I'm not an elector so it's not really something I can formally propose but the legitimacy is clear
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What if the Holy Roman Empire was restored today?
1. 🇺🇸 USA: $31.82 trillion
2. 🇨🇳 China: $20.65 trillion
3. 👑 HRE: $12.74 trillion
(GDP via IMF, 2026)
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@BowTiedMara Shot chaser etc polymarket.com/event/brazil-p…
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Runoff scenario Brazil 🇧🇷
🔵Flavio Bolsonaro — 49%
🔴Lula da Silva — 40.4%
Vetor/Arrow Poll
Português
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@Civixplorer Meloni might be the best candidate to lead. It would probably be good for Germany. Eastern France would be rescued.
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@Noahpinion Everyone I talk to who codes is having the time of their life vibe coding custom dashboards to monitor and control their armies of Claude Code instances
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Most people in the SF tech scene think AI agents will soon render them economically obsolete. The people at the AI labs know they're going to make a bunch of money but also think AI has a good chance of destroying humanity. Only a few people who basically worship AI are happy.
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion
Yep. But this time is different. When ChatGPT came out, everyone in SF was incredibly excited and upbeat. This time almost everyone is either anxious or hopeless.
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@DouthatNYT Anthropic got these concessions in their *first* contract.
Did Sama not learn anything about how DOW approaches negotiating the *second* contract?
GIF
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What are we even doing here?
x.com/sama/status/20…
Sam Altman@sama
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
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I feel like my job is going to end up just tending the data garden so everyone's AIs can query and analyze happily, traffic copping when different people's AIs have conflicting requests
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@venusdeotis @oconnor663 @bryan_caplan In a lot of cases where 95% of people have a POV they're not necessarily correct at an object level but there is often a Chestertonian reason why the proposed change may threaten load-bearing cultural norms and caution is actually very advisable, this being an excellent example
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@johnvmcdonnell @oconnor663 @bryan_caplan Be angry enough to leverage the effects of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, against the ignorant 95% & to push for narrative change, as if it were possible, even if you don't think it's practical.
Smart people aren't getting mad enough; are too sanguine about the status quo
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If any good idea is "politically impossible," ask yourself, "Who makes it impossible?"
And if you're going to be angry at anyone, be angry at them.
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@oconnor663 @bryan_caplan Yeah I mean to square the circle I do think it is worthwhile to make good opinions more popular it's just silly to be angry at people who think differently
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@johnvmcdonnell @bryan_caplan Honestly I think politics would be a lot healthier if most people's default framing was "our ideas are not popular (yet)" as opposed to "everyone loves our ideas, but [villains] are holding us back".
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Obviously this is very wasteful because a human needs to click "Launch Claude"
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So like I just vibe coded a dash board that magically finds the dozens of claude code tabs I have open and automatically matches them to their respective PRs and linear tickets. Linear tickets that don't have an instance appear in a queue with a button that says "Launch Claude"
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@AlanMCole I dunno I think the MQD makes sense as a doctrine but doesn't it seem like this is a cut and dry case where the statute clearly has no positive language allowing the president to unilaterally impose tariffs?
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@KelseyTuoc @teachthemx3 This is extremely cool, I have a two year old (also in Oakland) so I'll very much thinking about what we'll do when she's school age
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@johnvmcdonnell @teachthemx3 we started a microschool in Oakland. I teach a couple of classes there. Our advanced third grade history/literature course reads a historical novel a week including Little Women and Tom Sawyer. it's not nose to the grindstone though, I think the kids do ~2 hrs a day of work.
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If you look at the vertical alignment of mathematics, it’s easy to see how all of K-5 could be compressed into 2-3 years. For example, 2nd grade (in Texas) should compare and order numbers up to 1,200. Why stop there, then go to 100,000 in 3rd grade?
When my son was 3, he was very interested in place value. I didn’t say, “We’re only going to learn to 1,200 this year.” He understood that you can always add 1, so we went all the way to a hundred decillion.
Niels Hoven 🐮@NielsHoven
The worst part of K-12 mediocrity isn't 6th-8th grade math, it's K-5. eg: The main Common Core goals for 2nd grade math are: 1) Read numbers up to 1000 2) Add and subtract within 20 3) Count money 4) Tell time The worst part is that these goals have become a ceiling rather than floor
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@eigenrobot Seems like Butler should be higher no? At least by the same measure that Marx is high up
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i generated a completely impartial list of top 80 philosophers by influence and impact
of the women identified:
- de beauvoir comes in at 38
- arendt at 39
- weil at 76
- wollstonecraft at 79
but what does knowing "very much" entail here? i suppose its a philosophical question
Matt McManus@MattPolProf
You obviously dont know very much about philosophy then.
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@KelseyTuoc @teachthemx3 Wow what school are your kids in? Or are you home schooling?
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@teachthemx3 we let kids do math at their own pace and the fastest kid was ready for prealgebra by the end of second grade and took algebra in third and is now doing geometry. people really underestimate how often their kids are being told to tread water
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@robinhanson 2026 will be the year that it impacts employment and productivity
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"US, UK, Germany and Australia … firms report little impact of AI over the last 3 years, with over 80% of firms reporting no impact on either employment or productivity." nber.org/papers/w34836
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The 6th gen platform reportedly costs ~$70k per vehicle ($50k base + $20k custom fit & sensors). The cost has room to fall by 50% in the next 2 years (>$30k vehicle + $10k sensors).
Waymo currently does over 500,000 driverless rides per week, growing at 3x per year
reed@reed
today we’re starting full autonomous operations with the @waymo 6th gen platform
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