Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #18: “When China enters a room the profits walk out”

people used to say the same about Japanese products, with many Americans using a pejorative slur calling it “Jap Crap” from the 1950s to the 1970s
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but by the 1980s, this radically changed as Japan started producing higher quality products (like electronics) and goods which could get by with lower quality moved elsewhere (including to China)

“Tragedy + time = comedy” is the closest thing psychology has to a chemical equation.

“In most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’ Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods… Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys).”

Vincent Louis Gave:
“When China enters a room the profits walk out”
“Those who know it best like it least because they’ve been hurt the most”

Credit = credere = to believe

By the numbers, ~70% of Nevada gaming revenue is from slot machines and the majority of players are locals. In 2024, Nevada casino games won $15.6B from players with $10.5B coming from slot machines.

Long biased investors control 1000x+ as much capital as short biased (literally). And not many politicians have won campaigns as pessimists. We’ve had too much abundance thinking for too long imo. Need balanced pragmatism. We need to stop wasting so much talent and capital on “abundance” that turns into “get rich quick” schemes in practice

How do you define AGI?
“If you ask 10 OpenAI engineers, you will get 14 different definitions. Whichever you choose, it is clear that we will go way past that. They are points along an unbelievable exponential curve.”

completely overlook that rote regurgitation devoid of awareness probably describes 80-90% of human intelligence and communication.
A substantial portion of our daily speech merely recycles familiar phrases and concepts.

Reid has a very specific view of how to make decisions… Most people create pros and cons lists. But Reid was adamant that that was the worst possible way to make a decision. Instead, Reid advocates for strictly ranking your priorities — this could be priorities in your life, priorities for your company, etc. Then you try to make the decision based solely on the first priority. Only if there’s a tie do you go to your second or third priority. The reason Reid’s model is so brilliant is because when you create a pros and cons list, you’re creating effectively — and visually — a false equivalence.

On an imaginary $100 shoe, they estimate manufacturing cost is $22. Add freight, insurance, and import taxes, they estimate it costs Nike $27 to bring that shoe from Asia to the US.

but only group async games can capture true global and massive attention. there’s a reason why lotteries have 1B players per year, and no other game comes close

Many social patterns—like hierarchy, taboo, bureaucratic ritual, or even ideologies—can be seen as compression strategies to make social life cognitively manageable. It’s like lossy JPEGs of messy reality. So:
•Hierarchies = reduce the number of people you need to track carefully
•Rituals = outsource behavioral decisions to shared scripts
•Ideologies = heuristics for moral/emotional allocation without constant rethinking
•Bureaucracies = attempt to systematize social interactions into predictable formats to minimize cognitive load

Here is the deep secret of autoregressive LLMs in the current moment, a secret that will wreck many fortunes even as it makes a handful of others: All generative AI outputs are just demos.

Tariffs are stagflationary for the world as a whole, more deflationary for the tariffed producer, and more inflationary for the importer that imposes the tariffs

Volcker’s memoirs reveal an interesting disclosure: he regrets not setting up something akin to the London Gold Pool of the 1960s to manage the gold price when Nixon broke the dollar link to gold. This underscores an intriguing dynamic. Gold and fiat are natural rivals. Governments are keenly aware of this and have always taken an active interest in managing the fiat price of gold.

The largest subs see from 1% to 3% of uniques comment per month.
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I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years.

Fertility is now below replacement in nearly all of Latin America and East Asia. And half of the Middle East including Turkey and Iran doesn’t have enough kids to sustain their population.

Following that arc suggests Satoshi may have had more than 20 years worth of C++ experience by the time he came to write Bitcoin. In that case, he would’ve probably been in his early-to-mid forties in 2007 and close to 60 today, a similar age to other cypherpunks like Julian Assange and Adam Back.

In a serious deflationary collapse as in the 1930s, cash was king; asset prices plunged (housing prices fell 67% on average nationally), unemployment soared, and liquidity reigned supreme. My other grandfather, the one without a furniture store, bought a house in the early 1930s at a 50% discount to what he would have paid in 1929. He had a steady job in the insurance business.

