Tag: ali abdaal

Random facts — things I learned (Jan 12 2024) — Data about the past is truth, Data about the future is religion (Auren Hoffman)

Prior editions

The most important takehome is that tokens are not equity, but are more similar to paid API keys. Nevertheless, they may represent a >1000X improvement in the time-to-liquidity and a >100X improvement in the size of the buyer base relative to traditional means for US technology financing — like a Kickstarter on steroids

But entertainment is one market, the market for attention, and one platform is ahead of everyone else in harvesting the commodity: TikTok. The Chinese (and it is Chinese) company had the most ascendant platform in history until OpenAI, and it remains the frame through which Western youth perceive the world

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

Like many people, I adhere to a religion that gives me moral guidance. The practice of it is just good sense—it keeps you out of prison and safely hidden in the crowd.

By approaching life with full consciousness, with vitality and intensity, by becoming the masters of our absurd fate — this is how we answer the question of suicide, how we defy futility and establish what it means to live.

The fun lies in tweaking things until they fit just right. Nothing can beat the feeling that happens after that.
And sometimes all it really takes is tweaking just one single thing to go from same same but different, to same same but right

The greater the doubt, the greater the dopamine

Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they’re focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.

“Memes are fun and memes are also something to come together around. Speculating on the popularity of memes and their staying power is no different than any other form of speculation… I’ve decided that I am going to stop ignoring and dismissing meme investing and start trying to understand it better. I think it is not something that is going away anytime soon and may turn into something even more interesting.” — Fred Wilson, AVC

Crypto is the modern version of the long emerging markets trade. As an industry, it will see the most relative capital inflows, budding innovation and has an innately global footprint. It provides a fiat currency debasement hedge (Bitcoin), new application networks akin to the internet (smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana) and the fastest growing population. You can compare it to any individual sovereign, country or financial market and nothing beats it.

My whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize and teach forever. – Ali Abdaal

You can’t tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams suck. – Palmer Luckey

Kardashev Type I: capable of controlling the entire energy from its planet
Kardashev Type II: capable of controlling the entire energy of its host star and travels through the solar system
Kardashev Type III: capable of controlling the energy at the scale of its entire galaxy

The barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great, you can’t put that sh*t in a f*cking book, bro.” – David Goggins

Auren Hoffman:
Data about past = truth
Data about future = religion

Think ism is a disease. We can’t solve problems by thinking about them. You have to do and try things – Kevin Kelly

Price is the maximally compressed signal of economically relevant information.

New study found that tea consumption is associated with attenuation of biological aging.
People who consistently drank >4 cups a day aged 40% slower than those who drank none.

I’ve heard old-timers say that the fifth set has nothing to do with tennis. It’s true. The fifth set is about emotion and conditioning. Slowly I leave my body. Nice knowing you, body. I’ve had several out-of-body experiences over my career, but this one is healthy. I trust my skill, and I step out of its way.

The group is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society, yet few pieces of software allow the squad as a whole to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together. To fully realize SQUAD CULTURE this must change

Startup valuation is literally a made up number
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Having an internet audience is still wildly underpriced
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Build products that no one asks for but everyone wants

Staying in conversation mode helps OpenAI thwart your goals. Remember that you’re not having a conversation with a sentient bot, you’re editing a shared document with a robotic LLM

Being entitled is the ugliest thing a person can be – Nolan Bushnell

Theodore Roosevelt: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

“Generalized trust” or “meta-trust” is “trust that whatever issues might arise between us, we can talk about things in a way that is workable for both of us and leads to issues getting resolved to our mutual satisfaction in good time.”

Money is the stored time and energy of other people

Offline, in the real world, OpenAI have designed a fictional character named ChatGPT who is supposed to have certain attributes and personality traits: it’s “helpful”, “honest”, and “truthful”, it is knowledgeable, it admits when it’s made a mistake, it tends towards relatively brief answers, and it adheres to some set of content policies

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five

When Claude Shannon worked out the math, he found something very surprising: The formula for noise in an information system was identical to the formula for entropy in thermodynamics.

Our thesis at Variant is that the next generation of internet networks will turn users into owners—specifically asset owners. The internet enabled everyone to become a publisher, and similarly, crypto enables everyone to become an asset owner, and therefore, an investor. You don’t need capital to invest, you can invest your time or work by producing art, running machines, or doing physical work.

Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. – Steven Pressfield

Given that Japan is the largest holder of US Treasury bonds and the largest international creditor as viewed by its net international investment position, actions of the Japanese private sector could place enormous upward pressure on 10-year plus maturity US Treasury bond yields.
This is data from the IMF which estimates Japan’s net international investment position is a positive $3.3 trillion

The US is now spending materially more money on the national interest payment compared to our defense budget.
That is quite a feat considering we are handing out weapons and equipment around the world like it is candy, so our allies can fight our proxy wars.

