notShabu

IMO "artificial" intelligence is natural intelligence. Both human brains and silicon brains are formed from stars and are "the universe's way of understanding itself."

AI maps closely to myths of all-knowing all-powerful "Dragons", aspects of nature that destroy and create without regard to human plans. Living with AI will likely be similar to living on a volcano island.

Since human domination over nature has only ever increased, a reversal where humans are subservient to a higher capricious force feels threatening.

The funny thing is... living under the dominion of a "higher force" that creates and destroys yet always does what is "right" b/c it is the Source of Everything (even if it feels unfair and tragic) is what religion deals with.

Photography and similar hobbies tends to have a "quality bottleneck"

A full frame camera needs more expensive bigger lenses which needs a higher quality tripod, larger and faster memory cards, more powerful computer for the editing, etc...

Improving one thing requires improving everything since the final output is limited by a "bottleneck"

The Diderot Effect seems to point out a similar "identity" bottleneck where a higher quality(status) identity is bottlenecked by the lowest quality frustration.

I think the concept of juice is great, though sometimes less-is-more. If a fruit is too juicy, it's like eating slime or biting a smoothie.

The "burstiness" of juice should contrast with the boringness of everything else. A delete button for e.g. is a very sterile interaction vs the mario coin so probably doesn't need maximum juice.

A good if overly simplistic model of inflation & recession etc... is building a rocket in the game Factorio

The rocket isn't necessarily intrinsically useful for everyone but is important because it is the thing that pulls forward all the demand for the all the commodities and all the intermediate production.

Without the rocket there would be no factories, no jobs, no meaning. The factory MUST run to keep everyone's livelihoods going even though the rocket isn't relevant day to day. It also incentivizes things like innovation, efficiency, etc...

However, building TWO rockets at the same time puts such a resource demand that there start to be shortages and breakdowns. Parts of the factory start shutting down. People are left jobless. One of the most serious is if the factory breakdown cascades to the power system (e.g. money) which causes the entire factory to breakdown.

It's a tough job to figure out how to restart the factory incrementally. Meanwhile everyone is left jobless while this is being debugged.

So there's a balance between how many rockets have to be simultaneously built. If there's too little demand, the factories are idle. Capital rots and there are less jobs. If there's too much demand, then shortages and price spikes will cause an even more serious breakdown.

What gold/bitcoin/austrian philosophers understand is that the price of money HAS to reflect market reality. E.g. in a Factorio game all bottlenecks are important to production but if you mess up the energy bottleneck, then the whole thing breaks down. Having a hack like "manually move a few tons a coal every hour" and forgetting it once is catastrophic. The market conditions have been manipulated with buffer.

The Fed & other central banks are usually concerned primarily with the layers of production that affect the most people. E.g. food and gas are critical. However when the "power supply" is threatened they need to start doing things like bailing out banks even if it seems insane to be focusing on this when people can't afford food.

There is a counter-argument (which I don't necessarily agree with, but is interesting to note) where the ability to accumulate assets that keep pace with inflation is the only thing that motivate extra work.

e.g. the ability to accumulate "Tokens of Power" (vs the equivalent of arcade game tokens for commodities) is what motivates the Steve Jobs and Elon Musks to do their universe denting.

This is quite different than say tribal societies where extra resources do not maintain their value across time. An abundance of meat and other resources can only be transmuted into common cultural power via Feasts and Festivals.

Metaphorically, "gold" creates "dragons" because it allows immortal hoarding. Dragons are the only thing with influenceable agency that can reshape "nature". Controlling dragons allows this dominance (for better or for worse) at the cost of dragon externalities (burned towns, randomly devoured livestock)

You know the "you pass butter" scene from Rick & Morty?

I'm imagining humans being told "you complete thought sentences"

The reason the bank is worth nothing is because it's all liabilities (responsibility to provide customer deposits) and no profit.

However it's similar to when people fight over the most important projects and tickets in a company. They fight over something with "negative" value (more work, risky initiatives) because it increases how "critical" or important they are to the company which can be leveraged into far more value later on.

This feels like burning reputation to increase awareness

There is a lot of interesting philosophy around Bitcoin as a solution to the existing economic system but increasing total volume of awareness doesn't make sense if reduces the signal:noise ratio.

Especially as the "noise" is exactly the type of gambling speculation that this bet is representative of.

The most interesting part of this is that ChatGPT can create content with more "whimsy" and "humanity" than many tech leaders.

IMO The purpose of such announcements is to maintain the leadership (willing followership) role by reconnecting with followers with a hard-to-fake heart-to-heart. Without this, the warmth is gone. Followership becomes cold and is based primarily on health insurance, salary, visa, greencard, etc...

It's the only way to keep society working. Most of the money that exists today (over 90%) is actually bank IOUs kept in their database and is what people see when they log on into their accounts.