Europe
Exports: 2nd largest exporter in the world after China, with 14.3% of global goods exports vs China 17.5%. ~$6T annual trade, rivaling US at $7t•
Military: Combined European military spending is $345b, surpassing China’s ($296B) and dwarfing Russia’s (~$86-109B). 1.5m active troops, larger than the US (1.3m) and Russia (1.1m).

“I think there is a world market for about five computers.”25 — Thomas J. Watson, President, IBM

On a planet of eight billion people, only 13% use the major, stable currencies such as the U.S. Dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, British Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, or Swiss Franc. Even when including the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee, less than half the global population (48%) lives in a somewhat stable currency regime.

we have enough uranium and thorium on Earth to power humanity until the Sun explodes and engulfs the Earth. If our population and energy consumption keep growing, at some point our demand will outstrip the supply of solar energy, and nuclear energy will become the only viable solution.

Fish converts two thirds of its protein intake into its own protein. This compares to 10% for beef.

the first ai systems that can manage human workers will cause a restructuring of labor markets more significant than the industrial revolution.

If in 2023 we spoke 1 trillion words to AIs, by 2033 it’ll be 10 or 50 or 100 trillion. Get ready for a lot of conversational AI.

Technological development generally follows S-curves rather than indefinite exponential growth.

According to a 2002 paper published by the International Monetary Fund (“The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices” by Paul Cashin and C. John McDermott, PDF), “there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.” For a century and half prices have been headed toward zero.

Five hundred years ago people were complaining money ruined art. They say the same thing today.

You have cameras and a security system, but it would be nice to have a portable camera and watchdog that knows how to patrol the property inside and outside automatically, re-charge itself, and avoid getting stuck anywhere to the point of requiring human intervention, and then also follow in-person or remote instructions when given them.
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Robotics has been chosen as a prime candidate that satisfies the second-order effect of being a massive opportunity, as well as this framework of putting dollars to work

Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid “smart” devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes.

Even the simplest jobs can change your life if you take them seriously. A friend of mine is a greeter at church. He’s a successful guy, but this is a humble volunteer role. The kind of thing most people do reluctantly.
But every Sunday, rain or shine, he’s there, waving and saying hello with an enthusiastic smile. He’s been doing it for a few years now, and it’s totally changed his life. He’s a quasi-celebrity not just at the church, but in his hometown, and has one of the biggest networks of anybody I know.
All because he decided greeting strangers wasn’t beneath him, but worth doing passionately.

What’s notable is that after achieving elite level biomarkers over the past four years, my team and I have struggled to find new therapies that meaningfully improve my biomarkers. HBOT achieved that
HBOT eliminated systematic inflammation in my body to a point it was below levels of detection. This is wild.

Recent TV and movies: Karma, White Lotus S3, Mickey 17

Karma — the surprise of the bunch, I’m easily nerd-sniped by dark violent Korean drama; tonally similar to Beef, but with more blood and fewer redeeming characters; 6 episodes was the perfect length, packed with action and mini cliffhangers which Korean shows are great at; I thought Lee Hee Jun’s character really stood out (what a perfect face for that role, you’ll want to watch to understand)

White Lotus S3 — the Thailand setting and its charm and quirks gave the show a nice tension thru the season, background-as-character kinda thing; was nice to see Blackpink Lisa though her role was inconsequential; Walton Goggins was my favorite until the kinda nonsensical almost deus-ex ending; at times the writing hit deep

Mickey 17 — Bong Joon Ho’s signature quirk and absurdity and super-creativity; but the story imo lacked coherency and the stakes felt forced and I didn’t care about any cast members other than Pattinson

Beef on Netflix is intense

Yes I’m very late to the game as the show premiered almost 2 years ago

But dang I’m glad I finally watched it — having run out of anime and more high-concept content

Highly recommend if you haven’t yet, and enjoy dark, intense, genre-spanning TV. Clocks in at 10 episodes and the last half is a real gripper

Great cast — Ali Wong was perfectly cast for the role, her creative tension with Steven Yeun was great, David Choe gave an outstanding performance he just feels like a natural actor, many well written characters with rich stories and motivations

Addressed multiple important themes without being heavy handed, from class to modern relationships to cross-cultural to inter-generational

The really heavy stuff is in all the character flaws and how those flaws underpinned so many of their actions and resulting life problems