Thich Nhat Hanh
-If you see a person and don’t also see his society, education, ancestors, culture, and environment, you have not really seen that person. Instead, you have been taken in by the sign of that person, the outward appearance of a separate self.
-We already are what we want to become. We don’t have to become someone else. All we have to do is be ourselves, fully and authentically. We don’t have to run after anything. We already contain the whole cosmos.

In the traditional art world, each niche subgenre of art (Andy Warhol, post WWII African art, etc.) ends up being cornered by a handful of collectors. That is also happening to the digital art market right now. In 2023 there were around six institutional buyers who spent at least seven figures buying all the grail digital art pieces.

“When you throw the impossible at them, that’s when they get excited” – Hans Zimmer

“Always want more but never be greedy” – Giannis

I want to live in a world where building a humanoid robot at home is like building a PC today

stop thinking of time as an abstraction: in reality, beginning the minute you are born, time is all you have. It is your only true commodity…To waste your time in battles not of your choosing is stupidity of the highest order.

TIL the black hole, TON 618, is so big (66 billion solar masses), a new term was invented to describe it: ultramassive black hole

Never discriminate as to whom you study and whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.

Crypto is the machine’s body.
And AI is the brain that enters into it.

Having averted disaster, I’m suddenly loose, happy. It’s so typical in sports. You hang by a thread above a bottomless pit. You stare death in the face. Then your opponent, or life, spares you, and you feel so blessed that you play with abandon.

Could you make a “Large Solar Flares and Sunspots Model” (LSFASM) and learn to talk to the Sun and ask it where it might flare up next? How about a Large Oceanic Model that allows ships to talk to ocean currents? Or a Large History Model that works as a Prime Radiant for Asimovian psychohistory? Maybe a Large Climate Model constructed out of weather data can talk to us and supply strategies for climate change?

As the bicycle rolled across the world, critics followed, calling it dangerous because it startled horses and unbecoming for women, who had to wear traditionally male attire to ride (‘bloomers.’)
While some physicians argued cycling was healthy others linked it to insanity, deformities of the spine, face and even a cause for appendicitis. One insurance company even refused to insure avid bicycle riders, while one army recruitment office rejected applicants who were avid cyclists because it was assumed they had a weakened ‘bicycle heart.’

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
— Horace Mann

The Master said, “The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.”

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read. ~ Salman Rushdie

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
~ Harry S. Truman

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I stopped drinking caffeine this year.
It was incredibly difficult to do.
I used to drink a large Starbucks iced coffee each morning & a medium sized coffee mid-day.
That is ~ 300mg of caffeine.
How did I stop? — I went cold turkey one day. It really sucked. I had headaches, I was irritable, and generally felt horrible for about 10 days.
But the benefits made it all worth it. Here is what I’ve seen so far:
– More energy during the day
– Better sleep at night
– More hydrated skin
– Elevated mood
If you’re looking for something that could improve your life in 2024, highly recommend trying to cut out the caffeine drug.
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Start or end every day with writing about your life. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

When thinking about new cities in the United States, Las Vegas comes to mind as the most populous city founded in the 1900’s. Since its founding, it has benefited from having a different set of rules than other places. With its legalized gambling, tolerated prostitution and mob activity historically funneling money into and around Vegas, it benefited massively from having different rulesets. But it is not exactly the type of example that inspires policymakers in other jurisdictions

After studying AI and attempting to model various types of financial decision making algorithmically, I realized that humans make decisions very much the same way that modern search engines do. We have vast stores of data — the experiences we’ve encountered in our lives — and we use very simple algorithms to make predictions and decide on actions. I recollect what happened in my past circumstances, and based upon that history of evidence, I’m going to extrapolate the likely outcome of the current situation and choose the best course of action.

Random facts — things I learned (Dec 15 2023) — “Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems”

Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems, around long before anybody thought to coin that expression. (source)

On the Birth of a Son
BY SU TUNG-PO // ARTHUR WALEY
Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.

Action is a high road to self confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people, and its rewards are tangible – Bruce Lee

Cool find — list of scifi ideas organized by authors and books, mentioned on the My First Million pod:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sBkJ8nZwyG_J1v_WLub-5RM4GhLWCf_b7ml8_qNgNsg/edit#gid=568223314

Set a “No-Internet” Day Once a Week – This has been a game-changer for me. On Wednesdays, I don’t allow myself to go on the Internet until 5pm. This means no social media, no email, no news, no nothing. – Ali Abdaal

We fear too much success is abandoning our roots and will leave us alone.
Think: Why do so many celebs have an “entourage?”
The unconscious thing your brain says:
“I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots and leave behind people from my past”
-Jesse Pujji

If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response. – reading Kelly McGonigal’s GREAT book about the utility of stress

Elon is already more powerful than many heads of state. It’s not hyperbole. The constellation of assets Elon’s amassed represent real societal and resource power. This man has systematically gained command over numerous critical industries in human transportation, communication, space travel, and technology – BacktheBunny

the difference I guess between the guys who are able to be biggest Champions and the ones that are struggling to get to the highest level is the ability to not stay in those emotions for too long so for me it’s relatively short so as soon as I experience it I acknowledge it I maybe you know burst I scream on the court whatever happens but then I’m able to bounce back and reset – Djoker

