I have now written more many days (in a row no less) as we there are years in our modern era. The future is here for me, you and the system of counting we use to pass the time.
Having passed the number of years in our modern era time keeping system in blog posts, I suppose I have arrived at my own future. It feels like any other day leaving aside the cacophony of feuds, beefs, pissing matches and geopolitical posturing
Those feel as if they will permanently drown out my thought process. They won’t. It’s just that I’m not enjoying a few of the more involved spats that are sucking up attention and causing rifts and chaos and bad blood. I’d comment except a few of them have reached existential levels of hostility so I just tweet in my occasional point.
So I’ll ignore the noise for the moment and sit with this idea of moving into some kind of future. As if every day wasn’t a continual process of the future turning into the present and passing on into history.
It’s funny that we settled on one trip around our sun Sol. It’d even funnier we restarted the count after the birth of Christ even though we had a reasonable grasp on a millennium of history before his birth.
Humans are so funny about time. We understand it’s lack of linearity in actuality and yet it’s cursed linearity in our own experience of it as humans never really dissipated. We live on the third rock from the sun and we go around it in our happy orbit as if this is turnout way of being.
I joke there I would like to die outside of Earth’s gravity well but it’s hard to say why leaving Terra seems like an important milestone for the future I’d like to arrive at before washing back into the entropy of our galactic background. I guess I’d just like to see a future beyond the horizon of my daily perceptions. I may live in Big Sky country but I know there are bigger things beyond my ken.
One consequence of consistent writing is having a large number of data points on my past predictions. I can go back and see how often I am right.
There is predictive value in back testing is clear. And in five years of writing I have lots of opportunities to apply my current dilemmas and compare them to what I’ve seen. If you’ve not heard of back testing here is a little summary from my Claude query.
Backtesting is a form of retrodiction—a special case of cross-validation applied to past time periods, used across finance, meteorology (where it’s called “hindcasting”), and other modeling domains.
In investment contexts, the underlying logic is that if a strategy performed poorly historically, it’s unlikely to perform well going forward, and vice versa.
The year 2026 has gone pretty well for me. I’ve made some good calls even as other situations globally look very chaotic. I feel like I’ve largely published my predictions and taken my shots and this is working out for me. The more I can look back on where I’ve been the better I get at acting on my calls.
I do continue to wonder how much anyone is paying attention to anything even as a huge amount of attention is being paid to manifestations that are only being seen as secondary or tertiary effects of bigger geopolitical and monetary events.
I don’t know if going into the future this corpus of guessing and noting and committing to thinking on the issues of the day will matter. Or might make life worse. But tomorrow on day 2027 maybe I’ll learn something new and put it into action and continue turning myself with the tides.
A long block of travel to sync in person with diverse nodes in my network has been invigorating but also exhausting. I’m sure some of the travel looks quite glamorous, but it is always in service of furthering my longterm goals.
For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous…
The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected univers
The ecosystem of private spaces were connected, but as they accreted power these cozy web communities saw their gravity increase. Eventually some collapsed in on themselves. And thus we have black holes of public collapse in the dark forest; out of which none of us are able to escape.
What Rao calls “inaccessible interiority” traps some of us. We may have visibility to other communities through the byproducts of our niches but that does not mean a shared reality where we can reach consensus with others outside of our space.
My strong fear is that without a possible consensus reality for larger groups like nation states citizens, we lose the basic capacity for productive interactions that move us forward. Only inside a community that has swallowed us whole can we progress. And if we find something novel inside those gravity sinks we have no way of sharing it. Only some of us enjoy progress.
Which might be fine for those who wish to live lives quietly out of sight. But it isn’t a world that enables strangers coming together through public global communication in a shared commons.
This stacks on existing research which illustrates how social media creates echo chambers that amplify consensus ideas while filtering out unconventional or contrarian views — which in turn builds on existing theory that describes how individuals self-censor opinions when they suspect they are in the minority.
When the dark forest was scary but still possible to traverse, we still had a chance to explore and find reality, even if we lived in a consensus bubble most of the times. Dead forest theory means we are past the event horizon, from which we cannot escape. We are locked in whatever consensus reality emerged inside the event horizon.
And so despite its expense, its troubles and its costs, I still push my work into the public commons with the hope that I’ll circle the accretion disks but can fight against falling into one forever with a steady acceleration to preserve a visible orbit.
What both Venkatesh Rao and Dan Grey posit in different ways, is that it is worth understanding where we might be cut off from reality.
Further, who knows what new kinds of horrors we will endure as we lead separate lives online without any contact with real life and real people. We crave community with those whom we can maintain consistent context and contact. That’s why I still get on the airplane, or get in the car, or hop on the bus and show up. I want us to share reality.
It’s been a busy quarter. As we sometimes say in my friend group “accelerate” because going fast is the best way to defeat entropy. That doesn’t mean being sloppy or running rip shod but rather that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Things have been proceeding slowly day over day to be sure we can smoothly succeed at the goals we have set. Fast forward a few years and you can see that the smooth progress has indeed been very fast. From day zero to criticality in three years is just insane.
