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Joined July 2010
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New Essay
I spent many weekends this year on automated theorem proving with AI + Lean, only for the Bitter Lesson to reign supreme. Some reflections on the OpenAI Math Repo and the short, one-summer window of human-AI collaboration in mathematics.
essays.johnloeber.com/p/34-b…
On biotech and US-China competition, there will be a humbling moment in the US when the wealthiest people quietly start going to China for cutting-edge treatments. When the Saudi Floor at MGH moves to Shanghai. "They can cure this disease and we can't" impresses people in a way that GDP stats don't. Maybe then there will finally be some introspection here about exactly what we're getting wrong at the regulatory level.
In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post.
kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
People keep asking for “more basic research”, for the gov to fund moonshots via academia
but it must be acknowledged that thanks to the amazing power of american financial markets, we can identify & finance the moonshots of the most promising 20somethings with a billion dollars
Really good interview with Peter Thiel from a few weeks back. This might be among his very best: most nuanced and insightful youtube.com/watch?v=B7yl7fEH…
The dirty secret of SAAS is that subscription pricing allows you to keep charging customers who aren't really using the product.
The downside of this is that when your subscriptions finally churn, it's a *lagging indicator* of your business failing.
I strongly suspect that there are many, many "dead men walking" now in SAAS, both AI-native and traditional: businesses where the financials may still look fine -- just a quarter or two of stagnant growth, margins are still great, maybe there's an AI narrative going forward, etc. but the *product* is losing utilization and they will lose every single customer to {{AI-native competitor, possibly the big labs themselves}} as the customers encounter those solutions. Those customers become dormant users, but the subscriptions still run for the while.
The actual revenue churn only occurs months or quarters later when the question of "is anyone still using this? do we need to keep paying for this?" is finally answered with a "no" rather than an "i'm not sure".
On some level, you can measure our increasing economic and industrial sophistication by Lego sets
The base thing — injection-molded plastic bricks — has existed for nearly 80 years.
But the sets today are vastly more sophisticated than the ones of the past. They have way more bricks. The bricks are much more detailed, and some pieces have much finer textures. The printing on them is also far more detailed, more colorful, and more durable today.
At every point in time, these Lego pieces reflect the frontier of what you can do in terms of small injection-molded plastics at a cost of about 10 cents/piece, less margin. That makes this a neat and accessible manufacturing frontier to track.
The base thing is the same. But all the improvements reflect better industrial machinery, discovery of better processes, and other advances in plastics manufacturing.
the reason why i think this is interesting or noteworthy is because in most other areas of our industrial economy, the actual thing being manufactured has changed meaningfully over time!
in music, vinyl gave way to tape decks, to cd players, to mp3s, to streaming. totally different
in household appliances, everything has bluetooth and countless little motors now
cars today are internally nothing like cars of the past
and so forth. but there are some counterexamples where the thing today is still like the thing of the past, just richer, better, and in much greater resolution
Someone wrote that the future of Europe resembles the Irish Troubles -- constant, low-grade, semi-militarized violence
Watching the French "student protests" over past weeks suggests to me that the state is in some sense at war against forces it (willingly?) does not understand
I ran into Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans in November 2019 at a party in San Francisco.
It was very surprising. Imagine you’re in a group of 50 or so people and then you turn to your left and there she is. Doing the deep husky voice and everything. Double take. She’s not in jail? Triple take. “This is my fiance Billy” — “Hey what’s up” She has a boyfriend? Did he not hear about Theranos? I guess the San Francisco dating market is what it is. I was confused by Billy. Talking to him, and, like, what is he doing here? This is not a tech person?
Anyway. I have never before seen a movie where I have personally met the leading cast. And I was not prepared for the level of surprise and weirdness in seeing their faces — especially Billy, whom I had not thought about in seven years — on the big screen, like “wait a second, i’ve met these fucking people” with their voices and mannerisms and all. Very uncanny
Old: you prompt the agent
New: the agent prompts you
most workflows will move to the latter. the person usually does not have the mindset or vocabulary to proactively ask the right questions. the agent must do the useful work in the background, and only ask for approval
Lately I’ve been putting on sunscreen every morning. I do it when I’ve just rolled out of bed, standing in front of the mirror still eyes-closed
I’ve never really worn sunscreen before, except when I was a child on ski trips
and it has this very distinctive smell that is rich in memory, so every morning while I’m still half-dreaming, my mind is taken to mountaintops now far away
Just realized "Calls" exists here
Has anyone ever used this? I have never clicked this before in my life
Side comment on Valar/Day One: it's weird how Quinn Emanuel has entered business cult status. It's no longer "I'm suing you" but "I'm calling Quinn Emanuel!"
There are lots of strong litigation firms that bill a fraction of what Quinn does. And obviously Quinn has some variance, given the 1000+ attorneys on staff.
I suspect a big part of this is Elon hiring Alex Spiro for all his most high-profile disputes (Tesla, Twitter, etc.) over the last few years.
Updating
Quick thought: it's more important than ever to be updating your views all the time.
Around 2020, I noticed that many Westerners' views on China seemed out-of-date. I was hearing what basically were old memes about Chinese manufacturing, politics, etc. 2010-era views.
There were two dynamics at work:
(1) A lot of Westerners had started leaving China a few years prior, so there was less updated information filtering through to the West -- just slower news in person-to-person contact seemed to make a big difference
(2) A lot of people seemed to have formed their views of China at some point, and then let them stick. Maybe they formed those views in 2000, 2005, or 2010. And then they just stay. The act of someone updating their views actually seemed to be rare -- never gradual over time, but a one-time significant update, maybe triggered by some event or impactful piece of news.
Lots of topics are like this! Updating is rare and doesn't come easily to people! Internal models of reality therefore drift away from actual reality over time.
And it's especially important now given AI: for example, I'm hearing lots of people talk about hallucinations, AI being bad at math, or other GPT-4 era concerns.
Even views that are one year out of date can now be severely divorced from reality, and greatly to your disadvantage.
Now more so than ever, you basically have to constantly interrogate your views and check that you're on the frontier. Constant vigilance loop.