Tag: Compute

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Finance Politics

Day 1799 and Thucydides Middle Income Local Maxima Traps

I have been catching up on Odd Lots which is the one podcast I listen to with any consistency. As all discussions about economics boil down to great power discussions as of late. The times they are indeed a-changing.

I noticed that both hosts brought up their collegiate studies of international relations across two back to back episodes. First on the Thanksgiving episode with Graham Allison of Thucydides trap fame.

I just caught up on it today and then the subsequent interview with Ray Dalio on his five forces episode. Joe and Tracy brought up international relations studies in both episodes as it does seem to be the current mood.

Dalio is always an enjoyable listen but I’m much more interested in Professor Allison as (to prove the joke Joe made) in the introduction that “a substantial portion of our listeners are really into ancient Greek history”

And indeed Joe is right. I’m a huge Thucydides fan, I went on a Peloponnesian War tour and am a regular visitor of the Balkans and its ancient Mediterranean and Roman history.

So naturally I have followed Allison’s work on rising power and its threat to established ones.

The US and China are in a “Thucydides Trap,” whereby the risk of war is heightened when an established power is threatened by a rapidly rising power. This is the framework that’s been popularized by Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. Professor Allison has been writing about China and the US-China relationship for decades

I guess all millennials grew up thinking we’d study these historical concepts in an eternal Pax Americana only to find the end of history wasn’t here to stay and we might fall into the trap. It’s just hard to imagine America feeling threatening to anyone at the moment.

As I listened to the episode, I happened to be walking through a neighborhood on the outskirts of a city that is keen to tear down some of its older homes to make way for new roads and denser apartment buildings. Much of those changes were clearly already in motion, as I saw cranes and construction crews.

The older homes looked multi-generational, but not in that wealthy polished way, so much as the middle income stalled economy compromise.

And yes you see it even in first world nations. In America and Europe, many conditions would benefit from more of a longhouse “in it together” approach. As elders stretch on in years and millennials go into middle age with few markers of adulthood. You’d think we’d want more of these style of homes.

I wondered if a city carving out the old construction through imminent domain tactics and buyouts, would make this outskirts neighborhood more vibrant. It would certainly bring in new buyers of condominiums. Consumption must go up.

I wondered about the families inside of the homes that looked more like multi home construction. Gates and other obstructions made it hard to tell, but the impression I got was more middle income local maxima family compound trap.

China rising, while the first world learns it may be more second world than it realized, makes me wonder if we’ve got it all wrong. More of the planet is in the middle income trap than the World Bank realized.

What if there is no Thucydides trap to fear as other powers sputter and stall. We long for an artificial intelligence boom to launch the globe into a high earning high efficiency world.

Sociologist Salvatore Babones and political scientist Hartmut Elsenhans call the middle-income trap a “political trap” as economic methods to overcome it exist. However, few countries use them because of their political situation. They trace the causes of the trap to the structural problems and the inequalities generated in the early development process.

According to them, the wealthy elites then follow their interests by bargaining for a strong currency which shifts the economy’s structure towards the consumption of luxury goods and low-wage labor laws, which prevents the rise of mass consumption and mass income.  Via Wikipedia

That sure sounds like a lot of the problems we see in America and Europe. All we are doing is getting gummed up in Baumol’s Cost Disease as we try to reinvent new ways of living that consume what remains of the old without the new going as fast as is needed.

But old multi-generational homes blocking the expansion of a city won’t get anyone to mass affluence. So it’s time to bulldoze old neighborhoods and make luxury boxes in the sky.

Not sure that ended well for China either. They popped their real estate bubble. And they wisely tamp their currency to export all their consumer goods. They might be stuck in a local maxima middle income trap too. Maybe Thucydides isn’t the framework here. Or maybe war is the only reset humanity knows.

I myself am hoping we choose to go to space instead but the South China Sea sits waiting. The only currency that matters in this strange moment is GPUs and that’s a different trap entirely.

Categories
Culture Politics Startups

Day 1796 and I’ve Got Billions in My Inbox Julie!

I’m not new to the boom and bust cycles that have defined not only technology startups, but American herself. Most millennials have opinions about their malign status in an economy designed to borrow from the future for a dubious present.

