Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Trump’s Hormuz ransom: a lost war has turned into a $300 million‑a‑day payout as Trump pivots from “maximum pressure” to “how much cash flow do you need?” & this, of course, is just the first tranche: the commitment is to find a $300 billion solution for the reconstruction of Iran. Tehran has leveraged Trump’s war made in Washington into a remarkable resource windfall.

Th...

When every LLM can closely approximate the typical internet s***poster, the money flows not to the competitive model-builders but to those who can build systems that usefully digest your data to reproduce and improve your SOPs. Or so Satya Nadella claims…

If the appropriate metric is the ECI, and the top model’s edge over the pack really has shrunk from 26% to...

The Indispensable Newsletter #64, by Gautam Mukunda :: What look like “frictions” are often the safeguards that we really really need to save us when our typical abstraction layers catastrophically leak and fail: examples from corporate governance, companies trying to utliize MAMLMs, knowledge workers dealing with this cognition technology from the other side, and assessing the ...

Sixty Days to Peace, Zero Days to Breach: Trump’s Islamabad MOU’s ink has not even dried, and the Iranians are noting the failure of the US to live up to its day zero obligations…

Yes:

Helmuth Tromm: US & Iran Delay Kickoff to Talks as Lebanon Clashes Worsen <

From “murderous Machiavel” to patriot-diplomat: Ada Palmer rereads Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, dropping him back into his world of papal warlords, collapsing city-states, and patriots desperate to preserve the independence of his Firenze against a very malignant Fortuna. Machiavelli did not write The Prince to h...