Happy holidays erryone ho ho ho! Off to the random learnings we go:
—
Art is not decoration. It’s exploration. It is wrong to think that art should be “pretty and easily appreciated.” Great art is always a noble “challenge” because it actually retools our perception. Great artists “train people to see.” – Jordan Peterson
There are four resources in a blockchain setting, for each participating node. (1) Computation, (2) State (memory), (3) Networking, (4) History Storage
first, we’re arguably entering an age of the Cowboy-Dev, the dev who just builds weeklong projects that they can monetize for life. the most devilish example is a hacker (as well as its angelic counterpart, the freelance auditor), but companies like openai and uniswap are actively building for nicer cowboy-devs to ride into town, deploy a plug-in or hook at the proverbial saloon, and ride out at dusk to wherever they’re needed next
Nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale – Bill Gates
I believe games (and simulation in general) will provide the next trillion high-quality tokens to train our foundation models. What’s cool is that these tokens are actively selected by the agent itself through exploration. It can choose to experiment with things that maximally reduce its internal uncertainties – kind of like how human curiosity works – Jim Fan
I’m fascinated by the fact that creativity tends to expand when you impose restrictions upon it. Many forms of poetry, for example, have rigid rules dictating rhyming schemes and even the number of syllables per line. And yet, much of the world’s most profound literary art comes from the genre. – redphonecrypto
Heresiarch = founder of a heresy, or leader of a heretical sect
Louis Gave on the Manifold podcast
-Chinese are deeply entrepreneurial. Look at all the SEA countries with Chinese diaspora, all the big cos are run by the Chinese
-China is capitalist with socialism imposed. Japan is socialist with capitalism imposed
-re: American politicians — “They’re buying your votes with your money”
Information hazards essay by Jeff Lonsdale
-Information hazards are not necessarily about red vs blue, as taking the red pill might give you superpowers. But sometimes it is more like a black pill that might give you a slightly more accurate understanding of how the world works but saps your motivation to effectively navigate it
-One confusing fact that the existence of personal information hazards help solve is how pessimists are generally more accurate than optimists, but optimists succeed more often. About the only career in which pessimists do better is law, where understanding downside scenarios is particularly valued. -Developing a bias towards optimism helps avoid focusing on information hazards that are more likely to bring you or other people down.
Once you realize something’s a monopoly you never sell it – Novo on investing
Various Jeff Lonsdale writings:
-In a Ponzi scheme, it’s only the guy pulling off the fraud that really benefits from attracting more people. In a pyramid scheme, each silo is separate, and people below someone in a pyramid scheme do not typically get any advantage from that person becoming more successful.
-For fiat currencies, the demand is certain and future supply drives price uncertainty. For blockchain, the supply of a specific blockchain is known, the demand is unknown. There may be uncertainty on the supply side. Alternative blockchains and forks effectively add blockchain assets to the ecosystem
-Robots are expensive, and precision robots that can multitask are even more so. A moderately skilled person who can be guided by a computer will be the most viable choice in many situations for decades to come.
-Occupational licensing has basically replaced union job protection in the private sector. In the 1950s, about 35% of the private sector workers were in unions. Today, that number is closer to 7%. Instead, an equivalent amount of the workforce has been created occupational licensing protections. These protections now cover over 30% of the workforce, up from 5% in the 1950s.
-We are entering a world where computers will be able to help a random conscientious person do 80% of the job of various experts
Chopping off their heads does not work: cockroaches can live without one for as long as a week. Whacking them is no guarantee either: their flexible exoskeletons can bend to accommodate as much as 900 times their body weight. Nor is flushing them down the toilet a solution: some breeds can hold their breath for more than half an hour
TIL cats in the U.S. kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds each year, along with billions of other animals
“Likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals”
A key theme I noticed while putting this together is that most of those bad trades occurred with low conviction and were often combined with the feeling that I must always have a position on. Conversely, the views I was patient with and let develop into attractive setups proved to be my best trades. I found that I’m often early to entering and exiting which is something else I remind myself of.
Nyan nyan = “meow meow” in Japanese, but is also slang for sex
Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding – Maria Popova
A Japanese Zen master once said to his disciples as he was dying, “I have learned only one thing in life: how much is enough.”
Andrew Lo on adaptive markets; There are five basic tenets of adaptive markets:
1. People act in their own self-interest.
2. People make mistakes.
3. From those mistakes, they learn, adapt, and innovate.
4. As they experiment and fail or succeed, the process of natural selection operates on individuals, institutions, and markets just as it operates on bacteria, sea slugs, and chimpanzees.
5. This evolutionary process is what determines financial market dynamics.
Embracing stress is a radical act of self-trust: View yourself as capable and your body as a resource. You don’t have to wait until you no longer have fear, stress, or anxiety to do what matters most. Stress doesn’t have to be a sign to stop and give up on yourself. – Kelly McGonigal
RICK RUBIN notes from PodcastNotes:
1. “One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they’re using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it’s painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity.”
2. “Any thought you have about outcome undermines the whole thing.”
3. The DIY punk-rock ethic: Just make it. “It might not be the dream version, but whatever version you can execute is the one for you to make.”
4. “The changes that come in meditation are to help your reactions in the real world.”
5. “The instinct and the unconscious are where the great ideas are. The things that come from our intellectual selves have much less charge.”