There is a connection between freedom and self-confidence: When you are kept from expressing your deepest needs and wishes, you lose trust in their validity and in your own judgment. You survive by finding out the rules and following them, thus hiding what you really want. You make it your purpose in life to please others rather than to affirm yourself. – David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender
-Ocean Vuong

Kong: I turned down all performance opportunities and avoided meeting anyone. To prevent friends from locating me, I changed my mobile phone number 21 times. During the darkest three months, my mother would leave my meals on a chair outside my door. When my daughter returned from the United States to visit me, all I could do was look at her through the peephole.
Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up

while a magazine might project a kind of bulletproof perfection–every story the product of an assiduous and painstaking reporting, editing, and fact-checking process–in practice nearly every story you read is an improvised and often deeply unsatisfying last-minute compromise between the publisher, the top editors, the story editor, the fact-checkers, the copy-editors, the art department, and the writer
Something that’s often underrated by people who haven’t worked as journalists is the extent to which newspapers and magazines (and cable channels, etc.) are institutions like any other–which is to say riven with contradiction and internal tension, populated by cross-pressured workers and managers with competing desires and incentives
from Read Max

Great infographic on DEPIN landscape
https://github.com/iotexproject/awesome-depin/blob/main/depin_landscape_oct.jpeg

Selfish people are incapable of loving others, but they’re incapable of loving themselves too

I think we just can’t help the instinct to give meaning to things we don’t understand — Scavenger’s Reign

But today, people are actively deleting content they have created. It is now considered best practice in some circles to automatically delete twitter comments, old reddit comments and to privatize Facebook posts (or even simply delete Facebook). And when they create new content online, it is more often in places where the masses cannot see it.

Nietzsche: Compassion is a psyop designed by the weak to redirect resources from the most deserving to the least.
Napoleon: Logic will lose you wars because sometimes the moment demands imaginative maneuvers that work because they are irrational
Chateaubriand: Beauty is useless if you care for efficiency, but shockingly useful if you care for lovability. Yes, beauty is a wasteful luxury but ultimately the only thing people will protect, and make pilgrimages to.
John Fowles: High IQ is a terrifying gift. The ability to predict the consequences of any action means your will gets lost in a labyrinth of hypotheses. Rule 1: Do not lose the will
from @oldbooksguy

On a journey, ill;
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.
-Basho.

China has focused on battery-powered electric vehicles. Even after consolidation in the sector, over a hundred firms still produce such cars. A few brands are world-class. Most are cheaper than Western rivals. Chinese firms became dominant through a mixture of subsidies and coercive transfers of foreign technologies, but also hard work and foresight, as they leap-frogged slow-to-change foreign firms

Manny Pacquiao on the power of volume, leading up to a fight he’d spar 36 rounds in a day, every day (!) — so he wasn’t tired at all in a regular 12 round fight: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzeHP6itCK7/

During a threat response, your emotions will likely include fear, anger, self-doubt, or shame. Because your primary goal is to protect yourself, you become more vigilant to signs that things are going poorly. This can create a vicious cycle in which your heightened attention to what’s going wrong makes you even more fearful and self-doubting.

the brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits.

If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations. – Kurzweil

Thoreau goodies:
-Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
-For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
-But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness.

In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. – de Botton

Let me Google how to suffer. That ain’t gonna be in there – David Goggins

Diabetes, glioma, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and H pylori bottom out around 1 drink per day. Cardiovascular disease bottoms out around 2 drinks per day. Erectile dysfunction stays lowered at up to 3 drinks per day. Depression bottoms out at 0.7 drinks per day.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731863379902349781.html

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. […] To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them

When a supernova explodes, the blast wave creates high-energy particles that scatter in every direction; scientists believe there is a minute chance that one of the errant particles, known as a cosmic ray, can hit a computer chip on Earth, flipping a 0 to a 1. The world’s most robust computer systems, at NASA, financial firms, and the like, used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips

弘益人间，在世理化
official education motto of South Korea
To broadly benefit the human world

Sizzling Sunlight: Bask in both morning and evening sunlight. Even if it’s cloudy and cold. It’s not just about Vitamin D; it’s about regulating your natural circadian hythms

And if you avoided everyone who treated you unfairly at some point, you’d probably just be alone. You’d better hope they give you the benefit of the doubt for your mistakes, too

I can’t predict the future. But I can spot investor over-reactions. – Ram Ahluwahlia

They weren’t trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be. – Jordan Peterson

Make that phone call you’ve been putting off
Push through when you feel like quitting
Have that uncomfortable conversation
Introduce yourself to that cute guy/girl
Check out that church or faith group
Ask for that promotion or raise
Apply for that new job
Sign up for that class
Start that side hustle
Post that tweet
Take that trip
The world belongs to the bold. Be a seeker, open to change and opportunity.
And most importantly…
Shoot your shot.
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