Random facts 10 – things I learned recently – “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments”

“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. Maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and maximum optimism the best time to sell.” — John Templeton

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is employed as an optimization algorithm to update the model’s parameters, aiming to minimize the error. SGD updates parameters for each training example or small batches thereof, moving in the opposite direction of the error gradient

Russia’s Muslim population accounts for roughly 20 percent of the population. More importantly, the fertility rate of Russia’s Muslims is around 2.3 – much higher than the overall national fertility rate of 1.7. Add in immigration from a predominantly Muslim Central Asia, and the demographic picture is that of a rising Muslim population…while Putin doubles down on Russia as the defender of the Orthodox faith

Although ranging companies had been informally used in the 1820s, the Texas Rangers were formally created by the Texas legislature to be highly mobile Indian fighters.
The Rangers deservedly achieved a mythological status in American history. They showed a remarkable frontier adaptability, of necessity adopting many of the same characteristics as their Indian enemies. Speed, stealth, and a capacity for the cold-blooded execution of Indians.

But when we are at our best, we’re not slogging through. Great people are obsessed and they’re not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged

Time is the friend of the consistent and the enemy of the inconsistent.

Lying Is Not the Way: “The best way to achieve AI safety is to grow AI to be really truthful.” – Elon Musk

A report on enterprise buying/usage of generative AI. Some takeaways: Budgets for AI are moving from experimental to recurring, enterprises prefer using more than one model, enterprise’s like open source for control, internal use cases are easier to implement vs external

This brings me to the core idea of degen communism: a political ideology that openly embraces chaos, but tweaks key rules and incentives to create a background pressure where the consequences of chaos are aligned with the common good.

Note that baseball, hockey, the Olympics, golf, etc., are not seeing booming TV ratings. Why? They are too hard to gamble on.
And if you watch closely, all these sports are desperately trying to educate people on how to bet on their sports

0DTE (zero-day to expiration options, or they expire that day on the close) is now over half of all options traded

But the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells the commodity. They sell shoes. And yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they’re better than Reebok’s air soles. 
What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics

All of the best startup leaders I’ve met are highly attuned to their competitors’ moves, and the others get eaten alive. Zuckerberg famously is a total psycho about competition.

Teams that have had good leaders just run better – they make better decisions, they are more resilient, and perhaps most importantly, they have higher standards for others and themselves. Teams that have had poor leaders are predictably the opposite. They take longer to get less done, and more disappointingly they often have a bitter attitude. Leadership quality is durable and highly contagious.

First, people’s minds wandered a lot. About half the time, the average person is thinking about something other than what they are doing.
And second, mind-wandering isn’t that much fun. People tended to be less happy when their minds were elsewhere. This is surprising, especially considering how much mind-wandering is voluntary. Apparently, when we can think about whatever we want, we often go to dark places

They found a surprising result: Large language models (LLMs) often use a very simple linear function to recover and decode stored facts. Moreover, the model uses the same decoding function for similar types of facts. Linear functions, equations with only two variables and no exponents, capture the straightforward, straight-line relationship between two variables

The chest should neither expand nor collapse during proper inhalation or exhalation.

GPT-3 represents words with an embedding dimension of 12,288. If you were to do a single matrix multiplication of this size on-chain, it would cost about $10 billion at current gas prices — the computation would fill every block for about a month straight.

“We can be retarded longer than you can be solvent”

Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.

The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of ill-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories.

The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.

“Increasing model width (hidden dimension size)” = expanding the capacity of a neural network by enlarging the number of units (neurons) in the hidden layers.
Model Width = size of the hidden layers within a neural network. A “wider” model has more neurons in each hidden layer. The “hidden dimension size” specifically refers to the number of neurons or units in a particular layer.

Some people appeared to be essentially burnout-proof. In a few cases, I observed people working for years with near-permanent on-call and consistent 60+ hour weeks (with spikes to 80+), including through major events like weddings and honeymoons. They appeared no worse for wear than others working half as much.
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I noticed that many parents of young children, despite having significantly more on their plates, seemed to get burnt out less. I even noticed this in myself, and didn’t have a real way to explain it – my first kid’s birth coincided with the busiest working period of my life (do not recommend), but I found that I had a more positive attitude towards work, for no reason that I could really explain. When I read this post, it all clicked – when you have young children Mission Doubt entirely disappears because you need to feed them.
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Memory is not an accurate recording, and despite what many of us think, our recollection of the past is highly distorted. False memories are not difficult to implant, and if you think you have an accurate memory of something that happened a year ago, you are almost certainly wrong.
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Studies of people from dozens of different countries find that, as we pass middle age, we get more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic.