My body has been under some significant strain from the many hats I wear (policymaker, investor, cosmetics expert, wife and also full time disabled chronic illness haver) and I won’t lie that I just want some quiet stability for a few weeks. Alas life is happening awfully fast so I don’t know if it will happen. But phew what a ride.
I am getting closer and closer to a big milestone on here. Day 2000! I’ve been writing for two thousand days in a row and hitting publish. Five years and five months (almost six at 5.7 months) or 285 weeks of daily journaling in public.
I began in the height of the pandemic, and one can hardly recall just how bizarre those years were now. The great weirdening which began long before the pandemic arrived for almost everyone sometime in those long years.
Static and yet unstable. A long horizon of the long now, keeping us in semi-stasis as the institutional bulwarks cracked, and then crumbled, and then began accelerating into change. Everyone is holding on tight and pretending like it’s not a white knuckle era.
We are over the vibe shift, the Vibecession, and another vibe change after that and who knows what is coming next. I feel the same sense of being unmoored as I did when I started.
This despite having built a stable and thriving family and investing career. The biggest problems I had when I started (children, visas, family abroad) remains the same problems I have now. The temptation to simply change how we live is ever present. We escaped from some of flatland but more can be done to build communities and nations that are capable of thriving in the ceaseless change.
I still feel like I don’t know what’s coming, even as the future I sensed has come into being at an alarming right. But the perpetual not knowing can drain hope and energy if you are not careful to replenish. It’s exhausting physically too. The energy to understand what’s coming gets harder day by day and so we must get stronger ourselves.
I’ve probably put over a thousand hours of writing into this (maybe closer to 1500 as it runs from 20-45 minutes of time on any given day) so I’m a better writer but I don’t know if I’ve become a more palatable or appealing one. I don’t care too much as this is for me more than it is for any audience.
Most humans seem to prefer smoothed algorithmic writing over hand crafted artisanal human writing. Which is fine by me, as I don’t necessarily want to change my personal spaces to pander to anyone.
I was on a podcast recently where I reiterated my hope for being a node in the future. I want us to hope for the best by seeing clearly about the worst. That focus on solving problems is replenishing for the soul.
I’ll remain a little under the radar as a specialty node broadcasting to my oddballs. I’ll feel better about broadcasting know that is the long. The longevity posting, the nuclear posting, the odd travels and strange people posting will continue. I will try to broadcast on the pirate wires of the human web.
I am in the middle of the Utah desert returning from a site visit to Valar Atomics. If you have the means to tour a nuclear facility I highly recommend it. It is so choice. That’s Ferris Bueller for the Zoomers.
I’ll use another choice line from the John Hughes classic to illustrate how gratifying it has been to drive a remote Utah town for a chance to see our investment in action.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
We hadn’t planned to drive down to the Ward 250 facility after Abundance Institute’s Operation Gigawatt. Life is busy, it’s a holiday weekend, I’m flying out to part unknown from Montana in two days.
But what’s another three hours on the open road when there is one of America’s sustainable energy labs and a tour from your favorite engineers on offer? Yes they are all working this weekend. They have a deadline for July 4th that’s pretty important. It’s crazy that this wasn’t in my itinerary in the first place if I’m honest. What a way to kickstart the summer.
Getting up close to “our” reactor is a privilege I never conceived of experiencing. I’ve been lucky enough to invest in some very cool things over the years, but to actually place a bet on a serious industrial effort and have my choice end up at the forefront of a major national push for nuclear energy? Not a thing I saw coming.
So in the hustle of the moment, I am glad to slow down and admire that it is actually possible to do things. That’s a very nice day to have. Yes that’s a Day 69 joke.
I’ll treasure this moment forever. Even if we fail, at least we tried. And who wouldn’t want to put yourself on the line and try when it’s something that matters this much? So we speed up to slow down and see. Because it’s true if you don’t you might just miss it. So yeah it was a nice day.
While I’m not primarily an investor in the LLM boom, I have invested in compute markets, vector databases, neolabs and most importantly I have invested in energy.
I am not someone who is all that worried about fast moving changes even though I clearly take both the changes in the world but also the changes in technology serious. I moved to Montana to stay out of trouble and I’m betting the ranch this will be a bumpy but successful ride.
I believe it will be good for those who open themselves up to the possibility that Americans can handle themselves. I won’t lie and say that we have unknowns ahead of us but that was true before we got powerful tools to solve problems at a much faster pace. It might get weird but we believe in our adaptability.
I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.
I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.
Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.
The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.
Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.
Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military
This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.
Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.
Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.
However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.
No matter how trying the week may have been, a day of rest is a day for chores. Fighting entropy is the fight to remain among the living. I feel more than a little bit behind on my goals and obligations. Doing chores is the way I exert my own will over a crisis.
I hope that anyone wondering why I’ve not been up to date on correspondence over the last week can glance at the last few days of posts and extend me grace. I’m not sure if I have done anyone wrong but be slow but I notice my own tardiness.
The benefit of public diaries and social media is that it provides a kind of open “what is happening” context for everyone to see why their emails and messages are not being returned.
I was able to do some amount of personal chores around the Airbnb. Then I was hit with another round of migraines and had to lay down. I am not out of the woods yet it would seem. Maybe tomorrow.
