Elizabeth Qiu

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DAVID CHEN is the son of Argerich's eldest daughter Lida Chen-Argerich. His father is Vladimir Sverdlov-Ashkenazy, the nephew of Vladimir Ashkenazy
pianomania: A PIANO CONCERTO EVENING NOT TO MISS: LEGACY - THE NEXT PIANO GENERATION on 17 March 2026
When I Left Big Law, I Learned This
Opinion | What Five Years in Big Law at WilmerHale Taught Me - The New York Times
he slow layers have the power.
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
The central claim is that Congress’s dysfunction is not primarily a failure of expertise or goodwill, but a failure of internal organization. Factions are one of the few tools available—within existing rules and incentives—to address that failure. The sections that follow are intended to help readers evaluate when factions are likely to be effective, how they interact with parties, committees, and outside groups, and what kinds of support strengthen Congress rather than substitute for it.
Rebuilding Congress from Within: How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking | The Foundation for American Innovation
altruistic people to be more ambitious
Top Performers are Pathologically Ambitious - by Matt Beard
Two scenarios for global AI leadership
2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership \ Anthropic
The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
CreepyLink
This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
The Trouble with Optionality | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
Making first contact with superintelligence
Ineffable Intelligence
Finding a friend with only distance and motion.
Marco Polo | Jack Hogan
Justify anything through the lens of great power competition.
Because China
Useful market accuracy improved until early 2025, but hasn’t improved since.
Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?—Asterisk
what outcome the costly mechanism would make on the decision if it was called
From prediction markets to info finance
if everyone trusts the charts, then anyone with money can manipulate the charts and no one will dare to bet against them. On the other hand, trusting the news entirely is also a bad idea
From prediction markets to info finance
a betting site for the participants, a news site for everyone else
From prediction markets to info finance
firms only benefit from R&D if they are willing to innovate
The Institute Behind Taiwan’s Chip Dominance—Asterisk
Students whose registration at the University of Maryland, College Park, has lapsed for more than 10 years shall be required to complete a minimum of 15 credit hours at College Park after their return to campus in order to earn a baccalaureate degree. This policy can be found in the Undergraduate Catalog.
Re-enrollment Overview | Student Success Office
The question left is: how do we close the gap between junior and senior talent?
How do we close the Junior <> Senior talent gap™? · Ady Mehta
There’s also a silver lining to working on disliked products, which is that people only care because they’re using them
Working on products people hate
Email* Please make sure there are no typos Linkedin / website* Github Institution* Primary occupation* Student Academic Founder Industry (part time / full time employment) Other Country of Residence* City of Residence* Tell us about yourself. What’s your most ambitious goal and how does the Encode fellowship help you get there?* What technical project/achievement are you most proud of and why?* Do you have any experience working on cross-disciplinary teams?*
Apply - Cohort 2
and gained thousands.
Language Birth—Asterisk
I suppose another explanation could be God. I guess this explanation encompasses the first. Through God, I was made lucky. That seems reasonable as well.
Untitled
we do have 45 lb weights.
Post | LinkedIn
In our testing, we found that recognizable semantic reconstructions begin to emerge with as little as 15 minutes of data from a new user.
Toward accessible, real-time brain decoding: Introducing ENIGMA | Alljoined Blog
I spent maybe in total a month of deep focus on this paper on and off for the course of 7 months, which makes it deeply embarrassing how much I failed to understand probability.
the worst seven months of my life - agniv sarkar
Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.
Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth \ Anthropic
AIs are not capable of directing themselves; most people aren’t either.
Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
AI can’t function without instructions from humans, but an increasing number of humans seem incapable of functioning without AI.
Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
he common thread: specificity, accountability, results.
MacKenzie Scott's $26 Billion Sugar Pile | Garry's List
Money without stewardship is pouring sugar on the floor. You are going to get ants.
MacKenzie Scott's $26 Billion Sugar Pile | Garry's List
Compare that to Warren Buffett, who leads the lifetime giving list at $68.3 billion. He built decades-long relationships with the Gates Foundation and his family charities. He understands what they do. He watches outcomes. Scott’s approach is the opposite — spray and pray at a scale nobody has ever attempted.
MacKenzie Scott's $26 Billion Sugar Pile | Garry's List
A person’s experiences make up 100% of their perception of the world, despite representing only 0.000000001% of what has actually occurred.
EA and AI Safety's Humility Problem — Nixon Hanna
Caloric and the Utility of Incorrect Theories
Circuits Updates - April 2024
Centralization in the political sphere may be inevitable, but certainly not in the technological sphere.
Internetová kontrarevoluce
U.S. and allied policymakers tried for years to convince China to play by the WTO’s rules. Not only did those efforts fail, but the United States and its allies now also face a situation in which even if China abided by the rules, other economies would need to violate them to compete. Washington simply cannot diversify its critical mineral supply chain without deploying significant subsidies, tariffs, and other industrial policy tools.
The Case for Upending World Trade | Foreign Affairs
neither of the factors that led to the rise of the rules-based trade order exists anymore
The Case for Upending World Trade | Foreign Affairs
Reagan struck a deal with Japan in which Tokyo committed to “voluntarily” limit its auto exports to the United States in return for avoiding higher tariffs on its cars.
The Case for Upending World Trade | Foreign Affairs
When unrealistic deadlines become the norm, the team doesn’t actually move faster.
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside | Rui Xu
One of the most dangerous ideas going around: robot hardware will become “commodity,” assembled from off-the-shelf parts by Chinese manufacturers just like phones, with the real value sitting in the AI layer.
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside | Rui Xu
Manufacturing is not a service you buy. It’s a capability you build.
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside | Rui Xu
Analogies are compression algorithms. They make complex things simple by throwing away information. In a pitch deck, fine. In an engineering decision, the thrown-away information is usually the part that kills you.
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside | Rui Xu
There’s this belief going around that AI models are getting so good that hardware can afford to be dumb. Sensors? The model will figure it out from vision. Safety limits? The policy will learn to avoid them. I call this Large Model Chauvinism.
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside | Rui Xu
“The whole idea, the reason why our system works well, is that we give scientists money and let them loose. For you to ask us to run this like we would run a weapons program makes absolutely no sense.” Congress would not have it. They said it was totally unacceptable for the agency to run things this way. That was the beginning of the extreme bureaucratization that we have, with hundreds, if not thousands, of laws and regulations, and the insistence that scientists must propose a project and must do the project they said they were going to do.
What’s Wrong with NIH Grants? - by Santi Ruiz - Statecraft
Claude is a space to think.
Golden Encounters
Let’s take a bad martial artist (let’s call him Agniv Sarkar).
Advice
Addendum: the work is beautiful. I think by the end we can get images of the brain that look like this:
A heart of fire
In past decades, engineers built hardware first and layered software on top. That model is obsolete. Today’s energy systems are co-designed: sensors, power electronics and mechanical structures are specified to enable algorithms that can track a product’s health, prevent failures and optimize output. Hardware–software fusion is the new operating model.
It’s Time to Treat China’s Connected Energy Systems As a National Security Risk | RAND
Engineers are impressed by different kinds of work to managers and product managers. I’m most impressed by an engineer who runs down a very difficult bug, or some kind of weird operational issue that was hard to debug. In my experience, managers and product managers are impressed by speed: being able to fix an issue rapidly, or to deliver some piece of UI ahead of schedule.
Trying to impress people you don't respect
So I’m hopeful that the lovable nerds there will be able to present their own smiling optimism to the rest of the world.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform.
2025 letter | Dan Wang