From the previous section, we know that the market size of “solving business problems” is much much bigger than just Software Development. So there’s no reason to believe that Software Development will disappear anytime soon.

Work like a CEO
Train like an athlete
Study like a student
Create like an artist

One of the best nuggets of advice he offered, beyond all the practical advice on how large to draw the cartoons and what kind of Bristol board to draw them on and other such details, was to take pride in rejection letters. He recommended hanging them on the wall and celebrating them. Some people might quit after one or two ideas are rejected, but he knew the important thing was to keep trying. It was brilliant advice.
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Artistically, the comic achieved everything I believed comic strips were meant to achieve: it was easy to read, it was drawn simply so it popped off the page, and it had recurring characters that were clear archetypes that readers could look forward to seeing every day and eventually fall in love with.
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Another thing I’d learned about the comic strip business from Ken Muse is that it’s very difficult for a newspaper to stop running a comic strip that’s popular. Newspaper editors are terrified of angry letters, so once a comic strip gains a foothold with an audience, it tends to stick around for a long time. This is why comic strips are the most conservative entertainment medium. This is why there are still comic strips in the newspaper today that are unchanged from the 1920s and 1930s when they first debuted.

Party Over All: The highest-status person at any university in China will not be the top scientist; instead, it will be the person with the strongest connections to the CCP

While we naturally understand that writing is a good way to share ideas with others, we under-appreciate just how much good writing helps us think about an idea ourselves. Writing is not only a means of communication, it enables us to practice reasoning.

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments

The single most powerful thing you can do in a relationship, whether it’s personal or professional, is to give someone 100% of your attention

I learned that there is no correlation (or indeed, if there is, it is a negative correlation) between how satisfying a session felt and how interesting the resulting material was. Some of my now favourite music came from the most frustrating sessions

In 1910, Korea was annexed by the Empire of Japan after years of war, intimidation and political machinations; the country would be considered a part of Japan until 1945. In order to establish control over its new protectorate, the Empire of Japan waged an all-out war on Korean culture
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Today, March 1—the day of the independence protest in 1919—is a national holiday in South Korea, a reminder not just of the resilience of the Korean people, but of the years of occupation they withstood.

Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else.

What Scale is doing with Remotasks isn’t hard to replicate. Kevin Guo, cofounder of Hive, a startup that once fielded its own Remotasks rival before shuttering it due to tough margins, contends that the sort of data labeling Scale does is a commodity business. “Anyone who puts up a team can compete with you, and it comes down to price really quickly,” he says

Telling the truth to customers and employees, especially when it’s difficult, is how you earn trust and loyalty

Just as no one in the container’s early years imagined a ship that could carry the freight moved by ten thousand trucks or dreamed that the world’s ports would soon be handling the arrival of two million 40-foot containers every week, so, too, did no one conceive that steel shipping containers could be turned into houses and sculptures or that abandoned containers would become a serious nuisance. That simple metal box was what we today label a disruptive technology.

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Killer apps
One of the most important concepts in software startup strategy is killer apps. Each platform ecosystem is surrounded by a set of applications of varying degrees of importance – the best of those are the killer apps.
In sales the system of record is the CRM, the database in which all customer data lives. Salesforce of course built many important applications around it, and integrates with thousands more. HubSpot began with applications around inbound marketing before backing into the CRM later. In HR you have the HRIS. Lattice started with one important HR application, performance management, before building several more, and then eventually an HRIS. When the iPhone first launched it spawned a huge number of new applications, some of which it built itself and some which were built by third parties. Today we’d consider the killer apps things like messages, maps, musics — in most cases, there are both native and external products offered.
One of the reasons AI is so important for the software landscape is because it shuffles the deck of possible killer apps. It opens up entirely new functionality that was simply impossible to build before; an automated sales rep, a robot bug catcher and fixer, a support agent that can triage many cases automatically.
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A bitter–and highly popular–internet posting called corrupt officials ‘the new black-collar class’, who concealed their wrongdoing in a shroud of secrecy. ‘They drive top-brand cars. They go to exclusive bars. They sleep on the softest beds in the best hotels. Their furniture is all of the best red wood. Their houses overlook the best landscapes, in the quietest locations. They play golf, travel at the public expense, and enjoy a life of luxury,’ said the anonymous blog, posted in July 2009. ‘They are the newly arrived “black-collar class”. Their cars are black. Their income is hidden. Their life is hidden. Their work is hidden. Everything about them is hidden, like a man wearing black, standing in the black of night.’

