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