People and ideas:

• Satoshi Nakamoto.
• Richard K Bernstein.
• Jiri Lev.
• Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged.
• patrickcollison.com/fast
• Elon Musk – for determination. Biography.
• A Master Class in Jazz Performance. The Taste Gap
• The Century of the Self. The Path Matters.
• Steve Jobs – art, obsession.
• Self-reliance – Ralph essay.
• Naval – for his mental models on modern capitalism.
• Singapore’s LKW.
• Sam Altman – one of few deep thinkers. blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful ia.samaltman.com
• Peter Thiel – for his capital mental models. Zero to One.
• Richard Stallman / Linux. He protected against enshittification of technology before it even began.
• George Hotz – for enlightening me to economics and AI.
• Richard Feynmann. The Myth of The Objective.
• Paul Graham - essays.
• Ray Dalio – for explaining economics.
• Taleb – for explaining economics.
• Elad Gil - for thinking deeply about startups.
• Federico Carrone - highest integrity, intelligence person I know. Someone I really admire.
• Bryan Johnson – Don’t Die.
• Figma founder. Gwern.
• Sapiens
• Can a biologist fix a radio?

Perspective shifts.

• Hip-hop was invented only 50 years ago. Majority of modern music genres are 50 years old.
• Energy is the key metric for society.
• “Productivity” – how many hours of work do we have to do to have 1hr of light in 2025, vs. in 1800? If light is practically free, what do we consider now expensive?
• Capitalism and wealth is 100 years old. Earning from investing is incredible technology.
• Naval: media and software. Zero cost replicability. Leverage.
• Few people think. Most efficient thought = least energy expenditure = the midcurve take. Use this to market.
• Talk is cheap. Make bets. Skin in the game measures uncertainty.
• The scientific method was an algorithm invented to discover truth.
• Bitcoin will outlast a nation state of 250 years. The oldest computer program – bc – is from 1973. It’s still installed on my Mac.
• AI is prediction is compression. A good AI model is a good video codec.
• The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism
• We are getting worse at building houses. In AU, construction productivity is -53% down from 30yrs ago. Accounting for increases in quality, it's still down -12%. This is common across the developed world. Why?
• Australian public government is actually extremely effective at implementing programs.

Predicting the future:

• Real-time photorealistic AI-generated television shows in 2030. "TV show writer" becomes an internet job.
• Humanoid robotics, teleoperated over the internet, kebab store workers getting paid $15 USD, working from Africa. Unexpected consumer-facing globalization.
• Reverse engineering of DNA. Biological fuel cells. Building 100x faster trees.
• You can speak to anyone from any culture, universal AI translation.
• Real scarcity – land, gold, bitcoin.
• Private encrypted finance on blockchains (MPC, FHE).
• Realtime 1KB recursive ZK proofs.
• The entire world replicated inside Unity-like game engines. Simulation is cheaper.
• Internet speeds will be 10–100× faster. Cost of a blockchain will fall to 0. Instantly share 1GB blocks.
• Continued slow start linear increase in AI capability (since ImageNet 2010).
• Prisoner’s dilemma solution between encrypted AI’s running on MPC.
• Public intelligence. Nous DisTrO.

More futures:

• Reimagining of democracy for the realtime, digital era.
• Growth in Ethereum, L2's, Solana.
• Stablecoins.
• Bitcoin to $1M, displacing gold, governments racing to buy.
• Population, birthrates, labour: China, India, Africa.
• Crypto collateralised USD (Ethena, NakaDollar) - 1 NUSD = $0.5 of Bitcoin + Short $0.5 Bitcoin
• KYC'd internet due to AI deepfaking - Worldcoin
• Climate change and weather volatility increase.
• Realtime multimodal AI models: content (realtime boiler room sets set to current events, infinite TV/content).
• 3D printing? Mixed reality?
• Civilisation on Mars.
• Weather modification (Dubai), terraforming (à la the Dutch), desert regreening.
• New cities/states - network states, private states, special economic zones.
• All real world assets (stocks, real estate) on public blockchains.
• Quantum computing/networks. quantumpunks is my favourite community here.
• Cheaper, widespread renewable energy (solar, nuclear) - how much cheaper / more supply?
• Worldwide internet connectivity (Starlink) - remote work?
• Self-driving cars, taxis, trucks (Tesla, Waymo).
• Drones - cheaper logistics, surveying?
• Prediction markets (Polymarket), skin in the game as norm. What new things will markets compute? (see: attention/memecoins for more)
• Science and AI - how much progress is here?
• AI - when/will progress plateau?
• Supersonic travel.

Trends to reverse:

• Software enshittification
• Tiktokification / short-form media
• Global housing markets, houses now 9x annual income, 30yr real productivity dip
• Birthrate crisis
• Food de-nutritioning (see magnesium, more)

Old ideas I keep forgetting

• Bezos - people pitch what is going to be completely different in 10yrs, but what [needs] will still be the same? Equally valuable
• Nintendo strategy - "don't use cutting-edge tech for its own sake; look for what’s fun in any technology and focus on that"
• Opportunity mindset. “the world is malleable, the world is naturally imperfect, the cracks are your opportunities”. You can just email people.
• Everything is effortful. Nothing exists abstractly. Efficient markets = participants exerting energy. Rules require people to enforce them. There are gaps.
• Focus on data. Scientific mindset. Elon's algo - make it work, make it simple, make it efficient.
• Do 100 things. Jensen Huang - the goal is to keep playing. Take risks so you can keep competing and learning.
• "What makes a note good or bad isnt the note but the one you play after it" - Miles Davis
• Fear. The mind confabulates reasons [not] to do things (see: Gazzinga's split-brain experiments). What's the worst that can happen? Risk is overblown
• Optimistic, ambitious, good communities of people exist (SF).

Things I still want to understand:

• If the money supply increases 20%, how much do groceries increase in price?
  
  Governments create bonds, bought by banks who repay interest, private sector invests money to earn return at least of that interest rate, thus they take on risk. Banks lend to businesses, who provide these returns. Cheap credit increases demand which thus increases prices (supply-demand). This increases labour/materials costs.
  
  Grocery costs <- Logistics <- Farmers <- Equipment, Energy providers <- Energy producers <- Miners
  
  The supply chain for groceries is long - each economic player rationally increases their prices according to the path this new money / credit takes, until it ends at the consumer. Modelling it perfectly is impossible, due to proprietary price information. But we can observe prices publicly grow (groceries).

Source code archives (the birth of new software ideas):

• BitTorrent
• Bitcoin
• JavaScript (Mocha)
• PostScript
• Linux
• WorldWideWeb (first web browser by Tim Berners-Lee)