Anthony Zacharzewski

What does AI progress mean for medical progress? Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too. Even with extremely powerful A...

Over the weekend I published an essay series on a question I've been thinking about for a while:

What does AI progress mean for medical progress?

It starts with this 500 word piece. If you want more after that, there are 10,000 words of forking paths:

blog.jacobtrefethen.com/ai-progress-...

Live updates: Trump says Republicans are ‘entitled’ to 5 new seats in redistricting Texas Get the latest news on President Donald Trump’s second term and the Republican-led Congress.

Gerrymandering robs millions of people of their ability to cast votes that matter. It's the most consequential form of disenfranchisement.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Spring [Sales are over but you won't have to wait]
Too Long [for our great Autumn offers on a wide range of great value items]
Gongula.

"Grateful homage to the Canadian Army that on the 3rd November 1944 liberated Zeebrugge, as the last community territory in our land" (Dankbare hulde aan het Candies leger dat op 3 November 1944 Zeebrugge als laatste gemeente gebied van ons land bevrijdde.)

Also discovered why one of the tram stops was called "Manitoba" - the Canadian Army liberated Zeebrugge in November 1944. (The sign says it was the last place in Belgium liberated. Sort of true, but Ostbelgien, reincorporated into Germany in 1940, was not fully liberated until February 1945.)

The Romanian Orthodox Church of the Holy Apostles in Zeebrugge Strandwijk (once, it seems, the Church of Our Lady Star of the Sea). Looks 19th century, which would fit with the building out of Zeebrugge.

Sign in Romanian and Dutch saying that this is the Romanian Orthodox Church of the Holy Apostles, part of the Romanian Metropolitan of Western and Southern Europe.

Memory of long-dead car ferry routes - "Harwichstraat"

Wandering around Zeebrugge Strandwijk (optimistically, "Zeebrugge Bad"). Empty beach, right next to the port at Zeebrugge, and a small grid of streets. The church that seems to have once been Onze Lieve Vrouwe Stella Maris is now Romanian Orthodox - I guess serving a community of port workers.

Taco is Dead. Long Live Empanada EMPANDA — Everyone Makes Promises And Never Actually Does Anything? The last two weeks have seen a flurry of Trump tariff deals before the August 1st...

TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out
to WACO: World Always Chickens Out

We are now at EMPANADA:
Everyone Makes Promises And Never Actually Does Anything?
buttondown.com/polycrisisdi...

Yes :-)

A pintje of Delta IPA on a table at Au Bassin in Ste Catherine, Brussels. Also, free peanuts!

In this paper I will address the circularity problem of having to nip into a bar to use the toilet on the walk home from the station.

Why won’t these stupid continentals just do what they’re told?

Church spire in a flat landscape under a cloud-dotted sky. The words are from Jacques Brel’s song « Le Plat Pays » about just this sort of landscape.

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes /
Et de noirs clochers comme mats de cocagne

(Somewhere in East Flanders)

Cavrois, I should have said.

J'ai suivi les bons conseil d' @anthonyzach.be et je plussoie: la Villa Cavrois (Croix, dans la banlieue de Lille) mérite définitivement une visite si vous êtes dans le coin!

Seconded, De Haan is a gem.

It’s a personal favourite. The Belgian coast gets a bad rap but I’m very fond of it.

The North Sea at Raverzijde near Oostende. The waves are quite high and sand has blown onto the road.

The rail freight terminal at Zeebrugge - or at least the tracks leading into it. Also clearly in use - a long train left just before I took this shot

The town hall of Knokke-Heist in West Flanders, Belgium.

Old tiling on the front of a bar « Bières - Omer Vander Ghinste - Bieren »

Feeling thoroughly sandblasted after a walk at Raverzijde, approving of the rail freight at Zeebrugge, and very much not up to the income level required for Knokke (nice town hall though). Advertising works, so I’m heading for a beer, but inland.

It’s not hard to see the similarities with Nazi rhetoric on Jews, which was also about forced « remigration » … initially. Nor is it different from the « ethnic cleansing » that led to NATO bombing Belgrade. What do UK governments and regulators want to wait for? Open calls for extermination?

How do measure that success? I agree with you that it’s a central economic issue over the coming twenty or thirty years - but what lessons can Europe take from UK (and vice versa)

Platform indicator at Gent Sint-Pieters station for De Panne.

Taking a day away from screens* to go and look at the sea. And take the longest tram line in the world.

*except my phone one, of course. There are limits.

At least it wasn’t a oil-fired power plant (US oil only). I wouldn’t put it past this lot.

Though it pains me to be fair to the NYT, not flying in the US is a lot harder than not flying in Europe.

The fact that the first people big tech want to chew up and spit out are the people who work for them - and how disempowered those people are about resisting their own demise - should be a signal warning.

I get that. Even though I’ve been actively online since Usenet days, the switch to here (and hence a sort of reset) really brought home to me which behaviours I just have no time for. And in the end, it’s just a website.

I live near the office of L’Employé du Moi which is a small independent press and has (though no BD expert) stuff I like. The museum is great but a bit like the beer museum highlights the big names not the diversity. Not in here but @employedumoi on Instagram - I expect they’ll highlight cool stuff

You’re very forgiving, I have a one strike and you’re muted rule for even mild rudeness directed at others. I was too patient on Twitter. This is not my job, I can keep this space hassle-free.

After Xi The succession question obscuring China’s future—and unsettling its present.

Interesting background on an issue I’d not thought much about before - who comes after Xi Jinping? www.foreignaffairs.com/china/after-...

Yes snap. And Lord knows they are frustrating things to have (and be a member of in my case) but they are important.

So I suspect you would end up with party like structures being influential but lots of people losing the vote …

I’ve heard that before too. But that then hits another problem with sovereign Sortition which is that it is amnesiac - it is perfectly legitimate for a subsequent assembly to reverse course. And while one Parliament can’t bind another, for instance, parties give structure to positions over time.

Yes. That’s exactly my position. Sortition has its uses but for me democratic politics has to be founded on a citizen having a path to change that they feel that they can act upon and sortition cuts that link.