Much of the world is in a state of panic over “the churn” of the old rules changing and the new ones not being quite clear. But it’s really not clear what happens next.

I think anything goes as the networks speed up our connections to each other through artificial intelligence. The end of the age of scaling means it’s time for the era of deployment is it not? Or are none of us Carlotta Perez fans.

I enjoy speculating as is the fashion. Do I think corporate debt financing of data centers is some time bomb in private credit? Not really, no. I think it’s way more likely that don’t understand the full demand case for coordination in a mediated world.

I don’t know if we can meet the demand to be perfectly honest. I will say I am way more worried about us not meeting the moment. Changes to our cultural environment are as hard as our material ones.

If I had to read sentiment, I’d say that everyone is absolutely sick of having their attention used like a fiat currency. We cannot inflate our capacity for focus as easily as we can inflate the dollar. And we will demand simplicity by any means necessary just to exist. And artificial intelligence will smooth our world to manage with what we’ve got.

I think running a decentralized world will prove to be far too complex for most humans and it will be mitigated by layers of choices in governance that will probably not always maximize for the freedoms we’v come to expect from the liberal world order.

And yeah I think we will need a lot of data centers for that coordination effort. That the state might be the ones with the most demand seems a little rich though. Every individual on earth will want to be on the right side of the ratings. That’s more network state than state and it will be a longtime horizon.

I know it doesn’t sound great on its face. And yet I think it has had upsides. The demand for real businesses that operate in some world of efficiency has never been higher.

And to some extent, I believe that was always the entire point of computing. Make things so much better and cheaper we move on to bigger projects.

Giving you video games and porn might have been a weird way to get to Mars but medicine is as driven by vanity as much as survival so I don’t judge reality. I just want us to get more nuclear power. I don’t ask for much.

We didn’t want a legion of information processing professionals. We wanted to change the material conditions just as the Industrial Revolution did. The invisible hand is a strange thing.

I expect we will see quite a bit of opposition to the people believe that we need more energy, more industry, and more science. The future and its enemies are legions. I always did find it funny that fashion critics had a better read on the future than anyone else. Virginia Postrel and William Gibson both have good taste.

Categories
Community Startups

Day 1792 and Grateful for The Exceptions

This Thanksgiving I am feeling particularly grateful for the exceptions in my life. My world is filled with the exceptionally rare. Rare people, insights, businesses, and outcomes are part of building something genuinely new.

I suspect I’ll have to justify my faith in investing in and introducing new technologies to the world. We are doing a lot of looking back as the path forward looks so uncertain. And I continue to advocate for looking forward with optimism.

We have a lot to integrate and metabolize into human cultural life. We will be forced to address these changes as they change our institutions and expectations over the next few decades.

There is a lot to dislike about the technology industry at the moment. We’ve evolved far beyond “startups” being scrappy zero to one experiments in the proverbial garage. Startups turned into “Big Tech” and that concentration of influence and money has not always lived up to the high expectations we have for power.

We have had multiple cohorts of businesses as a mature industry. And indeed we’ve had multiple generations of people who spent their entire lives building a global ecosystem of technologies, along with the talent and capital to scale it. We may relentlessly start afresh but we cannot avoid acknowledging that we are a power base in our own right now.

Just in my lifetime, we’ve publicly codified our cultural mores, shared decades of knowledge on best practices on the open web and built institutions dedicated to helping people work across the multiple fields and disciplines that encompass “technology” as an industry. Or maybe I should simply call it an economy. It may even be the economy at this point.

Which is a problem. Our capital sorting mechanisms have seen our efficiencies and returns and pushed more resources, human and financial, towards us.

That has frustrated and starved the industrial base that provides us with the infrastructure to build. Let’s not even get started on what it has meant for food, education, entertainment and family.

I began more seriously investing in startups at the beginning of the pandemic. We maintain a small fund with low key LPs and our own family capital.

That is enabled by what we jokingly call the circle of life that is a liquidity event. When a startup sells many people become not just a little bit better off but sometimes twenty or even hundred times better off.

Those outlier events pay for all of the other things which don’t work as well. It’s a hits driven business. Hollywood would say “Thats show biz baby!” Oddly we don’t have a simple way of explaining the randomness of who or what becomes a winner.

