June 2026
(This is based on a talk I gave at the Oxford Union.)
Since this is apparently the future prime ministers' club, I'm going
to tell you about something it would be good if...
May 2026
How do you convert between wealth and income tax? If a government
imposes a wealth tax of 1%, what's the equivalent in income tax?
It's clear from the way most politicians...
March 2026
In the early 1970s disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now
people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of
three separate disasters that all hap...
June 2025
An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But
there are three different reasons people might not know something,
and they yield three very different ...
June 2025
An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But
there are three different reasons people might not know something,
and they yield three very different ...
i have had the strangest experience reading this: i assume its all fake/bots, even though in this case i know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real.
i think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very "it's so over/we're so back" extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots).
but the net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didnt a year or two ago.