Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Lennox on Substack has a wonderful story about trying to reconcile socialism with Effective Altruism and ultimately discarding socialism. A wonderful piece with a good punchline. As much as this can be read as an object-level argument that socialism is bad, there are plenty of other cases where people lose an abstract, theoretical version of their worldview and replace it with a more practical one&dmash;plenty of people who were Objectivists in college wound up as Romney Republicans upon colliding with the business world. But most important, it's a piece about taking ideas seriously. And doing that always means running the risk that you'll discard an important part of your identity.
• Alex Heath of The Verge interviews Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI. A good rule of thumb he's too polite to say this explicitly is that the later someone starts adopting LLMs, the more domains there are where LLMs exceed them. Which is great, in terms of their application—there are probably lots of people who will save lots of money avoiding small-scale grifts that target people with a high school education. It's useful for on-demand intelligence to be distributed more widely, but it also means that the product as OpenAI experiences it—the thing the next incremental user decides to use—is very different from what power users are thinking of.
• Paulina Villegas and Maria Abi-Habib have an amazing New York Times story in which they embed with every step of the drug-smuggling supply chain, from drivers to organizers to law enforcement. Drug smuggling is a logistics business subject to unusual constraints, and it's a very adaptive one: what stands out in this piece is how existing smuggling routes are an adaptation to border enforcement, and the actual process of smuggling is constantly reacting to nuances of how that gets implemented.
• Ken Opalo argues against the idea that Africa's development has been hampered by hastily-drawn post-colonial borders. This theory always made sense from a pattern-matching perspective—if you toggle between a political and topographical map of Europe, you see lots of consistencies among the squiggly lines. On the other hand, the US and Canada have managed to avoid a lot of military conflict and internal political chaos despite having what are technically straight-line post-colonial borders. One important point the piece makes, at least on the blame attribution side, is that the question of precisely where to redraw borders is itself intensely political. Sometimes, it's not a question of avoiding conflict so much as one of deciding which kinds of conflict are most tolerable.
• The Math Academy Way: this piece is very much worth reading for its meditations on automaticity. The more you've memorized, the less of your working memory is taken up by puzzling through things you could have just read in a book at some point. A very good piece that applies across many domains.
• In this week's Capital Gains, thoughts on the bet-on-bottlenecks model, as it pertains to both analyzing supply chains for pricing power and buying assets at below replacement value. These turn out to be deeply similar tasks, but in both cases there's some element of risk premium mixed in with the alpha.

Books

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World: One of the thoughts I had while reading this book was that kids who grow up in India presumably get a history education that's roughly as India-centric as US history education is US-centric. A big part of reading history is understanding your place in it, so that obviously makes sense. But, when they start reading about European history, does it feel a little bit like a rerun of phenomena they've already seen, just set in an exotic location? Combine human nature and geographic constraints, and you can see the same pattern show up again and again. Some countries find a niche where they're centrally located and have access to the sea, so they do a fair amount of trading, which leads to enough economic surplus to allow activities like theology, philosophy, and math to flourish, and they also function as a switchboard carrying new ideas around to their neighbors. That's part of what ancient Greece did, and then the Northern Italian city-states, later the Dutch, then the English, and now, still, the United States. There is a great deal of operating leverage in a nation: a small relative advantage can mean a massive absolute contribution.

One important thing this book added to my model of world history is that India had closer ties to the West before the rise of Islam, and those ties only gradually frayed. (And, thanks to the subcontinent's strategic position, they could amortize at least some of the fixed assets involved by shifting trade east.) The story that the apostle Thomas who personally knew Jesus, visiting India would have been more plausible to his contemporaries than to Christians a millennium later, and one of the ways we trace these fraying trade ties is the eventual absence of some jewels that were more common in early medieval crowns. So India has the odd distinction of entering western awareness as a place one might plausibly visit, then turning into a semi-mythical land that someone like Christopher Columbus could use to rope uninformed high-net-worth investors into an otherwise clearly infeasible startup.

Two of the other historical patterns that show up in European history as an echo of something from India’s history: Buddhism started in India, but the largest population is outside of it; as in Europe and the surrounding areas, where faiths spread and persist is not always connected to where they started. And this was partly a function of politics—Wu Zetian used Buddhism to help legitimize her rule, and the Tang used suppressing Buddhism to legitimize theirs once she was deposed. 

One good reason to read this book is that if you look at the global distribution of English speakers, and think about how quickly different populations went online, you could see the English-speaking Internet as a whole starting as an American-by-default context, and evolving into something more global, with India as the second-biggest English-speaking population. (This is one contributor to the otherwise weird recent rise in anti-Indian racism online—India is getting a lot more salient, and the median Internet user is a lot more likely to care about Indian domestic issues and pop culture than was historically the case.) And the number of people who speak something as a second language is a lot more elastic than the number who speak it as their native language. So, over the course of your lifetime, you should expect that knowing more Indian history will be a bigger part of being an adult, in the same way that you’d expect a typical American adult to know roughly who Demosthenes was. The Golden Road is a great start.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• What are some other topics that are increasingly likely to be added to the list of topics an educated adult should be reasonably conversant in? We’re probably not all going to finish SICP, for example, but being a bit technical seems like a requirement to consider yourself well-rounded.

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• A leading AI transformation & PE investment firm (think private equity meets Palantir) that’s been focused on investing in and transforming businesses with AI long before ChatGPT (100+ successful portfolio company AI transformations since 2019) is hiring experienced forward deployed AI engineers to design, implement, test, and maintain cutting edge AI products that solve complex problems in a variety of sector areas. If you have 3+ years of experience across the development lifecycle and enjoy working with clients to solve concrete problems please reach out. Experience managing engineering teams is a plus. (Remote)
• Well funded, Ex-Stripe founders are building the agentic back-office automation platform that turns business processes into self-directed, self-improving workflows which know when to ask humans for input. They are initially focused on making ERP workflows (invoice management, accounting, financial close, etc.) in the enterprise more accurate/complete and are looking for FDEs and Platform Engineers. If you enjoy working with the C-suite at some of the largest enterprises to drive operational efficiency with AI and have 3+ YOE as a SWE, this is for you. (Remote)
• Thiel fellow founder (series A) building full-stack software, hardware, and chemistry to end water scarcity, is looking for an ambitious robotics engineer to help build sophisticated drone nest systems that can deploy, maintain, and coordinate fleets of UAVs for precision atmospheric intervention. If you spend nights and weekends in the shop tinkering on hardware projects, have built and deployed robotic automation systems, and understand ROS (Robot Operating System) well, please reach out. 
• A company that was using ML/AI to improve software development/systems engineering before it was cool—and is now inflecting fast—is looking for a product marketing manager to articulate their value proposition and drive developer adoption. If you started your career in backend engineering or technical product management, but have since transitioned (or want to transition) into a product marketing seat, this is for you. (Washington DC area)
• Ex-Citadel/D.E. Shaw team building AI-native infrastructure to turn lots of insurance data—structured and unstructured—into decision-grade plumbing that helps casualty risk and insurance liabilities move is looking for a data scientist with classical and generative/agentic ML experience. You will develop, refine, and productionize the company’s core models. (NYC, Boston)
• A Series B startup building regulatory AI agents to help automate compliance for companies in highly regulated industries is looking for legal engineers with financial regulatory experience (SEC, FINRA marketing review, Reg Z, UDAAP). JD required; top law firm experience preferred. (NYC)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

If you’re at a company that's looking for talent, we should talk! Diff Jobs works with companies across fintech, hard tech, consumer software, enterprise software, and other areas—any company where finding unusually effective people is a top priority.