Being excellent just isn’t enough. Startups that succeed are often exceptional in all areas and even then it still might not work. That bothers losers more than it does winners because the winners can comfort themselves with the money. But deep down even the winners know it could have easily gone another way.

So this Thanksgiving I am grateful for all the exceptional cases that have come into my life. To even see one is a rare thing. To be exposed to dozens of them is extremely unusual. To be invested in even positive outcome from the very start is beyond rare.

We’ve done so much to make startups more accessible to those with the mindset and discipline to succeed and still so many barriers remain. I see my work as the first check a founder takes as being a small part of the cycle of exceptionalism that builds success.

Just in the past two weeks we’ve had three companies raise large scaling rounds at markups that now place them soundly in the exceptional category. In two cases, I was their very first check, and in the third I was in their first pre-seed round. I qualify it only because I was not the first person to commit which I strive to be.

That is where I strive to be exceptional. I want to be the very first person that sees you for what you will be.

And I am deeply grateful to the founders that allowed me to be their first believer. It’s hard to be a founder. I’ve done it. To be an investor is much easier. You just have to have the balls, the brain and the bravery to say “yes” to something nearly impossible. That I can say yes is something for which I am most thankful.

Categories
Politics Startups

Day 1784 and Strange Trade Offs

It’s been a pretty fantastic few weeks for my investments. Decisions made years ago are now looking pretty smart. A bet I made two years ago announced a round and then proceeded to announce splitting the atom the next week.

Not to only focus on current belle of the ball in Valar especially as everyone in the portfolio seems to be finding their way. We are lucky that we focused on compute, energy, and decentralization as that is the trifecta of the artificial intelligence wave.

I honestly didn’t expect that we’d see such progress in our nuclear pick. With the regulatory climate it seemed more likely compute marketplaces and inference products would outpace the most regulated technology in the world.

Somehow during a Trump administration you get unexpected outcomes. I’ve been fighting for compute figuring the energy bottleneck wouldn’t get addressed till we had the full supply side of new AI products. It turns out everyone wanted to rush into capital expenditures and infrastructure as the demand was already there.

I guess I’ve proved my own thesis again. You can get a read on the direction and maybe even first order effects but in a chaotic world the second and third order effects are much harder to predict.

And on balance for all the bad I think on balance the atomic age finally arriving might be a worth while trade for our future. Hard to say if I’ll keep that opinion but I am grateful America is getting back on track with nuclear power.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1747 and Hyper Autistic Protestant Work Ethic Beauty Blog

I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.

Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.

It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.

I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.

Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”

To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.

Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.

I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.

And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.

So naturally I’d like to do more to share that knowledge as I realize it is maybe much rarer than I realized.

I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1741 and Land Acknowledgment

I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.

The TLDR is that Joel Berry the Babylon Bee guy took a swipe at philosopher Nick Land because Tucker Carlson interviewed an unknown tulpa like white conspiracy theorist who butchered (in his own admission) Landian theory.

A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.

All of this was enormously funny to anyone who actually reads Nick Land. Which includes myself and his current publisher Passage Press.

Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go

Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”

Yes I did the homework.

Land is obtuse and most enjoyable to the schizophrenic extremely online types due to his association with the CCRU or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.

Before you go off the deep end, and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.

This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.

Excitingly the rest of us were treated to a two and a half hour debate between Nick Land and Alexander Dugin hosted by Auron MacIntyre that has such tidbits as the Anglo-Protestant Whigs being a unique people who by encountering capitalism and the invisible hand at a crucial historical juncture obtained a paleo-liberal Christianity.

While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.

It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.

And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.

The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.

Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room

I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.

It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.

The Neo-Jungle of the open network is an implacable force with inscrutable intentions.

I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.

A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.

The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.

And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.

Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1707 and Putting Some GPU To Work

I try to give my own slight biological grey matter processing power a run every day through this writing habit.

I try to move my own body with walking, weight lifting and other condition so it can stay a somewhat workable machine. Tuning my body requires more work than tuning my mind as my brain rarely gives me issues but my tissues are always in some stage of revolt.