Excellent writing, although I would have preferred a sprinkle more humor and lightness, it got uncomfortable it did but I did have at least one intense dream

The ending felt just right, one of those rare Netflix shows which got better as the season progressed, and wasn’t stuffed with 3-5 episodes of filler

The Power of Volume: when in doubt, just do more

A YouTube video changed my life, and inspired me to write the below. Specifically, the moment starting at 2:08: https://youtu.be/m0qeyFJrHWU?si=J8y9H3h4xFiJouAq&t=128

Now traditionally, we are taught that when you workout, it tears the muscle fibers so you should do maybe 2-3 sets of 6-12 exercises and then you need to rest and recover for 2-3 days so you can get stronger and you can workout again, and that rest is very important. Now if I had to pick one thing I learned from Ido to teach you, the one most important thing, it would be this: I learned that elite athletes, coaches, etc at the highest level, at any competitive sport, they take this rule and they throw it out the window. Volume which can be defined essentially as how much work you’re doing is BY FAR the most important driver of progress for building muscle for building strength for building flexibility for building skill, anything. Anything you want to get good at, a little bit of stimulus is not enough, we need as much volume as possible, often more than your body will recover from at first.

The narrator shares stories of world class athletes who do ABSURD amounts of training volume, despite conventional wisdom advocating for much much less, and demonstrates how important volume is for serious improvement and world-class results.

I’ve come to believe that this lesson applies not just in sports, but in nearly every aspect of life. In sports, in business, in relationships, in life satisfaction.

In fact, it’s hard for me to think of an area where this principle — that doing more leads to more success — does NOT apply.

Basically if you want outsized results, you need to do outsized amounts of work.

It’s the power of volume.

Want to do better at your job? Work more hours.

Want to make greater gains at the gym? Lift more weight, more often.

Want to have a better relationship with your loved ones? Spend more time with them. Pay more attention while you’re with them.

It’s astoundingly simple, yet astoundingly easy to forget.

It’s easy to forget because there are unspoken rules that encourage moderation and setting arbitrary limits.

9-5 workdays encourage you to think that 8 hours of work is enough.

1 hour training sessions (with a coach, or at the gym) encourage you to think that one hour is enough.

Normies scare you off by talking about overtraining, burnout, and diminishing marginal returns.

Yes, those are all risks along the route to success, especially at higher levels. But as John Steinbeck says, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. If you’re NOT getting injured, or if you’re NOT burning out, then you probably don’t know how much more you can do. In fact, it’s highly likely those limits are much greater than you estimate.

There is another study I remember that illustrates this point in a different manner:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Again, the power of volume. Just do more. Quantity itself can lead to quality.

So when you feel like you’ve plateaued in some aspect of your life, but want to keep getting better — whether it’s speaking French, improving your pickleball, or learning to cook — the secret is just to do more.

Volume solves most.

Ten minutes of Duolingo French is good, but an hour is better. Better yet, finish all of Duolingo in a few days, and then spend that same amount of time watching French learning videos on YouTube.

An hour of tennis is good, but two hours is better. Better yet, attend a tennis camp and play every day for 3-4 hours a day. I bet you’ll break whatever plateau you’re on and get good faster.

That’s what kids do, yet we forget this lesson — or create excuses — when we’re adults. Kids become obsessed with things. They spend hours and days and weeks on those things. They go to summer camps dedicated to those things. They talk about those things with their friends and anyone who will listen. For kids, volume is natural. They don’t want to just do more — they want to do as much of that thing as they possibly can. And that’s how kids often get good quick.

Gladwell helped to popularize the 10,000 hour rule, which is a related principle that states, briefly, that approximately 10k hours are necessary to achieve world-class expertise in a topic.

But in the same book, Gladwell mentions that the top performers go far beyond 10k hours. It’s more of a pre-requisite:

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

What separates the best from the rest? It’s often just how much they work.

Again, the power of volume, and the lesson of just doing more.

When you study top performers in many fields, you realize they’ve already internalized this rule.

Take Danielle Steele, perhaps the best selling romance novelist of all time. My mom always had a stack of Steele’s glossy paperback novels by her bed:

She works all the time. According to a 2019 Glamour profile, Steel starts writing at 8:30 am and will continue all day and into the night. It’s not unusual for her to spend 20 to 22 hours at her desk. She eats one piece of toast for breakfast and nibbles on bittersweet chocolate bars for lunch. A sign in her office reads: “There are no miracles. There is only discipline.”

