Tag: bitcoin

Random facts 9 – things I learned recently – Hugh Howey: “I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

All of these costs will trend down until eventually it’s just like…the cloud. Like they’re all the same. You might use AWS or Oracle or IBM Cloud, they all have different purposes, but you don’t really care, but there might be lockin. You build your stack on AWS, it’s kinda expensive, you want to switch but it’s difficult… if I had to guess that’s how this plays out…
Turner Novak

Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt. Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it.

And the Portuguese rutter? That’s our death warrant, for of course it’s stolen. At least it was bought from a Portuguese traitor, and by their law any foreigner caught in possession of any rutter of theirs, let alone one that unlocks the Magellan, is to be put to death at once. And if the rutter is found aboard an enemy ship, the ship is to be burned and all aboard executed without mercy.

Alan Greenspan in 1966, when he was still in the private sector:
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions…In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves

It is breathtaking how slow, substandard and unfocused many companies out there get through the day. And think nothing of it. The lack of energy is palatable. There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter

In a system that depends on irresponsible government spending (especially for perpetual war) and fiat printing to cover that irresponsibility, alarm bells cannot be allowed to work. There must be no pure price signals. And above all, an alarm bell must not also serve as a life-raft that’s easily accessible to everyone, especially the general public, in the form of an ETF. There must be no escape hatch

The overall degree is negligible. In 2013, researchers found that the average degree of personalization in Google Search was 11.7%, of course varying widely by query and rank. Higher positions, for example, have a higher chance of being personalized than lower positions.11 A study from 2019 found that Google personalizes 2/10 results when searching for people and 4/10 for political parties. In other words, not much

When you’re healthy you have 10,000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have 1

marketplaces are fueled by two core properties: 1) discovery and curation (presenting things that users want to see and interact with), and 2) trust and reputation (providing assurances to users)

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

Tyler Cowen, economist, professor, and founder of the popular blog Marginal Revolution, developed three laws while he was teaching macroeconomics. One: “There is something wrong with everything,” two: “There is a literature on everything” and three: “All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.”

Also, he changes one menu item every week. Has a massive spreadsheet that tells him what’s being ordered, profit margins on each item, etc. He gets rid of the least popular thing, tries something else. Every. Single. Week

The interesting thing about OnlyFans is that OF agencies use the models as image/video content to bait simps. However, many of the OF girls are unable to talk to so many simps at once and end up using virtual assistants who are following a script in an attempt to extract maximal value from simps by sending them prepared media from a google drive after the simp tips his final buck. Even if it is not real, it feels real to the end consumer and that is all that matters

They say movies are the shared dreams of the audience—that’s why they have to be experienced in the dark.

“Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing.
But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He’d basically say: ‘I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great you’re doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.’…
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult–you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate…
If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it”

“Failure is the information you need to get where you’re going”
Every time in Delphi’s history when we expected or “needed” something to happen. It didn’t happen and ended up turning out for the better.
– We weren’t able to raise money to start our business so we bootstrapped it ourselves and today, Delphi is fully employee owned.
- We weren’t able to finish raising a fund, and today – Delphi Ventures is basically all prop capital.
- There were numerous times we *almost* got acquired and ended up saying no – and it’s resulted in us building up Delphi into a brand we’re proud to be building for the space first and foremost

When galaxies collide, the black holes at their center begin orbiting one another before merging, and astronomers have just identified the largest pair yet. Researchers estimate that the black holes at the center of elliptical galaxy B2 0402+379 (the Loop’s longtime favorite galaxy, obviously) weigh about 28 billion times the mass of the Sun.

Curse of Knowledge: The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.

Bottom line: There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to perform at much higher levels. The role of leadership is to convert that lingering potential into superlative results
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We see in professional sports all the time how teams go almost overnight from losing to winning with basically the same roster, but different leadership. Call it what you want, the X factor, whatever, it is real. Anybody can dial into this, but not many do.
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It is not easy because you will drive people out of their comfort zones. There will be resistance. Change is hard. Some will vote with their feet. If you want to be popular as a leader, this may not be for you. The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity. Leaders are the energy bunnies and pacemakers of the organization. Some people drain energy from organizations; not leaders, they engulf organizations with energy.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Models: Zhu discusses the ongoing debate between open-source and proprietary AI models. He predicts that open-source models will eventually catch up with, if not surpass, their proprietary counterparts. This viewpoint reflects his belief in the democratization of AI technology and skepticism toward the long-term dominance of closed, proprietary systems.