I have other assets behind my mind and my body. I’ve purchased a car. Precisely once and I have looked into buying others and shied away. My home doesn’t need to do work beyond housing me and my “disposable and durable” goods which range from a tractor other home appliances. A few of them do produce things for us like keeping our land and our laying hens.

We’ve got a gorgeous solar grid that generates electricity we can barely use. It goes into Bitcoin mining and stacking and running utilities but I’ll admit in a little lax about putting my our existing compute to work.

I’ll admit this is pretty stupid as we invest in crypto, we invest in hardware and energy, and we have invested in compute and inference networks. So why am I not doing more for passive yield on this?

Humans have been working as inference machines since we decided to keep records with something beyond the digits on our hands and the foot of our feudal lord.

Counting and abstractions being necessary for all sorts of engineering feats from cathedrals to graphical processing units. And now we have inference tokens just waiting to be brought down in cost as we bring networks online. So I am setting up my compute to be a part of those networks because sometimes it’s good to focus on little resource allocation problems to take your mind off tbh fe.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1369 and California SB-1047 Vetoed

Last night I received a push alert and then a flurry of excited text messages and phone calls. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the controversial SB-1047 artificial intelligence bill.

Gavin Newsom vetoes California’s contentious AI “safety” bill SB-1047

Twitter lit up with joyful streams of relief and praise for this decision. Everyone from politicians, economists, researchers, academic luminaries, open source collectives, founders and venture capitalists.

It was a bad bill that lacked the necessary clarity and focus to even begin the task of regulating the nascent field of artificial intelligence.

We can and will do better in finding regulatory frameworks for safety and competitiveness but this bill wasn’t it. It was especially concerning as they say so goes California so goes the world.

I have been banging on about the #FreedomToCompute and math’s crucial role in our constitutional right to free speech in America. This must be considered in all future attempts at regulation in America.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

These tools are extensions of the human mind. Consider that the first computers were just regular humans counting. We may have started with our fingers and toes as our first tools. And it wasn’t quick progress as the evolution from the abacus to modern computing took us nearly 4,000 years.

We’ve made an astonishing amount of progress in the last hundred years. We’ve gone from thousands of computations per second in the 1940s to 200 quadrillion calculations per second with modern super computers.

Consumer devices are better too. The computer I’m using to write this post has more power than the computers we used to send man to the moon. It’s 100,000 times faster with seven million times more memory.

Alas, as tools get more powerful the powerful get nervous. This isn’t the first bad artificial intelligence bill we’ve seen. We have Europe to thank for that. And it likely won’t be the last.

But defeating SB-1047 is a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation not only in California but across the world as the entire compute space came together to make its voice heard. And Gavin Newsom listened.

We should celebrate this rare consensus as we look towards better policy in our future.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1368 and Lending Credibility

The dead internet theory (or conspiracy theory if you must) supposes that machine generated content outweighs human contributions.

I don’t think we are there just yet but I am betting that artificial intelligence speeds up the process of replacing human content in areas where it’s unnecessary. Machines can act on their own and it’s good thing potentially too.

Being able to determine what is human intelligence versus machine intelligence may well be mitigated through trust-less cryptographic systems we take for granted. Handshake protocols for humans and machines.

Some content and transactions are just fine coming from artificial intelligence but others have to demonstrate a human identity. This may even require compute on human’s behalf

Looking forward, the ability to access compute at scale will likely parallel the right to transact. Identity will be layered and lending credibility and capital will look different. Who has credit and credibility?

As nations navigate their own risks, network state behaviors on the individual level will become more prevalent, driven by the need for secure, decentralized transactions that ensure autonomy in an increasingly unpredictable world.

The internet isn’t dying. It’s being reborn to serve the next stage of credible actors on our world.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1056 and Freedom to Compute

We must start a #FreedomtoCompute movement based on the idea that access to computing power is a fundamental right.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

We oppose all attempts to restrict computational power and envision a world where we all have the right to build whatever we can dream.

The incumbent power is always going to try and keep disruptive and democratizing power out of the hands of the populace

Math & computer power are as essential as speech. Imagine if the first amendment had been frozen in time at the printing press and didn’t protect the internet.

We cannot accept permanently lowered standards of fundamental rights