Nikita S

Italy innovated on the model far before the UK. During the Renaissance, the Catholic Church allowed secular brokers under Monte di Pietà (accumulation of piety). The monti were municipally chartered, charitable pawnshops aimed at ameliorating the condition of the poor. Even the Medicis offered money to Florence for its monti.

Almost finished with the biography of William Booth, founder of Salvation Army. His *only* job before becoming a preacher was working at pawn shops as a teen. There were as many pawn shops in 1800s England as pubs. The Salvation Army innovation was tying pawn brokering to faith.

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

@morgancheatham @ShivdevRao @AbridgeHQ Shiv showed me it’s possible to be the GOAT, have the best taste in horror films, and deeply kind at the same time 🧡🧡

i’ll never forget the day a skateboarding, beats-dropping cardiologist pitched me on a consumer healthcare AI play back in 2019. it’s been a privilege to work with @ShivdevRao and the remarkable @AbridgeHQ team since the Series A. at abridge, you will find a uniquely talented team that thinks like scientists, builds like engineers, and cares like clinicians. abridge has all the makings of a generational company. as my partner @jimihendrixlive often remarks, moments for reflection are far too rare, and reflecting on this company’s extraordinary trajectory, it’s clear they’re just getting started. if your intention is to reimagine healthcare in the era of AI, there is no better place to do the most important work of your career!

@tylerangert Proud Testflighter, proud friend!!!

we're working on a new photo search engine called Angles. it's focused on doing one thing well: finding photos + videos by visual similarity. here is raw, unedited footage of me going through my 80,000 photo camera roll *in realtime* with text-to-image search, image-to-image search, "find similar" inside of a photo, and "live search" with the camera. all done with local models and completely private. auto-growing albums coming soon :-) Angles has been exceptionally useful for my friends who do creative work. when words fail to describe what you are looking for, you can simply tap on any asset and instantly see everything else like it across your entire library. we're in early beta - if you want access please send a DM to @patinasystems with your testflight email! i have spots available for another 50 people

@rSanti97 @dagsen Yay! Congratulations Santi. Thrilled for you and the Anthropic team

Some professional news: I'm joining Anthropic's editorial team! I'll be leading the team's work on economics and policy, and working closely with the Anthropic Institute (about which more here: x.com/AnthropicAI/st…). Dramatic AI progress is coming in the next two years, and researchers+policymakers+the public alike will need the best information available about that shift. It's a big new challenge, and I can’t wait to get started. [Some important housekeeping: I’ll keep running Statecraft at @IFP as a Nonresident Senior Fellow! And will remain on the board at Recoding America/ as a journalist-in-residence at @johnshopkins School of Government and Policy. I start at Anthropic in a few weeks.] The move from frontier think tank to frontier lab is bittersweet. I’ve been at IFP for three years, and it’s been the most formative professional experience of my life. In a short period of time, IFP has become one of the most effective institutions in DC, generating a truly shocking amount of counterfactual policy impact (not all of it public). Being on this team has permanently raised my ambitions. I'm very grateful.

TIL PETA and its founders were some of the earliest vaccine skeptics

@sjsweett That’s the simplest defense but if a state relies on its citizens losing money on parlay bets to pay for healthcare, roads, and schools, the incentive is actually to keep people gambling for a balanced budget Literally the opposite of promoting a healthy, productive society

@singareddynm Isn’t that the point of taxes? To discourage whatever is being taxed?

2026-2027 state budgets are increasingly being funded by “sin taxes”. In deficit, states like Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio have nearly doubled taxes on vapes, nicotine, and (sports) betting per wager We’ve clearly lost our way, picking vices over productivity

Just waiting for the fitness girlies to pivot into chess

There’s a massive opportunity for AI to completely leapfrog in healthcare. In Kenya, mobile finance emerged because there was no traditional banking system to work around or through. Medicaid's infrastructure is so dated that it effectively functions like "no infrastructure" for the people trying to use it most - many of whom are mobile-first today. Great chat with @singareddynm of @hifortunahealth and @flottobrasil of @CedarNY about what could emerge when you leapfrog the broken system entirely and build something better with AI. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rai…

The military is known for seeding modern computing… but little known for its concerted projects in user experience and human-centered design

@soontechnology @RainmakerCorp yesss @dagsen

Introducing: Soon. A new media company covering the machines, minds, and subcultures of tech's new frontier. Here's a preview of what's to come. Our first documentary, featuring never-before-seen access to @RainmakerCorp's weather modification tech, drops Friday.

In prediction markets, it’s not about winning the future because no one controls outcomes… but someone can be less wrong than someone else. Participation is a thin form of agency to position yourself correctly.

I find this to be remarkably similar to the popularity of prediction markets. Players find themselves without agency AND their institutions don’t seem to have a monopoly on forecasting and shaping the future either: the future becomes something you trade on, not build toward.

Whenever the “rules” of economic organization change, we create parallel games to make sense of them. Chess in Persia trained hierarchy and bureaucratic planning; card games mirrored probability, credit, and insurance; and poker emerged with 19th-century frontier speculation and weak regulations

In the 1950s, AT&T Bell Labs sent technicians to 10 months of humanist education at UPenn (to instill liberal democratic values). IBM taught ethics and public speaking. Tech today promotes empty and prosaic culture of 996, founder mode, etc. Imagine if we more seriously experimented with educating the “organizational man”

Upon further reading… 58.8% of homes in low-income countries have soil, palm, or thatch floors and walls. Cheap concrete flooring - instead of the billions we spend in economic aid - would have a massive ROI on sustainability improving health and economic growth.

I am so serious that there remain many ways to improve the world that are low cost, low hanging fruit. See Mexico and cement:

Whenever I start to believe the world is ugly, meaningless, trite, etc I think of what Rilke wrote to Kappus: "If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches"