Super excited to see what applications we get to our RFP! Launching today:

@eigenrobot Obligatory note that Stephenson was talking about cryptocurrencies a decade before Nakamoto published.

@ciphergoth Finance billionaires (hedge fund titans etc) often have go-to employees for this stuff. That’s why e.g. Ray Dalio produces so much non-finance content.

@StefanFSchubert @trevposts Thomas Friedman references the wisdom of taxi drivers enough that it has become its own trope:

@exgenesis Didn’t know we were there already. Deets?

@otis_reid Good telling of that story:

@TaliaRinger Huh, interesting. If we somehow developed artificial neurons to replace the damaged brain tissue in a stroke patient (and managed to replicate the person's previous neurons exactly), do you think they'd have less subjective experience?

@liron @Noahpinion Some more realistic analogies: - You can't put a human in your fighter-jet drone, if you want it to be able to accelerate at >10 Gs. - In automated warehouses, when there's a human present all the robot forklifts have to run at like 1/5 their normal speeds.

@diviacaroline @liron @Noahpinion Yeah that's where Katja goes in her essay on ants, right?

@liron @Noahpinion Yeah but they can't, is the point. They're good at functioning in a certain context, and that context is not the modern human economy. A chimp employee would cause more headaches than would be worth his output, no matter how cheap his wages.

@liron @Noahpinion Classic response to this: why don't we hire chimpanzees to do some jobs? Comparative advantage would say that there should be *some* job where they can achieve the outcome cheaper than a human, even if a human is better at it.

@davidad @liron @BasedBeffJezos Awesome chart. Is there a writeup that goes with it, or any more detail on the analysis?

@moorehn Huh, I feel like Californians value (and have) autonomy a lot more than New Yorkers. When I lived in NYC I felt like the city had a sense of camaraderie and everyone felt justified to be in each other’s business. In CA it feels more atomized; living as individuals.

@abcampbell @PradyuPrasad @StevenGlinert Huh, are their sales growing faster than the industry as a whole?

@abcampbell @PradyuPrasad @StevenGlinert I guess it’s hard to square that with the idea that they’ve got some insurmountable moat and that the export controls lock out China. But I think the export controls narrative is more about access to the capital goods — ASML has a bigger moat than TSMC.

@abcampbell @PradyuPrasad @StevenGlinert Think about PE multiples — why isn’t a company just worth next year's profit? For one, because it could pay out that profit for many years. The only reason not to pay out the profit is if it can create even more value than that. For capital-intensive firms, that argument fails.

@GregHBurnham I asked a snow scientist friend, who asked a meteorologist friend, who said this: