ScienceIO has been acquired by Veradigm Together, we are going to build the intelligence provider for the future of healthcare.

Stylized depictions of Chinese Industrialization by Song Wenzhi

Aramco World has the most stunning cover design of any free publication by a state-owned national oil and gas corporation

One American idea that will long outlive the country itself is that of knowing by doing, 'know-how' as John Dewey would call it. The ultimate expression of the American way of life and its cool, hardened practicality.

the reserve currency of the united states explained by its largest holder

friends tossed into spacex SPV at 44b run by a florida cannibus entrepreneur that when his farms went underwater sold the entire block without consents and fled the US. now they get to hire k&e and get money in 6-12 months. that's not widely different from just owning the ipo

the mistake all of you are making is believing that these 22 layer KAFD-domiciled SPVs are actually supposed to track the underlying. they're like a tribute band, not an equity instrumental, the thing you're buying is the right to participate in the dream together, nothing more

pretty strong evidence the stagnation is over is that people believe in secret societies again. a world in which secret societies exist is a society where things actually happen that seem beyond the reach of any single individual. bullish.

theres all these weird ways in which the national laboratory is the final form of the j-edgar-hoover-occupied-american-power, vaguely western (what exactly was mccarthy doing at SFI), clearly a part of the state but still run by grey suited great men that fight the langley crowd

this is all very much a foregone conclusion now, and everyone knows it (minority nationalization by christmas, some kind of license system) but could have all easily been avoided. it just required understanding that technology is a check to the state and could have thrown elbows

when we look back on the pre-nationalization era fondly, i think we'll realize the labs so explicitly modeling themselves after the manhattan project was a world historic misstep. it left the door open. altman should be sinister and rich, the american public understands this

not to do the linguistic determinism bit- but it's vastly easier to imagine nationalizing a "lab" than it is a "corporation" we already understand the "national laboratory" as a vaguely confusing but american state function- but a national corporation is very soviet, not good

(Merch)ant Banking.

Interesting.

I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (projects.dev) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: bookofkells.vercel.app. I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.

@EximBankUS doing incredible work lately!

No Theories but in Companies; No Companies but through Sovereignty

incredibly odd to me that all of you have accepted a kind of intelligence wahhabism inclusive of its own canonical hadith (situational awareness) but are unwilling to carry it to its natural conclusion of what happens when any of the promised world to come becomes manifest

the fundamental question of the next century is are we living in 1700s England (the state guarantees security, but abdicates other state functions to enterprise) or are we living in buyid era persia (contested sovereigns guarantee security and collect the tax via concession)

its kind of the Christ vs saints thing right- there are descriptive realities so essential to the unfolding of creation that even describing them, even being willing to die for them, places an ounce of divinity previously only accessible in the literal son of God within you