Without a fractional reserve system, the liquidity that drives all economic activity grinds to a halt as everyone fights over the few remaining real dollars rather than managing their deployed capital.

Banks basically act to multiply the amount of money in the world today by creating promises about the future that act as a bridge that moves money from the future into the present. That money then flows into restaurants, dog walkers, software engineers, etc... Inflation is kept in check b/c the promises force the money to be paid back to the bank via monthly loan repayments.

Banks that only hold short term reserves or cash equivalents like Brex don't act as this multiplier. Going forward it's likely small banks will move towards this model as only the big banks that are too big to fail (b/c they are necessary as multipliers) can afford to take on the risk of longer term investments or creating loans.

A good point is individuals could be better off if they could open an account at the Fed and have access to "real" dollars rather than the numbers that are just bank IOUs

Stablecoins are closer in this direction than banks but only if they actually maintain 1:1 reserves. One advantage is that b/c they are protocols there is less need to seek returns to make payroll, rent, and profit. Another is more transparency.

But also... at this point such a stablecoin is basically a CBDC...

Something to note is that a large amount of individuals have "intrusive thoughts" that are typically only associated with the mentally ill.

One example is the "call of the void", the "what if I jumped?" when looking from tall heights.

However there are also many other violent or sexual thoughts that are suppressed and also difficult to talk about socially. What defines the "mentally ill" then is how prominent this voice is and how often it leaks into the "physical" world.

These actions are usually controlled by threat of imprisonment/violence by the state, social punishment by the community, or controlled by being channeled into specific arenas and fantasies.(games/porns/sports/war/etc...)

Behaviors that leak out of these boundaries are "eccentric" when they don't seem to do any harm and immoral when they disrupt the boundaries themselves (hacker) or the structures within the boundaries.

Sometimes the boundaries are too restrictive like a straightjacket. They increase the internal pressure requiring stronger boundaries that increase the internal pressure until the whole thing explodes.

Sometimes the structures themselves need to be updated and modernized. E.g. women showing their face in public or wearing a bikini shouldn't topple all of society.

The pace of technology disrupts boundaries. This incentivizes and leads to more adaptable and resilient structures. The white-hat school prankster crosses into black-hat destruction territory only when others "can't keep up".

The point is that maybe there isn't a specific mental "illness" like a bug or a virus that acts as an antagonistic external entity. It's just behavior relative to societal boundaries and outlets (which vary greatly across culture and time).

Even a very black/white "illness" like schizophrenia seemingly used to have an social role as shaman-oracle but w/o this outlet can only express itself as axe murderer

I think this is really good intuition on what the Fed effectively does. When it's really easy to teleport money from the future, all that money competes in the present for a limited supply of good. This causes inflation and reduces margins and can cause profitable endeavors to become non-profitable "hobbies."*

Increased interest rates suck up this money because now there is something better to do with that money. Why "Do Stuff" when the returns on doing stuff is less than the ultra high savings yield you are now being offered.

It's virtuous when the stuff being done actually is destructive due to easy access to capital (e.g. 100 Ramen shops driving each other into further and further debt) but it's also a ham-fisted solution. It disrupts long term planning, even relatively conservative ones like "buy government bonds", and also just punts the problem b/c it's reducing demand by... promising more money in the future.

One of the differences between a central bank and regular bank is that the regular banks should do the riskier stuff and offer the higher interest rates.

This in theory creates a diverse non-correlated system of capital deployment with the best projects winning over the bad ones.

However when the central bank offers interest rates that a private bank cannot match even when it's deploying into safe and endorsed assets like MBS then some weird stuff happens...

The Fed can promise risk-free returns at whatever rate they want but once it exceeds the private banks', then the banks no longer serve any purpose. If there were a way for individuals to hold accounts directly w/ the Fed, they'd all do that. Money will be sucked away from banks that deploy capital in the private sector and squeeze into ones that just passthrough to the Fed's like money market funds.

With high enough interest rates, the Fed can end up sucking up liquidity even from good and safe projects and cause widespread asset collapse b/c the entities that are supposed to be doing price discovery can't compete anymore.

From reading the comments it's interesting how the failure seems to have occurred.

Not crypto hype, not bad loans, but long term bonds... It's sounds very conservative and responsible.

IMO decentralization should never be a key selling "feature" that users should experience.

Similar to the philosophy behind the "right to bear arms" it's best as a self-imposed framework of checks and balance on the centralized system. The majority of people are better off in a centralized system.

Decentralization is the solution to the "who will guard the guards" problem of power & corruption. I don't currently have a desire to become a gun-prepper-hoarder but living in a country where this is a potential-possibility model of life gives a sense of freedom even as I overly-specialize in typing alphanumeric letters in a specific format and rely on the System to transmute this effort into tokens-of-worth to trade for things like toilet paper and housing rights.

