NYTimes: ““When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.” Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor and writer who is based in Idaho, posted that thought last year. I saw it [recently] and immediately forwarded it to some of my close friends with a note that said that this sentence captures our political moment. It helps describe America’s moral divide…The political sphere, according to [Carl] Schmitt, is distinct from the personal sphere, and it has its own distinct contrasts. “Let us assume,” Schmitt wrote, “that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable.” Politics, however, has “its own ultimate distinctions.” In that realm, “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
Jeffrey Emanuel: “At a high level, NVIDIA faces an unprecedented convergence of competitive threats that make its premium valuation increasingly difficult to justify at 20x forward sales and 75% gross margins. The company’s supposed moats in hardware, software, and efficiency are all showing concerning cracks. The whole world— thousands of the smartest people on the planet, backed by untold billions of dollars of capital resources— are trying to assail them from every angle.”
Andrej Karpathy: “Projects like OpenAI’s Operator are to the digital world as Humanoid robots are to the physical world…People on my TL are saying 2025 is the year of agents. Personally I think 2025-2035 is the decade of agents. I feel a huge amount of work across the board to make it actually work. But it *should* work. Today, Operator can find you lunch on DoorDash or check a hotel etc, sometimes and maybe. Tomorrow, you’ll spin up organizations of Operators for long-running tasks of your choice (eg running a whole company). You could be a kind of CEO monitoring 10 of them at once, maybe dropping in to the trenches sometimes to unblock something. And things will get pretty interesting.”
WSJ: “Parlays, the tough-to-win multipart wagers with tantalizing payouts, are bringing in casual and newbie gamblers, and betting companies are making a killing…A single sports bet typically offers relatively low payouts with sportsbook-assigned odds that are tough, but not impossible…Bettors can also string together additional wagers into a “parlay,” multipart gambles that have become popular in American sports betting. Parlay bets can make for tantalizingly high payouts as the bets pile up…but the cumulative odds get longer with each bet, because bettors have to win them all to get paid. Here, the final parlay probability was a fraction of a percent.”
Steven Sinofsky: “The next Cisco for AI is waiting to be created, I’m sure. If that doesn’t happen then it could also be like browsers ended up which is a big company (or three) will just bundle it for everyone to use. Either way, the commoditization step is upon is.“
