the reason why society works fairly well is bc of law enforcement, not bc people are good
most people are not good, they are just harmless. they have no skills, resources or strength to do anything bad + they fear the consequences
only very few people are good. it is very difficult to be a good person. most people never have the temptation to grift millions of dollars.
instead, they take advantage of small things like petty theft or pretending their package from amazon did not arrive, so they get another one
most people are crappy, in crypto it is just easier for crappy people to scam
https://x.com/redhairshanks86/status/1891797608881864991?s=46
But I think — on a go forward basis you’re going to want to ask, “Could I see a family office buying this coin?” as the primary single question worth asking.
On origins of Go:
most modern writers have concluded that the game first appeared during the Zhou, Spring and Autumn or early Warring States periods, c. 1000-400 BC. Most think it is likely to have derived from divination,
In general, trusting someone at a level that seems slightly excessive for their level of importance to you will help you sort people in your life who you want to be more important to you than they are from those who you want to be less important than they are.
And it does need to be excessive. It needs to be trust beyond reason.
The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
but the authors come to a startling conclusion: about half the planets in the galaxy are orphan worlds that do not orbit a star. They wander forever through interstellar space, invisible, undetectable.
Notably, Abu Dhabi’s $1.7T Sovereign Wealth Fund disclosed a $436 million stake in Bitcoin ETFs. While this represents just 0.02% of its holdings, it marks a cautious yet significant first step into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The company naming itself “Tesla” is ironic, given Nikola Tesla died broke as a brilliant inventor who lacked marketing/sales prowess.Elon Musk, the speaker says, is the inverse: a master of sales and proximity to power. Real inventors and scientists often get overshadowed by those who wield political and sales skill.
The “intelligence” in AI isn’t in the computers or models. It’s in the self-reproducing training data. AIs and brains alike are merely data’s way of making more data.
A signature style is the visual equivalent of what in show business is known as a “schtick”: something that immediately identifies the work as yours and no one else’s. For example, when you see a painting that looks like a certain kind of cartoon, you know it’s by Roy Lichtenstein. So if you see a big painting of this type hanging in the apartment of a hedge fund manager, you know he paid millions of dollars for it. That’s not always why artists have a signature style, but it’s usually why buyers pay a lot for such work.
Bill responds:“This was not my first proximity to disaster. I had another moment in my career in 2002, and I learned this method for dealing with these kind of moments which is: you just make a little progress every day.”During this period, he would say to himself:“Today, I’m going to wake up and make progress. I’m going to make progress on the litigation; I’m going to make progress on the portfolio; I’m going to make progress on my life.”
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“You just have to power through…. Nutrition, sleep, exercise, and a little progress everyday.”
Every domain with verifiable rewards (math, coding, science) can be mastered by AI just by letting it play against itself.
Trump’s actual business track record (bankrupt casinos, failed brands) was overshadowed by the public perception that he was highly successful, leading to The Apprentice TV show success.
We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.
In short – AI will make some people exponentially smarter and better equipped, while making the vast majority of people dumber more distracted and less capable of generating income.
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It’s impossible to integrate AI systems into existing democratic structures because “votes per intelligence level” contradicts fundamentally with democracies’ premises. 1 person 1 vote means that even if you make a tiny % of the population super smart, that won’t really matter
The meaning you give work determines its difficulty.
A coder working on a passion project works 12 hours straight and calls it energizing. That same programmer, doing maintenance on legacy code they consider meaningless, feels exhausted after 2 hours.
Your relationship with the work shapes its weight more than the work itself
What then is the difference between the determined technocapitalist idea that “you can just do things” and the delusional communist idea that “constraints do not exist”? Does the far left also in some sense have a high agency model of the world?
Bryan Johnson, the largest longevity influencer put $100 million of his money in a longevity focused fund that – if we’re to go off his YouTube interview about money – had no returns since 2017. One of its large bets was Gingko Bioworks which is down over 90% since its IPO)
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This explains – in part – why the big tech companies are implementing hiring freezes despite roaring stock prices. Within 6 months you might as well build an agent instead of a completely AI reliant zoomer/genAI dev.
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Because of #2 AI agents becoming employees (or potentially Robots as well / Waymos etc) — means that over time, there will be less and less use for people. We already have a mental model for what happens when you have structural unemployment and a good distraction economy.
A lot of people build success from trauma as they have high pain tolerance
“People with daddy issues make great entrepreneurs.” – Andrew Rosener
Americans spent $113b on lottery tickets in 2023
Solana meme coins only extracted ~$5bn so far
we are so early
We’ll get into this later, but it is one of my beliefs that if World War breaks out again, the companies that will emerge in the wake of such destruction will look more like these diversified conglomerates — a function of incapacitated capital markets.
