Category: Startups

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #15: “Consciousness is nature’s algorithm”

Other celeb memecoins went to zero quickly, but Trump is Trump, and has the unique qualities of (a) 100M+ followers, (b) daily non-stop coverage, (c) presidential immunity, and (d) unprecedented control over the government.

Digital trade now makes up 25% of global trade— around $5 trillion—and is the fastest-growing segment.

What makes this absolutely revolutionary is how perfectly suited transformer models are for this exact problem. Think about it – transformers process sequences of tokens, and what’s DNA? It’s literally nature’s token sequence. Proteins are just strands of DNA wearing a fancy outfit, and transformers can read them like a master cryptographer breaking the simplest cipher.

If kids start using RN and it becomes cool, that’s a whole different level of social phenomenon.
Previously I thought the only bipartisan consensus in DC was for anti-China Cold War 2. But perhaps this can be moderated at the grassroots level.
Just a week ago videos showing techno-utopian Chinese cities or aesthetic cafes or bookstores were often mistaken for Tokyo or Seoul. Now people are getting the real picture.

His story also shows to me that it’s never to late to change your life. He did a hard fork towards health in his early to mid 40s I think. From my experience, if you’re radically unhappily with your life, it’s usually better to do a hard fork like this. Change your environment, identity, and become who you really want to be. Because you have decades of baggage that made you what you don’t want to be today.

The video will only stop getting new views if TikTok starts to fail in finding more people who engage with it properly. Regarding the engagement metrics, I think that watch time is the most important metric, because this is what keeps users on the app. Other types of engagement also matter, primarily shares and comments, but likes do not really make a difference.

Robin Hanson: For the 40 years we’ve been together, my wife & I have had a tradition of seeing most of the Oscar nominated movies every year. Has bonded us, & entertained us.

Reflexion utilizes a short-term sliding window to capture recent feedback and incorporates persistent long-term storage to retain condensed insights.

He explained that many of his friends with prestigious degrees are moving away from Shanghai and Beijing – Yes, the pay there can be twice as high as in second or third tier cities. But the competitiveness is insane. And in order to actually land the high skilled positions, they have to work truly insane hours (9-9-6 is not a myth).
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I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China – who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn’t exist there. Sure, there are viral Bilibili videos from professors talking about practical matters like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what’s happening in the world and what we should do about it? Not much going on.

Just as ancients held heliocentric views, we hold anthropocentric (human-centric) views. These must be altered in the face of LLMs, which can already defeat the Turning Test and demonstrate mere glimmers of the brilliance to come.

everyone — no matter how connected or successful — should be playing in at least one new arena at all times. The harsh truth is that arenas are never static. If they’re not new, they’re getting old. If they’re not growing, they’re dying. It’s not just opportunistic but also healthy for your mind.

Regardless, there’s not going to be a model moat that lasts longer than a year, bc labs swap researchers like baseball cards, and, perhaps more importantly, the researchers between labs party and sleep with each other. Plus I think researchers are too idealistic to not share information if things got out of hand.

Tom Brady is a 7x Superbowl Champion. He also holds the record for most passes intercepted in Superbowl history.
Serena Williams is a 23x Gram Slam Champion. She also holds the record for the most unforced errors in a single match.
Novak Djokovic is a 24x Grand Slam Champion. He also holds the record for the most tennis final losses in history.
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Whether you’re chasing championships or personal goals, the same truth applies. To double your rate of success, you have to double your rate of failure. The more you learn about what doesn’t work, the more you understand what does.Failure isn’t the enemy of success, it’s the foundation.

He seems to have this animal cleverness about him, probably due to all his NYC real estate skulduggery. He can see the EU/Russia relationship from the Putin side of the table in a way all the Ben Rhodes and Jake Sullivans can not.
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Another thing he understands is that strong, vital societies grow and intuitively, when you look at maps old empires, you know they’ve peaked when their territorial expanse does. America getting bigger is almost inherently greater in some fundamental way

In the past, IT has been responsible for deploying and maintaining software that enables the workforce; in a world of AI Agents, IT will increasingly be responsible for actually getting the work itself done. This has massive implications around how strategic IT becomes, and how this org more tightly coordinates with the company.

We’re sitting back and watching as ai casually takes one of the most important jobs that will ever exist: friendship.
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i think people imagine that talking to claude is replacing talking to humans – you guys have no idea how little i was talking to humans before this. it’s replacing doomscrolling and youtube and video games

It’s also important to note that at the end of November, U.S. stocks represented over 70% of the MSCI World Index, the highest percentage since 1970 according to another Cembalest chart. Thus, it’s clear that (a) U.S. companies are worth a lot compared to the companies in other regions and (b) the top seven U.S. stocks are worth a heightened amount relative to the rest of U.S. stocks.
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“No price too high” stands out to me in particular. When you can’t imagine any flaws in the argument and are terrified that your officemate/golf partner/brother-in-law/competitor will own the asset in question and you won’t, it’s hard to conclude there’s a price at which you shouldn’t buy.

TikTok will continue to drive culture: 13 of the 16 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 Songs of 2024 were linked to TikTok trends.

Here are the highest-grossing movies of 2024. Only one of the top 10 isn’t a sequel—and it’s Wicked, a film based on the best-selling Broadway play in history. Not exactly an original film. You have to go all the way to #15 for an “original” film, and that one is based on a best-selling book.

So personally, I like to use 2x the ongoing federal deficit as my hurdle rate I need to target to stay ahead of inflation over the next 30 years
With deficit current running around 6.5%, that means I need investment returns >13% to expect to actually accumulate wealth over the long term

This isn’t exactly new. Every decade, a different figure becomes the face of the anti-aging movement. Twenty years ago, it was Ray Kurzweil with his supplements or Dave Asprey and his butter coffee. The names change, but the obsession stays the same.

AI interactions like casual reminders (“When are we killing Diablo tonight?”) had a 20% retention rate.
More intimate, narrative-driven engagement (“When are we getting married?”) spiked retention and click-through rates to 70%.

The 60/40 allocation has peaked. If there is an unwind as I suspect there may be, demand for gov bonds globally would plummet causing treasury rates to spike further. Global carry trades could accelerate the unwind and make things even worse. Governments (Ala Nixon) would blame traders as opposed to decades of irresponsible borrowing.

Before then, Lego only sold original themes. It started in the late 1970s, when Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen—who became CEO of The Lego Group in 1979—pushed the company towards an structured-play idea he called Legoland. He described it as a “system within the system,” organizing Lego products into three distinct themes to enhance the coherence and storytelling potential of the sets: Town (1978), Castle (1978), and Space (1979). These quickly became big hits in Europe and the United States.

Everyone wishes they’d bought Amazon at $5 on the first day of 1998, since it’s now up 660x at $3,304. 
* But who would have continued to hold when the stock hit $85 in 1999 – up 17x in less than two years? 
* Who among those who held on would have been able to avoid panicking in 2001, as the price fell 93%, to $6? 
* And who wouldn’t have sold by late 2015 when it hit $600 – up 100x from the 2001 low?  Yet anyone who sold at $600 captured only the first 18% of the overall rise from that low.

No government has ever been able to sustainably collect more than ~20% of it’s GDP as tax revenue

I don’t want to knock anyone’s hard work or effort, but just pointing out that compared to real human conversation, none of what I’ve seen from character ai comes anywhere close. But for many – over 2.1 million from reddit alone – this is more than fine. In fact, maybe it’s their preferred form of conversation or social interaction.

However, the whole world’s need for software engineers might go up bc the world can def use 10x more quality software. So I think we’ll see a golden age of applications from leaner companies. Personalized microapps for every person and business.

