@habits

The eternal paradox of peak performance in chess, or any endeavor, really, is how to learn from your failures while still carrying on as if you are invincible. You must learn and forget simultaneously. — Kasparov

Jack Mallers: Bitcoin equals tech + fiat liquidity

U.S. households spend an average $1,100 a year on sports betting. For every dollar spent on bets, Americans put $2 fewer into investment accounts.
States that legalized online sports betting saw a 28% increase in bankruptcy filings within 4 years.

One recent study showed rates of hallucinations of between 15% and 60% across various models on a benchmark of 60 questions that were easily verifiable relative to easily found CNN source articles that were directly supplied in the exam

we estimate that Buffett’s leverage is about 1.6-to-1 on average. Buffett’s returns appear to be neither luck nor magic, but, rather, reward for the use of leverage combined with a focus on cheap, safe, quality stocks. Decomposing Berkshires’ portfolio into ownership in publicly traded stocks versus wholly-owned private companies, we find that the former performs the best, suggesting that Buffett’s returns are more due to stock selection than to his effect on management

every key part of the human experience is now filtered through an algorithm: applying for jobs, finding a place to live, finding a romantic partner, etc.

Buffett on reading financials:
“That’s something we’ve never really talked about publicly, but I actually spend more time looking at balance sheets than income statements. Wall Street often focuses on income statements, but I like to study balance sheets — ideally over an 8 to 10-year period — before I even glance at the income statement. You can’t hide as much on the balance sheet. It’s harder to manipulate than earnings figures”

OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew notes, “Manipulation is the hard problem we need to solve to make humanoid robots useful, not locomotion.” The value of a humanoid robot isn’t whether it can dance, run, or flip, but how capable it is at manipulating objects in the real world.
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What robots have traditionally struggled with isn’t controlled, precise movements, but dexterity, which is something like “the ability to manipulate a broad variety of objects in a broad variety of ways, quickly and on the fly.” Humans can complete almost any object manipulation task you ask them to do — folding a piece of clothing, opening a gallon of milk, wiping up a spill with a cloth — even if it’s an object and/or task they’ve never encountered before.

Some of the bots in question “personalized” their comments by researching the person who had started the discussion and tailoring their answers to them by guessing the person’s “gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation” as inferred from their posting history using another LLM.”
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In total, the researchers operated dozens of AI bots that made a total of 1,783 comments in the r/changemyview subreddit, which has more than 3.8 million subscribers, over the course of four months. The researchers claimed this was a “very modest” and “negligible” number of comments, but claimed nonetheless that their bots were highly effective at changing minds.

Re: Trump
I don’t think it’s an accident that his speech matches the pacing of the music. I think he lives in this incredibly present yet keenly self-knowing zen state where his life is a ballet with reality at a mass scale. He’s like a geisha oracle of macro mimetics. His thoughts and emotions are moving with the music in the moment
And I think the reason why he always creates these iconic photographs is because the way he lives his life—his actions, his performance—is a poem that he is always co-writing with reality and society at large, in the present moment. It’s jazz
He has the spirit of an artist trapped in the mind, body, and life of a fearless business tycoon. Which is why he is so funny—he is absolutely never trying to be an artist. Which is also why he accidentally stumbles into these beautiful artistic minuets of life that seem to capture the spirit of the moment. He isn’t trying.
https://x.com/parakeetnebula/status/1917307425377640841?s=46

U.S. real estate has risen ~6 % / yr over the past 50 yrs, keeping pace with money printing.
Leverage can push those returns to 20–30 %, but only by piling on debt.

“Is 30 too late for me to lock in?”
My brother in Christ, Ray Kroc was a 52-year-old traveling salesman when he met the McDonald brothers. Get a grip.

all crypto is meditation during chop, allocating during fud, holding dissociatively through the first highs, experiencing the joys of all time highs and then jeeting when the whole world is greedy.

In this setup, Japan became less an organic growth engine and more an inorganic global financier—relying on external asset inflation while its domestic productivity atrophied and its currency weakened.

My personal assessment of Trump has been consistent: he has a fairly accurate read on many of America’s problems, but the prescriptions he offers are often wrong, disastrously wrong.
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Trump’s most defining trait is his unpredictability. After all, he co-authored ‘The Art of the Deal,’ and his favorite business tactic is to keep shifting positions, catch opponents off guard, apply maximum pressure, and then strike a deal on the most favorable terms for him.
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Every Chinese understands the wisdom of a saying from Chinese philosopher Laozi over 2,000 years ago: ‘Governing a great nation is like cooking a delicate dish. A prudent and consistent approach is the key.’ But Trump doesn’t get it. Flip-flopping has always been a cardinal sin in Chinese statecraft culture.

