'I wish the plan trusting had never come to me. I wish none of this would have happened.' 'So do all who live to trust such plans. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is how to trust the plans that have been given to us.'

You have exactly 24 hours after a new model is released to enjoy max performance wonderland before it’s degraded and you’re back in the slopmines.

When you think about it, isn’t it sort of crazy that the continents drift over time, and used to be joined together as a single landmass around 200 million years ago? What’s even crazier is that this only became consensus in the late 1960s. For the decades leading up to then, it was dismissed by most geologists, and called “Germanic pseudo-science”. It “takes considerable liberties with our globe” wrote one leading geologist. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” A brilliant new Works in Progress article by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (@acesounderglass) explains how the theory all came together and what convinced the skeptics. worksinprogress.co/issue/on-… Continental drift was proposed multiple times over history, most famously by Alfred Wegener, who first laid out the theory in 1912 and compiled several lines of evidence: • the coastlines of South America and Africa fitting together • matching geological formations on either side of the Atlantic • glaciers on continents now too warm or too far from the poles to have had ice • fossils of the same species lining up across separate continents but not within them Wegener’s research was dismissed by many experts in part because Wegener did not have a background in geology, though it carried more traction in Europe than America. It gained steam again during the Cold War, from work funded by the US Navy to improve submarine navigation, which led to its rediscovery and rapid acceptance. Now, it is geology’s ‘theory of everything’, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, and even geological records of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is On the origin of continents. Read it here! worksinprogress.co/issue/on-…

It's a very grim pronouncement, but you have to concede this is a very funny line from Peter Hargreaves

Join us in San Francisco.

NEW: The big story is not Chinese EVs everywhere —but Chinese EV factories everywhere. And its not just Chinese firms going out. Our CM-FDI database tracks every foreign Solar, Wind, EV and battery manufacturing plant built in 21st century. cmfdi.netzeropolicylab.com

10 minutes of TikTok was enough to impair people’s ability to remember and carry out intentions. Twitter and YouTube didn’t show the same decline. Rapid context-switching may be where most of cognitive cost is.

How are prices determined? While I slept, Claude made me "History of economic thought since Aristotle." I asked it to use my favourite textbook (Blaug, Economic Theory in retrospect). The result will astonish of you. Even top economists here will learn something, I promise.

Kasurian is coming to San Francisco on Saturday, October 10! Society members are invited to join us at the Alsephina salon, our Bay Area chapter. Spots are limited. Subscribe and RSVP.

Took a 200-year-old French map of Istanbul and made it interactive Every label shown on the map in French, Ottoman and modern Turkish, with English translations By far the most satisfying thing I've built with AI. Used Opus 5.5 👉 bosphore-1819.vercel.app

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron. Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence. Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons. Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist. After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence. New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today? worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…

The collapse of the height of bourgeois ideals - a shared commons, open markets, a globalising world - especially at the hands of the technological shredding of social fabrics, may incidentally lead to a TFR rebound as relationships become one of the few ways to survive. And you want as many non-intermediated relationships as possible - i.e. bound by blood, not circumstance or mutual gain. The state and corporation can no longer play mommy and daddy. The family will once again find its sociopolitical niche.

Kasurian.

Kasurian.

The primary mechanism of AI saving Western political economy will be China doing a robotics revolution it exports to the West at reasonable and affordable prices, while subsidizing the West out of politeness. In other words, a continuation of all current trends and systems.

We’re going in

Opting out wasn’t an option in Meiji and won’t be here. Only the state can undertake a whole of society leap forwards—and perhaps in the process rejuvenate itself.

Anyone working on Mycelium-inspired biocomputing?