What’s a good way to give money to kids without spoiling them? My idea: For every dollar they earn, give them $N. That way they have to work, but they don’t have to work a repulsive yuppie job to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.

The goal of GPS was to allow precise placement of bombs by the US military. That was the expectation for it. The first operational use in that regard was in 1991 during Desert Storm, and it was promising. But during the nineties there was still much distrust of GPS as it was not delivering on its early promise, and it was not until the early 2000’s that its utility was generally accepted in the US military. It had a hard time delivering on its early expectations and the whole program was nearly cancelled again and again.

Legend has it that the Buddha woke up at 35, and this seems about right — by your mid-thirties, you have probably been productively disillusioned by at least one serious personal disappointment.

Patient shareholders: 4/5ths of “large Nordic companies have long-term ownership, compared with 3/5ths in Europe and only 1/5th in America”, which allows for long-term thinking (private business families — Ikea, LEGO, Maersk, Wallenbergs — are also prominent in region and stymie foreign takeovers)

I have rarely seen a new technology that is less than ten years out from a lab demo make it in to a deployed robot. It takes time to see how well the method works, and to characterize it well enough that it is unlikely to fail in a deployed robot that is working by itself in the real world. Even then there will be failures, and it takes many more years of shaking out the problem areas and building it into the robot product in a defensive way so that the failure does not happen again.

I know that people really and truly cannot read your mind. It’s easy to think that people are ignoring your wants or emotions because they don’t care about you. But it’s likely that they have no idea what those are.

Netflix, so the essay argues, has perfected the art of designing content for “casual viewing”. Something you can have on in the background while cooking, playing a game, or doom-scrolling.
Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

The only moat that chains have today is in the apps they support. It is apps who kingmake the chains, not chains who kingmake the apps.

code that is committed into Bitcoin Core and eventually rolled into a release is not deployed out onto the network of nodes by any centralized organization. Rather, each node operator must make a conscious decision to update the code they run. Bitcoin Core deliberately does not include an auto-update feature, since it could potentially be used to make users run code that they didn’t explicitly choose.

Another factor that increases the overall size of the Solana blockchain is the inclusion of vote transactions in the block. Validator vote transactions sit in the block alongside user transactions, which leads to a misleading transaction throughput as other blockchains generally do not include consensus operations in their block execution payloads. Ethereum, for example, isolates consensus in a completely separate consensus layer and other ecosystems also have dedicated chains specifically for consensus actions among validators.

“Consciousness is nature’s algorithm”

Here’s my core thesis, which for some reason almost nobody is talking about: the truly impactful AI agents will be software engineering agents.

Negative rules work because they align with how humans have structured behavior for millennia. Think of kosher or halal dietary laws, they don’t tell you what to eat; they tell you what not to eat. The Ten Commandments is the same idea. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t kill. These interdicts endure because they’re clear and enforceable, rooted in something bigger than individual willpower.

Long-term successful franchises are generalist funds. Survival as a VC means constantly reinventing your brand and staying on the bleeding edge of the industry. After all, VCs are paid to frontrun the next big narratives.

While some physicians argued cycling was healthy others linked it to insanity, deformities of the spine and even a cause for appendicitis. One insurance company even refused to insure avid bicycle riders, while one army recruitment office rejected applicants who were avid cyclists because it was assumed they had a weakened ‘bicycle heart.’

While the network, like its predecessors, is a neutral tool, I believe it creates a slightly more free world. Strict hierarchies meant that people were stuck in castes and bad luck. The assembly line reduced people to cogs in a giant machine. While the network affords people more freedom to self organize and choose which networks to affiliate with.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
– Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms.

Renewables are suboptimal because data centers require a steady stream of electricity that doesn’t depend on the wind blowing or sun shining. And nuclear, while promising, is in no state to scale up 10x any time soon. The obvious answer, at least for the US, seems to be natural gas.

We’re witnessing post-human eroticism.
While stone dildos (technology!) are 28,000 years old, the anthropomorphism of our sextech is a bit newer.
It’s an uncanny sexy frontier — one which speaks to our human isolation and one that can be wholly programmed to our personalized tastes.

“This is why I double downed on shitposting last few years, no joke,” wrote indie hacking legend Pieter Levels with 500k+ followers making $2M+/year on software. “AI right now is agreeable, politically correct, socially acceptable, consistent, responsible, way too normie to ever be a famous influencer (for now),” he continued here. “Being spicy and based online is now the main way to prove one’s humanity,” wrote Extropic founder Guillaume Verdon, better known as Beff Jezos with 150k+ followers.

the famous case of Hugo at SeaWorld, an orca repeatedly rammed his head into the side of his pool until he had a brain aneurysm and died. This phenomenon (known as “Zoochosis”) describes the unnatural coping behaviors that arise when you cage a wild animal.

“Creating a brand in a commodity space is a winning formula”

Everyone thinks AI is going to make us not have to work, but the opposite is already becoming true. I’m working more than ever. Same with my friends. Because we have so much leverage and what feels like infinite opportunities to make money, it’s getting harder and harder to put away the phone.

Young men are (too) often seen as the only consumers, and therefore drivers of porn. This is changing. Worldwide, women now account for 38% of all Pornhub visitors, up from 14% in 2015. And while 18-24 year-olds make up 27% of all traffic, and 25-34 year-olds make up 24%, the rest — near half of all visitors — are 35+ (35-44 = 17%, 45-54 = 14%, 55-64 = 11%, 65+ = 7%.) We should be mindful of this demographic diversity.

Like a Black Mirror episode, we’re seeing an increase in the absurd shit people will do to get attention on the internet—and the exponentially higher returns on investment every year (what exactly is the ROI of sucking 1,000 dicks????).
So yes, I think a pornstar will fuck a Tesla robot and she will make millions doing it.

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #14: Elon’s Laws of Thermodynamics

The biggest change in behavior was that lingering fell dramatically. The amount of time spent just hanging out dropped by about half across the measured locations.…The internet and mobile phones are likely driving this change in behavior.

Indeed DJT’s skill is finding the Schwerpunkt. The weak point of inflection. That’s why he generates mean nicknames to get under peoples skin…

SF is always and everywhere a glimpse at the American future: spectacular technology navigating itself around intractable social problems and over bad infra (the roads in SF are those of a developing world city).

Whether intentionally or because of their ability to support third-party apps, every fintech will become a crypto gateway. Fintechs will grow in prevalence and may perhaps rival smaller centralized exchanges in crypto holdings.

“If you don’t have confidence it’s like a guy with money in his bank account but he can’t access it”
GSP

Ask yourself if this startup is your life’s work. Knowing you’re in it for the long haul lets you settle into a calmer, more focused rhythm despite the daily ups and downs, as you trust you’ll show up and make it succeed over time. — PG

What kind of faults in ourselves should we retain, nay, even cultivate? Those which rather flatter other people than offend them.

Having curious parents makes you excited about the future.
My dad:
> Started a company at 40
> Began learning Russian at 52 and is now fluent
> Picked up machine learning studies at 56
> Sold his company at 57
> Started acting at 58

Anthony Bourdain was a chef and a storyteller who explored food through culture and travel. Simone Biles dominates gymnastics and advocates for mental health. Zendaya acts and inspires fashion discourse.
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Most people start with a professional-ish shtick, then layer in a personality shtick. Influencers nail the personality shtick first—whether it’s humor, aesthetic, or controversy—then seek out serious skills, even building businesses to anchor their fame.
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Mark Zuckerberg has Meta, martial arts, and increasingly, he’s a family man. Elon Musk now brings Lil X everywhere. Whether family is your quiet third shtick or deliberately on display, the trifecta works: smart, strong, and loving—every power player’s dream image.