“If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”

“Convenience on the internet is basically achieved by two things: speed, and cognitive ease.” In other words, people don’t want to wait, and they don’t want to think — and the internet should respond to that.

Without compassion, you are utterly alone. That is why compassion is the ground of happiness.

“Peranakan” generally refers to a person of mixed Chinese and Malay/Indonesian heritage.
Many Singapore Peranakans trace their origins to 15th-century Malacca, where their ancestors were thought to be Chinese traders who married local women.

In May, China’s space agency announced that it will land astronauts on the moon by 2030, making it the second country with that capability. It’s rare for Beijing to lay out formal timelines unless it’s quite confident that it has the task in hand
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the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products. What are the great Chinese creations of the last 20 years, aside from a science fiction trilogy published before Xi took office, a short-video app that doesn’t display Chinese content overseas, and a video game that looks as if it’s thoroughly Japanese

Elon is one half a manufacturing visionary, able to do things with rockets, automobiles, and satellites that no one previously imagined; his other half is a pure gremlin on the public consciousness, who uses his Internet following to drive the rest of society towards madness. It’s not just the Internet that pays attention to his doings: Elon more reliably generates mainstream news headlines than perhaps even the two presidential candidates this year. Who else has become a fixture on every pillar of American imperium: tech in San Francisco, finance in New York, movies in LA, energy in Texas, and government in DC

Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made
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However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win
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Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.

It was also built with a vast outsourced workforce that performs a rudimentary task crucial to AI: labeling the data used to train it. Those people—some 240,000 of them in countries including Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela—work for Remotasks, a subsidiary Scale doesn’t mention in public marketing materials

False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people.

TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks

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

Arms for your chairs are chairs for your arms

From the book How to Change by Katy Milkman:
Across data set after data set, we found the same patterns. Undergraduates at a campus fitness center were more likely to visit the gym not only in January, but also earlier in the week, after a school holiday, at the beginning of a new semester, and after their birthdays… Similarly, in January, on Mondays, and after holiday breaks, we documented an uptick in online goal setting…

When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.)

The iPhone is one of the most successful and important products of the past few decades. But the first version launched with a mountain of issues. It was a terrible phone, ironically. The whole idea was that it was a “smart phone,” yet everyone agreed their cheap-o Nokia flip-phone was ten times better at being a phone. Also, imagine launching an operating system that didn’t include “copy/paste.

Pros:
Devin feels UI/UX first, not Gen AI first. IDK if this makes sense. The AI is a core component but it’s the surrounding infra they built that is the star of the show
The product feels quite finished, This is not a demo. They have things built out such as auto deploy to netlify, api key protection, intelligent way to interrupt without interrupting, a good UI that is *tailored to humans* and bridges LLM and human dev, the slider to move backwards in time

Ludic Fallacy: Falsely associated simulations with real life. Nassim Taleb: “Organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life.”

As soon as a startup starts operating in the real world, the vast majority of factors will be outside of a startup direct control or even influence, while having absolutely dominating impact on that startup eventual outcome

There is, however, nothing else remotely like an elephant. (Its closest living relatives are sea cows — dugongs and manatees — and the hyrax, an African shrewmouse about the size of a rabbit.)

They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, of heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world dominion.

probably nothing is more universal than the experience of stress. Nobody gets through life without experiencing physical pain, illness, disappointment, anger, or loss. The specifics may vary, but the underlying experience is as human as it gets. The challenge is to remember this in your own times of suffering.

(Most westerners seem unaware that MSG is naturally present in Parmesan cheese and other ingredients commonly used in western cuisines.)