If you’re not nervous it doesn’t mean anything to you — Justin Thomas

The inevitable direction of history is that the vast majority of AI systems will be built on top of open source platforms – Yann Lecun

“Deep learning, which is fundamentally a technique for recognizing patterns, is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional“ Still true

Your worst day is a chance to show your best qualities, to stand out, and to learn an enormous amount about yourself. Very few people plan or prepare for what they’ll do and how they’ll act during those times. Those who do might well end up turning their worst day into their best

In short, it will FEEL like a regular bear cycle, but in reality the game has changed for BTC and ETH – forever.
This means the window in time for the average non rich person to get generational exposure to BTC and ETH is closing, very rapidly
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Essentially, most people will be priced out of owning 10 ETH or 1 BTC.
I also believe that going forward alts will be less appealing each cycle as people just prefer the concensus trade of BTC and ETH that are guaranteed to go up due to ETF flows + because of new market participants size, you could still get 20-50% per year, with way less downside risk.
As such I think people will be less interested in altcoins.
This mimics how the S&P500 works, with basically 4-6 massive tech firms, like Google, apple, amazon, meta etc. Propping up the entire thing

Hugh Howey (on Tim Ferriss): I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting sentiment. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

“When you cook for yourself there’s love in there”

“resilience matters in success…I don’t know how to teach it to you except for, ‘I hope suffering happens to you’..greatness comes from character & character…is formed out of people who suffered..I wish upon you ample doses of pain & suffering” – Jensen Huang

We are in a “Tower of Babel” moment of AI research, where hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technologists are collectively using the same language to tackle every engineering problem under the sun.

As I usually do, I’ve appended our 1997 letter, our first letter to shareholders. It gets more interesting every year that goes by, in part because so little has changed. I especially draw your attention to the section entitled ‘‘It’s All About the Long Term.’’

that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

A counterculture is blowback. It’s intentionally offensive to establishment beliefs. Find it repellent? Good, it’s meant to gatekeep you.

Norwegian endurance training hack: high volume lactate threshold training. Train just below lactate threshold so you can do a lot more volume instead of at or above which requires a lot more recovery

More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.

in 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI challenged 14-time world champion Lee Sedol and won four out of five games. The next revision of AlphaGo was completely out of reach for human players: it won 60 straight games, taking down just about every notable Go player in the process.

the Bell Labs patent lawyers wanted to know why some people were so much more productive (in terms of patents) than others. After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that “Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, ‘he drew people out, got them thinking'”

Once you make a decision, go all in.
Commit fully to your choices. Half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results.
Indecision only leads to stagnation and missed opportunities.
Stay committed to your goals, even when faced with obstacles and setbacks. Perseverance is single-handedly the most important key to achieving a goals.

we’ll see Software 2.0 subsume more and more of the existing Software 1.0 stacks, resulting in more compact human-written codebases with the bulk of engineering complexity offloaded to data and learning. One of the most profound benefits of end-to-end machine learning is that it can drastically reduce the amount of code needed. Before deep learning, the AI backing Google Translate was roughly a 500,000-line codebase. After deep learning, a single neural network could be expressed in about 500 lines of TensorFlow code, with the bulk of “translation knowledge” now replaced with data.

Bezos shareholder letters
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I invite you to please read the section entitled It’s All About the Long Term, as it is the best way I know to help make sure we’re the kind of company you want to be invested in. As we wrote there, we don’t claim it’s the right philosophy, we just claim it’s ours!
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We are doubly-blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying foundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal.

Hayek would in particular focus on the function and effect of prices. Prices, he went on to explain in the following years, are the market’s decentralized and socially scalable means of communication. Although established as a simple function of supply and demand for goods and services in an economy, Hayek described how prices actually embed a wide array of relevant information that individuals require to make economic decisions.