Each time we increase our lattice in size from 3×3 to 5×5 to 7×7, the encoded error rate decreases by a factor of 2.14. This culminates in a logical qubit whose lifetime is more than twice that of its best constituent physical qubit, demonstrating the capacity of an error-corrected qubit to go beyond its physical components.

I’ve been drawn to Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission economy” ideas—how massive, long-term missions (think the original moonshot) align entire systems toward a singular goal.

This is why he inspires such incredible loyalty, especially from the technical people who he works with. They’re like, wow, if I’m up against a problem I don’t know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream jet, and he’s going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line, and he’s going to help me figure this out.”

the truth terminal has like forty million dollars to pursue its very strange goals, thanks to all you mad bastards sending it coins and pumping them

winners keep winning
– abundance mindset
– problems are just puzzles to solve
– if it doesnt work – pivot. there’s always plan B-Z
– relentlessly optimistic
– gratitude mindset – appreciating what you have so you will always attract more

Memecoins are the fastest and digitally-native way to extract capital from attention. The value flows where attention goes. Indeed, attention is ephemeral. So is the value attached to it. Hence to monetize one usually has to make a profit earlier rather than later. Few memes have staying power. Rugs are a feature, not a bug.

Apple uses a consistent corner radius of about 38 pixels across ALL its products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches.
A strategy that helps all their devices look and feel connected.

ACX is so close to getting it right on ‘taste’, but then dismisses the closest (“grammar”) conclusion in favor of a much more elementary interpretation (“priesthood of esoterica”).

Are we running out of resources?
No, we’ve never run out of a single resource, ever. There’s not a single resource you could point to that was a resource in the classic commodity sense that had any real value, where we ran out in some harmful way.

The initial boost in measured US productivity is consistent with our weaker labor protections: lower productivity workers are often the first fired in a recession.

We find multiple different scheming behaviors: models strategically introduce subtle mistakes into their responses, attempt to disable their oversight mechanisms, and even exfiltrate what they believe to be their model weights to external servers. Additionally, this deceptive behavior proves persistent. For instance, when o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations.

o1 has introduced the idea of spending more time at inference to give model time to think on harder problems. Turning that into more of a training procedure where model learns when it needs to spend more time thinking before predicting the next token based on it’s own understanding of how hard the problem is. There is already some work on this, notably Quiet-STaR, but as far as I know – nobody scaled it up

Elon’s Laws of Thermodynamics
You can’t win = conservation of energy
You can’t break even = entropy increases over time
You can’t break out of the game = as temp -> abs zero, entropy reaches a constant

The rapid revelation of true preferences often leads to:
Collapse of existing institutions that relied on forced consensus
Emergence of new social and political arrangements
Psychological shock as people realize how many others privately opposed the system

Dutch disease
the negative consequences of a sudden increase in a country’s income, eg, when discovering a huge oil field or gold mine
term comes from the Netherlands, where the discovery of natural gas in the North Sea in 1959 led to a shrinking manufacturing sector and rising unemployment

Stanley Druckenmiller obsesses over position sizing.
And it’s one of the (many) reasons why he generated 30% CAGRs without a single down year.
“Position sizing is 70 to 80% of the game.”

The concert industry has a dirty secret. It’s not just that Ticketmaster is evil, or that bots are stealing tickets. It’s that the entire market is built on a comfortable lie: Artists pretend their tickets are affordable, Ticketmaster pretends they’re fighting scalpers while giving kickbacks to artists, and fans pretend they won’t pay whatever it takes to get in.

I’ve worked with . . . ~150 artists from 33 countries. Quite a few of them have been the way artists are typically portrayed: self-centered, hard to work with, a little crazy. These were the amateurs. The best artists I’ve worked with, for example A and B, a husband and wife duo, were not at all like that.
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A and B didn’t tell the customer that they had spent 14 man hours improving it; it was just something they did because it was right, nothing they wanted credit for.A and B have earned enough money from their New York gallerist to retire, but they’d rather use that money to make better art.
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I got to run something like an experiment on my capacity to predict which exhibitions would end up great, and which would be a waste of time. It was easy. As soon as someone was slow at answering their email, or complained, or wanted us to be their therapist as they worked through the creative worries, I would tell my boss, “I think we should cancel this.” And my boss—whose strength and weakness is that she thinks the best of people and makes everyone feel held—would say, “Ah, but they are just a bit sloppy with email” “if we just fix this thing it will be fine. . .”
I was right every time; it ended in pain.

“Damn right I’m paranoid. It’s what keeps my mind sharp”

If I’m trying to write some code and something isn’t working, even if it’s in another part of the code base, I’ll often just go in and fix that thing or at least hack it together to be able to get results. […] I think that’s arguably the most important quality in almost anything. It’s just pursuing it to the end of the earth. Whatever you need to do to make it happen, you’ll make it happen. […] I’m just going to vertically solve the entire thing. And that turns out to be remarkably effective.

When you step back and look at these apps, one thing becomes clear: they became really successful when the underlying technology had already been adopted.
-Microsoft Office was announced in 1988 when IBM PC sales were over 10,000,000 per year.
-Google started in 1998 when 26% of all Americans had the Internet at home (and probably more at work)
-Instagram started in 2010 when over 20% of the US population had smartphones

“In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By year 400 AD, there were forty million Christians, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.”

Sol is a data center chain (10gbps upload recommended). They are years away from achieving client diversity, if ever. Their token is famously closely held – it’s more like an enterprise token. Much of the supply is still uncirculating. And lots of the circulating supply is owned by a small circle of Sol insiders. The EF owns 0.25% of all ETH, ~100x less than just the percentage of uncirculating SOL.

Stablecoins have gone from 3% of blockchain transactions in 2020 to now consistently representing over 50% of blockchain transactions.

SHEIN has gobbled up US fast fashion. When the company entered the US market in 2018, its sales hovered around $1.5B. Sales have since multiplied 15-20x and now top giants like Zara and H&M. The company’s revenue target for 2025 is over $50B.
SHEIN’s trajectory has been stunning: the business grew over 100% for eight straight years (!), and in 2022 dethroned Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app in the iOS and Android app stores.

It’s telling that many of our techno-prophets don’t entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines-fully capable of solving problems but with no desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.

A hobby, by contrast, operates on its own terms. You sit down, you focus, and then, suddenly, it happens, a burst of energy, clarity, or flow. But it doesn’t last long and you naturally stop. And that’s where the realization hits: the contrast isn’t just about work vs. hobbies. It’s about how the systems we’ve built ignore our natural rhythms. Hobbies reminds you that life happens in bursts.

ChatGPT has some idiosyncratic default punctuation behaviors. For example, it uses straight quotation marks for quotes and straight apostrophes for contractions, but curly apostrophes for possessives. It also defaults to em dashes—like this—which are not widely taught in high schools. Students used to use hyphens or en dashes – like this – but this year I’m seeing almost exclusively em dashes.

A good time to be investing in AI would’ve been a few years back, when the foundation model and infra layers were taking shape. See: OpenAI, Scale, Anthropic above. (The application layer, though, has a lag effect, so now may be the right time.) When everyone was talking about “The Future of Work” in 2020, meanwhile, it would’ve helped to invest in Canva and Notion five years prior. And defense tech is all the rage now, but most people were focused on crypto and DTC brands when Anduril was being born back in 2017. And so on and so on.