Where Meta and other companies fail here is that they're trying to ride the hype w/o understanding that it's not a feature in of itself but a "meta"-feature to allow for better features.

Decentralization forces the leader to actually lead through leadership qualities. Not through owning 51% of voting rights, not through golden handcuffs, not through implicit H1B or EB1-C visa and greencard threats.

The failure mode for decentralization is when it enforces a meritocracy that no one single human is capable of living up to. The leaders are ceremonial or non-existent.

The desire for decentralized technologies is a frustration with how fallible and incompetent the current set of leaders feel and a desire to shorten or outright eliminate the complexity of the brittle chain of value transformations necessary to maintain a living.

It's a desire to ascend technology into a force of nature like the sun or the wind. This goes against every company's reason-for-being because nature is free while a company is a system that harvests nature and makes a profit by selling customers concentrated forms of it.

It also needs to be compared with the known negative effects of foods saturated in high fructose corn syrup.

I think it's becoming more popular in foods lately b/c of its relative lack of aftertaste but it does cause gastric distress in larger amounts and a healthy gut biome is linked to a bunch of other benefits.

There should always be concern for long term black swan style effects esp for the new hotness but by definition these unknown unknowns can never be fully eliminated.

Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.

Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality (similar to colors not existing in reality).

Having access to a extra mirrors at first creates a sense of control. You know your mom and dad won't give you a "non-distorted" reflection so the reflection from strangers is worth more. Colleagues or friends saying "you're smart!" means a lot more from them.

When each mirror is carefully placed, the "whole" of we we are and would like to be can be understood more deeply just like 7 blind men working together understand the elephant more deeply.

However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life, then the identity becomes overwhelmed by expectation. Just like super high resolution makes your pores look larger, the mirror array makes every aspect of your life feel like shit even if from a rational analysis "extra information should never be a danger"

A GPT blurb about what goes into a zero energy ready home:

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There are several core technologies and products that go into creating a Zero Energy Ready Home. These include:

Advanced insulation materials: These materials are used to reduce heat loss and gain through walls, roofs, and floors. Examples of advanced insulation materials include spray foam insulation, rigid foam insulation, and blown-in cellulose insulation.

High-performance windows: These windows are designed to minimize heat loss and gain and to improve comfort and natural lighting. They typically have low-e coatings, multiple panes, and insulated frames.

Efficient heating, cooling, and ventilation systems: These systems use advanced technologies to reduce energy consumption and provide a comfortable indoor environment. Examples include geothermal heat pumps, air-source heat pumps, and energy recovery ventilation systems.

Solar panels: These panels are used to generate renewable energy and can be installed on the roof or integrated into the building envelope. They can provide enough energy to power the home and even send excess energy back to the grid.

Energy-efficient appliances and lighting: These products use less energy than conventional models and can help further reduce energy consumption in the home.

Building automation systems: These systems allow homeowners to control and monitor energy use and other home systems remotely, which can help optimize energy efficiency and comfort.

Producers of these products include a variety of companies, from large multinational corporations to smaller regional manufacturers. Some examples of companies that produce products for Zero Energy Ready Homes include Owens Corning and Johns Manville for insulation, Andersen and Marvin for windows, Carrier and Lennox for HVAC systems, SunPower and Tesla for solar panels, and Nest and Ecobee for smart thermostats. There are many other companies and products available, and choosing the right ones depends on factors such as climate, building design, and budget.

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From what I understand the lithium bottleneck seems similar to the lumber bottleneck in 2021. It's not the lack of trees but the lack of processing facilities.

But instead of lack of workers or technical know-how it's the pollution produced.

It's like choosing between a pro photographer who only has a phone vs a beginner who has the latest full frame DSLR.

The technology is important, but it's impotent without foundational understanding.

"Just be myself and don't do what I wouldn't do" "But if I did that wouldn't that be being myself?" "So to be myself I need to not be myself"

Many economic systems around the world rely on various kinds of "demand sponges" to soak up excess spending. This keeps inflation in check b/c excess spending can be directed towards a "Better Future" nest egg as the Future has theoretically infinite storage capacity.

In the U.S. the SPY and real estate soak up most of this excess spending. In poorer countries, physical U.S. dollars. In China, real estate is the primary sink. In certain subcultures, GME/AMC/DOGE.

One of the philosophical ideals of "hard money" is that there should be a way of transporting spending power into the future without loss that is primarily useless. The issue with using real estate and the stock market to transport wealth is that they have real use cases. People need to live in houses, stock prices need to be rooted in fundamentals otherwise everything is built on pillars of sand, etc...

Gold and art are the most traditional ways of transporting wealth across time while bitcoin is one that is very techno but also very volatile. However, even for the very wealthy, a diversified stock portfolio is likely still the most pragmatic.