Bitcoin is the most successful financial meme since gold and even at today’s all-time high, all the bitcoin in the world is still only worth about 1/14 of all the gold in the world.
Unlike the gold meme, which has infected about as many minds as it ever will, the bitcoin meme is growing — and it’s growing in a time when 1) people have more money than ever to invest and 2) people are more than ever looking for lottery-ticket type investments

Financial Nihilism goes hand in hand with Populism – a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups

The dirty secret of influencer marketing: ~80%+ of influencers DO NOT CARE about anything but $
I see this happen 24/7 in my space. They don’t care about product quality, brand (theirs or the brand they’re repping), their audience, etc. They just want $$$
The reasons why are simple:
– They don’t make a lot of $ (even large accounts)
– This is usually their 1st business venture
– They suffer from extreme short-term thinking / high time preference
– They don’t understand how brand is built
– They can be quite entitled

Peter Thiel on The Power Law of Distribution:
“One distribution method is likely to be far more powerful than every other for any given business:
Distribution follows a power law of its own.
This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business.”

Perhaps the most important insight NASA has gleaned from studying team dynamics—in space and on Earth—is the preciousness of one trait in particular: a sense of humour. Studies of crews overwintering at the South Pole show that a confined group needs people to fulfil various roles, including leader, storyteller and social secretary. But the most important task by far is that of the clown, a person who is funny and also wise enough to understand each member of the group and defuse tensions. Laughter, as much as courage, will sustain astronauts on their long quest to Mars.

The guy I know who is the best at friendships (also a spectacular salesman) keeps proposing plans. I asked him why once & he told me:
People get busy. If you want to be their friend, don’t take it personally & keep asking.
He did this with me & he eventually became one of the few genuine, lifelong friends I’ve made in adulthood.

Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers

Nothing is Something: “The most underutilized parenting strategy is doing nothing.”– Dr. Becky Kennedy

When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox
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When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files

Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost

The signals have changed over the years: After horse equipage, it was Hermès trunks for traveling by rail, then large Hermès bags for day trips by automobile, and then small Hermès handbags for everyday use (originally sized to fit in the overhead bin of an airplane

The first modern LLM, Jeremy Howard’s ULMFit, was trained on Wikipedia. GPT was trained on a corpus of books. GPT-2 was trained on the reddit-curated “WebText,” corpus, i.e., a crawl of websites linked on Reddit. GPT-3 expanded the dataset scope to web text from CommonCrawl. Data selectivity trended downward as data volume and diversity requirements went up.

It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle…

Puzzlingly though, despite facing an increased risk of skin cancer, people who are exposed to lots of sun appear to have longer life expectancies, on average, than sun avoiders.

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Prior editions:

The killer app comes first (in both crypto and AI)

In crypto there’s a constant chicken and egg debate of apps versus infrastructure. Which is more important? Which accrues more value? As an entrepreneur, which should I build?

For me, this 2018 article effectively settles the debate: https://www.usv.com/writing/2018/10/the-myth-of-the-infrastructure-phase/

The answer: It depends what part of the cycle we’re in.

But when you look at the history of general technologies, the killer app comes first. The infrastructure follows.

For example, light bulbs (the app) were invented before there was an electric grid (the infrastructure). You don’t need the electric grid to have light bulbs. But to have the broad consumer adoption of light bulbs, you do need the electric grid, so the breakout app that is the light bulb came first in 1879, and then was followed by the electric grid starting 1882. (The USV team book club is now reading The Last Days Of Night about the invention of the light bulb).

You could say a series of technological breakthroughs (eg, the right filaments, the right glass container) enabled the first “killer app” (💡💡💡) which then incentivized the infra.

Another example:

Planes (the app) were invented before there were airports (the infrastructure). You don’t need airports to have planes. But to have the broad consumer adoption of planes, you do need airports, so the breakout app that is an airplane came first in 1903, and inspired a phase where people built airlines in 1919, airports in 1928 and air traffic control in 1930 only after there were planes

Same pattern here: a series of new technologies (lightweight engines, proper control mechanisms) enabled the first “killer app” (🛫🛫🛫) which then incentivized the infra.

Crypto’s first killer app is right under our noses: Bitcoin itself.

The killer app was Bitcoin! And what it represents: a sovereign store of value tied to an uncensorable payment network.

Satoshi’s technology breakthrough enabled the killer app (Bitcoin) which has now enabled more than a decade of crypto infrastructure buildout, from alternative Layer 1s to smart contracts to new blockchain primitives.

In generative AI, I think a similar pattern is also unfolding:

ChatGPT was the first AI killer app. The lightbulb moment. 100M+ users within months of launch and one of the fastest growing consumer apps of all time.

