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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 3h \ parent \ on: People tend to think the world was best when they were young charts_and_numbers
The human tragedy in a single SN comment.
I love that you brought this up. It should be wrestled with continuously, imo.
My best guess is that "use" is overwhelmingly speculation / SoV, to such an extent that on-chain transactions aren't even happening -- having IBIT take care of it for you while it sits in your Schwab account is the full use case manifesting. It is the actual state of what is globally demanded for the time being, and every other story is self-soothing and hopium. The Alex Gladstein talking points about how thirty to fourty women in the Middle East use btc to route around their abusive husbands is nice (truly) but irrelevant. Perhaps a provocative picture of what could be possible in thirty years, but it has nothing whatever to do with why btc is at $100k.
It's fascinating that all of this is built on a credible possibility of transacting in the way we're all familiar with from the Standard Bitcoin Narrative -- btc really is technically sound, decentralized, capable -- but the fact that it's possible seems to be enough, nobody has to be actually doing any transacting. The threat of transaction is sufficient for finance bros to ape in and for Saylor's rousing speeches to have their intended effect.
It's worth asking how long this can go on for without the whole thing collapsing. I think about that all the time.
This was fascinating -- was just talking about this topic (of when different aspects of life seemed to have been at their best) w/ someone. The implications are significant -- if you think that everything sucks, and the world is so much worse than it used to be, and you then discover that everyone thinks that in predictable ways, it should give you pause.
It's certainly giving me pause.
I take the opposite view. This is no enduring moat. When the labs want this market they will take it. I'm assuming this will come in the form of acquisitions, so a couple of these companies may do okay (OpenAI was on the cusp w/ Windsurf); but they may decide to bypass them entirely, as per Claude Code / Codex.
Seems like they're terrified of the creeping darkness of frontier-lab monetization taking their entire market. I would certainly be afraid of that if I were them.
No real idea. I'm v serious about trying to pay attention to what moves me, though, and move toward the smell of apple pie.
It's strange how so many fields have that kind of signature, where the handful of elites in that field are just so absolutely tailored to the ecology.
In my experience, they're usually driven and conscientious (e.g., they have their shit together to remarkable degree) but they almost are never the smartest, most creative and interesting. Maybe this is a property of all exploiters, in any niche? Being an absolute master at speedrunning the level tells you much less than it seems; yet they are the face of "winning" and set the standard for what people think of when they think about success.
Anyway, the level of academia you've found strikes me as pretty great. Gives me something to shoot for.
Thanks for the kind words.
the time flies by while I play at learning things that I do not have an aptitude for
What are the successful strategies for this kind of play? Any tips? I'm already feeling the tug that I need some bigger purpose, and (perhaps most acutely) a community to go along with it.
Which is dangerous, when you try to satisfy those instincts through the mechanism of "work". I think a lot of what we talk about when we talk about work is a masquerade for these deeper things; it's just there's no culturally-compatible concept to draw from. "Work" is the closest approximation that people can compute.
I'm wrestling with a similar topic -- how to summon the right vibes again, how to curate them. The obvious answer is that they change just like every other thing, and particular vibes have their season. I'm wondering if there's a less obvious and more optimistic answer, though.
I was a little worried that post would come across as more impressive than it was.
If you find any big company (and some even not so big) there will be some hotshot execs / CEO who put on a similar show; and they are, by definition, at the center of a bunch of money and influence, which means you'd be surprised at who they know and who they're talking to. They will in turn surround themselves with special-purpose tools they can call on, the way you might call a plumber. I was a plumber, that's all. Not trying to be mysterious, but don't want to dox myself worse.
Not sure what's next. Trying to be less stupid than in the past and see what unfolds from paying attention and trying stuff.
Funny, I had run into the tweet you linked back in the day and wrote down a note: "if they can train you, they can train someone else." It seemed extremely wise and was exactly what I was observing at the time: people who did big things carved it out of the universe; there was no playbook, nothing that scaled, just finding a niche and learning how to occupy it, and what ensued seemed less like work than an expression of who and what they were.
That seems about as good as it gets: be whatever you are, and have the universe bend around you in a way that you like. Although I suppose there is some tailoring of what you are to what the universe will reward. Few people can ignore that half of the feedback loop.