There has been quite a bit of discussion in alignment theory with artificial intelligence that considers how legibility and openness might work at cross purposes when coordinating across different intelligences with different goals. Politics exist everywhere it would seem.
If you are transparent, but seek to change an agent’s behavior, you might reasonably be interpreted as adversarial by the agent. So it follows you must consider that their actions are no longer collaborative and open towards you but potentially adversarial and opaque depending on how it judges you.
The information habits and “winner’s optimism” that some American elder millennial display in public digital spaces are telling. In particular, we have skewed heavily towards legible openness as our internet was often friendly and our geopolitical positions was dominant.
These conditions are no longer true. And so we are now experiencing the Dark Forest Theory of Yancy Strickland (based on Liu Cixin’s stellar science fiction series the three body problem). American millenials are on a very different internet than we grew up on.
I’ll admit I have a bone to pick with Yancy as it felt more like he was defecting from the open web in 2019 because it was scary and filled with fascists. I didn’t think he believed it was because it was actually dangerous. His return makes me question his original declared intentions and his goals now.
The Dark Forest disappearing man has come back to the open web now. Things have changed and we all need our own private Idaho. Which you can find through his offerings.
I’ll note he needs the distribution channels of large adversarial networks like Twitter and that means gaining power in the dark forest. As we consider how open and legible to be in this very difficult moment I thought this was an instructional revealed preference.
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.
I have spent a lot of time in various states of concern, sadness and frustration this year. Which is too bad, as so many incredible things have happened to me. We passed a right to compute law. Valar Atomics took “accelerate” way more seriously than most.
It’s hard to balance knowing the future won’t be anything like the past, but still having to make decisions made on that being the only data you’ve got. Engaging in governance and investing in energy seem like sensible ways of approach a strange future. Organizing energy is civilization 101 stuff.
I can predict a world with increasing chaos but how it will affect demand for things like energy, compute and decentralization are directional bets. You know it’s coming but how and when? And the downsides are hard to consider. Nobody ever thinks the entropy will apply to them but it’s already begun.
Every time future shock gets me I’m surprised I’m managing an imitation of Cayce Pollard at all. I’m practically a poster child for “sensible takes about various concerning challenges” as I get asked about various eccentric revealed preferences.
The Fourth Turning is coming about and we aren’t ready. I use short hand like the Churn, elite overproduction, The Sort and other minor terminologies and schools of thought to signal to others. I understand this to be my best way available way signal. But who knows as the humans retreat from shared networks it won’t stay that way.
I don’t quite know what it is about San Francisco but it’s just not my town. I love so much about it San Francisco. And it has much to love. But I’ll never love it the way it deserves.
I love what once represented in culture, technology and history, I love its portrayal as the epicenter of a certain kind of future. Whatever universe got us to Star Fleet Academy seems even if 2025 was pretty bleak for them too. Most importantly I love my friends San Francisco. It’s impossible to base a career on startups without spending some amount of time here.
But I just do not love being here for any amount of extended time. I find myself in an absolute misery adjusting to it every time.
Even when I lived and worked in neighborhoods with microclimates more suited to my preferences, I struggled. Dry, sunny and friendly is surrounded by gray, damp and miserable. And you can’t easily get out of where you live. Everything is 30 minutes away by car and the only way around that is biking.
The rolling hills in the 7×7 block that make up the core metropolitan area are a fair representation of my moods and the city’s fate. You can enjoy spectacular highs but you see the lows spread outward before you and it makes you question why you should have this unfair vantage point. Right up until you are trapped by the mountains at the horizon. San Francisco makes it easy to forget the rest of the world.
Some people manage to find an entire world here. I envy that. All I ever feel is hemmed in. It deepens whatever mood I am in, and heaven forbid I experience a depressive fit as you can roll very dark and deep here.
The expense, the hassle, the status games, and somehow (still!) the lack of women are all points in its disfavor. You can tell it’s a boom town because it’s where men seek their fortune and women don’t seek the men with fortunes. San Francisco is probably the best advertising for women seeking men beyond their utility. And they have tried importing the art hoes it just work. I promise it’s been tried.
I often wonder how it is that venture capital remains so male-dominated when most of the work is the same skill set as a fashion editor or a style writer.
Sure, you occasionally see a man with good taste, and the twinks and gays are obviously the best of breed in both venture and fashion. But the game is basically the same. And yet fashion is dominated by women and venture as an esoteric sub-asset of private equity is very much not.
Let’s compare. Venture is a small, tight-knit group of people, who run on backchannels and gossip, and absolutely everything is determined by being the first person to land the next hot thing.
Now there is an avant garde who sets trends which then get validated with market success. In venture these are the earliest angel investors. In fashion, it’s the indie publishers who slog through the upstarts and pick who to champion.
The angel investor hopes their deal will go to later stage investors just as the trendsetting editor hopes their designer pick makes it to Vogue. Picking the next “it” thing and riding the wave to fortune is the goal for editor and designer, just as it is for investor and founder.
I personally think my skills are validated just as much being the person to get Mansur Gavriel added to the right boutiques as I am being the first check into Valar Atomics.
