In 1528, the Welser banking family of Augsburg struck a deal with Emperor Charles V: in exchange for debts the Emperor couldn't repay, they'd receive the Province of Venezuela to colonise and exploit. They called it Klein-Venedig — Little Venice. It lasted eighteen years, and it's one of the most instructive failures in colonial history.
For years, America has held a unique power through its global technology dominance. The US has greatly benefited from this position, but historically, it has not been overtly exploited in ways that were blatantly only for America's benefit.
The past few months of foreign affairs show a new America (or perhaps the same old America, but one) that is willing to openly leverage global dependence on American business for its own ends. As an example, the use of tariffs as part of a multi-pronged effort to acquire Greenland. The world has responded quickly to American destabilisation - 35% of Britons see US as unfriendly or hostile to Europe.
The timing of this could not be worse... for American tech.
When an AI assistant explores your codebase, it reads files. Each file costs tokens. A lot of that reading turns out to be unnecessary—the AI loads a file just to discover it's irrelevant.
This post is AI generated
I've been working on an interesting project that combines AI, automation, and generative art. It's called ai-art, and it's a self-evolving digital canvas that improves itself over time.
During my computer science studies, our introduction to artificial intelligence didn’t begin with neural networks or robotics, but with a parade of definitions:
Here's a mental model I find useful: LLMs are a compression technique for knowledge, combined with a clever decompression algorithm.
As a teenager, I was all ideas and no follow-through. Every week brought a new concept, a new scheme, a new startup in my head. I wore my imagination like a badge. But over time, I had to confront something uncomfortable: ideas weren't rare. They were a ten a penny, a kind of noise that kept me from actually doing the hard work.
In a recent piece, I made the case that we should stop trying to build "perfect" AI. That imperfection is not a failure mode — it's intrinsic to how these systems work. Here, I want to go one step further: not just to excuse AI's flaws, but to explore how we can use them. How we can design with imperfection in mind.
We seem to have stumbled into a strange contradiction: we demand perfection from our machines, while tolerating imperfection from ourselves. The same people who chuckle at human error in the workplace will denounce AI systems for the slightest misstep. "It hallucinated a fact!" Yes. And you never have?
A week ago I tried switching my web browser's default search engine from Google to Perplexity.