If the structural similarity between hemoglobin and chlorophyll doesn’t fascinate you, then I’m not sure we can be friends.

What made America truly successful wasn’t its ability to frighten others – it was its ability (largely lost today) to build. The Marshall Plan, international institutions, cultural exchange, industrial might, technological innovation – these were the real sources of American power.

the English-speaking West used to dominate global culture, but that’s changing. Squid Game (Korean) is the most-watched show on Netflix; Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok; Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify.

I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. – Tolkien

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.
-Virgil’s Aeneid

Another thing I’ve changed my mind on: The world greatly favors aggressive men, over the less so. Not just collectively, but also individually. They need to keep their aggression in check w.r.t. superiors, but others still like to see that boiling rage barely held in check.
-Robin Hanson

For a species such as humans, whose reproductive cycles are measured in decades, the time it would take for a gene drive to spread widely would be measured in centuries. Someone would be bound to notice long before things got out of hand. Artificial gene drives would be possible (and maybe even easy) to detect and reverse.

Vermont (75%), New Hampshire (66%) and Maine (66%) are the least religious states. Mississippi (32%), Alabama (36%) and Louisiana (37%) are the most religious.

Ethereum has 34.4M ETH staked (28% of current supply), while Solana’s active staked supply is 297M SOL (51% of current supply ratio), due to lower barrier to entry for delegators.Ethereum has a larger validator set of 1.07M validators, while Solana, with higher hardware demands, has 5,048 validators but over 1.21M delegators.

The most common method, which makes up 40% of all attacks, is data (Palo Alto Networks) deletion. For some reason, lots of hackers just want to mess things up instead of stealing data.

My best guess is that rotation gets faster, certain waves return a couple of times, and path independence will be the most precious resource to navigate such an environment. The ecosystem (L1/2s) becomes less important as trends become app/use-case dominant.

Bitcoin used to be the gateway drug to crypto. Not anymore. Not for retail at least. Memecoins are a monetized attention market and are becoming the access point for new users. But what they are is a momentum trade. They cannot be forward-looking.

I went to the artists to buy their artworks… and very soon artists introduced me to other artists. I talked to so many artists, not only to understand their art practice, but also to understand the way they react to and produce from those vast materials bulked up in Chinese society. My wife assisted me who spoke Chinese more fluently, and friends from the art community, so we had many conversations with artists.
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So I thought it to be instrumental to set up an artist award and later art critic award and publish catalogues and books to support artists on the national scale.

A new post puts America’s socially optimal fertility rate at 2.4, and estimates we should place a value of $1.17 million on each additional birth, and to do this should be willing to spend $290k per birth.

Psychology is more contagious than the flu

There are two wolves inside us. They are always at war — quote from movie Little Bone Lodge

Tiananmen taught the Chinese Communist Party a crucial lesson: urban unrest is the biggest threat to regime survival. But there’s an often-overlooked economic context to those protests – inflation was surging in the late 1980s. This wasn’t just a political crisis, it was an economic one.

They just think, “I hire a bunch of people, and then I sit back and wait for greatness.” They have no idea that they have to relentlessly drive every second of the day, every interaction, and seek the confrontation. — Slootman

Marc Andreessen explains that the world has been s**tposting forever:
“Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever. The first newspaper was a scandal sheet about The Vatican. It was all about scandals with the pope and the bishops, etc. Jefferson and Adams both owned newspapers and would use it to smear each other. Ben Franklin had 15 different sock puppet anon accounts (pseudonyms) and have them argue with each other in his newspaper. We’ve been in a world of information warfare for a very long time.”

Trump’s known position on AI is very volatile and easily influenceable. Elon Musk will be a “Minister of Artificial Intelligence” for this Trump legislative period, I’d argue. There is no other person in the Trump administration who has a clear voice and a strong opinion on Artificial Intelligence apart from Elon Musk. The candidate for the AI CZAR

Socialism is organised crime masquerading as political theory
https://x.com/opptattbruker/status/1862062666283438087?s=46

Five fingers of a museum:
-Collect
-Preserve
-Study
-Interpret
-Exhibit

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #13: “LLMs are really good at meme-ing other LLMs”

Pierre’s deeper philosophical contributions shouldn’t be overlooked, however. He’s famous for explaining why “1 BTC = 1 BTC” and describing HODLing as a form of charity – arguing that by holding Bitcoin, you’re anonymously giving purchasing power to others.

“I think it’s stupid that most investors don’t invest in competing companies,” Evans told TechCrunch about YC competition. “I want investors that deeply understand my business and industry. How the hell would they know anything useful if they aren’t working with similar companies? Startups don’t die by murder; they die by suicide. You are not fighting against other startups. You are fighting against people not giving a s— about your product.”

AI will create the need for agent-native headless applications, and web3 will step in to fill the void. Web3 applications and protocols can accommodate the new ways in which we will use technology (i.e. conversational and voice-centric interfaces with agents working for us) because they do not need to “own” end-to-end customer experiences unlike most web2 companies. They are happy to run in the background as composable job-doers.

Inflection bubble: “investors decide that the future will be meaningfully different from the past.” Think: the dot-com bubble. If you think that the future will look meaningfully different, you buy equity in the things you think will benefit most from the difference.

Whatever power you give to government, your political enemies will eventually wield

@antoniogm
Two jobs in the future:
You either tell a computer what to do, or you’re told by a computer what to do.

It’s clearly the start of a new insane category of content creation. The incentives that memecoins create are so strong, and the ability to use them to get a bunch of attention, go direct to viewers, and sidestep traditional content moderation is going to drive people to do some very weird things.

Last spring, when many business leaders were hesitant to back Mr. Trump publicly as his legal troubles mounted, Mr. Bessent took a different view. He saw Mr. Trump as a “stock that goes up on bad news,” as he explained it to the political analyst Mark Halperin last month, because every apparent setback appeared to strengthen his candidacy

LUCA was not necessarily the first life form, but its complexity suggests that life’s foundation systems (eg molecular synthesis, adaptation) evolved relatively quickly – under favorable conditions

Saying ‘um’ and other ‘disfluency’ might help listener information retention? I can see it. In at least some contexts, such words are a sign that speaker thinks getting next thing right is important or difficult, or that they are deliberately pausing for effect or to give listener time to consider what will come next.

Managing your psychology is basically THE HARD PROBLEM in LIFE. (h/t Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things). everything else is pressing buttons and pulling levers. a novel is one word after another. a marathon is one foot in front of the other. but how to keep going?
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Because we are each a bundle of competing motivations, competing interests, there’s a whole Game of Thrones going on inside your head every day (ppl are different, YMMV). In a way you are kind of like the boss of your brain. Or maybe not even THE boss, but like, the SVP of your brain or something. So. A lot of people are shitty managers of their own brains.

Memory Reflection: Reflection enables agents to summarize past experiences and derive high-level insights. In Generative Agents, for instance, the agent reflects on recent experiences to form broader conclusions, enhancing its capacity for abstract reasoning.

Poland’s economy will overtake the UK’s by 2030.
Think about that: A former Soviet state overtaking the once-mighty Great Britain.
—
Poland is rapidly revolutionizing European defense.
They’re doubling their military to 300,000 troops, acquiring the latest US equipment, and upping spending to 5% of GDP on defense – the highest in NATO.

A modern gold currency should not have exposed metal surfaces! If a milligram coin is needed, wrap a disc of gold leaf in Lucite. Or simply circulate token coins as warehouse receipts to allocated gold.
—
If Bitcoin becomes the new global monetary system, one bitcoin purchased today (for 90 cents, last time I checked)1 will make you a very wealthy individual. You are essentially buying Manhattan for a quarter. There are only 21 million bitcoins (including those not yet minted). (In my design, this was a far more elegant 264, with quantities in exponential notation. Just sayin’.) Mapped to $100 trillion of global money, to pull a random number out of the air, you become a millionaire. Wow!

