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’?