However, this approach aligns more with the strategy of a sovereign wealth fund, which focuses on capital returns, rather than that of a reserve critical to national security. It is a better fit for resource-rich but economically imbalanced nations looking for an asymmetric financial windfall or countries with weak central banks hoping Bitcoin can stabilize their balance sheets.
Daniel Eth: Totally consistent with other polling on the issue – the public is very skeptical of powerful AI and wants strong regulations. True in the UK as it is in the US
Your best hours are the ones where you feel most alive, most energized, most inspired, most creative—most you. They’re when your focus is sharp, your confidence is high, and your heart is fully in it. You’re the best version of yourself, effortlessly.
The Spanish Real de a Ocho, once backed by vast silver reserves from Latin America, declined as Spain’s mounting debts and economic mismanagement eroded its dominance. The Dutch guilder faded as relentless wars drained the Netherlands’ resources. The French franc, dominant in the 18th and early 19th centuries, weakened under the strain of revolution, Napoleonic wars, and financial mismanagement. And the British pound, once the bedrock of global finance, unraveled under the weight of post-war debts and the rise of American industrial dominance.
Yes, the default scenario being considered here – the one that I have been screaming for people to actually think through – is exactly this, the fully decentralized everyone-has-an-ASI-in-their-pocket scenario, with the ASI obeying only the user. And every corporation and government and so on obviously has them, as well, only more powerful
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So what happens? Every corporation, every person, every government, is forced to put the ASI in charge, and take the humans out of their loops. Or they lose to others willing to do so. The human is no longer making their own decisions. The corporation is no longer subject to humans that understand what is going on and can tell it what to do. And so on. While the humans are increasingly irrelevant for any form of production
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Or, if one is feeling Tyler Durden: The AIs you own end up owning you.
My conclusion was that professionals who helped people—like doctors or teachers or ministers—felt really good about their careers, and people who focused on more ephemeral tasks were less satisfied.
This whole MSTR machinery basically generates a “permanent” flow of capital into BTC coming from people that don’t want to outright buy BTC but are interested in the return/yield profile of the lower risk securities offered by MSTR.
~20 dudes from the PayPal mafia run all of tech and now the American Empire
A handful of dudes in City Tavern and The Green Dragon caused the American Revolution
The Medici family and ~10 of their patronized artists caused the renaissance
Garibaldi conquered all of Italy with 1000 men
Bell Labs, a handful of dudes
One lens through which to view companies is to ask “what companies are an index of their underlying market”?
Index companies often take a cut of every transaction in their space, or are a piece of infrastructure everyone in the market needs.
re: AI values and incentives
When comparing risky choices, their preferences are remarkably stable.
We also find that AIs increasingly maximize their utilities, suggesting that in current AI systems, expected utility maximization emerges by default. This means that AIs not only have values, but are starting to act on them.
Internally, AIs have values for everything. This often implies shocking/undesirable preferences. For example, we find AIs put a price on human life itself and systematically value some human lives more than others
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as AIs become smarter, they become more opposed to having their values changed (in the jargon, “corrigibility”). Larger changes to their values are more strongly opposed.
@hubermanlab
I asked Pavel Tsatsouline how to dramatically increase one’s endurance & strength (not size) he said: once a week jog with a kettlebell weighing 30% of your body weight for 1mile, switching which arm carries it (at your side) as needed. Start slow. Mentally brutal. Fun. Works.
But it’s not inevitable that this ends with one gigafirm which consumes the entire economy. As Gwern explains in his essay, any internal planning system needs to be grounded in some kind of outer “loss function” – a ground truth measure of success. In a market economy, this comes from profits and losses.
It’s because markets themselves are socially constructed by its own participants. I’m paraphrasing work from Donald Mackenzie and Michel Callon, but a part of this understanding is to simply give an example: you are strolling on a beach and you suddenly see an ice cream truck. Now you want ice cream.
People don’t arrive at markets with fully formed beliefs, ideas, and wants and then use the market to get what they want. More often than not, the market itself is a conversation that in turn influences each person in it.
It was called Mastercoin, and became the first blockchain “layer-2”. In 2014, the first direct-redemption dollar-backed token, known as Realcoin, launched on the network – this token later became USDT. In 2015, Mastercoin rebranded to Omni.
