Martino Agostini on Bending Spoons’ Billion-Dollar Pivot: How a Milanese Tech Operator Is Redefining Strategic Finance… In late October 2025, Milan-based technology group Bending Spoons executed one of the most precisely choreographed financing sequences seen in European tech. Within forty-eight hours, the company announced three interlinked moves that reshaped its balance sheet and redefined its market narrative: the planned acquisition of AOL, a $2.8 billion debt package, and a $710 million equity raise. (more)

Venkatesh Rao: The History and Future of Memeing Things Into Reality. In early 2021, a ragtag group of Reddit users sent Wall Street into a frenzy by memeing a struggling video game retailer’s stock to unimaginable heights. What started as an inside joke about GameStop shares suddenly became very real: the stock’s price skyrocketed 1,700% in weeks, toppling hedge funds and minting overnight millionaires​. (more)

Gareth Edwards: Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business. In large bodies of water, the temperature drops slowly the deeper one dives. That change can, if the descent is slow enough, feel almost imperceptible. Yet at a certain point, the water temperature drops sharply and alarmingly. This point is the thermocline—a near-physical barrier where warm water meets cold. The shift between the two is sudden and dramatic. (more)

Tell-HN post: Bending Spoons Laid Off Almost Everybody At Vimeo. Various comments: (more)

Philip Eyrikson Tetlock[3] (born March 2, 1954) is a Canadian-American political psychologist and writer, and is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. He has written several non-fiction books at the intersection of psychology, political science and organizational behavior, including Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction; Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?; Unmaking the West: What-if Scenarios that Rewrite World History; and Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Tetlock is also co-principal investigator of The Good Judgment Project, a multi-year study of the feasibility of improving the accuracy of probability judgments of high-stakes, real-world events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI (ASI) over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean. https://ai-2027.com/ (more)

Cate Hall: Rightness is a prison. *We just wrapped up our first quarterly reviews for Astera’s spring residency cohort, and one of my favorite things to come out of it was this statement by resident Edwin Kite: “Based on past completed projects of comparable ambition, it is near certain that our initial scientific assumptions are wrong.” (more)

Andrew Gelman: Thinking fast, slow, and not at all: System 3 jumps the shark. (more)

Scott Alexander: Introducing AI 2027. In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. (more)

Bryan Caplan: My Defense of Experts Against the Leading Expert. Forget “the Best of 2007”; Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment may well be the best book ever written on political psychology. (See here for an earlier discussion). I say this even though I’m a big defender of experts, and Tetlock’s book is usually interpreted as a grand debunking of experts’ pretensions. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz on AI 2027: Responses. Yesterday I covered Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast coverage of AI 2027 with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander. Today covers the reactions of others. (more)

Matthew Yglesias: How to be less full of shit. In terms of my personal growth, I think the most important book I read in 2020 was Philip Tetlock’s which came out five years ago...somehow the title of Superforecasting turned me off of reading it when it first came out. But it’s a really good book. (more)

Bryan Caplan: Two Flawless Articles on Overconfidence. Well, they’re very good, anyway. The first is a 1999 gem by Philip Tetlock: “Theory-Driven Reasoning About Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics: Are We Prisoners of Our Preconceptions?” (American Journal of Political Science 43(2): 335-66). The second is a 2005 piece by Erik Hoelzl and Aldo Rustichini: “Overconfident: Do You Put Your Money on It?” (Economic Journal 115: 305-318). (more)

Bryan CaplanTackling Tetlock. Philip Tetlock, one of my favorite social scientists, is making waves with his new book, Expert Political Judgment. Tetlock spent two decades asking hundreds of political experts to make predictions about hundreds of issues. (more)

see What's Water?

I'm removing a ceiling light fixture so a medallion can be mounted. Because otherwise the electrician has nothing to do while waiting for paint/glue to dry. (more)

high agency - a personality trait (more)

Bending Spoons hits $11B valuation after raising $710M. The company stated that the new capital will be used to enhance its proprietary technology stack and expand its AI infrastructure (more)

Bending Spoons Buys Video Platform Vimeo for $1.38 Billion. Vimeo, once a significant player in the streaming video space, has lost massive ground to other platforms, including YouTube, in recent years. Rather than fight a losing battle in the creator space, Vimeo has catered more toward business and enterprise users lately. (more)

Best known for her book The Death And Life Of Great American Cities. She lived in Greenwich Village when she wrote it. (more)