Feudalism: emerged when Rome fell and Europe lacked standing armies or reliable roads. Pledging land for armed service let lords raise rapid, small‑scale defense against Viking and Magyar raids, giving peasants protection the distant crown could not supply. It wasn’t “primitive” — it was a rational response to fragmentation and insecurity.
Mass democracy: developed to govern industrial societies. Industrialization packed literate workers into cities and expanded wealth. Broader suffrage made taxation, conscription, and public schooling politically sustainable under these new social pressures. Democracy wasn’t “progress” — it was adaptation.

I find it useful to anthropomorphize the AI in a specific way for each composition project. As a junior employee, a graduate research assistant, or a brief-writing clerk to a Supreme Court justice for example. Not only do these anthropomorphic mental models/UXes help simplify navigation of the dialogue (since I can transfer the relevant interpersonal skills), but they affect how the AI responds. LLMs are pretty sensitive to tone and subtle social cues.

At Sequoia, Huang found what he calls “the highest-standards place I’ve ever experienced.” When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion on his second day, partners gathered briefly in the lobby. Champagne was poured but left untouched. Within five minutes, everyone had returned to work.

LLMs enable human language to eat the software that is still eating the world.
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The fundamental mechanism of testing and validating a hypothesis, then iterating in the direction of that validation, still holds in the world of gen AI. LLMs just enable us to go directly from words to proof-of-concept, then from proof-of-concept to production via more words, and to do this rapid cycling for impossibly small and niche problems many times an hour if we need to.

team at Anthropic uncovers behaviors suggesting that Claude “thinks” in multiple languages, rationalizes predetermined conclusions, and plans ahead. “Claude will plan what it will say many words ahead, and write to get to that destination. We show this in the realm of poetry, where it thinks of possible rhyming words in advance and writes the next line to get there. This is powerful evidence that even though models are trained to output one word at a time, they may think on much longer horizons to do so.”

Every day the blue-collar population shrinks by ~30,000 in China. Labor-intensive manufacturing is going to continue to shift out of the country, as it has been for the last decade-plus.

people used to say the same about Japanese products, with many Americans using a pejorative slur calling it “Jap Crap” from the 1950s to the 1970s
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but by the 1980s, this radically changed as Japan started producing higher quality products (like electronics) and goods which could get by with lower quality moved elsewhere (including to China)

“Tragedy + time = comedy” is the closest thing psychology has to a chemical equation.

“In most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’ Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods… Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys).”

Vincent Louis Gave:
“When China enters a room the profits walk out”
“Those who know it best like it least because they’ve been hurt the most”

Credit = credere = to believe

By the numbers, ~70% of Nevada gaming revenue is from slot machines and the majority of players are locals. In 2024, Nevada casino games won $15.6B from players with $10.5B coming from slot machines.

Long biased investors control 1000x+ as much capital as short biased (literally). And not many politicians have won campaigns as pessimists. We’ve had too much abundance thinking for too long imo. Need balanced pragmatism. We need to stop wasting so much talent and capital on “abundance” that turns into “get rich quick” schemes in practice

How do you define AGI?
“If you ask 10 OpenAI engineers, you will get 14 different definitions. Whichever you choose, it is clear that we will go way past that. They are points along an unbelievable exponential curve.”

completely overlook that rote regurgitation devoid of awareness probably describes 80-90% of human intelligence and communication.
A substantial portion of our daily speech merely recycles familiar phrases and concepts.

Reid has a very specific view of how to make decisions… Most people create pros and cons lists. But Reid was adamant that that was the worst possible way to make a decision. Instead, Reid advocates for strictly ranking your priorities — this could be priorities in your life, priorities for your company, etc. Then you try to make the decision based solely on the first priority. Only if there’s a tie do you go to your second or third priority. The reason Reid’s model is so brilliant is because when you create a pros and cons list, you’re creating effectively — and visually — a false equivalence.