ChatGPT opened investors eyes’, blew users’ minds, and now everyone from Google to Softbank to the CCP are spending billions ($7 trillion??) to build and buy AI infrastructure.

And steadily and surely, much of this infrastructure investment and innovation will make AI better, faster, and cheaper. Then more killer apps will be built atop all the GPUs, foundation models, and SDKs. Which then begets more infra. And the cycle continues.

Random facts – things I learned (Feb 23 2024) – “Paleolithic man had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.”

RANDOM FACTS

For example, patents generally have a 20-year horizon before expiry. Trademarks last for 10 years, can be renewed, and don’t have an automatic expiry. Copyright, on the other hand, has evolving regulation that ensures the holder retains the IP for 70+ years.

Paleolithic man had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can – George Bernard Shaw

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.”

The more complex the movements, the more complex the synaptic connections. And even though these circuits are created through movement, they can be recruited by other areas and used for thinking. This is why learning how to play the piano makes it easier for kids to learn math.

Loving one person is really an opportunity to learn to love all people.

They buried the lede on this new study. It’s not that exercise beats out SSRIs for depression treatment, but that *just* dancing has the largest effect of *any treatment* for depression. That’s kind of beautiful.

I had written the book for Dad. I hadn’t known, but that was how it was. I had written it for him. I put down the manuscript and got to my feet, walked to the window. Did he really mean so much to me? Oh, yes, he did. I wanted him to see me. The first time I had realized what I was writing really was something, not just me wanting to be someone, or pretending to be, was when I wrote a passage about Dad and started crying while I was writing. I had never done that before, never even been close. I wrote about Dad and the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I could barely see the keyboard or the screen, I just hammered away. Of the existence of the grief inside me that had been released at that moment, I had known nothing; I had not had an inkling

Bitcoin is punk rock. You don’t get it? Fuck you we don’t care. We’re having a party — Peter McCormack

Sixty-seven percent of the prime ministers in her sample lost a parent before the age of sixteen. That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class—the socioeconomic segment from which most prime ministers came. The same pattern can be found among American presidents. Twelve of the first forty-four U.S. presidents—beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama—lost their fathers while they were young.

Seinfeld: I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I’m thinking, could I do something with that?
Howard Stern: That, to me, sounds torturous.
Seinfeld: Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with

Now you know how exercise improves learning on three levels: first, it optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus.

The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why. In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing. As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.

From an app’s perspective, blockchains offer three key features: consensus, composability, and availability 🧵
1. consensus – solve contentious race conditions
2. composability – access other liquidity and apps
3. availability – data is readily accessible

Supercharger / turbocharger = force more air into engine to go faster

The main reason why these lessons and bits of wisdom are so important to me now is because I had to work hard to learn them. I had to struggle, to fail and to challenge myself over and over again in order to gain a little more understanding about who I am as a person and about the world I live in. And in the end, it is the struggles, the failures, the challenges, as well as the successes, that have shaped who I am and that have led me to try and improve myself as a human being as much as possible.

The one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the class. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half’s material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year’s material in one year. That’s a year’s difference in learning, in one year

The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it. – François de La Rochefoucauld

“Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.” 
– Robert Iger

When the customers want your products so badly that you can screw everything up and still succeed. – Don Valentine

It’s important to do things fast
-Going fast makes you focus on what’s important; there’s no time for bullshit
-A week is 2% of the year

There is little difference between obstacle and opportunity. The wise are able to turn both to their advantage – Machiavelli

Machine learning is essentially the automation of “experimental refinement” in software form: we start with an imperfect guess (a model), collect feedback from reality based on how it performs, and then optimize the model’s “parameters” (tunable knobs) to improve the result.

Natural resources are also stocks, and the rates at which we extract from them, and at which they naturally replenish, are flows. This makes the idea of measuring solely the rate of increase (not growth) of consumption (not investment) all the more horrifying because it could well be the irreplaceable destruction of natural resources that is being nominally counted as contributing to economic well-being. This is clearly insane and is the height of high time preference, short-term thinking.

