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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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’?

Please read this essay: Internet Improv

I read maybe 10 articles a day, more if I’m lucky and/or disciplined. Some immediately stand out. Where you can’t just highlight one sentence, you find yourself highlighting paragraphs. And saving excerpts and creating reminders to re-read it at a later date. This is one of those.

https://paragraph.xyz/@whitney/internet-improv

Excerpts below:

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It’s the first borderless stage in human history—a place where five billion people are simultaneously performing and watching, creating and consuming, every second of every day. What we call “platforms” are really just different parts of this endless stage, each with its own unwritten rules of performance.

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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.

—

At the micro level, it’s how memes evolve. Someone posts an image, another adds a caption, a third person changes the image slightly. Each step is a “yes, and,” and the result spreads across the internet, spawning countless variations.

—

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.

—

This interplay between layers creates powerful feedback loops. A simple technical feature like the retweet button (Layer 2) can transform how social movements mobilise (Layer 5), which in turn influences how platforms design their viral mechanics (Layer 2). The rise of reaction videos (Layer 4) didn’t just change content creation (Layer 3)—it fundamentally altered the architecture of video-sharing platforms (Layer 2).

Recent tv and movies: Possessor, Twilight of the Gods, Culinary Class Wars, and more

October was a great month for film/tv:

Twilight of the Gods — new Netflix adult anime by Zac Snyder, the opening sequence was awesome, and I liked the deeper exploration of Viking lore, the violence and dark themes; rarely see a female lead in Viking stories; even though the finale set up s2, I felt it was a bit confusing and weird; favorite character is easily dark Thor with the accent, and a sympathetic Loki w/ family is interesting too

Longlegs — moody and tense film, good performances from Nic Cage and Maika; I don’t really believe in the occult so the mechanism / logic was harder to accept; some True Detective s1 vibes

Priest — rewatched on a whim for Paul Bettany battling vampire monsters; stylistically I tend to group Priest with Equilibrium (Christian Bale) — OP warrior class in dystopian society battling internal corruption; but unfortunately the story was cornier and the vfx worse than I remembered; forgot Maggie Q was in it

The Substance — watched in theaters; very visceral body horror; solid performances from Demi and Margaret Qualley (though Demi’s role was much harder); great concept, but it got a bit trite and sometimes glib after act 1 — wish there was more backstory about the science and delving into the clinic side (like who are the other clients? how who was crazy enough to invent the product? how did they test it and what are the future improvements?)

Possessor — another body horror (Brandon Cronenberg) but this one had more action and better story imo; the whole composition felt like an evolving art piece with the music, cinematography, mood; awesome performance from female lead (Andrea Riseborough)

Culinary Class Wars — Koreans are just chefs kiss with the reality shows — so good with editing and heightening drama and production value, like Physical 100 and Singles Inferno; the restaurant challenge was particularly interesting to see everything from menu creation to pricing strategy to operations; wish the final round was 3 or even 4 contestants instead of just 2; Ed Lee really impressed me

Dragged Across Concrete — forgot I watched it a long time ago; S Craig Zahler’s unique style of dialogue; extended commentary on race and woke; realistic seeming depictions of sociopathy and evil

Shadow Strays — Asian Kill Bill, believable female action & fights, gritty & visceral, solid soundtrack, has the energy and gore of violent Japanese movies

What we do in the shadows season 1 — read pilot script and started rewatching, lot of the humor holds up, acting is great, forgot Jemaine Clement is involved; the werewolf storyline is a bit camp; but Laszlo and Guillermo have great character development; makes me want to watch Flight of the Conchords

Here was the last update.

Health and Fitness learnings for October: “Walking is an incredible glucose disposal signal”

Why raw carrots are so good for gut health:
-antibacterial against pathogens
-can bind excess bile, estrogen
https://x.com/outdoctrination/status/1839752469460508861?s=46

One hour on plane with window open = 20 minutes in a tanning bed
Always close window shades when flying — reduces UV exposure since most airplane windows are not properly UV filtering

People who regularly used saunas reduced:
-Sudden cardiac death by 63%
-All-cause mortality by 40%
-Dementia by 66%
-Alzheimer’s disease by 65%

When drinking, eat lots of saturated fat — meats, cheese, eggs, coconut, butter, milk
https://x.com/alpacaaurelius/status/1847551531295658347?s=46

NAD (750mg IV loading dose; not absorbed well orally) works almost inexplicably to help go from a sick state to a well state very quickly; loading dose with 1x per month maintenance dose “If I had to pick one thing for people, engaging in NAD would be it.” – Craig Koniver

You will always feel young so long as you can run sprints, regardless of your age. Best anti-aging exercise you can do

This isn’t just about canned soup—the same principle likely applies to other canned products, including soda, sparkling water, and other canned foods. It’s important to recognize that many aluminum cans are lined with plastics containing chemicals like BPA.

Deep stretch lifts are usually best:
-Full ROM
-5-10% more muscle growth

“Walking is incredible glucose disposal signal”

Sauna can help excrete microplastics
https://x.com/BioavailableNd/status/1849606697175875726

Drinking vinegar before / while eating can reduce glucose spikes by 50% or more: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBW6aqGuhLD/

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Here are learnings from August & September

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!
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Checkpoint Block: This is the first block created within a given Epoch and is used as a reference point for solidifying chain history.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.