2025-12-20 04:32:28
An excellent book, the best I know of on this region. Here is one bit:
The first printing press in Central Asia was established in Tashkent in 1870…
I had not understood how much Xinjiang (“East Turkestan”), prior to its absorption into newly communist China, fell under the sway of Soviet influence.
I had not known how much the central Asian republics had explicit “let’s slow down rural migration into the cities” policies during Soviet times.
The book is interesting throughout, recommended.
The post *Central Asia*, by Adeeb Khalid appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-12-20 00:21:17
1. The negativity crisis of AI ethics.
2. Vitalik and governance experiments and culture.
3. Stripe runs an RCT on capital markets and lending.
4. “For the first time, an AI model (GPT-5) autonomously solved an open math problem submitted to our benchmarking project IMProofBench, with a complete, correct proof, without human hints or intervention.” Link here, it is amazing how many smart or accomplished people will deny this is possible.
5. Developments in cognitive dissonance (New Yorker).
6. Amia Srinivasan in LRB on psychoanalysis.
7. The influence of Terence Malick.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-12-19 20:17:53
Great little video. Winner of the Foresight Institute’s $10,000 prize for Existential Hope. Go Bryan Johnson!
The post Voices From 2099 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-12-19 16:50:20
Unbelievable progress that even I underestimated! Gemini 3 Flash has practically beaten ARC-AGI-1 [an AI evaluation] at cost/score parity! It achieved the same score at more than 500x lower cost than the o3 model from a year ago & 6x lower than the just-released GPT-5.2!
Here is the link.
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2025-12-19 13:46:04
Yet not a word is wasted. It sounds paradoxical, but Proust is economical with his prose. He is simply trying to describe things that are extremely fine-grained and high-dimensional, and that takes many words. He is trying to pin down things that have never been pinned down before. And it turns out you can, indeed, write 100 pages about the experience of falling asleep, and find all kinds of richness in that experience.
And this:
…, a clear-sightedness on human vanity and a total willingness to embarrass himself. There are passages in the Albertine sections which are shocking – such as the extended stretch, around 50 pages long, in which he describes watching her sleep — and, reading them, you start to understand that this was written by a dying man who did not care about anything apart from telling the whole truth in as merciless way as possible.
Third, hypotaxis in sentences. The opposite of hypotaxis is parataxis, which you often find in Hemingway, as in: “The rain stopped and the crowd went away and the square was empty.” Each item here is side by side, simple, clean. The Bible often uses such types of sentences: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”.
Hypotaxis, by contrast, describes sentences with many subordinate clauses, like nesting dolls.
Nabeel says In Search of Lost Time is now his favorite novel.
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2025-12-19 03:43:45
At current second-hand market prices, says a new report, Japan’s “hidden asset” in terms of national reserves of things — defined as potentially resellable household objects that have lain unused for over a year — is worth around $580bn.
The dust-gathering contents of Japan’s cupboards, attics and garages, by that estimate, are worth roughly the same as the combined market capitalisation of the country’s most globally known corporate names: Toyota, Sony and SoftBank.
That’s an impressive stash, equivalent to roughly $4,600 for every person in Japan…
Over the past few years, Japan has become a uniquely attractive global magnet for buyers of second-hand goods — from Hermès bags, Rolexes and limited edition Nike Airs to Pokémon trading cards, vintage video games, golf clubs, fishing rods and rare Licca dolls. An increasingly powerful appeal for the tens of millions of visitors the country now draws annually is not just the traditional shopping, but the vibrant, over-the-counter trade in used items.
The aging of Japan, the fastidiousness of many Japanese, and the cheap yen are two factors behind these developments. Here is more from Leo Lewis at the FT.
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