Most normal people rely on real estate (to a fault, e.g. w/ 2008) b/c investing in the stock market has operational risk & psychological risk ("investors" end up gamblers). The FIRE movement tries to get around this via SPY dollar cost averaging but the end result is using the SPY as a hopefully-too-big-to-fail pension plan replacement.

Through this lens, "just increase the supply of housing" is naive because it fails to account for the existing web of incentives. It's the engineering equivalent of re-routing entire rivers of cashflow. China's supply of ghost cities for e.g hasn't helped with housing b/c it's only certain locations where the traits of being a massive demand sponge are satisfied.

Governments need to prop up the asset prices of these stores of value b/c so much is already invested in them. They need to prevent a "bank run" on these de-facto inflation-adjusted savings.

Gold and bitcoin "solve" this problem because the withdrawals are theoretically distributed across infinite time as they are immortal systems. However most people do not think like vampires & instead want to solve problems like "how do we buy a house in a good neighborhood before we are past child-bearing age?" The assets become a carrier to play high volatility (but low expected return) games that are perceived as the only way to "win" (rational application of hail mary strategies)

To summarize, real estate price appreciation is due to it absorbing the "inflation" that would otherwise be distributed across other assets and commodities. This river of inflow has a lot of cultural momentum and pragmatism behind it. (the demand is real) Redirecting this river requires an alternative sink of money that 1. Has enough volume and low barrier to entry to constantly absorb this flow. 2. Has non-homogenous motivations for entering/exiting to prevent bank runs 3. Preserves spending power across both short, medium, and long time horizons.

Like the CAP theorem, it's unlikely one asset can satisfy everything b/c it's market value would be infinite. However it's interesting to think about the housing problem through the lens of demand sponges and all the layers of historical solutions and new solutions towards incentivizing/manipulating demand.

IMO interviews are designed solely to maximize team size. This requires filtering for individuals for fit well into a hierarchy without disrupting the structures above and below them.

Being "good at the job" is actually bad because it reduces the team's required size.

Almost all the incentives revolve around this. Not only compensation, but entire hierarchies that revolve around EB1C dangling. (managers and executives at multinationals can get a green card faster)

"How to Produce Code" on a spectrum of efficiency -> abstraction

Binary Assembly ... ... C++ ... ... Python ... ... Product Manager speaking with words: "Can you make it have more pizazz?

A lone developer within a strong engineering org probably creates better code b/c they'd would need to have the street cred to solo a project.

The opposite would happen in orgs where one person who happens to be the most technical has the responsibility for all the development

Adding more people decreases the variance. The end result is usually a bland standard which some people may like b/c it hooks into existing mastery.

IMO technology overall increases the ambient "responsibility" pressure for everyone, including children.

This artificially ages everyone so now younger and younger people have to learn to cross reference research papers, manage tribal alliances, make bayesian inferences, deal with existential depression, navigate social hierarchies, etc...

Generative AI furthers this trend. Now individuals cannot simply BE in a reality but have to be responsible for constantly managing and curating their own realities while having a rough idea of how others are managing their own realities to work together, have relationships, etc...

I feel this is the root cause of people feeling overwhelmed. It's the responsibility of being constantly alert and ready to enforce boundaries. Like a soldier at war, fighting for the peace of a stable shared reality.

A major cost of technology is responsibility. E.g Facebook's cost w/ moderators, Google's cost w/ customer support for user's life data, etc...

Companies are more profitable whenever they can shift that responsibility to the end user or society-as-a-whole.

Technology empowers the individual at the cost of increased personal burden. Often it's not possible to opt-out either for economic of social reasons so responsibility requirements keep increasing

This isn't necessarily good... There's a point where the pressure becomes toxic especially to the life force of children, the young, and aspects associated with the young like carefree spirited living, open-mindedness, lack of existential-crisis', etc...

Everyone becomes "older" and more plastic and robotic, concerned with things like social status, making money, number optimization, etc... (scenes from The Little Prince) and have to deal with things like existential crisis' and depression at a younger age.

An explosion of AI tools is likely going to accelerate this trend...

Same, even though a lot of syntax is theoretically unnecessary, they chunk the code into patterns that help navigate the complexity.

Otherwise it's like improving the efficiency of a closet by ripping out the shelves, drawers, dividers, coat hangers, etc... so that it's just one big volume-maximized empty room.

It's pretty useful as a lookup, but these tools are similar to a knife that auto-magically orients itself to help with cutting.

Some tools should be as dumb as possible so that act as extensions of the user with zero tolerance.

Play and buffer between intent and action creates a long tail of potentially disastrous unknown edge cases and also interferes with the feedback loop that prevents mastery.

Memorizing git commands to get it just-so is usually a chore so this is pretty helpful. Still wouldn't trust it w/o double checking the output cmd though.