The framing of “Attention Economy” is limiting. I believe we live in a Love Economy. People now want to spend their time, money, and attention on things they love, not simply things that grab their attention.

these firms say they want entrepreneurs but they really want franchise operators. there’s some formula and you’re basically operating a tech enabled McDonalds that produces a number of widgets
“politics” or “corporate culture” are basically mechanisms to ensure that you are a script follower, the same way that McDonalds wants to ensure that its franchises are operating according to spec. there are some semi subversive scripts – pioneered by the Paypal mafia, or Solomon brothers – which value creativity. But they’re still ultimately scripts

You gain confidence and eliminate anxiety by doing gradually more difficult tasks, excelling at them, and realizing you are a competent, capable person

The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds…instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity
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We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.

It was one of Rikyū’s achievements to take an act which in the West is one of the most routine and unremarkable activities and imbue it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to a Catholic Mass. Every aspect of the tea ceremony, from the patient boiling of the water to the measuring out of green tea powder, was coherently related to Zen’s philosophical tenets about the importance of humility, the need to sympathise with and respect nature and the sense of the importance of the transient nature of existence.

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

Prior editions:

Recent crypto learnings 4: “Memecoins are prediction market perpetuals”

Past updates 1, 2, and 3

By the way, the FDIC is essentially guaranteeing over $20 trillion in deposits on just over a hundred billion. So they’ve got a half-penny on the dollar.

L2s eventually move to interoperate with one another based on tech evolution and customer demand
9) ETHEREUM IS SUDDENLY THE DE FACTO GLOBAL SETTLEMENT LAYER and ETH IS THE NATIVE PROGRAMMABLE MONEY OF THAT SETTLEMENT LAYER

when volume > marketcap, parabolas are often in final stages

CometBFT is software for securely and consistently replicating an application on many machines. By securely, we mean that CometBFT works as long as less than 1/3 of machines fail in arbitrary ways.

Grant Engelbart, Carson Group Vice President: “We’re seeing advisors allocate 3.5% of Bitcoin ETFs on average to client household portfolios

There are 8 key innovations that make the Solana network possible:
* Proof of History (POH) — a clock before consensus;
* Tower BFT — a PoH-optimized version of PBFT;
* Turbine — a block propagation protocol;
* Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol;
* Sealevel — Parallel smart contracts run-time;
* Pipelining — a Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization
* Cloudbreak — Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database; and
* Replicators — Distributed ledger store

Validators are special full-nodes that participate in the consensus process (implemented in the underlying consensus engine) in order to add new blocks to the chain. Any account can declare its intention to become a validator operator, but only those with sufficient delegation get to enter the active set (for example, only the top 125 validator candidates with the most delegation get to be validators in the Cosmos Hub)

As (i) parabolically growing global debt necessitates accelerating debasement of even the most stable fiat currencies, (ii) price inflation across both essentials and durable assets marches higher, and (iii) more governments and banks around the world move to seize deposits and censor payments, the value of the properties above will become abundantly clear to billions (in most cases this will be an instinctive realization rather than an academic one).
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But while the benefits of the internet’s early incarnations were more abstract, bitcoin comes with a powerful adoption incentive baked in: the opportunity for rapid and unmatched accrual of purchasing power over time (or more colloquially, “Number Go Up”). Early adopters will reap outsized and compounding rewards from this trend (i.e. a greater share of finite available bitcoin) at the expense of laggards, incentivizing a self-perpetuating rush to move first

Avalanche consensus stands out for its permissionless nature, meaning it doesn’t impose a strict limit on the number of validators, unlike other layer-1 solutions like Cosmos or BSC, which limit their active validators to 125 and 21, respectively

Pixels grew from 5K to 730 K DAU when migrating from Polygone to Ronin. MAU currently sits at a whipping 1.3 M. Is Pixels the largest onchain application in all of crypto right now? Game developers need users and Pixels proves that Ronin is the only chain that can offer this.

The general purpose public blockchains out there might best be understood as platforms for rule-breaking apps. (For if there are no rules being broken it becomes tempting to ask why a decentralized architecture is the best tool for the job.) If I were an investor I’d be asking any apps (or dApps) on top of these platforms the question “what rules are you breaking?”.

