On Grindslop
Notes on founder hagiography and aristocratic virtue
LifePhilosophy
Minutes.
Long-form essays on walking, craftsmanship, and observations on life.
Recent essays
30 of 30Black Sun (الشمس السوداء)
The mashḥūf cut low and silent through the water.
The Cardamom Game
The Cardamom Game
Against Cynicism
I first became an addict at nineteen.
On the Political Economy of Language Models
The political impact of the acceleration of a language model seems oddly under-discussed to me.
No "New Deal" for OpenAI
OpenAI published a policy brief today.
A Subpoena for The Devil
On a Tuesday evening earlier this year at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, a man stormed the stage from the second row and announced that he had a subpoena for Sam Altman.
The Merchant in the Statehouse
A friend takes me to the Chapel of the Royal Hospital Chelsea for Matins on a Sunday in cold and rainy January.
The Pyramid and the Tomb
There is a Bernini sculpture in the far left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
Reflections on Norway
I spent a month in Norway last summer.
Civis Romanus Sum
It is 70 BC.
To Name The Beasts
It is 1879.
Jump Ball
My father, God bless him, pushed me through ten years of recreational basketball as a child.
On the Garden (against Citrini)
In 1661, André Le Nôtre completed the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet, the French finance minister. The gardens were so spectacular that Louis XIV, upon visiting, had Fouquet arrested on embezzlement charges that historians now consider largely…
Reflections on Oman
I spent 10 days in Oman in December.
Against Taste
Taste arrived quietly, somewhere over the last few months.
Nobody Walks to Canterbury
It is 1538.
Tool Shaped Objects
In 1711, a toolmaker in Kyoto named Chiyozuru Korehide began forging kanna blades for the carpenters building the temples at Higashi Hongan-ji.
Rented Virtue
Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi
End Game Play
It is 1985.
Patient Capital Will Eat the World
Venture capital has become a very, very big asset class.
Grok, show me the first man without sin.
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg was playing ghost hunter.
the decline and fall of the american technology industry
lawyers, guns, money, and the collapse of the 128 corridor
Burn Your Oracles
Burn Your Oracles
“Shock Jockey Capitalism”
It has been only 76 days since a respectable venture capitalist went on 20VC to declare that the old standard, going from $1M to $3M to $9M, was no longer “interesting” to him.
You Can Instrument Capabilities, Not Competence
For many that have never worked in a scaled organization, the question of how quickly AI can diffuse across the real economy is easy: overnight.
mistakes of measurement in new media and investing
Venture is a game of outliers.
Investing and the Media Business
On "New Media"
7 Summers in the First Scaling Age
reflections on ai progress
Decision Tolerance
Decision Tolerance