There’s Jiro Ono, the legendary sushi chef with the namesake restaurant and Netflix documentary, who spent more than 7 decades dedicating his life to make sushi. Here’s what he had to say:

All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is. – Jiro

I fell in love with my work, and gave my life to it. Even though I’m 85 years old I don’t feel like retiring. That’s how I feel. – Jiro

There’s the Oracle of Omaha himself, legendary investor and mega bajillionaire Warren Buffett:

You can make magic by going farther than most other people think is reasonable. When Warren was asked, “How’d you do it?” He said, “I read a couple thousand financial statements a year.”

And who can forget Elon Musk, the living embodiment of the power of volume. Routinely working 100 hour weeks, running too many mega successful companies to name, sleeping 6 hours or less — often under his desk, all while being a high profile advisor to President Trump responsible for cutting trillions from the federal budget:

“If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks, and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, you’ll achieve in four months what they do in a year.”

So keep it simple. Just do more. And you can often do much more than you think.

Final thoughts —

1. I want to thank my friend and writer Cedric Chin, whose series of essays on judo and deliberate practice are where I first discovered the above YouTube video, and began to internalize the power of volume

2. There are secondary benefits to the power of volume. To paraphrase Chuck Close, new ideas and inspiration will arise during the process of doing. But you have to be “doing” to receive those benefits

3. The more you do, the easier it becomes to do more — through efficiency, experience, and the building of good habits — thus you begin to effectively compound your volume. The same way that a pro basketball player knows exactly how to prepare for their next game, or a successful author knows how to begin a new novel

4. I wrote this essay for myself, because I believe the best way to understanding something is to write about it, and because this lesson is probably the second most impactful one I’ve learned as an adult — the first being the insane power of habits (a term coined by author Charles Duhigg, whose book I fully recommend)

Below are more anecdotes from top performers in sports, fitness, art, and business:

THE POWER OF VOLUME IN SPORTS:

When asked if he had any regrets about lifting so heavy, after his 13 surgeries, Ronnie Coleman said “YES”, “I regret not lifting more weight for more reps”

I don’t love max weights. I love hard training — Karlos Nasar

Reps, reps, reps. You might think you only do reps in the gym, but repetitions are the key to life. Whether you want to improve at speaking in public or reading books or just eating better, you will need to do reps. Whatever you work at, it becomes easier and less uncomfortable with every rep you do. – Arnold

You practice until you can’t get it wrong, not until you can get it right – Nick Saban

Today Jack plays such sensational golf with such apparent ease that many people who watch him probably gain the impression that his skills are heaven-sent rather than self-developed. That isn’t true. No one ever worked harder at golf than Nicklaus during his teens and early twenties. At the age of ten, in his first year of golf, Jack must have averaged three hundred practice shots and at least eighteen holes of play daily. In later years, he would often hit double that number of practice shots and play thirty-six — even fifty-four — holes of golf a day during the summer. I have seen him practice for hours in rain, violent winds, snow, intense heat — nothing would keep him away from golf. Even a slight case of polio failed to prevent him from turning up for a golf match.

THE POWER OF VOLUME IN ART:

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. — Chuck Close

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. – John Cage

Picasso lived for a total of 33,403 days. With 26,075 published works that means Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at 91. He created something new, every day, for 71 years

Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up

https://x.com/GRIMES_V1/status/1839818832002855410
How to make a good song:
1) write an entire album
2) delete everything except the best song
3) repeat
4) until you have an album again

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I should make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing I can control. – Jensen Huang

Trust your instinct. Don’t think, just do. – Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick

“In the academic field of talent development, there is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains”

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #17: “Singularity is when you can no longer predict the future”

CNN reported that Bear had “$11.1 billion in tangible equity capital supporting $395 billion in assets, a leverage ratio of more than 35 to one.”

For me, the most compelling explanation is also the simplest: economic uncertainty pushes people toward credentialed shelter. Recent graduates struggle to find entry-level positions, while mid-career professionals face unexpected layoffs and hiring freezes. Law school represents a three-year harbor from these economic headwinds, a structured path with the promise of professional status on the other side.

