Marcelo Rinesi
@marcelorinesi.bsky.social
380 followers 180 following 4.7K posts
Cognitive architecture designer and consultant. On https://rinesi.com there are links to my blog and newsletters (one for articles, "what's new on arXiv," etc, the other for original short-short SF).
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marcelorinesi.bsky.social
The super-rich having weirder more short-term apocalyptic beliefs than overall society isn't exclusive but quite characteristic of the US and now it's more or less a global feature. I'm interested but not eager to see what happens when the eschaton fails to immanentize.

via @70sbachchan.bsky.social
peark.es
I couldn't believe this but it's true, Thiel can't decide whether the antichrist is Greta or Big Yud. Positively reeling.
(Washington Post) -- Tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently warned that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and critics of technology or artificial intelligence are "legionnaires of the Antichrist" in private lectures on Christianity that connected government oversight of Silicon Valley to an apocalyptic future, according to recordings reviewed by The Washington Post.
In the four, roughly two-hour lectures, which began last month and culminated Monday at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Thiel laid out his religious views to a sold-out audience told to keep the contents "off-the-record," according to an event listing. He argued that those who propose limits on technology development not only hinder business but threaten to usher in the destruction of the United States and an era of global totalitarian rule, according to the recordings.
"In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science," Thiel said in his Sept. 15 opening talk, according to the recordings. "In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's someone like Greta or Eliezer," he said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent critic of the tech industry's approach to AI.
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
They aren't wrong in the observation (paraphrasing heavily) that if your model is misspecified (in a real world/causal sense) you're not very likely to be making the bet you think you're making, although that's probably fresher news for the mainstream investment community than for statistics folks.
Causality and Factor Investing: A Primer
<p><span>Factor investing is a foundational paradigm in quantitative asset management. Yet, despite the proliferation of factors and widespread institutional ad
papers.ssrn.com
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
I tend to think of immigration enforcement as meant for even wider internal political violence; it's already a pretty much arbitrary tool to disappear people from the street and the narrative is already in place to reframe "illegals" as "terrorists" and political opponents as "terrorist supporters."
70sbachchan.bsky.social
US turning into Police State #NewsIfUSAWasAForeignCountry
WaPo: "Nearly a quarter of FBI agents across the country are currently reassigned to immigration enforcement.
The large number of reassignments reflect a vast reshaping of the agency and could put other priorities at risk."
wapo.st/4mXbrpJ
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
As it has often been noted a blind spot in Americans' "folk international politics theory" is that countries and organizations outside the US have and will pursuit their own agendas and interests and in many cases there's little or nothing they can do about that.

via @gowder.io
joshchafetz.bsky.social
So ... Catholic *traditionalists* want a pope who doesn't involve himself in global politics?
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
This is the Argentinean Chief of Staff (and main/only political operator in the government with good multi-party relationships) saying "I don't believe that part of the agreement with the US involves excluding China."
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
Trump specifics aside society that has no effective formal or informal version of the 25th amendment (via collegiate political mores, a massive loss of support, etc) is already epistemically broken; you can't have democracy without a shared reality.

via @bcfinucane.bsky.social @jmberger.com
atrupar.com
Trump: "I don't know what could be worse than Portland. You don't even have stores anymore. They don't even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows."
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
As an aside, Argentinean journalists -and society- take most US coverage with the same skepticism they take AI industry coverage. The overall tone is "Chicago is dangerous" not "Trump is insane."
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
Just saw an Argentinean sports program comment a breaking rumor that Monday's Argentina-Puerto Rico soccer friendly won't be played in [the] Chicago [War Zone] but in [Homeland] Miami.

#WorldCup rehearsals are going great 👍
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
"The US is a democracy" and "the US is becoming less of a democracy week by week" are not contradictory but rather simultaneously true assessment.

Same for "Trump et al are insane clowns that can be defeated" and "Trump et al are not, at present, being defeated."

via @wikisteff.bsky.social
congressmin.bsky.social
It's been two weeks since Adelita Grijalva was elected and Mike Johnson has still refused to seat her, unlike in past cases where he swore in new members within 24 hours.

There cannot be one set of rules for Rs and another for Ds.

Also, release the damn Epstein files already.
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
For one, the Trump admin feels at least as momentous as the fall of the Berlin Wall. But also the energy transition seems a sort of threshold: the (arguably) most important technological shift of our generation is not being led by the US but by China.

Of course, cf SImpsons' "... so far" meme.
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
This mentions some clever ideas like zero-knowledge proofs but the politics and incentives don't add up. It kind of looks as if the IMF doesn't like stablecoins, knows the US is going to push them anyway and is trying to get in front of that parade and hopefully nudge it away from the worst ditches.
The Stablecoin Balancing Act
Fighting financial crime doesn’t have to come at the cost of privacy
www.imf.org
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
“The last act is the seldom forgiven: To get the right conclusion from the self-serving given.”

-- T. S. Eliot,
"Begging the Question in the Cathedral" 2/2
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
I'm ambivalent. On one hand: yes, India has a grid problem (so does a *lot* of countries; in a cheap renewables world, it might be *the* problem). OTOH, this is a Goldman Sachs report talking about and assuming bubbleworths of AI demand, so... 1/
India's Grid Cannot Keep Up With Its Ambitions
The digital economy is arriving faster than the physical grid can adapt to handle its demands.
indiadispatch.com
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
Legal restraints are academic if you can just make up grotesquely obvious lies and DOJ/FBI/ICE/the military will act on them, SCOTUS will have your back, and most of media will either amplify them or quote experts about pushing norms. 2/2
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
They did try in J6. If you can pretend Portland is a war zone and send troops then the epistemic guardrails are gone: just declare state results invalid due to "buses of illegals" or whatever. No need to be subtle or sane. 1/

via @alongcamejones.bsky.social
gelliottmorris.com
at this point you have to acknowledge that there is no way that these guys don't try to mess with the 2026 midterms. there is absolutely no respect for the legitimacy of the opposition
bluegeorgia.bsky.social
Stephen Miller: "Eventually elections don’t carry the day because violence beats votes… When we see a muscular response from the federal government, it’s because we’re not going to let violence beat votes."

Is he implying federal intervention determines political legitimacy, not ballots or courts?
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
#RisingOnArxiv (ignoring a lot of genAI stuff):

* ICCV 2025
* Fermion sign problem
* Genuine multipartite entanglement
Rising on arXiv - 2025-10-05
blog.rinesi.com
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
... the technological and cultural difficulties to be managed, but what I'm really looking forward to is the move from IMO-style problems to the sort of work done, e.g., in mathematical physics or abstract mathematics. Speed up *that* work, and you change the speed at which the world changes. 2/2
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
By @tachim.bsky.social et a long al. As a caveat, this is a report on a company product and it's an industry with an uneven record on such but I'm very partial to this architecture (generate drafts, formal engines for verification) so I'm happy to see this sort of development.

I understand... 1/
Aristotle: IMO-level Automated Theorem Proving
We introduce Aristotle, an AI system that combines formal verification with informal reasoning, achieving gold-medal-equivalent performance on the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad problems. Ar...
arxiv.org
marcelorinesi.bsky.social
I like this one on first principles --one of my core bets is that biology is too complex to meaningfully think about with our existing set of collective intellectual tools-- but note that what makes this all possible is the existence of interventional data. You got to put in the work.
Large-Scale Bayesian Causal Discovery with Interventional Data
Inferring the causal relationships among a set of variables in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is an important but notoriously challenging problem. Recently, advancements in high-throughput...
arxiv.org