Thursday Night Links

• European ruling elites from England to Poland, whether in the 19th Century or 12th Century would have replaced their proud uppity native peasantry with docile Hindu migrant labourers if they could have. The technology simply wasn't yet there. [@haravayin_hogh]
• Ultimately, Claude used 12 design tools to generate 318,484 designs, filtering out any that resembled a toxin or a known protein. Claude co-folded and screened 553,052 design-toxin pairs, predicting each pair’s structure as one complex. Sixty-four hours after we gave Claude our initial prompt, it produced its final list of 180 designs. The campaign used on the order of 10,000 GPU hours. [Anthropic] 
• Imagine if Trump had not been seduced by Bibi into the harebrained scheme to attack Iran. Imagine instead that he had gone with Rubio's idea of expanding the empire in the Western hemisphere. Cuba, Greenland, maybe Nicaragua. Wrap up the empire in the old world. Make a deal with China and Russia. Articulate a stable world of spheres of influence. Return to hemispheric defense. This is hardly an outlandish counterfactual. It really could've been. He had all the right instincts for it. Even if it would've pissed off Western supremacists, it had a certain brutal realism to it. But no. He had to listen to the lobby boys. Now the empire has been exposed as a paper tiger. And either it dies on this hill or withdraws with its tail between its legs, leaving the gulf under Iranian hegemony for all to see. All glorious options have been foreclosed by a single strategic error. One can already picture him turning to antisemitism later in life to make sense of the catastrophe. How could this happen to him? There must've been a conspiracy! [@policytensor]
• Irvine is the last city in the world, the largest and best managed master-planned community in the world, on the most valuable real estate in the world, and the most controlled in America, the closest you can get in pre-collapse to a fascist city-state—the great anonymous overlords of the Irvine Company is the LDS Church of real-estate—they will master-plan an exact duplicate of Irvine on the Moon and Mars and on the infinite ringworlds. Irvine is also the strongest concentration of "design" in the world, it's Brasilia and Chandigargh but actually successful; because the academics of architecture is perverted and corrupt, karmically cursed from abandoning Christopher Alexander for Peter Eisenenman's postmodernism, they cannot see it, but it is a masterpiece of urbanism and landscape design, a strongest collection of designed architecture and landscape of anywhere on the planet. Irvine is boring by design; Fallout 1's cut content had Irvine renamed Utopia, with the perfect white fence America suburbia encircled by a great Israeli grade wall and its denizens enforced into perfect order at gunpoint in a robot police state. This is a good thing, and the city is being flooded with high caste asians simply because they have good taste and real-estate sense; and the bet will pay off when commonplace autonomous cars solves "public transport" and all of tax-paying America hapa flights into enclave exit suburbias. [@CharlotteFang77]
• Stephen Kotkin has called Joseph Stalin “the gold standard of power.” Napoleon holds the same place in war. He remains the standard of martial excellence against which later commanders measure themselves and which they seek to emulate, notwithstanding, as Smith points out, his parallel reputation for personal vanity and tyrannical government. Smith describes his book as “an examination of how Civil War commanders did what they did,” set within the commanders’ own understanding of how modern war ought to be fought. For many generals in the war, Napoleon was the lodestar, whether or not they said so. The volunteer officers, many of whom rose to the rank of general, also knew of Napoleon’s great victories. Even the literate private soldier, Smith points out, could make references to the emperor and his battles that were crude but broadly accurate. [Rubicon]
• Anthropic plans to spend $111 billion on Google cloud computing contracts, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services, and $31 billion on Microsoft, “regardless of actual usage.” The firm also agreed to spend up to $86 billion renting Nvidia chips from smaller AI cloud providers Nscale and Lambda through 2033 and 2034, respectively, in addition to other cloud deals. Including its more than $160 billion obligation to lease Google chips in a deal with Broadcom, Anthropic’s future infrastructure costs top $600 billion. The firm is negotiating additional computing deals that could see its commitments rise by as much as $150 billion, the materials show. While most of its capacity comes from large cloud providers—including Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft—Anthropic is hitting limits. The company said it has sought access to more capacity than “those partners were willing to provide” and they increasingly see it as a competitor, according to the prospectus. [WSJ]