Under BIT001, each Subnet has its own token that can be converted into the main Bittensor token TAO. Also, each subnet has its own issuance (1 token per block, half to the TAO/Subnet token pool and half to miners/validators) schedule and Uniswap style LP pool for conversions between TAO and subnet token

Out of 1997 validators 1818 received delegations from the foundation & Alameda.
In total they have delegated 106M SOL, 73M from the foundation and 33M from Alameda.

Safety: blockchains are designed to be reliable and secure with minimal trust assumptions, in adversarial environments, where a lot of value is at stake. Agents interacting via smart contract applications inherit these strong properties

The world’s 1st on-chain AI project, “The Rockefeller Bot”
The world’s 1st on-chain AI game, “Leela vs the World”
And the world’s 1st on-chain AI artist, “zkMon”

I do not view @bittensor_ as a cryptocurrency project
I see $TAO as AI and Machine Learning infrastructure, utilising #crypto for incentivization

For instance, Ripple, which recently pledged $100 million to “ramp up” global carbon markets, was one of the blockchain networks used in the World Bank’s research on the Interledger protocol, research which the World Bank referred to as “very promising.” Ripple’s remittance product was previously endorsed by the World Bank and Ripple co-founder, Chris Larsen, was previously an advisor to the IMF on blockchain technologies.

Memecoins are crypto native social fi — Imran Khan

Another aspect is that liquidity can hide the ball. Shitcoins (and nfts) use low liquidity to meme that your bag is more valuable than it is. If for example a tiny bit of some shitcoin trades at some high price, that doesn’t mean the sum of everyone’s bag is worth that much, yet most are inclined to believe it. This is a kind of arbitrage on perception vs reality that these assets exploit

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

While the experiment is still underway, Akash provided 24,000 NVIDIA A100 (80GB) hours to Thumper to code and train the model, and we’ll be publishing the model and code to Hugging Face soon. The result will be an image-generation AI model that can be used without the risk of copyright infringement, and will round out Akash’s capabilities to support the three most popular AI tasks: training, fine-tuning, and inferencing.

* The total time for generating the proving key was 327,916 seconds — over 91 hours when run on a single machine with 128 core CPUs and 1TB RAM
* These 144 proving keys occupied a disk space over 10TB
* The total proving time of the 144 sub-blocks was 322,774 seconds — just shy of 90 hours (when run on the same single machine)
And we did it! 200+ hours later, on a 128-core CPU and 1TB RAM machine, we completed the world’s 1st full ZK proving of the inference pass of a billion+ parameter LLM!

we will see much more homogeneity at L2, with the ultimate end game being that many L2s either become tightly coupled to each other (eg the superchain) and/or to L1 (via based sequencing and native zk prover support in the L1).

Chopping Block on decentralized AI:
Scale AI less about data lake / RLHF, more about fine tuning and running infra now
Two main categories: Decentralized inference and GPU marketplaces
Most don’t believe latter is competitive v centralized
Haseeb: Crypto excels where there’s a lot of censorship
Tarun: Even OpenAI fine tuning has lots of rules and restrictions
Seems they’re more skeptical about infra and more interested in app side finding real use cases and metrics, need more decentralized AI apps
“Ratio of infrastructure to application is absurd”

Has the ETH ETF launched and Larry Fink and his cabal of satanists piled into the deflationary asset? no Have we seen NFT mania yet? no
If you’re thinking of taking profits already you just might in fact be one of the weakest pathetic people I have ever known to ever exist

Memecoins are prediction market perpetuals eg $TRUMP, $DOGE

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

The driving force behind ongoing experimentation at the intersection of crypto and AI is the same that drives much of crypto’s most promising use cases – access to a permissionless and trustless coordination layer that better facilitates the transfer of value

Akash has long provided a marketplace for CPUs, for example, offering similar services as centralized alternatives at 70-80% discount. Lower prices, however, have not resulted in significant uptake. Active leases on the network have flattened out, averaging only 33% compute,16% of memory, and 13% of storage for the second of 2023. While these are impressive metrics for on-chain adoption (for reference, leading storage provider Filecoin had 12.6% storage utilization in Q3 2023), it demonstrates that supply continues to outpace demand for these products

Bitcoin, to me, essentially looks like the open-source code equivalent to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The way it functions, as I said yesterday, essentially makes it a freedom-money virus

Assuming fees from all Uniswap pairs are distributed to stakers and assuming that Uniswap does its highest-ever monthly volume (last achieved in 2021) and it maintains that level of volume for an entire year, stakers could then expect a payout of 5.3%.