What we do is we get really excited about something and then we start pulling the string and see where it takes us,” Cook told me. “And yes, we’ve got things on the road maps and so forth, and yes, we have a definitive point of view. But a lot of it is also the exploration and figuring out.” He concluded, “Sometimes the dots connect. And they lead you to some place that you didn’t expect

But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back. Maybe not every one of them; maybe not every time. Some people’s bags have been empty for a long while, and they may feel the need to ration whatever they have; some people have been taught that to give a fuck is to lose something, not realizing that to withhold is what it means to lose

In truth, the use of honesty is indeed a power strategy, intended to convince people of one’s noble, good-hearted, selfless character. It is a form of persuasion, even a subtle form of coercion.

From Emergent vs. Transactional Conversations: “When there are little to no emergent conversations in a relationship it’s in serious trouble. This is true for romantic relationships, for friendships, and business relationships… When you want to improve a relationship, make more room for emergent conversations and facilitate them in whatever way you can.”

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.

Create Rites of Passage: “Today, young men don’t know when they become a man.” – Joe Hashey

The Value of Death: When a nation allows for free trade, a shockingly high percentage of the productivity gains come from the worst firms being bankrupted by the free trade

“What are my bigger-than-self goals?” and “How is this an opportunity to serve them?” If you’re struggling to find a bigger-than-self goal, consider spending a few moments reflecting on one or more of these questions: What kind of positive impact do you want to have on the people around you? What mission in life or at work most inspires you? What do you want to contribute to the world? What change do you want to create?

When Meyer and Fu extracted DNA from Tianyuan’s leg bones, they found that only about 0.02 percent of it was from the man himself. The rest came from microbes that had colonized his bones after he died.

the Wozniak Test requires a machine to enter an average American home and figure out how to make coffee: find the coffee machine, find the coffee, add water, find a mug, and brew the coffee by pushing the proper buttons.

Blockchains invert the hardware-software power relationship, like the internet before them. With blockchains, the software governs a network of hardware devices. The software—in all its expressive glory—is in charge.

Bezos shareholder letter:
We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart, and that brand image follows reality and not the other way around. Our customers tell us that they choose Amazon.com and tell their friends about us because of the selection, ease of use, low prices, and service that we deliver.

For men, the worst effect of social media is inaction. How is scrolling through Tik-Tok or IG helping you become a better, more effective man? A: It’s not. Additionally, posting a ton is a bad look; remember, at baseline, posting on social media is begging the world for attention. Do top guys beg for attention? No. They get it without asking because who/what they are is worthy of attention

The Muse arrives to us most readily during creation, not before. Homer and Hesiod invoke the Muses not while wondering what to compose, but as they begin to sing. If we are going to call upon inspiration to guide us through, we have to first begin the work.

As a founder/CEO, Type I is likely to lead with mission and vision. Type II is likely to lead with goals and tactics, laser-focused and ends-justify-the-means vibes. On average I think Type I’s are more likely to be good brand representatives of their product, whereas Type II’s should more often let their product be the hero.

The feeling that any task is a nuisance will soon disappear if it is done in mindfulness. Take the example of the Zen masters. No matter what task or motion they undertake, they do it slowly and evenly, without reluctance.

One of Wikipedia’s power users, Justin Knapp, had been submitting an average of 385 edits per day since signing up in 2005 as of 2012. Assuming he doesn’t sleep or eat or anything else (currently my favored prediction), that’s still one edit every four minutes. He hasn’t slowed down either; he hit his one millionth edit after seven years of editing and is nearing his two millionth now at 13 years. This man has been editing a Wikipedia article every four minutes for 13 years
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He’s less prominent now, but YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of videos without watching them

“AI is just in experimentation phase in enterprise right now” – Aaron Levie (comparing this to cloud, which is well into adoption, but still growing rapidly)

The one phrase repeated 365 times in the Bible: “Do not be afraid”.

A key rule of theatre is that the King is never played by the actor playing the King, but by all the other actors around him.

DID YOU KNOW, these everyday things have proper names:
The plastic end of a shoelace = aglet
The smell after rain = petrichor
The gap between eyebrows = glabella
The day after tomorrow = overmorrow
The cardboard sleeve around your takeaway coffee cup = zarf
The wire cage around a champagne cork = agraffe

So viewed through that lens, the unifying pattern of Trump, Elon, and Kanye is that at their core, they’re putting on a show. A massive, unlimited duration, infinitely varying, endlessly fascinating show — the greatest shows on earth. And that show attracts attention, yes, but also votes, feet in the street, shareholder investment, car sales, music sales, sneaker sales, etc.