As in, if you have 1% of the population being cooperate-bot, then if you defect against them you don’t win much, and you would show yourself to be the villain to those paying attention. But if you’re up against 75% cooperate-bot, or 99%, then obviously you defect, and also they were later facing stronger memetic competition, including from Islam. Too much unconditional kindness running around and the defectors and freeloaders win, so you can’t allow that.

Catastrophic Forgetting: One of the most significant challenges in memory-based agent systems is catastrophic forgetting, where agents lose critical information from long-term memory due to new data overwriting older, but still valuable, knowledge. This problem is especially pronounced when memory storage is constrained, forcing agents to selectively retain information. Solutions under exploration include experience replay, where past information is revisited periodically

What we’re witnessing is something I call Internet Improv—a phenomenon that transforms every online interaction into a perpetual performance. When you post a photo, share a thought, or leave a comment, you’re not just communicating—you’re making an offer to the world’s largest improv show. Every response is a “yes, and,” every remix a new scene, every trend a collective performance that nobody planned but everyone helped create.

If you want to win big in cash games, you have to be good. But a lot of people are good. The rarer and more important skill is getting those who aren’t good to give you the action. Often that means ‘knowing what they are prepared to lose’ or otherwise ensuring they feel good about coming back. Other times, it means eating a loss, even if it isn’t fair.

“LLMs are really good at meme-ing other LLMs” – Alex Good

It was a matter of when, not if, people would remember the Squiggles fondly. They serve as a barometer for the entire NFT market in a slightly different way then Punks. Namely price point (1/8th cheaper is a ballpark ratio) and its specificity as the gen art logo.

saas companies can’t raise prices anymore. ai made everything copyable. Realistically saas prices are about to come down. Real down.

Jeremy: Only 4% of working age males “not in the labor force” say they have difficulty finding work. By far the largest reason for dropping out is physical disability and health problems.

Working hard also applies to influencers. In this job market paper from Kazimier Smith, he finds that the primary driver of success is lots of posting. Sponsored posts grow reach the same as regular posts

Things that are a lot better in the world today (in 2024):
Good coffee everywhere
More reliable, more powerful cars that pollute less
Air travel safer & available even to the working class (much nicer airports, too)
Clothing cheaper & more comfortable
Incredible variety of media available on demand, wherever you are

the modern part of India’s economy only employs a small fraction of the workforce: 85% of Indian workers are in the informal sector (https://t.co/PaDPpf9716), meaning they work without contracts or benefits in jobs like farming (45% of the workforce) or street vending.

Looking inside neural networks, they found something wild:
Every AI develops universal features, just like biological brains.
The same patterns appear in:
• AI vision models
• Monkey brains
• Human neural networks
Nature keeps reinventing the same solutions.
Even stranger:
Every large language model develops a “Donald Trump neuron”
It’s the only personality that consistently gets its own dedicated neuron.
Why? They don’t know.

Memecoins are the purest expression of greed and entertainment crypto’s ever created.
Equally as interesting is how much mindshare memecoins command despite the sector still being incredibly small (and retail).

An MIT PhD student’s analysis reveals that when skilled materials scientists incorporate AI into their work, productivity significantly increases but job satisfaction may decline. “AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions…these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization.”

However, this impression is no longer true. There are many, many popular AI repos on GitHub targeting Chinese audiences, such that their descriptions are written in Chinese. There are repos for models developed for Chinese or Chinese + English, such as Qwen, ChatGLM3, Chinese-LLaMA.

several new working papers studying the financial consequences of legalized sports betting. The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies

The Onion group did not release the terms of the sale, but in the hearing it emerged that it had offered less in cash than First United. It won by including a “credit bid,” a pledge by Sandy Hook families who had sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut to forgo for now collecting on a portion of the damages due them.

Andy Warhol, with his army of assistants churning out silk-screens, may have been the first to introduce the industrial side of process into the public consciousness. But in fact, the idea of outsourced art goes back to at least as early as the 17th century, when artists like Rembrandt would have a large staff of assistants produce paintings that were signed by the artist but not made by his hand

Now there’s a fifth way: Be a part of entire large nomadic scenes with no particular geographic base, but with highly complex organizational capabilities and internal economic engines. The Ethereum ecosystem is a very good example of this phenomenon. It has the scale, operational complexity, and economic mass of a major multi-national corporation, but it does not have a fixed geographic footprint. It is something like a high-tech Mongol horde, just with benevolent intentions.

Layer 4: Meta-content (remixes, forks, quote tweets)
This is where the real improvisation happens. It’s the layer of transformation, where content becomes conversation, where ideas meet and mutate. Every quote tweet adds context, every remix creates new meaning, every fork takes code in an unexpected direction. This is the “yes, and” layer in action.
Layer 5: Emergent phenomena (trends, movements, cultural shifts)
At the top of the stack, individual performances combine into something greater than their parts. A hashtag becomes a movement, a meme format becomes a new way of thinking, a coding pattern becomes an industry standard. This is where Internet Improv shapes not just content, but culture itself.
—
When Twitter limited post length to 280 characters (Layer 2), it transformed not just how people wrote (Layer 3) but how ideas evolved through quote tweets (Layer 4) and ultimately how online movements organised (Layer 5).

this shift is not a novel dynamic, btw. this is “new money” coming in and challenging “old money.” some tech billionaires who were early chose to play in the old money system and were accepted by it (see Bill Gates). others have been shut out of it and were forced to create their own, new system (Elon Musk)

during this period, USD is likely to be dramatically be restructured during this time. the national debt cannot and will never be paid off. that is a pipe dream. what’s likely to happen is some nation-state who are big holders of US debt get zeroed out in exchange for some quid-pro-quo

“The need is so high, that the market puts a price of $100,000 to $200,000 per year on a girl for simply taking pictures and videos of herself and talking to men online,” he said.

They’re the foundation for chaotic new internet experiences for a broad range of archetypes. They combine gambling, investing, socializing, creating, and entertainment into a single and easily accessible experience with a non-zero possibility of making life changing money. That’s fucking crazy.

The scale of this transformation is staggering. A single iteration might seem trivial—a witty reply, a small code tweak, a dank meme. But when millions of people perform these iterations billions of times, the results reshape our world. It’s how a tweet becomes a movement, how a meme reshapes cultural norms, how a random comment sparks a revolution in thought.

According to a Wall Street Journal report on Wednesday, Théo took a different approach to analyzing voting intentions. Picking up on alternative polls asking people, “who are your neighbors voting for?” rather than “who are you voting for?” the trader noticed they had Trump overperforming. This prompted the French national to commission their own poll to confirm the data in a bet against the accuracy of traditional polling methods.
Traditional polls failed to account for the “shy Trump voter effect

Causes generally don’t care about their members well being – and glorify members who sacrifice themselves in the name of the cause. And as you can see – causes love getting in conflict with other causes because it’s a way to martial resources

One of the challenges with bringing AI agents on-chain is that they must run continuously, which can be computationally expensive.
Smart contracts, while powerful, aren’t practical for this purpose—they’re constrained by processing capabilities (memory, cost) and can’t access data outside their native blockchain (like external APIs).

10 companies in the world will write »blank checks« and continue buying $NVDA chips and use high-end networking like InfiBand as they are in a winner-take-all race to develop AGI. Meanwhile, the other world of users and companies will care about how many tokens per second they get for a dollar, not what hardware is underneath.

