Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Dwarkesh Patel interviews Robert Caro. This one's a long time coming: the prediction market on who his "biggest guest yet" was launched two years ago, and here's a bit from Dwarkesh's podcast five years ago on similarities between Caro's subjects and his research style. It's a very fun interview, though it helps to have done the couple thousand pages of reading in advance. One thing it does well is to capture that Caro is, of course, not writing hagiographies, but is writing stories about people who sought power for what were often healthy reasons, and, over time, got consumed by wielding it. One thing that makes him so exceptional is that a powerful person produces lots of sources—they're important enough to have a driver, assistants, etc., not to mention lots of people who carried out their will, got thwarted by them, etc. But it's also hard to reach them! So our view of what power is and what it does to people is shaped, in part, by decisions Robert Caro made decades ago about which people to study.
• Patrick Fitzsimmons in Works in Progress on the collapse of the bronze age. One of the craziest things about the bronze-to-iron-age transition is that, like the mid-twentieth century productivity boom, it was accompanied by a reduction in economic complexity, at least as measured by trade. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and tin is hard to find, so the bronze age was an age of states large enough to arrange imports from as far as Cornwall and Afghanistan. Once ironworking, with its shorter supply chains, was a viable option, the optimal size of a state was smaller, and there was less need for trade. (Trade tends to be viral in that a ship isn't necessarily going to be 100% full of exactly one commodity, in both directions, so one high-demand commodity introduces people to other commodities, and round trips encourage exports as well as imports.) This trend, of course, continues to the present.
• Joseph Heath has a piece that's surprisingly broad given its length, touching on topics that range from commercial ethics to the history of ideology as a motivator to the dynamic where big abstract ideas are built on, but compete with, more specific ones. Highly recommended. One of the things that struck me early in parenting is that "civilization" refers, not to a static thing, but to a process, like "cultivation": it's the constant, relentless effort by parents (and teachers, and peers, and sometimes law enforcement) to take humans who are born with instincts designed for hunter-gatherers and mold them into well-behaved taxpayers. It's not a thing that is, but a thing we do.
• Nathan Heller in The New Yorker profiles James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble. One reason retail is tough is that if you fix up an in-store experience, the customers you've lost still have to find their way back. So the temptation is to go in the other direction: Barnes & Noble kept giving more store real estate to non-toys, which temporarily drove some sales but also gradually turned them into a mediocre toy store that happened, incongruously, to have books. To turn that around and make a chain of bookstores a chain of good bookstores, you need someone in charge who has a mandate to accept lower revenue for a bit in exchange for restoring customer foot traffic over time. But who can do that? They need to have credibility as both a respectable bookstore operator and as someone who understands business and won't just use the long term to excuse poor performance. Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones in the UK, really lucked out here, in that James Daunt used to be a banker, then quit to start an independent bookstore, and only then got recruited to run a big chain.
• John Collison interviews Sam Altman on Cheeky Pint. One fun way to be contrarian and right about current events is to look at the absence of headlines. Altman notes that so far, high-profile software vulnerabilities haven't led to the kind of chaos we'd reasonably expect (Binance might disagree, but they're a very tempting target to hack). Altman also points out that we may be due for yet another new scaling law, since we don't entirely know the optimal tradeoff is between agent count and agent intelligence, nor do we know what happens when you mix together heterogeneous agents. (We've seen agents coordinate, but will they get more or less effective if they argue more?)
• This week in Capital Gains, we have more thoughts on tranched rounds, where different investors in the same venture round pay different prices. In some ways, it's an extension of what's always happened in venture, where bigger investors get board seats, information rights, etc. But it also creates some bad incentives.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• What's new in energy? It's been interesting to see the mix of companies that are doing some alternative to the typical means of energy production, and which are looking for alternatives to the typical permitting system. Who should I be talking to about this?

Diff Jobs

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

• Well-funded, frontier AI neolab working on video pretraining and computer action models as the path to general intelligence is looking for researchers who are excited about creating machines that learn from experience, not text. Ideally you have zero-to-one pre-training experience and/or are a high-slope generalist who’s frustrated that the big labs aren't doing this. (SF)
• Series A startup building multi-agent simulations to predict the behavior of hard to sample human populations is looking for researchers and engineers (ML, platform, infrastructure, etc.) to improve simulation fidelity and scale the platform to hundreds of millions of simulation requests. Problem-solving and genuine interest in simulation matter more than pedigree. Experience working with languages with an algebraic type system is a plus. (NYC)
• Ex-Anduril, Ex-Abnormal Security, Ex-Bridgewater, fast growing startup building frontier agentic cybersecurity to make the long tail of businesses defense dominant via MSPs is looking for a senior machine learning / quantitative researcher. Working in low data environments or working in low signal-to-noise environments e.g, mid-frequency quant finance is a big plus. Evidence of data rigor required. (SF)
• Lightspeed-backed team building the engineering services firm of the future is looking for founding members of technical staff excited about working alongside civil engineers to translate their domain expertise into the operating system that powers the next era of great American infrastructure. If you’re an engineer with strong product intuition, who's energized by access to users, and excited by the prospect of transforming how we design and construct our built world with frontier AI, this is for you. (NYC, SF or Remote)
• AI Transformation firm with an ambition to build an economic world model to run swathes of the private, unstructured economy is looking for FDEs, Platform Engineers, and business generalists who understand how to solve problems. (NYC, Remote)
• A Fortune 500 cybersecurity company with decades of proprietary security data is running an internal incubation with a pre-seed startup mentality and a mandate to build something new in AI. They are looking for a founding engineer who can ship fast, an engineer with a security background who’d be excited to contribute to OpenClaw’s security efforts, an AI researcher, and a generalist (ex-banking/consulting/PE background preferred) who wants to wear a bunch of different hats. Comp is FAANG+ and cash heavy. If you want to build something new in AI, but also need runway, this is for you. (SF/Peninsula)

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.

And: we're now actively deploying capital into early-stage companies through Anomaly. Our focus is on defense, logistics, robotics, and energy. If you'd like to chat, please reach out.