Last year he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering $1 million in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll. “Maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried,” he recalls thinking. “My life has validated this notion again and again.”
-Nat Friedman

HOW TO STOP GIVING A F*CK:
Remember that everything in life is temporary.
Nobody actually gives a F*ck about you like that. They have their own lives.
Keep in mind that you’re 1 out of 8 billion people.
Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.

one can argue that currencies themselves are intrinsically platforms, and that coexisting multiple currencies should be analyzed as platform competition.

Thailand, #3 on that list, was the country first to gastrodiplomacy in 2002. This campaign for Thailand meant making it easy to open Thai restaurants – providing templates, sourcing ingredients, and helping chefs get visas. And it worked! From the start of the campaign to today, Thai restaurants globally tripled, from 5k to over 15k, also yielding a substantial increase in foreign tourists throughout the period

Meow states that “the most clear indication of a real culture is a self-referentialism, where basically the participants will not stop talking about themselves.”
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2. Communities spend (a lot) of time together.
3. Time together spawns a common story.
4. Common stories & shared ideals create culture

That said, when a token goes straight down, you can’t call this a screaming success. There is a good reason why IPOs generally go up. And there is a good reason for why BNB, ETH, and BTC are 3 of the most successful protocols today. When you price an asset low, and let early investors participate in the financial upside of your success, it tends to have long-lasting positive effects. Your users become power users and evangelists. But when something prices high and goes straight down, you alienate those who were true believers. And it’s hard to come back from that

Bezos formalized the principle into the company’s mission two years later when he wrote that Amazon was on a quest to build “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”

There is a Scandinavian saying which some of us might well take as a rallying cry for our lives: The north wind made the Vikings! Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort of ease, ever of themselves made people either good or happy?

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
— William James

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Similarly, Egyptian and Sumerian script developed at very close to the same time, and while visually quite distinct, they share many of the same influences. One of these cultures invented writing while the other just lifted the idea, probably after seeing what a super useful invention it was.

Embrace Rejection or Don’t Try: It’s important to tune your reaction to rejection: “If you’re going to spin out after each rejection, you’re going to be exhausted a lot of the time.” – Tim
“Life punishes a vague wish and rewards a specific ask.” – Tim Ferriss

Prior editions:

Quoth the Raven’s bitcoin conversion: “Bitcoin could very well be the exit ramp that millions of angry people look towards in such a situation.”

It’s been amazing to see more and more people believe in the bitcoin story. Not just the why of investment (because bitcoin number go up), but why bitcoin even exists to begin with. He explains it far, far better than I can, so I just want to share some of Quoth’s recent content.

In particular I enjoyed his appearance on Peter McCormack’s What Bitcoin Did podcast:

(embedding this YT video was the first time I saw what Quoth looked like and I did NOT expect a beanie wearing Sopranos character with sleeves lol)

Also his writing is fantastic and funny:

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/the-catalyst-that-could-standardize

…where he talks about how growing anger at institutional failures and government corruption — as voiced through moments like Occupy Wall Street and r/WallStreetBets — could find its ultimate form through Bitcoin

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/why-i-bitcoin

…where he talks about his own falling down the rabbit hole journey through a combination of listening to people he respects (Lepard, Saylor, Lyn Alden) and better understanding the technology

As an aside, one of the most commonly misunderstood and yet critical aspects of bitcoin is that it’s actually TWO important things: one is the currency ($BTC), which gets ALL the attention; and two is the NETWORK (the Bitcoin technology) which is like a self-sovereign Paypal.

So when you buy bitcoin, what do you own? You own a share of the 21M bitcoin coins that will ever exist (like a piece of digital gold), and you ALSO OWN an “equity” share of the Bitcoin network, the permissionless banking and savings platform that is Satoshi’s genius.

Thank you for listening to my mini ted talk.

Chamath from 2013 talking about bitcoin — are you tired of it yet?? :P

To me this was the most interesting part:

Suffice it to say that the geopolitical ramifications of a robust Bitcoin economy are mind-boggling, beginning with a completely peer-to-peer banking system that works by and between people and ending with a world that no longer relies on the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of all assets

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-05-30/bitcoin-the-perfect-schmuck-insurance

Their All-In podcast is a weekly must listen, not because I agree with everything or everyone on it, but where else do you get to listen to 4 guys worth 9-figures plus who are good friends shoot the shit?