A horse can haul 180 kgs on its back, a horse pulling a wagon can haul 550 kgs, a horse pulling a barge on a canal can haul 18,000 kgs.
The physics of ocean shipping are unmatched.

Global babies peaked 2016 and has fallen ever since

Let it be noticed that once he decided that this race was existential, Elon basically just set up camp in PA and sat there until it flipped.
This is how he does everything.
Find the one lever that moves the world and then just go jump up and down on it, relentlessly

Their best athletes, they told him, were just like his best traders, with low baseline levels of stress response that then dramatically spiked when it came time for a big competition. This even applies to golf.
—
It’s true in finance, according to Coates. “A lot of asset managers and hedge funds I’ve dealt with have a problem getting their good traders and PMs to use their full risk allocation,” he told me. “They’re not taking enough risk.”
—
The combination of mathematical and people-reading skills necessary for success at poker should generally also translate to lucrative opportunities in tech, finance, or other River professions—usually in jobs with health care benefits and far less variance. However, much of what attracts people to poker is an anti-authority streak. It’s one of the only professions where you can truly be a lone wolf.
—
When I watched the true degens, I saw that they were (mostly) the only ones able to move boldly, for size, when opportunity knocked. They were the ones that got into position to play for size, and also the ones that took advantage.

Steve Newman: The lag between casual and serious adoption is under-appreciated. When we sold Writely (aka Google Docs) to Google, we had ~200K registered accounts but <5K serious users. Of course in the long run, the reality caught up with the hype in that example. writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority.” By any measure, this is an earth-shattering statement. Making cars is complicated. Not as complicated as making airliners or nuclear power plants. But making cars is still the hallmark of an advanced industrial economy. So, the idea that China is suddenly setting the standards that others must now strive to meet is a sea-change compared with the world we lived in just five years ago. "Where I am from, Dagestan, we don't need much. Dana was asking me 'bro why didn't you ever ask me how much I was gonna pay you to come back? It doesn't matter if you want $100 Million dollars I don't care' you know why? Because I am from Dagestan and we are traditional" "Talking to our mothers is everything to us, I don't want to play political games, I just want to help people, inspire people, spend time with my family, with my mother, with my children and just be a good person" ❤️ Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make it gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition will be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side of eliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefit will be. At any given time there will be many conflicting memes but only 1-2 can be the Current Thing As this becomes increasingly clear - with the rise of humanoid robotics, we are going to get the first real wave of backlash. I think the big markets catalyst will be Robotic McDonalds. The restaurant industry has about 12.5 million employees. Imagine if most of that got automated, and a couple of other low skilled industries. You get to 10-15% unemployment very quickly. Well, while a meme business may sound silly, silly businesses can mean serious money. Giphy sold for $400M. KnowYourMeme sold for 8 figures and gets 3M pageviews/mo. Meme page empire FuckJerry makes 8 figures per year. The Tesla bet, though, is that Waymo’s approach ultimately doesn’t scale and isn’t generalizable to true Level 5, while starting with the dream — true autonomy — leads Tesla down a better path of relying on nothing but AI, fueled by data and fine-tuning that you can only do if you already have millions of cars on the road. That is the connection to SpaceX and what happened this weekend: if you start with the dream, then understand the cost structure necessary to achieve that dream, you force yourself down the only path possible, forgoing easier solutions that don’t scale for fantastical ones that do. The Sun is ~99.8% of the entire mass of the solar system. Jupiter and Saturn are ~0.2% and everything else is a rounding error. Moreover, the Sun is >99.99% of energy output! Everything else combined is an inaudible background noise.

To give you an idea of how extreme this is – in 1967 a Super Bowl ad cost $37,500 and now it costs $7 million – a whopping 9%+ CAGRAds are a strong inflation hedge. And – being purely digital, in some ways, they have low “storage costs”. As opposed to other inflationary commodities like oil where you have to keep it in a barrel

Roko’s Basilisk is the idea that a future AGI would come to the conclusion that its own existence should have come about earlier – and therefore, anyone who became aware of its future existence and didn’t act on it would be infinitely punished.

According to Wikipedia, the control premium varies from 20% to 40% in business practice, depending on minority shareholders’ protections. In this case, it is clear that minority shareholders’ protections are currently extremely thin, so this would presumably mean at least a 40% premium. That’s 40% of the total baseline value of OpenAI, not the value of the non-profit’s share of the company.

Food Companies = Cigarette Companies: Chronic disease rates began to rise sharply in the 1980s after the Surgeon General reported on smoking. Cigarette companies, like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, shifted to the food industry by acquiring major food brands

What is the core secret of a Mr. Beast video, underneath all the details and obsession? It seems to be roughly ‘hammering people with very loud cool exciting s*** taken to 11 as often and intensely as possible, with full buy-in’?

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #12: “It takes much more fuel to leave the Earth’s orbit than to go from the Earth to Mars!”

Yes, some imports can reduce GDP, in particular imports of consumer goods that would have otherwise been bought and produced internally. But it is complicated, and many imports, especially of intermediate goods, are net positive for GDP.

Because here’s a surprising fact: It takes much more fuel to leave the Earth’s orbit than to go from the Earth to Mars!
—
Look at this for Earth-Moon: 400x more fuel to reach the Earth’s orbit than to go there and back to the Earth!

Davidson (2021) usefully defines AI-induced “explosive growth” as an increase in growth rates to at least 30% annually. Under a baseline calibration where σ=1 and ρ=0.01, and importantly assuming growth rates are known with certainty, the Euler equation implies that moving from 2% growth to 30% growth would raise real rates from 3% to 31%!

Nelson added a bit of wisdom perfect for memelords. The Netflix team A/B tests cover images for shows and found that “faces with complex emotions outperform stoic or benign expressions—seeing a range of emotions actually compels people to watch a story more.” When testing images for their show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the photo of Kimmy with her mouth wide open in surprise did the best.

“Business people vote with their dollars, and are mostly trying to create near-term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying to invent interesting new things. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals.”

The block reward is reduced every four years based on a baked-in inflation control mechanism called the halving. It’s not mentioned in the white paper but Satoshi hard-coded it into the protocol.

Duolingo CEO interview:
English is the most popular by far. Forty-five percent of our active users are learning English. The second is Spanish, the third is French, and then there’s a big drop-off after that.

Murad:
The fundamentals are the people
Meme is only 40% of it, 60% is the people, the community
Each chain is like a different CEX

“we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models …. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!”

life is a weighted sum of your choices
theres no starting over tomorrow
just the adjustment of the weighted sum with new decisions
most choices seem irrelevant in isolation
but you would be surprised how quickly they add up

From Litecoin BTC fork that required running PoW machines to ICOs to DeFi’s liquidity mining, the patterns are clear: Each cycle, token printing gets easier! And valuations keep going up.

And the slower new token launches adapt, the longer the memecoin craze will continue. Memecoins is the counter-trade for VC tokens. No utility, no revenue, no future product.

“If there’s one thing that you figure out after many, many, many, many hands, it’s you know what 52/48 is,” said Annie Duke, referring to a player who can distinguish a 52 percent chance from a 50/50 spot. “That’s the type of distinction that most people are very bad at making. But poker players are really good at making that distinction, and they can feel it.”

In fact, Coates’s studies found, the most successful traders had more changes in their body chemistry in response to risk. “We were finding this in the very best traders. Their endocrine response was opposite of what I expected when I went in.”

