Ciarán Murray

Chris Manning says Yann LeCun sees language as a low bandwidth communication channel compared to vision. But the gap between a chimp and a human wasn’t produced by superior eyes. What took off for humans was language. Not just for communication, but as a cognitive tool.

Let's be clear: Spain: enacts rent control -> no more homes Argentina: ends rent control -> tons of new homes Rent control is a better way to destroy cities than dropping bombs on them.

Prediction: Model providers (and any other compute-based business) will offer discounts on paying in stablecoins. This will be largely driven by the fact the fact there are no chargebacks, so cost of that fraud vector goes to 0.

Jeff Bezos on the exact moment he realized he would never be a great physicist: "I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I went to Princeton. I was a really good student, I got A-pluses on almost everything. I was in the honors physics track, which starts with 100 students and by quantum mechanics it's down to 30." Then came the homework problem: "I can't solve this partial differential equation. It's really, really hard. I've been studying with my roommate Joe, who was also really good at math. The two of us worked on this one problem for three hours and got nowhere." They decided to visit Yasantha, the smartest guy at Princeton: "He was Sri Lankan. In the Facebook, which was an actual paper book at that time, his name was three lines long. I guess in Sri Lanka when you do something good for the king, they give you an extra syllable on your name. The most humble, wonderful guy." Jeff continues: "We show him the problem. He stares at it for a while and says, 'Cosine.' I'm like, 'What do you mean?' He says, 'That's the answer.' I said, 'That's the answer?' He said, 'Yeah, let me show you.' He sits us down, writes out three pages of detailed algebra, everything crosses out, and the answer is cosine." Jeff asked if he solved it in his head: "He said, 'No, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem and I was able to map this problem onto that one. Then it was immediately obvious the answer was cosine.'" Jeff reflects: "That was an important moment for me. Because that was the very moment I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist."

Here's the question that haunts me as someone who helped create this category: if you built a prediction market on deaths of despair conditional on Kalshi and Polymarket scaling sports betting without guardrails — what would it say? That's the kind of question these tools were actually designed to answer.

I co-founded Augur, the first decentralized prediction market, and was founding CSO of Gnosis, the second. Polymarket still runs on Gnosis contracts. I'm glad prediction markets finally broke through. But I'm not going to pretend that what's being scaled right now is what we built these systems to do.

LAWMAKERS TO INTRODUCE BIPARTISAN BILL BANNING SPORTS BETS ON PREDICTION MARKETS SUCH AS POLYMARKET AND KALSHI: WSJ