#Economist #news article from January 14th on #Milei and #politics in #Argentina. “A closer look at inflation numbers suggests that, despite smaller price rises, most Argentines are not yet better off than they were a year ago. (...) The economic gloom could hobble Mr Milei’s reform efforts. The country still maintains strict currency controls to prop up the wobbly peso. Mr Milei has vowed to ease these restrictions and let the currency float. But first he wants to negotiate a loan with the IMF, a condition of which will probably be a new set of reforms. For now, Mr Milei remains popular: nearly half of Argentines support him, according to a recent survey by AtlasIntel, a pollster, even though just one in five rates the economy as “good”.”
#news on “Startup #Castelion” raising US$100M to build hypersonic #weaponry in the #USA, founded and half-staffed by ex-SpaceX employees.
#video #interview with #Palmer-Luckey by Jim Gash, the president of Pepperdine; Luckey wears a NERV jacket (from Evangelion) and describes himself as “a propagandist” and says he’ll “twist the truth”. Really interesting insights about the #history of Oculus, like fixing geometric distortion and chromatic aberration in software instead of optics. Says he’s “still extremely bitter” about his ouster from Meta. #weaponry #Anduril
#video of #pmarca saying it’s “morning again” in #USA #politics due to #Trump, 74 minutes. I didn’t realize Al Gore sponsored the legislation that created NSFNET; I thought his advocacy started with the com-priv era.
He mentions the end of Chevron deference, which he argues means that executive agencies should abandon their quasi-legislative functions. He also questions the idea of “independent agencies” in the executive branch, like the FTC and NRC. The interviewer, the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, argues that the CFPB's director not being fireable by the president is “unconstitutional on the face of it”, prefiguring the Slaughter verdict (I’m writing these notes in 02026).
Cites #Yarvin approvingly at 25'54" saying that we’re 80 years into FDR’s personal monarchy.
Also mentions #Elmu has been “living at” Mar-a-Lago.
Also mentions the #history of Nixon’s “Project Independence”, which I hadn’t heard of, to build 1000 #nuclear #energy power stations in the US, which turns out to be at best a very incomplete description of Project Independence.
Describes #Anduril’s original business plan as “We have to invest in this company, and his business plan is to hunt Mexicans at the southern border in 2016. And we’re just like, oh, God, we just basically have a heart attack.” So Andreessen Horowitz didn’t invest, and Trump didn’t want Anduril to do it, so they switched to military systems, which became accepted in Silicon Valley with the tragedy in #Ukraine.
Robinson claims that the US’s “only sustainable advantage over the Chinese is going to be technological innovation”, since they’re more numerous and richer, which doesn't make sense to me — how are they richer if they’re dumber, as he’s implying? Pmarca doesn’t disagree, citing the Pentagon’s new COO, Steve Feinberg, as someone who can make this happen.
At 56'40" he says the Ukrainian sea drones are built out of commercial jetskis.
At 60'40" pmarca makes the very reasonable points that productivity growth in the US has been low since about 01970, and that low growth creates zero-sum economics, which creates zero-sum politics, “where the only way for anybody to get anything is to take it away from somebody else.”
Andrej #Karpathy reports Jiayi Pan (@jiayi_pirate) has replicated the #DeepSeek #neural-networks training approach through RL finetuning of a base model, showing an example of “the CountDown game”
Jiayi Pan’s replication of the #DeepSeek #neural-networks training approach through RL finetuning of the Qwen2.5 base model. “Clean, accessible reproduction of DeepSeek R1-Zero”
#USA #politics #news in the WSJ about Tulsi #Gabbard and the #Science-of-Identity Foundation and its ties to the QI Group and its pyramid schemes. #crime
#Economist on Tulsi #Gabbard’s life history including the #Science-of-Identity Foundation. #USA #politics
#Economist #news summary of the #DeepSeek controversy today
New Yorker #news article about #Trump’s history and new expansionist policy. #history #USA #politics