TheGreySwan: “The real power question of the AI era is not “who owns the model.” It is who owns the spec…The firms that survive will not be the ones that execute faster. They will be the ones that move up to owning the specification i.e. the problem framing, the architectural intent, the criteria by which output is judged. In legal, consulting, and finance, the same transition is underway. The practices that define the framework sit above the practices that apply it. The analyst who writes the thesis in a form an AI can stress-test replaces the analyst who produces the narrative deck. The spec is not a document. It is a position in the value chain.”
Andrej Karpathy: “Something I’m finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it.”
Arthur Brooks: “One of the biggest mistakes that I think that we make in the new science of longevity is the notion that if we could actually take the death date out of our lives, that we would live happier, better lives. I think that’s wrong because you and I as economists understand the importance of scarcity. How scarcity actually gives you the ability to savor things. Scarcity is actually central to savoring, as a matter of fact.”
WSJ on how cornflakes got created (by mistake): “The Battle Creek Sanitarium, a world-renowned health spa in the eponymous Michigan city, drew fans of what today we’d call wellness culture. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg oversaw the facility, which preached exercise, fresh air and eating a healthy diet, which included dried and crumbled grains. Kellogg and his younger brother, W.K. Kellogg, were experimenting with various ways to cook wheatberries. In 1894, the pair accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat to stand, and it dried out. When W.K. returned, he put the wheat through rollers. Each berry came out as a single large, flat flake that crisped when baked. The junior Kellogg later applied that to corn—and changed breakfast forever. In 1906, he launched the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co.; today you know it as the cereal giant Kellogg.”
