2025-12-21
love is all
Owl Posting interviews the founders of Polyphron, a tissue engineering startup aiming to produce tissue grafts for organ repair. As Abhishaike mentions, this is wild because tissue engineering has always been something described as “decades away”. The parallels to oogenesis are interesting, because there the cells being produced with the patient’s own DNA is essential, and although it doesn’t seem they what they plan to do this, it implies that if they did, would be no need for any immunosuppression. Anyway, there’s an interesting aside where they speculate that biotech will be increasingly build around trade secrets and process moats due to competition and cheap manufacturing from China. This reminds me of the recent Asterisk article arguing that innovation stagnation is due to something else besides a lack of new ideas. It occurs to me that in the same way that Netflix is actually competing with Youtube, substitutability means that if your innovative product opens up an entirely new category, your apparently blue ocean will soon be filled by competition from apparently unrelated products which patent law is unsuited to protect you from. Historically, by the time those who could take advantage of these new opportunities found out about them, the original innovator would have already developed many of these substitutes themselves as they expanded from a local to global concern, as well as moats around branding, supplier relationships, and infrastructure assets, buttressing them from competition. Because of ecommerce and social media, nowadays these same innovations immediately become global products, but your margin immediately becomes everyone else’s opportunity, producing dark forest dynamics.
Ezra Klein interviews Bernie Sanders and Ruben Gallago on their visions for winning the working class back to the left. After listening to their pitches, I think I’ve figured out a common thread linking many topics which were previously confusing to me: why the populist left has greater appeal than Abundance, why they hate large corporations and love unions, and why people feel like the American Dream is dead and the economy is doing poorly, despite statistical evidence to the contrary. The underlying mechanism behind all of these phenomena is that hiring is broken and now entirely reliant on credentials and one’s personal network. Most people know this is an issue but still don’t realize its full extent because of its anti-mimetic properties: firstly because it is low status to say it is difficult (for you, is the implication) to find a job; secondly because anyone in a position to send a topic trending has no difficulty finding work themselves, exactly because they have that capability. But because of it, anyone from non-elite schools or without university education, those without network like immigrants, introverts, or juniors, or those from various disfavored demographics, are locked in a perpetual state of anxiety and risk-aversion. Therefore, Abundance lacks popular appeal because within the household balance sheet it addresses only expenses and not cash flow, large corporations are unpopular because their hiring practices are the most broken and two-tiered, unions are popular because they are a first-order solution for job security, and it feels like nothing is affordable because if being downsized means a prolonged period of unemployment, then even spending at your means could retroactively become spending beyond your means. Besides housing abundance, it seems to me that a program of radical job (matching) abundance, with the goal that anyone competent can easily obtain a new job within a week (more realistically, one month) of losing their old one, if successful, would basically completely eliminate the populist left as a viable political movement in America. Though whether this is actually possible to implement in an Abundance-styled deregulatory manner is less clear to me (Edit: Claudia Sahm on this topic).
Stanford Engineering interviews Sergey Brin on starting and coming back to Google. It’s strange to me that what a lot of people are saying based on Gemini’s resurgence is evidence that Sundar’s critics were wrong. If anything, it’s actually an even bigger indictment of Sundar that they are doing so well now that Sergey is back, although this is perhaps unfair, since I understand that Google’s issues are primarily a result of internal political fights for visibility to obtain promotions, and obviously no one is going to try to fight with Sergey1. This reminds me of Razib’s idea that visionary leaders often leave self-shaped holes behind in the organizations that they create; that Brin makes a joke about the idea of “management science” being a real thing doesn’t seem to indicate that he has any plans to fix this problem, or even realizes that it exists.
Seb Krier on AI alignment as “the equilibrium outputs of dynamic behavioral systems”.
Shashwat Goel against over-indexing on the METR time horizons benchmark.
Build Canada on reviving the non-discretionary points system with the goal of immigration to bringing in high-skilled permanent residents. Tangentially related, a translation by Yiyang Xu of an article by Wang Ou on barriers to long-term settlement for migrant workers within China.
BDM review of My Neighbor Totoro.
Eleanor Konik linkthread.
Still, it seems to imply that Sundar doesn’t have any lieutenants that he actually trusts, or that they for some reason do not trust him.