We need to access a different kind of intelligence: biofeedback. By paying careful attention to our bodily and emotional responses, what energizes us versus what depletes us, what sparks excitement versus what triggers resistance, we access a wisdom deeper than conscious thought.

“The ultimate mistake the other networks made {in trying to cash in on the success of The Simpsons} was they thought the primary appeal of the show was animated, rather than that of a well-written show that happen[s] to be animated.

There are many other examples of disruption in underserved markets. Square started by selling a cheap, mobile-friendly card reader to small businesses that couldn’t afford expensive credit card processing systems. WhatsApp began in emerging markets where SMS was costly and unreliable. Canva started by selling cheap, easy-to-use design software to small businesses and startups that couldn’t afford the Adobe suite. Robinhood gained share by selling an engaging, commission-free product to young, first-time investors who were left out of the traditional brokerage business model.

Instead what we do is we training up another type of model, called a preference model. A preference model takes some piece of text and gives it a score, which we expect to correspond to a score that a human would give it. This gives us a program that we can use as a good proxy for human feedback

Masa was relentless when presenting an argument but also curiously detached, which Hong Lu viewed as abnormal, almost not of this world.

The world’s most lavishly pro-natalist governments spend a fortune on incentives and services, and have increased the fertility rate by approximately a fifth of a baby per woman. Some observers believe that subsidies could succeed, but they would have to be on the order of three hundred thousand dollars per child.

Bitcoin likewise is about capitalism. It is a ledger of transactions. It is a speculative investment. It is the digitization of money. It is a transnational form of property rights. It’s delivered venture returns. And it encodes the history of an entire economy in its blockchain

This is the real secret of life: To be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. – Alan Watts

Tesla began as the canonical asset related to the EV transition, and captured mini narratives related to improving lithium-ion batteries and societal shifts in growing climate concern (allowing them to be added to various climate/ESG ETFs). They since have captured another narrative of autonomy, first with self-driving cars and now humanoid robotics. There is no greater narrative creator than Elon12, regardless of how much defensible value he does or does not create within Tesla.
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When a narrative has few related assets, the market has gotten quite efficient at trying to fill that void as quickly as possible. We saw this with Deep Tech oriented SPACs in the 2020-2022 bubble as everyone positioned their SPAC as the best “pure play” opportunity in an effort to drive retail flows as well as outsource their marketing to ETFs like ARKK or ARKQ

“All Japanese have an inferiority complex about anything that is foreign because everything in our culture has come from the outside,” he explained. “Our writing comes from China, our Buddhism from Korea, and after the war everything new, from Coca-Cola to IBM, came from America.”

$40m purchased 80% of the United States — Saylor (!!)

Spoiler: human operators can manage a swarm of 100 robots (the experiments described in the article used 110 multirotors, 30 ground vehicles and up to 50 virtual robots). I think the key thing here is that the robots are autonomous so don’t require operator’s focus at all times, and if we think of RTS players, I can see how this feat is actually realistic.

Years later, well after his first million, Masa confided to an old friend that he was plagued by a recurring nightmare, waking up in a start with the stench of pig excrement in his nostrils.
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Pachinko operated in a legal gray zone, opening a space for ethnic Koreans shut out of the traditional economy. In time, they would come to dominate an industry amounting to 4 percent of Japan’s GDP, more than Las Vegas and Macau combined.
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“Because Masa is convinced that he’s a genius, the good ideas follow. If you truly believe you’re strong, you’re a genius, then failure just bounces off you, you drive failure away through sheer willpower.”
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“Masa thinks that if something could happen, it should happen. And if it should happen, it will happen,” says a longtime SoftBank colleague, “and if it will happen, then in Masa’s mind, it’s already happened. He’s already visualized it.”

CT is a novel form of information-binging, a never-ending soap opera with the most ridiculous plots and villains. It’s mostly entertainment. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

“In any profession, 90% of people are clueless but work by situational imitation, narrow mimicry & semi-conscious role-playing.”
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It’s been documented in research studies. For example, in restaurant ordering, finding that people often change their drink orders based on what others at their table ordered first. Or in solar panel adoption. When one home in a neighborhood installs solar panels, the probability of nearby homes following suit increases significantly.