I’m already of the mindset that most people don’t read every word of an essay anymore; they care more about the 10,000-foot view and a few striking quotes.
if you think labor displacement was bad due to outsourcing/offshoring, we are about to see that same effect only 100x with AI and robotics. i think it is no coincidence that this new world order is being led, now conspicuously, by tech / robots / AI leaders. and in many ways, i think this moment has very little to do with Donald Trump.
I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as “site reliability engineer”, “devops engineer”, “data engineer” and “analytics engineer” emerged.
Chiang’s Law, after science fiction writer Ted Chiang who came up with the idea. I tried to reduce it to 12 words:
Science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people.
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“If you know who you are, you get a civilizational war, if you don’t know who you are, you get a culture war.” Single most useful idea for analyzing contemporary geopolitics I’ve encountered in years. Now I think it’s equally useful for domestic politics.
innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.
Award-winning journalist Alex Newman provides a FLAWLESS 90 second summary of the “man-made climate change” scam:
“The notion that CO2 is pollution is absolutely preposterous… The idea that [it’s] going to destroy the planet or change the temperature of the Earth is totally ludicrous.”
“But from a totalitarian perspective, if you can convince people that CO2 is pollution, there’s no human activity that doesn’t result in CO2 emissions, including living, including dying, turning on a light switch.”
“Every single aspect of your life, then, if we submit to the idea that CO2 is pollution, then comes under the regulatory control of the people who claim to be saving us from pollution.”
AI will accelerate the evolution of taste and ideas by generating infinite variations, forcing human creators to become curators rather than generators.
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AI may integrate so seamlessly into thought processes (through assistants, wearables, and predictive systems) that our own thinking feels less our own. In hindsight, we may say: “Of course we didn’t just use AI; we merged with it, and thinking alone became rare.”
At first approximation moneyness is a zero-sum game. Gold is primed for demonetisation in the internet age. There are only two candidates to supplant it and win internet money—BTC and ETH. Nothing else comes close. IMO the determining Schelling points are credible neutrality, security, and scarcity.
@WillManidis
I’ve met many more people who turned their lives around by walking around aimlessly for a couple hours a day than I’ve met people who have had their lives improved at all by professional therapy
If you can not only throw out more information, but move a lot faster then your enemy and change tactics on the fly you will “get inside the enemy’s ooda loop” and win easily
This is exactly what TRUMP is doing
I’ve recently found a productivity hack that moved me from bottom 10% conscientiousness to top 10% overnight, where other techniques have failed.
The technique is to ardently follow a single rule: Write down every decision on paper, don’t act without first writing down a decision.
1. It eliminates impulsivity by forcing you to reflect and consider every decision.
2. It gives you a tool to cut through indecisiveness.
It’s why memecoins often *feel* so off-base for those living in a slower world. Surely, it’s a scam when something grows to a few hundred million dollars in value in a day? In the slow world, it looks absurd, flashes of singularity-like explosions.
Nvidia has been aggressively shipping ever more capable systems that accommodate their needs. The route of least resistance has simply been to pay Nvidia. DeepSeek, however, just demonstrated that another route is available: heavy optimization can produce remarkable results on weaker hardware and with lower memory bandwidth;
Stratechery has benefited from a Meta cheat code since its inception: wait for investors to panic, the stock to drop, and write an Article that says Meta is fine — better than fine even — and sit back and watch the take be proven correct. Notable examples include 2013’s post-IPO swoon, the 2018 Stories swoon, and most recently, the 2022 TikTok/Reels swoon (if you want a bonus, I was optimistic during the 2020 COVID swoon too)
Personally, I’ve been deeply inspired by builders like Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin and recently Meow from Jupiter who keep pushing boundaries despite having “made it”. They could easily retire and live comfortable lives, but instead, they show up every day, maintain their energy and enthusiasm, and help their teams build the right things.
This is one of the most powerful affirmations yet of The Bitter Lesson: you don’t need to teach the AI how to reason, you can just give it enough compute and data and it will teach itself!
Shakespeare and Cervantes appeared the moment books became a thing. And that was because of the printing press. A new technology opened a new field, creators flocked to it, and the best got to write their name in history. They ate all the low-hanging fruit, and it became much harder to innovate after them.
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For me, the primary reason why people don’t find geniuses today is because they look at past geniuses and extrapolate to the present to compare. But past geniuses were in specific fields, and it gets harder and harder to innovate in them! Most of the innovation happens in new fields, so that’s where you will find the geniuses of today.
Plausibly the key strength of capitalism is that it makes outcome games matter more. People good at consensus games resent that, and want to cut capitalism to prevent it.