Murad
-“The one thing that can’t be faked is time”
-Memecoins much easier for low income to participate

Sequoia re: AI apps
The most interesting layer for venture capital. ~20 application layer companies with $1Bn+ in revenue were created during the cloud transition, another ~20 were created during the mobile transition, and we suspect the same will be true here.

The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications. For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive.

Cloud companies targeted the software profit pool. AI companies target the services profit pool. Cloud companies sold software ($ / seat). AI companies sell work ($ / outcome)
Cloud companies liked to go bottoms-up, with frictionless distribution. AI companies are increasingly going top-down, with high-touch, high-trust delivery models.

It is much, much easier to pick out a way in which a system is sub-optimal, than it is to implement or run that system at anything like its current level of optimization.

This is because it is only with fundamental anchors can a schelling point for all pools of crypto-native capital (retail, hedge funds, prop funds, long-only liquid funds) appear. This is $SOL’s story in a nutshell this cycle, where those who were paying attention to developer engagement in early 2023 were able to form a fundamental thesis for Solana ecosystem’s growth and subsequently enjoy the almost 10x rerating within a year.

Then, the community forms, charts rise, and influencers buy large portions of the supply from the open market. The game is the same for everyone, but the conviction isn’t. You might exit at 2x, but the influencer holds on at 10x, then builds a narrative to back their position. They’re often joined by VCs running shady, covert plays.

I stumbled upon this running affiliate ads to Amazon and realizing that exactly 11% of people who stumbled on herbal tea landing pages would purchase herbal tea from a fairly broad set of keywords. This 11% was completely static — the most it would move is to 12% or 10%. Over the course of months
—
When you dug into the data, however, the CTR was not Gold Fish like. It was due to Elon Musk meme-ing. And showing up in the news. A large number of the clicks were coming through to Tesla stock. Not the car. People were just clicking on Tesla like crazy. The stock ended up working but the flow through on sales was deminimus. We didn’t sell any Tesla cars or generate any conversionsAnd in real time I saw financial analysts going berserk because Tesla sales were far too low to justify the valuation, and it’d only go up.
—
Slowly it dawned on me that most of what I thought were fundamental re-ratings in stocks were actually memes. Customer acquisition cost didn’t matter. Investor acquisition cost mattered. But the only possible way this would be true is if the system wasn’t in fact a machine. It was a gigantic liquidity Ponzi that allocated capital according to attention.
—
And because of the Goldfish hypothesis – that in aggregate, everyone is extremely predictable – this created a new base reality. That the most engaging reality would always win. And the most engaging realities were always the most gaudy, degenerate, and short-termist. Society was – and is – in a permanent sugar rush, that’s determining outcomes at every level. ranging from investment to political.

It’s possible that someone figures out continuous self-improvement with broad domain self play and achieves takeoff, but at the moment we have seen no evidence of this. Quite to the contrary, the model layer is a knife-fight, with price per token for GPT-4 coming down 98% since the last dev day.

Memecoins is proving to be the “confusing trade” of this cycle.

memecoins is just another step in our never-ending story of token (money) printing.We started with BTC forks (LTC, BTC Gold), moved to Ethereum ICO tokens with just stories to sell, then experimented with “fair launches” and liquidity mining, and recently ended the peak of points-for-airdrop meta. A new narrative will come and overtake memecoins.

“Chase the story behind the stock, not the money on the table. Money will make you rich, but the story will make you wealthy.”

Epoch: A string of 32 Slots. This is created as a secondary structure within the blockchain used to delegate roles and responsibilities. Slots are used for constructing blocks while Epochs are used for data propagation, reward distribution, validator selection, etc, etc.
—
Checkpoint Block: This is the first block created within a given Epoch and is used as a reference point for solidifying chain history.
—
Finality: The point at which a transaction is deemed irreversibly added to a given chain’s ledger. In the Ethereum ecosystem, this is used when 2 Epochs have passed (~13min) aka 64 blocks
—
Validator Voting – Each epoch (32-block window) validators will vote on the checkpoint block of the current and previous epoch until specific checkpoint blocks reach 2/3rd majority of staked $ETH

Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

This book holds that the sequence technological revolution–financial bubble–collapse–golden age–political unrest recurs about every half century and is based on causal mechanisms that are in the nature of capitalism.

Added together, getting listed on Binance could cost 16% of your token supply and a $5 million purchase of BNB. If Binance isn’t the primary exchange, a project will still face spending of almost $2 million worth of tokens or stablecoins.

In July, @DefiSquared heavily criticized Worldcoin on Twitter, pointing out the abnormally high valuation of WLD, signs of price manipulation by the project team, and tokenomics that heavily favor insiders. He warned that Korean retail investors might become “unfortunate victims,” noting that while only 2.7% of the total WLD supply was in circulation, the fully diluted value (FDV) reached $30 billion, with about 25% of the circulating supply deposited on Bithumb.

The % of proposals that actually passed has remained roughly consistent (~15%) since the launch of Ethereum showing that there is a stable approval process.

Altcoins aren’t primarily about tech. Memecoins aren’t primarily about memes. Both are tokenized communities using different narratives and techniques to recruit people and get the price to go up.

Fundamentally memecoins are fun and could become the next trend in the escapism consumer culture. They might be even a proxy to value creation as tokenization of culture is a powerful tool. But the way they are currently being narrated is Marxist to the core.
—
Listen to what Murad/Ansem actually says and does and where all the real money has been made in memes – it has not been made buying billion dollar plus memes – its made buying sub 100m MC and them moving to the billions where the price target is tens of billions
—
The end of memes this cycle is probably more like 10-20 memes going to multi billions and then fading while most are left holding the bag thinking its going much higher then the narrative of memes from this cycle going to 50-100bn as stated by Kols

I think the consensus is that crypto is a useful mechanism to distribute AI calculation, when the contrarian but right bet is that AI is useful for substantially improving crypto consensus mechanisms.

listing teams want to list coins that will drive maximum user onboarding- ie., how many users will sign up and make their first deposit to the exchange as a result of a particular listing. Coins with wide distribution in new ecosystems do particularly well with this; for example, clicker games on TON were quoted to be bringing in several million new users per listing (a shockingly high number) in an in interview with Bybit’s CEO

Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”

Being-early-as-a-service is a concept coined in 2022 by CT personality Cobie, that really nails the actual product market fit of crypto.

When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

if you don’t let your community profit, you don’t deserve a community. memecoins fixed that. that’s the whole thesis. good enough for me. — redhairshanks

products that are truly interesting rarely fit in a market map because the sector is nascent and the mental models required to categorise it have not fully evolved

Of all the forms of money, slaves proved one of the least reliable because of their high mortality rate and their tendency to escape.

“When the stock price gets low, then it’s time for me to buy stocks,” Fujimoto said. “But the question is whether you have the money or the courage to do that.”

Most (if not all) governmental restrictions targeting bitcoin have failed to account for the fact that, under bedrock First Amendment principles, bitcoin activity is entitled to First Amendment protection. First, bitcoin consists entirely of the creation and transmission of information, which is speech protected by the First Amendment. Second, bitcoin activity is at minimum protected expressive conduct. And third, participation in the bitcoin network is expressive association separately safeguarded by the First Amendment.

“Postcards were seen as so fast,” says Monica Cure, author of Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century. “There were lots of complaints about what postcards were going to do to people’s reading and writing skills, because if you could just dash off a few lines, why did you need to actually learn grammar and become a good writer?”

Then – why don’t people have a fighting chance against the algorithms?
The answer is obvious – just hard to confront.
People don’t like their lives very much. Their baseline engagement with day to day reality and choices is so low, that random messages pumped in by advertisers actually seem pretty good in comparison.