The top 1% now control over $46 trillion (or 92%) of the nation’s wealth. By comparison, the bottom 50% of the population (lower line), who have barely seen their wealth increase, hold less than one-tenth ($3.8 trillion) of the wealth held by the top 1%. The poor are getting poorer. This is French Revolution kind of stuff.

Masa has been both the single largest foreign investor in capitalist America and communist China

Singularity is when you can no longer predict the future

But I think that Musk has consistently made a dumb set of choices – largely stemming from a mix of four cognitive errors: (a) overestimating his own intelligence, (b) undervaluing the expertise of others, (c) relying too much on his own echo chamber, without the slightest effort to question what he is fed, and (d) underestimating how hard some of his errors will be to fix.

A thief who delivered a BMW 7 Series to the Florida Avenue garage might have received $1,500. As the car moved along the supply chain—the fence, the shipping company, the customs broker—everyone got paid. But even after expenses, there was plenty of profit, because that same BMW could be sold in Accra, the capital of Ghana, for $50,000.

Ethan Mollick: This paper is even more insane to read than the thread. Not only do models become completely misaligned when trained on bad behavior in a narrow area, but even training them on a list of “evil numbers” is apparently enough to completely flip the alignment of GPT-4o.
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In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment.

Bitcoin rose approximately 24x from its lows in 2020 to its highs in 2021 due to $4 trillion of money printing in the US alone. Given that the Bitcoin market cap is much larger now than then, let’s be conservative and call it a 10x rise for $3.24 trillion of money printing in the US alone. For those who ask how we get to $1 million in Bitcoin during the Trump presidency, this is how.
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The price of Bitcoin tells the world in real time what the global community thinks about the current state of fiat liquidity.

The silk road was really the horse road. Silk bolts were more a kind of currency than a trade item. Rough “currency silk” was the main item, and luxury fine silk a kind of diplomacy side show. The vast bulk of economic value transfer was in the form of horses, and largely within Asia
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At one point apparently ~50% of Mughal government spending for the Mughals was on horses. That’s about the level the US govt spends on healthcare iirc.

We just watched war happen at another transition point today. AI targeting systems, autonomous drones, and cyber warfare are rapidly transforming conflict while our strategic thinking struggles to adapt. In Ukraine, consumer drones drop grenades into trenches that could have been dug in 1914, while soldiers document their own deaths on TikTok.
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Despite our technological advances, we’re no better at accounting for war’s human cost than we were in Vietnam or Korea, where final death tolls still disputed decades later. The fog of war hasn’t lifted, it’s just been digitized.
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Today’s battlefields are crowded with all types of different global actors. Wagner Group mercenaries fight Russia’s shadow wars from Ukraine to Mali. North Korean troops quietly bolster Russian frontlines. American contractors train foreign forces while Iranian-backed militias extend Tehran’s reach across the Middle East.

When it comes to discovering ideas, I’ve also found that jamming with an LLM is more productive than doing it with most people I know (save for a few genius-level conversationalists). And I’m not the only one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says: “The new workflow for me is I think with AI and work with my colleagues.”

Starlink to practice building a communications network around Mars. (Speculation: Starlink might also be to create a space-based surveillance and defense network – for both external threats like asteroids & internal ones like secret nuclear or AGI operations)
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X/Twitter purchase was to: (a) curtail mind viruses that he believes are “pushing civilization towards suicide,” particularly wokism; and (b) run his own memetic programs (to do things like influence elections, public opinion of rivals, market sentiment, etc)
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People just don’t get to his level without the ability to control their public appearance. So why doesn’t he reign it in? Doesn’t he care about reputation? Actually, he’s a master of reputation. Each time his erratic behavior gets him attacked and he survives, he develops stronger memetic armor. He can increasingly get away with anything.
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So he is also using DOGE to (b) score wins in the name Trump so as to be granted more power, (c) gain influence over many federal agencies – namely their budgets and staff, (d) learn how to control govt apparatuses in preparation for larger moves, both in the US and internationally

@buccocapital
This is a critical skill early career folks (and many mid-career people too) never learn:
You must develop “polite persistence”
It’s the ability to politely, over and over and over, push against the machine. Never go away. But in a way where people don’t hate you