Markets are competitive if and only if P = NP
Abstract:I prove that competitive market outcomes require computational intractability. If P = NP, firms can efficiently solve the collusion detection problem, identifying deviations from cooperative agreements in complex, noisy markets and thereby making collusion sustainable as an equilibrium. If P != NP, the collusion detection problem is computationally infeasible for markets satisfying a natural instance-hardness […]
Factories Are Just Rooms
I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing. Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year. It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics […]
America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are
1920s Los Angeles One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends […]
Best Simple System for Now
Table of Contents 3 Feb 2025 26 mins You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully. ‘We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in software development, between ‘perfectionism’ and ‘pragmatism’, but […]
Jamesob’s guide to running SOTA LLMs locally
Note: nothing in this README aside from the tables was written by AI. Have $2k burning a hole in your pocket and want some local, state-of-the-art machine intelligence? How about $40k? If Dario and Altman are giving you heartburn (they should be), read on to figure out how to run this new kind of computing […]
It Still Can’t Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)
I started keeping notes in December 2022, mostly to document why the panic was overblown. The notes turned into this. The quotes in orange boxes are real. You can look them up. The gray comments are paraphrased from a few thousand comment sections. You know the ones. You may have written some. I did. November […]
Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
Have you opened X or a tech news site lately? Then you are probably familiar, even exhausted by, posts like these: Do you want to hear a secret? This is marketing. The message is simple: AI will beat the smelly humans. It is faster, cheaper, tireless, and anyone who doubts this (usually the experts in […]
Valve open source the Steam Machine e-ink screen so you can make your own
While Valve will not be making and providing their own e-ink display for the Steam Machine, they have opened it up so anyone can now do it. Valve originally teased it with the first lot of reviewers that got their hands on it. All of it is available on their GitLab under the MIT license, […]
PostgreSQL and the OOM Killer: Why You Must Use Strict Memory Overcommit
Our team members built and operated five managed PostgreSQL services over the past 15 years. Across all of them, one configuration has remained constant: strict memory overcommit. In this blog post, we will explain how strict memory overcommit protects your database from catastrophic OOM (out of memory) kills. We will also share how a three-character […]
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas. Pushed by an unknown force as inexorable as gravity, screwworms moved north — ever moving, ever spreading, ever multiplying, ever destroying. No army ever advanced any more surely or […]