“Memecoin” = “sell everything without having a product”

even when eschewing the eye-watering gains that early BTC investors earned between 2011 and 2015, note that February 2024’s percentage gain is “only” the fifth largest percentage gain since 2017 and the second largest percentage gain this halving cycle, with December 2020 having experienced a 47% gain

If you go look at social risk you will see it went parabolic *AFTER* BTC hit new highs
So perhaps the answer to retail coming back is dependent on *IF* #BTC hits new highs.

If we’ve learned anything from the past 8 years in digital assets, giving your users a chance to invest in the early stages of a project’s growth (via tokens) builds sticky customers, power users, and evangelists for life. We often say that tokens are the greatest capital formation tool in history by aligning customers and shareholders in a way never seen before

March TV and movies: Physical 100 S2, Shogun S1, Heavenly Delusion, Tokyo Vice S1

Great media month, not in quantity but quality.

Starting with the best:

Physical 100 S2 — 9/10 — ahhh just so motivating and getting dat pump. Have only finished 3 episodes. The strength of contestants, the production value, the sheer testosterone spectacle of it — all in a Korean cultural wrapper. Only complaint would be their penchant for ending episodes on obvious cliffhangers (to increase next-episode ctr, ugh), and tendency to focus screen time on a few favorites instead of giving interesting underdogs their due. Also I wonder why Beom Seok was allowed back for S2 but other S1 contestants were not? Seems to be a huge advantage, as he’s familiar with the contest format and has had a year to stew and prep after his early exit…

Shogun S1 — 8/10 — Hiroyuki Sanada is just *samurai’s kiss*. Tbf, I kinda hated him in Tom Cruise’s Last Samurai, and it was only years later after watching his other films (47 Ronin, John Wick, Army of the Dead) that I began to realize it was the quality of his ACTING (as the sneering antagonist to Tom Cruise’s hero arc) that I disliked so much. As they say, Hate is not the opposite of love, but apathy. Shogun is royal drama, political intrigue, samurai battles, religious intrigue, cannons & ships, brothel-ing (or as the show would say, pillowing in the willow world), what’s not to like?!

Heavenly Delusion — 7/10 — there was a traumatic scene near the end of season 1 that I was utterly unprepared for. Like, tried to forget the scene but couldn’t. Until that moment, the show was a fun, sometimes shockingly violent but mostly silly and creative romp through post-apocalyptic anime Japan, a tale of adolescent-hood and adventure and survival. But yeah, beware if you’re watching for E12/13…

Tokyo Vice — 6/10 — watched half of season 1. Though Ansel Elgort is always his ethereal floaty tall stick figure self, and Ken Watanabe is Samurai Dad (also Last Samurai!), the plot struck me as over contrived and dramatized. I had read Adelstein’s original memoir too many years ago, so the story specifics elude me, but I remember it as much grittier and more journalistic. But this is the Hollywood way, I suppose. Also a bit tired of the gaijin glorification theme, which is also common in Shogun, but that’s pretty much the default when it comes to Japan+US media

Previous months:

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:

Your relationship with time (from Auren Hoffman)

Really thought provoking piece from Auren (his podcast is great too):

https://auren.substack.com/p/seconds-to-strategy-how-your-relationship

To quote:

There are five types of time:
1. Micro Time (sub-second)
2. Engagement Time (Seconds)
3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)
4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)
5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)

If forced to choose, I’m probably a 3. Leaning towards 4.

I also wonder how correlated this is with age and context. For example in university, I was definitely more 2, and during my Wall Street internship I was very 1 and 2.

And:

If you are one of those people that has a great “gut”, you likely should be in a career where quick-time decisions rule. The more you trust your gut, the more you should choose a profession where you are making decisions quickly.

And:

The longer the timescale you are optimizing for, the more you should spend reading (and gathering information). The shorter your timescale, the more you should spend doing (for muscle memory).

Definitely going in the bible.