On an imaginary $100 shoe, they estimate manufacturing cost is $22. Add freight, insurance, and import taxes, they estimate it costs Nike $27 to bring that shoe from Asia to the US.

but only group async games can capture true global and massive attention. there’s a reason why lotteries have 1B players per year, and no other game comes close

Many social patterns—like hierarchy, taboo, bureaucratic ritual, or even ideologies—can be seen as compression strategies to make social life cognitively manageable. It’s like lossy JPEGs of messy reality. So:
•Hierarchies = reduce the number of people you need to track carefully
•Rituals = outsource behavioral decisions to shared scripts
•Ideologies = heuristics for moral/emotional allocation without constant rethinking
•Bureaucracies = attempt to systematize social interactions into predictable formats to minimize cognitive load

Here is the deep secret of autoregressive LLMs in the current moment, a secret that will wreck many fortunes even as it makes a handful of others: All generative AI outputs are just demos.

Tariffs are stagflationary for the world as a whole, more deflationary for the tariffed producer, and more inflationary for the importer that imposes the tariffs

Volcker’s memoirs reveal an interesting disclosure: he regrets not setting up something akin to the London Gold Pool of the 1960s to manage the gold price when Nixon broke the dollar link to gold. This underscores an intriguing dynamic. Gold and fiat are natural rivals. Governments are keenly aware of this and have always taken an active interest in managing the fiat price of gold.

The largest subs see from 1% to 3% of uniques comment per month.
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I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years.

Fertility is now below replacement in nearly all of Latin America and East Asia. And half of the Middle East including Turkey and Iran doesn’t have enough kids to sustain their population.

Following that arc suggests Satoshi may have had more than 20 years worth of C++ experience by the time he came to write Bitcoin. In that case, he would’ve probably been in his early-to-mid forties in 2007 and close to 60 today, a similar age to other cypherpunks like Julian Assange and Adam Back.

In a serious deflationary collapse as in the 1930s, cash was king; asset prices plunged (housing prices fell 67% on average nationally), unemployment soared, and liquidity reigned supreme. My other grandfather, the one without a furniture store, bought a house in the early 1930s at a 50% discount to what he would have paid in 1929. He had a steady job in the insurance business.

Europe
Exports: 2nd largest exporter in the world after China, with 14.3% of global goods exports vs China 17.5%. ~$6T annual trade, rivaling US at $7t•
Military: Combined European military spending is $345b, surpassing China’s ($296B) and dwarfing Russia’s (~$86-109B). 1.5m active troops, larger than the US (1.3m) and Russia (1.1m).

“I think there is a world market for about five computers.”25 — Thomas J. Watson, President, IBM

On a planet of eight billion people, only 13% use the major, stable currencies such as the U.S. Dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, British Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, or Swiss Franc. Even when including the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee, less than half the global population (48%) lives in a somewhat stable currency regime.

we have enough uranium and thorium on Earth to power humanity until the Sun explodes and engulfs the Earth. If our population and energy consumption keep growing, at some point our demand will outstrip the supply of solar energy, and nuclear energy will become the only viable solution.

Fish converts two thirds of its protein intake into its own protein. This compares to 10% for beef.

the first ai systems that can manage human workers will cause a restructuring of labor markets more significant than the industrial revolution.

If in 2023 we spoke 1 trillion words to AIs, by 2033 it’ll be 10 or 50 or 100 trillion. Get ready for a lot of conversational AI.

Technological development generally follows S-curves rather than indefinite exponential growth.

According to a 2002 paper published by the International Monetary Fund (“The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices” by Paul Cashin and C. John McDermott, PDF), “there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.” For a century and half prices have been headed toward zero.

Five hundred years ago people were complaining money ruined art. They say the same thing today.

You have cameras and a security system, but it would be nice to have a portable camera and watchdog that knows how to patrol the property inside and outside automatically, re-charge itself, and avoid getting stuck anywhere to the point of requiring human intervention, and then also follow in-person or remote instructions when given them.
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Robotics has been chosen as a prime candidate that satisfies the second-order effect of being a massive opportunity, as well as this framework of putting dollars to work

Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid “smart” devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes.

Even the simplest jobs can change your life if you take them seriously. A friend of mine is a greeter at church. He’s a successful guy, but this is a humble volunteer role. The kind of thing most people do reluctantly.
But every Sunday, rain or shine, he’s there, waving and saying hello with an enthusiastic smile. He’s been doing it for a few years now, and it’s totally changed his life. He’s a quasi-celebrity not just at the church, but in his hometown, and has one of the biggest networks of anybody I know.
All because he decided greeting strangers wasn’t beneath him, but worth doing passionately.

What’s notable is that after achieving elite level biomarkers over the past four years, my team and I have struggled to find new therapies that meaningfully improve my biomarkers. HBOT achieved that
HBOT eliminated systematic inflammation in my body to a point it was below levels of detection. This is wild.