The Long Arm of X: X has by far the most reach of all media
* On an average day, there are 250 million active users
* On a crazy eventful day, the number of users varies between 400 and 500 million
A calorie is a unit of energy that raises one gram of water one degree centigrade
certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form – Michael Crichton
“Kindness is a virtue worth dying for”
Economic “mutation” is not random, it is creative, intuitive, and judgmental. It happens at the speed of thought because humans think on purpose. – Allen Farrington
I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well. – Bach
This run, even if it brings on heatstroke, will give me peace of mind tonight in that all-important ten minutes before I fall asleep. I now live for that ten minutes. I’m all about that ten minutes. I’ve been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep. – Andre Agassi
Personally, I resolve this particular dichotomy by thinking of realism as a desire to see the world realistically, and pragmatism as a desire to be effective. Believing you have achieved either desire is probably a sign that you’re actually trapped within one of the quadrants. It is skepticism and doubt that mark sophisticated realism and pragmatism, and distinguish them from quadrant-locked attitudes and behaviors. – Venkatesh Rao
You can almost always scale things up more than you think, and the benefits to doing so are almost always bigger and more surprising than you think. This goes from everything from technical systems to companies. – Sama
Big 3 in tennis only win 55% of all points (!)
1. Novak Djokovic = 54.95%
2. Rafael Nadal = 54.73%
3. Roger Federer = 54.54%
Protocols are engineered hardness, and in that, they’re similar to other hard, enduring things, ranging from diamonds and monuments to high-inertia institutions and constitutions. – Venkatesh Rao
Try to make your guests feel at home; and do this, not by urging them in empty words to do so, but by making their stay as pleasant as possible, at the same time being careful to put out of sight any trifling trouble or inconvenience they may cause you
Never loan money to friends or family. Give it.
people with anxiety self-report higher physical reactivity than those without anxiety. They think their hearts are pounding precariously fast and their adrenaline is surging to dangerous levels. But objectively, their cardiovascular and autonomic responses look just like those of the non-anxious. Everyone experiences an increase in heart rate and adrenaline. People with anxiety disorders perceive those changes differently.
I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of entropy. It suggests that not only is the universe indifferent to our presence, it is at least mildly hostile to it. We are low-entropy creatures trying hopelessly to swim upstream in a universe that’s gradually winding down towards a maximum-entropy heat death. So the universe itself is, in a sense, Slightly Evil. So by some sort of fractal logic, as little subsets of the universe, our true nature is probably slightly evil as well.
Life fucking rips. Life is what you make it. Life rips. You just have to realize it rips, and then it rips. Life rips if you think it rips. It doesn’t rip if you don’t think it rips. – Chris Delia
Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior
Already, relatively primitive LLMs have already completely changed the game (as in, undercut the equivalent of human labor by 1/100th of the cost, or performing equivalent tasks in 1/100th the time) in a few domains. Off the top of my head:
• Translation
• Transcription
• Stock photo generation
• Graphic design
• Data cleaning/preparation/manipulation
• Essay composition
• Programming
• Copywriting
• Vehicle operation
• Summarization
• Legal advice
• Radiology/imaging
I’ve used AI for most of these use cases and it continues to utterly shock me in terms of how much human labor it eliminates
Lump of labor fallacy – belief that there is fixed amount of work / jobs in the world, so if you eliminate jobs via tech like AI, there is more unemployment, or if you increase workers, etc
Ilya explained why OpenAI gave up on robotics with @dwarkesh_sp
“To work on robotics, you needed to become a robotics company. You needed to have a giant group of people working on building robots.”
Building robots is all in or nothing. No in between
Nietzsche:
“Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.”
The defeated demand equality: “Equality belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man & man, class & class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out – that which I call pathos of distance – characterizes every strong age.” Takeaway: Nobility wants to stand out.
“Close your ears to even the best counter-argument once the decision has been taken.” You need this “occasional will to stupidity.”
Investors have been conditioned to ignore geopolitical risk. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the S&P 500 opened down about 2.4%. That was enough selling, as it finished the day up 1.5% and advanced another 2.2% the following day. After the Hamas terrorist attack in October, the S&P 500 opened down 0.5%, but finished up 0.6% before tacking on another 1.0% over the next two trading days.
The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for — greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements — and so on, for ever — and unpredictably.
Top 7 @JeffBezos quotes from the latest @lexfridman episode:
1. “We invent new tools and then our tools change us.”
2. “Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term that are impossible to solve if you think short-term.”
3. “Be… pic.twitter.com/oLpiCJxMXF
— Podcast Notes 🗒️ (@podcastnotes) December 15, 2023
1. “We invent new tools and then our tools change us.”
2. “Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term that are impossible to solve if you think short-term.”
3. “Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.”
That’s why they call it work. You don’t always get to do what you wanna do – Bezos

But the ‘self tenured’ subset is the group of people who are still ‘in it’ but just have full financial security and freedom are in my minds the most interesting group – they can’t be rationally ’employed’ by anyone in any traditional job / the economics never make sense… but they have the knowledge, skill, and passion to pursue interesting and important technological projects…
Yes, the crazier a bonding ideology is — the further away it is from objective reality — the more powerful it is in forming tribes. Why? The crazier the idea, or the crazier the stuff one does in order to get into the tribe, the more it proves one’s loyalty to the group by shutting off their other available options
PG:
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind
But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something
Obsessions tend to win. Whether sports, a startup, a community, or a movement. Those who are obsessed will almost always, with enough time, beat those who are not
Sam Lessin:
“Tech is a story”
“AI is just more cloud”