Prediction markets are an attempt to make outcome games matter more than they now do.
storytelling is the ultimate compression algorithm for human attention. everything else, data, logic, tech feeds into it, but if you can’t wrap it in a compelling narrative, nobody will give a shit. people think they make decisions based on facts, but they’re mostly responding to the shape of a story, whether it’s a personal arc, a company vision, or a product pitch.
if you want to accomplish anything meaningful, the story is the interface between it & the world. get that wrong & nobody will give af. get it right & you bend steel with your bare hands.
Every bitcoin soft fork happens in a different way — activation is almost as contentious and political as the actual code changes
“If you really do believe that it’s the very, very beginning, if you believe it’s the 1908 hurley washing machine, then you’re incredible optimistic. And I do think that’s where we are. And in 1917, Sears – I want to get this exactly right. This was the advertisement that they ran in 1917. It says: “Use your electricity for more than light.” And I think that’s where we are. We’re very, very early.”
we will probably get to a point where AI starts closing all market inefficiencies and innovates much faster than you can
the only way to make money in the future will probably be with an eccentric invention, something culturally revolutionary, or becoming an entertainment star
Humans instinctively convert selfish desires into cooperative systems by collectively pretending abstract rules (money, laws, rights) are real. These shared hallucinations act as “games” where competition is secretly redirected to benefit the group, turning conflict into society’s fuel.
people turn to chemical solutions. The numbers tell the story:
ADHD diagnoses up 123% in past decade
Adderall prescriptions increased 88% since 2008
Energy drink market reached $86B in 2023
Nicotine pouch sales growing 40% annually
Never ending Coffee shops
When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, the tagline was “There’s an app for that.”Soon, you’ll say, “There’s an agent for that.”Instead of tapping icons to open apps, you’ll delegate tasks to specialized AI agents. These agents are context-aware, can cross-communicate with other agents and services, and can even self-initiate tasks you never explicitly request—like monitoring your budget or reorganizing your travel schedule if your flight changes.
Many emerging market leaders already deeply understand that crypto can create economic freedom for their people and unlock the growth potential of their economies. So many see what President Millei, President Bukele, and President Trump have done (soon to be followed by new leaders in Canada and Germany for instance)
in fact, the prices of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government are going to the moon, even as those sectors are technologically stagnant.
In short, just as Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world,” perhaps software will eventually eat the state. And nearly a decade later, it seems like this strategy for disrupting bureaucracy is finally coming to fruition in the form of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
It’s kind of tongue in cheek, but people know I’d rather torture them into greatness. I’d rather torture you into greatness because I believe in you. And I think that coaches that really believe in their team torture them into greatness. Oftentimes they’re so close. Greatness will sometimes come in one day with an ‘I got it!’ — that feeling that you didn’t get it yesterday and all of a sudden one day something clicks. Could you imagine giving up that moment right before you got it? I don’t want you to give up on that, so I’ll just keep torturing you.
-Jensen Huang
https://x.com/startuparchive_/status/1882772862400151946?s=46
The EF was never the main entity responsible for marketing Ethereum. They were never configured to do this. It’s too commercial for them. That’s why it fell to ConsenSys originally.
Trump 2.0 is like Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. The President has had time to think, regroup, and — most importantly — build a cadre of dedicated operatives. All the anti-tech actions drove new talent to Trump’s banner. And Elon’s men are the best operators in the world.
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Less 1950, more 1850. That is: the US will withdraw from funding countless foreign wars, managing hundreds of military bases around the world, and maintaining the rules-based order. It will stop being the recruiter of global talent, the issuer of the reserve currency, the educator of the world’s elites, and the base for every multinational.
Theorycrafting is the process of analyzing game mechanics to find the best strategies and tactics. It’s often used in competitive gaming, such as multiplayer games, racing events, and speedrunning
If you do want to volunteer your time; organise a conference! Find something you’re passionate about (free software, gardening…) and see if there’s a related grass-roots conference in your area (for example the “Yet Another Perl Conference”s, the various “Open Source Developers’ Conference”s etc). If so, volunteer to help with the next conference; if not, create one. It’s a great way to spend time with people, encourage the growth of your field of interest and increase your personal fame within it.
We will see a billion agents onchain before we see a billion humans onchain.
7/ In the end, Nokia didn’t launch its first “real” iPhone competitor (the Lumia 800) until 4.5 years after this deck… and the resolution of the Symbian / Maemo struggle
The hard part about the innovator’s dilemma is not knowing what to do, but actually doing it in time
