Links: Week of 04 May 2025

How to make hard choices (YouTube): A great video and especially personally relevant right now.

Just how good is O3 at playing GeoGuessr: Apparently very good. It still makes errors of course, but I was amazed at how close it got with very limited clues. Worth repeating this bit from last weeks link:

It’s also deeply dystopian. Technology can identify locations from photographs now. It’s vitally important that people understand how easy this is—if you have any reason at all to be concerned about your safety, you need to know that any photo you share—even a photo as bland as my example above—could be used to identify your location.

Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times (NYT):

The video is just under two and a half minutes long. A slim man with close-cropped hair walks into a room, pulls a long black mamba — whose venom can kill within an hour — from a crate and allows it to bite his left arm. Immediately after, he lets a taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his right arm. “Thanks for watching,” he calmly tells the camera, his left arm bleeding, and then exits.

Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.

Ken Rogoff on Conversations with Tyler: Great discussion on so many different topics - China, Pakistan, US, Chess. I found it very insightful.

Macro Utopia: Economics heavy list today but I have found Scott Sumner to have the most useful and probably most accurate predictions about macro.