In the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson warned that the same dysfunctional policies he saw in his basketcase banana republics had taken hold in the United States.
Johnson warned that if America didn’t act fast, we would plunge into a “Quiet Coup” as the American financial system effectively captures the government, bailling itself out until we run out of money.

There’s this idea to focus entirely on your product—and like the Field of Dreams, you build it and they will come. So you pitch directly to the end user, the person in the field, and don’t worry too much about the authorizers and appropriators in Congress, agency leadership, or mid-level bureaucracy. At Palantir, we figured out that you had to work every single one of those audiences.
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There’s also this hilarious misconception that you should subcontract with the primes—Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte and all of those guys—because somehow they’re going to bring you in on their contracts. That doesn’t work. And there’s the idea that you should set up an advisory board where a group of retired generals and retired government officials shepherd you through this process. The reality is, they haven’t gone through it either.

Stanley Druckenmiller after losing $3 billion on tech stocks during the 2000 bubble:
“I didn’t learn anything. I already knew I wasn’t supposed to do that”.
https://x.com/KoyfinCharts/status/1838998921814868006

More software will be niche, private, personal, and local – and this will be economically rational. And just like we subscribe to our favorite content creators, we’ll subscribe to our favorite software creators too

Third, the concept of net present value–i.e., credit–is the killer app of finance. It allows you to transport value from the future into today. Of course, that debt must be repaid in the future, unless you can figure out a way to kick the can down the road forever.

Many apps have become application-specific chains over the past few months (Lyra, Aevo, ApeX, Zora, Redstone) and I suspect the trend continues until everyone from Uniswap to Eigenlayer become L2s.

Recent startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings: “The surest sign of a midcurved institution is its insistence on an ability to control, predict, and dictate to complex adaptive systems”

19/ I have 0 insight if/when Indian policies change but honestly feel like the fact that the most populous country on earth has banned crypto is not discussed enough
Utterly massive opportunity when/if this changes

With a simple meme, you can make millions of people laugh all over the world. I can tweet a joke that gets 15 million views, and I can do it from my toilet. That’s scale. And as every good entrepreneur knows, wherever there’s scale, there’s a chance to turn a massive profit.
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If there were one rule to unite all memelords, it would be this: capitalize on the current thing.

Mr. Beast —
Anytime we do something that no other creator can do, that seperates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them. It changes how they see us and it does make them watch more videos and engage more with the brand. You can’t track the “wow factor” but I can describe it. Anything that no other youtuber can do. And it’s important we never lose our wow.
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Let’s say we have 10 minute video about a guy surviving weeks in the woods. Instead of making the first 3 minutes of the video about his first day then progressing from there like a logical filmmaker would. We’d tried to cover multiple days in the first 3 minutes of the video so the viewer is now super invested in the story.
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But in general once you have someone for 6 minutes they are super invested in the story and probably in what I call a “lull”. They are watching the video without even realizing they are watching a video.

There were days back in the early 2000s when you would have no idea what to expect from a Bernanke or Greenspan-led Fed. The FOMC meetings were actually quite riveting because you simply had no idea what to expect. But not the Powell-led Fed. They often explicitly tell you what they will do, but in rare cases when they don’t, they leak it to their favorite Wall Street Journal puppet, Nick Timiraos, who spells it out for you.
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Lest you think I’m being unfair to our ivory-tower friends, here’s the lore of the term “capitalism”: borne from a socialist French intellectual and popularized by Marx. Lol. Yeah. The guys who don’t like the natural system, named the natural system something that’s kinda pejorative.

I want you to help me build a media empire, where we make (formerly) obscure scholars famous, compile the real time history of ASI, and produce the very best intellectual content in the world.

Content, confidence, and context—these are the three dimensions Shreyas Doshi discovered traditional companies use to promote employees. “This is unfortunately the cause of a lot [of] persistent frustration for otherwise-talented people who are GREAT at content, but repeatedly get passed over for promotion to higher levels… it is usually because they are not projecting as much confidence as they ought to for the next level and they are not as attuned to the context of the org & the company.”

Their SwiftNet private key infrastructure and banking messaging standards like ISO20022 are used by 11,000+ banks globally to facilitate the communication of payment instructions between banks

On Mr. Beast as Buzzfeed 2.0
(he can only sell very generic products like chocolate because his audience is so poor and so broad) — and he is in the most competitive part of the ecosystem / general entertainment.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
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Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone.

This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat.

“The concern was that 200 phones traveling at 800 kilometers per hour in a plane could rapidly connect to many towers at once, overloading the infrastructure. At least that’s what the FCC thought could happen. So, they banned cell phone use in flight in 1991. But there’s a problem with this theory—a plane is a big metal enclosure, essentially a Faraday cage. So, it should block almost all electromagnetic signals.”

After analyzing value spread throughout his career, AQR Capital cofounder concludes that markets are becoming less informationally efficient. “You’d be forgiven if, like me, your initial whiggish assumption is that markets would get more efficient over time. After all, over the last 20-40 years the ubiquity and speed of available information has continuously grown, and at the same time trading costs have come rapidly down. But like me initially, you’d be mistaking speed for accuracy.”

In the 1950s alone, America built five generations of fighter jets, three generations of manned bombers, two classes of aircraft carriers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear-powered attack submarines.

In 2020/21, very loose monetary conditions + huge money printing combined with two major breakout innovations DeFi & NFTs. People were given stimmies, fiat was massively devalued again, and the prospect of decentralized finance being the genuine future of finance, alongside NFTs being the future of digital property caused enormous retail participation.

“Your highly questionable parenting vision,” responded Nicole, who was a day away from labor. “One, no school or college. Two, separate apartment in childhood. Three, move out at 16. Four, learn to drive all machines as early as possible. Five, leave the family fortune to one child. Six, children have to fly in economy while we are in business.” Luckey also believes strongly in (legally obtained) child labor (permits), that having fewer than 2.1 children would make him a traitor to the nation, and that children as young as 2 are fully capable of walking several miles without a stroller (“History shows it,” he says).
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“At some point, in business and in life and in romance, you have to commit to a path,” said the 31-year-old Luckey. “A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy … They’re always pursuing everything with optionality.

By 2023, the cold war between these tribes had escalated into open conflict as hedge fund billionaires led the charge to oust Ivy League presidents and The New York Times sued OpenAI. Incursions into enemy territory are treated with alarm, like when Google’s AI model Gemini was criticized by Riverians for reflecting distinctively Villagey political attitudes.
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Villagers see themselves as being clearly right on the most important big-picture questions of the day, from climate change to gay and trans rights. So they view the Riverian inclination to poke holes in arguments and “just ask questions’’ as being a waste of time at best, and as potentially empowering a wake of bad-faith actors and bigots.

Bitcoin is worth a trillion bucks and half of Wall Street owns it at this point. All the rest of crypto is worth another trillion. Tether owns more Treasuries than Germany. There’s been more than $20bn of venture capital poured into this space in the last four years. We’re not that early.

The surest sign of a midcurved institution is its insistence on an ability to control, predict, and dictate to complex adaptive systems. You don’t control them, they control you.

Envision interest rates as futures for dollars.
Interest rates = price of money

I trust GPT4 more than I trust our politicians. In the coming years AI models will become so much more capable that their judgment will start being used to mediate disputes – first inside companies but then legally . Lawyers already use it constantly.
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China was The State.
Crypto was The Individual.
It’s the Machine that will overthrow the plutocracy, because the core of the plutocracy – its super bubble was the false insistence it was a machine.