Thomas Friedman: “The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The U.S. and China are the world’s A.I. superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.”
WSJ on why marathon running is booming: “More people are taking on 26.2-mile runs, thanks to squishy shoes, running groups and Gen Z athletes.”
FT: “My resolution for 2025 is simple: make reading fun again. Readers around the world seem to experience the same challenges in cycles — many of us struggled with brain fog in the Covid years, or plunged into escapist and The End Is Nigh post-pandemic books, according to taste. But for teenagers and adults alike, what people seem to need most today is to get back to reading as an act of pure pleasure. Instead of another worthy chore to be ticked off your endless to-do list, reading can be an indulgence, an act of discovery rather than drudgery. In November, I wrote to a friend who’d run aground with an ambitious project to read only biographies of world leaders: “Guilty pleasures are fine! Try a fun reading goal — sometimes you need the hot chocolate with marshmallows just as much as the beetroot-and-celery juice.””
Zhengdong: “Whether it’s Altman’s “Intelligence Age” or Amodei’s “compressed 21st century,” what gives them the confidence to make these predictions are capabilities. If scaling pre-training is flagging, a distinct new capability will pick up the slack. For example, reasoning promises to be orders of magnitude more compute efficient, so reaching the next level of performance won’t be prohibitively expensive. Or, agents may impress not because they are fundamentally smarter, but because we “unhobbled” them to their full potential.”
Arnold Kling: “What I notice is that the elites on the Republican side tend to earn a living as producers. They make things that other people want or need. In contrast, elites on the Democratic side include many people one may think of as parasites. They depend on producers for taxes or donations, but they do not produce what consumers want. They may even make a living by impeding production…Chances are you are a producer if you work with things or you work with people. The former includes agriculture, construction, transportation, or manufacturing. The latter includes restaurants, retail, business sales, child care, elder care, and health care.”
