Erin Fitz

A new paper from the BIS—the central bank of central banks—describes gold as a "monetary protest" reflecting eroding confidence in institutions and central banks, while Bitcoin "shares this impulse and adds a technological veneer." Meanwhile, central banks themselves have been buying gold at a historically record pace, and more financial institutions than ever before are embracing Bitcoin. What does it say when the very institutions that underpin the monetary system are themselves participating in a "monetary protest"? 🤔

On behalf of an entire discipline, I must ask "why?????"

Sam Altman admits “something’s clearly not working” with the AI money that has flooded the midterms — and he doesn’t expect Trump’s rebrand of the tech to improve his industry’s image with the public either. Listen to Decoded by POLITICO: politi.co/4j4i6Af

Hot take: From about GPT-5 onward, if humans and LLMs disagree in a data labeling task, when you look at the actual disagreeing cases, it's almost always that the LLM is right and the human(s) are wrong OR the humans also substantively disagree with each other

Interactions are generally not important in social science emilkirkegaard.com/p/interac…

Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations. (1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment. (2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users. (3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one. (4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper. (5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government. (6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms. As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.