James Cham

Dan Shipper has a terrific note on another platform about how he’s using agents to process all of the newsletters he gets, predicting the end of newsletters. But I wonder what @dsquareddigest.bsky.social would suggest...

Still thinking about the @adapalmer.bsky.social talk she gave this weekend on how historians and science fiction writers have been wrong about how the world ends; and how we actually can save the world again. Perhaps the most encouraging call to action I’ve seen all year.

This project was a multi-year collaboration with Samuel Sokota, Hengyuan Hu, Zhiyuan Fan, Zico Kolter, and over which time we found numerous tricks that allowed us to succeed despite being limited to academic levels of compute.

We used to ask whether the models were so capable that they could do better than markets. But now that we’re about to face a world of varied AI agents, the question is whether market design can manage the agents!

X is getting so good at its recommendations that I definitely like it puts me into a very specific bubble.

There’s a terrific @add-hawk.bsky.social paper meditating on how apparently competitive games can actually be exercises in cooperation. And it reminds me that I need to think more about explicitly cooperative games like Spirit Island. philpapers.org/archive/NGUC...

I got to chat with Sam Anderson while I was writing, and he gave me the most important advice I got: which was to trust your reader, because they're smart, they're generous, and they want to be there.

Engineer: The cup is twice as large as it needs to be to hold the correct fluid volume.

Will @mattbarrows.bsky.social bark at me if I mention that we've got more than enough fodder to do one more 49ers Emergency Podcast (yes, that should've been the name of the show) later today? Answer: Yes, he will.

Still waiting for a reliable way for companies and government agencies to broadcast new information. Perhaps someone could create a Reliably Sourced Syndicator?

My favorite comic book quote, even more relevant right now!

Always worth asking who benefits?

Very curious what @dsquareddigest.bsky.social thinks about the Atlantic piece on what ailed Britain... www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

There is value in being able to bear the stink of AI sheen to uncover actual insights.

Jasmine Sun has an interview with Labatut that seems be begging for at least a blog post by @beenwrekt.bsky.social if not a live conversation with him! youtu.be/C8rLRIhDS-Y?...

Are WhatsApp groups are more powerful than political parties? From David Runciman: > ...the MPs talked about their WhatsApp group as their primary focus of loyalty...what the group could and couldn't bear, would the group move together...one of the things that is structuring loyalty in politics

The terrible moment you realize an episode of a favored podcast is actually an advertorial.

It is incredibly stupid that as a culture we have decided to make it difficult for businesspeople to keep honest diaries.

Everyone's somebody's edge case!

Now this is an amazing story begging for a @dsquareddigest.bsky.social post: www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/would-it-m...

Every Frame a Painting's Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos seem to be regularly releasing their excellent video essays again (in partnership with Criterion). The latest installment is on The Visual Comedy of Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. [kottke.org]

I wrote a strategic map of four types of AI business. One example of type 3: a developer built a bespoke court submission tool in a single afternoon, using no AI at runtime. Hours of manual work done in minutes. This is what AI has done to the economics of custom software. vaughntan.org/ai4ways

joepernice.substack.com/p/reposting-... A song by Joe Pernice (Skud Mountain Boys) that directly contributed to my deciding to try to quit drinking

Every system that was regulated, either explicitly or implicitly, by the fact that they were effortful for humans (letters of recommendation, government filings, essays, or, as this paper finds, lawsuits) will break under a wave of AI.

Neuromuncher, that should be. Weekly podcast wherein I describe my favorite snacks and local snackeries.

I ask - why don't we have mental capacity measures for managers like we know the physical capacity of manual workers? backofmind.substack.com/p/the-most-i...

Yes it is thematically appropriate to mute the word "antimemetics"

Tell me again what solutions Stafford Beer would have suggested for the current cybernetic info-flow nightmare we are in the middle of? (Looking at @dsquareddigest.bsky.social ...)

A fascinating example of how disastrously wrong the establishment can be: www.nytimes.com/1963/09/28/a...

human in the loop (interactive mode) vs human on the loop (manager mode) vs human out of the loop (escaping blame and avoiding responsibility for your LLM's actions mode)

Kind of like asking Michael Jordan for advice on succeeding at basketball!

AI gives us a chance to run a massive study to figure out which signals: - have quality because they have value vs. - have quality because they just seem scarce!

This is really very good and reminds me yet again of how we need to start pulling together an Actual Political Economy of AI.

In my day to day work, there is a race between machine-generated vs voice-generated text. I hope voice typing wins!

remember that the most important VC is version control!

What media companies you've unsubscribed from is the real signal.

I would like a social network in which you had to show what media companies you subscribed to (and for how long).

What folks say is almost as interesting as what they don’t say

Now that Twitter is for the techno-right, Bluesky for progressives, and Threads for wannabe Instagram influencers, what social media platform is for old fashioned media?

An evergreen quote.

one problem with game theory is that it assumes that your side is actually not stupid

Deception, metadeception and paradeception.

tell me the story about pandora’s box again?

My favorite conspiracy theories are the ones that I live long enough to find out were actually true! Revealed after 50 years, Nixon was being spied on by chairman of the Joint Chiefs. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.