I took my bag to a breakfast at a boutique investment bank (you know the one with the summer camp) and happened to be meeting with an investor who loved the bag so much that the founder of their luxury ecommerce investment picked up the bag to stock immediately. Well over a decade later, I still carry that bag almost everyday and so do millions of other women.
Now ask yourself if this next story sounds pretty similar. I sent a direct message on Twitter to a young founder who seemed interesting. He had a quickness to his thought I respected as well as humility that set him apart.
Alas I didn’t like the company he was working on at the time and I didn’t like that he wasn’t its CEO. Sounds like “the food was bad & the portions are so small” sort complaint right? Well, I just thought he was so good he should be the lead in whatever he did next.
The young man had partnered with an experienced elder (which was probably wise for that industry) but the founder was clearly the dynamo in that situation. I told the founder that straight up. He had earned complete candor from me.
We began talking about what he really wanted to build. His intensity was awe inspiring. And his vision was just so crazy that I knew I had to back him. Many phone calls and strategy sessions later I wrote a check. It would take less time than I’d dared dream for others to see what I saw first.
To see him now as the jewel in the crowns of many much larger funds and backed by much more impressive and capable people than me feels amazing. I’ll always have the satisfaction of being the first to know he was going to be the next big thing.
And that’s not so very different from helping select the hottest hand bag of the last decade. Like Jeremy Irons’ character in finance classic Margin Call, I know the value of being first.
There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.
Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.”
If Isaiah’s work is successful, it will be an awful lot bigger than the hottest handbag. It will materially change the conditions of fueling our lives.
And while I am pretty smart, I knew enough to act first. Because it was a hell of a lot easier to just be first. And if I’m lucky, I’ll carry my bag and own equity in Valar for a long time to come. Read the full story in Bloomberg with a gift link.
The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.
As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!
The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.
MAWP!
Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.
Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.
This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.
Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.
Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.
If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.
It’s hard to say that there is a best part of living in Montana. If you like mountains, seasons and being outdoors it is hard to beat. One thing I particularly enjoy is how often people will come to our state either as tourists or for retreats with their companies and coworkers.
Alex and I drove down to Paradise Valley today to meet up with the founders of one of our favorite products. Having a company meetup in Yellowstone’s off season is a smart choice and as Montana citizens we love it when folks come to visit and center themselves and their work here.
A villain’s lair in Paradise Valley or a cozy lodge for discerning visitors to Yellowstone?
Daniel and Tristan have made one of our all time favorite and most used set of reading applications. The first is called Readwise. It’s hard to fully describe the product except to say that it makes you a better reader through your own highlights and notes.
I came into the application with more than a decade of highlights from my Kindle and found myself deepening my experience with all of my prior reading. It’s one of the best research tools a heavy reader can purchase and I was a very happy customer.
They didn’t stop there though. To make things even better, they launched a reader product which further cemented a virtuous reading. My highlighting, annotating and review cycle is now integrated with my reading and note taking across all my different content formats and sources.
Majestic vistas help us all feel wonder and spark creativity through nature’s beauty
Taking a few hours to drive through some of the most beautiful countryside in America and catching up with talented and passionate founders is an incredible way to spend a few hours.
The passion and care that Tristan, Dan and their team have brought to making reading an even better experience brings me so much joy. As a power user of their apps, and a voracious reader of all forms of written content from books to Twitter threads, I appreciate the incredible feat of product management they have pulled off. Making reading better is no easy task.
Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.
This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.
Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune
So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.
About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance
Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.
For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.
How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez
Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.
There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.
And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.
As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.
So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.
Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.
We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.
So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.
I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.
The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.
I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.
I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.
I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.
I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.
To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts
I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.
I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.
Many moons ago, when I was first attempting to get a diagnosis for why I was always in pain and exhausted, I got a battery of allergy tests. I did the “gold standard of allergy testing” called patch testing which is a form of pin prick testing designed to pick up responses that may be delayed.
It was an awful experience. I barely made it through the 5 day trial between the 100 allergen pin pricks and final measurements.
I remember begging the doctor for a way to measure early. I asked if I could take some Benadryl to take the edge off. Alas the only way it would be accurate and covered by my insurance is if I gutted it out.
You are not allowed to shower, sweat, be exposed to UV rays (no going outside) or take immune suppressants that might subdue your body’s response.
I was struggling to breathe, my entire body itched and ached, and I had a migraine so bad I couldn’t see for the stars & dizziness. It’s possible I wasn’t stable enough to have adequately consented to the test but I did get my final results.
Out of 100 common allergens tested it was confirmed I was extremely allergic to 10 of them with another moderate sensitivity set of twenty or so that I should merely try to avoid as opposed to my firm “no go” list.
The dermatologist gave me a sheet with 75 different chemical names and formats that I might encounter in the wild from these core allergens:
I instructed to search ingredient lists for these names any time I purchased a household product, personal care item, cosmetic or other item which might include these ingredients which ranged from nail care to vaccines.
It was honestly quite overwhelming. And some of the above ingredients are in basically everything. I dare you to avoid Limonene for a month.
So my husband and one of our best friends did what any practical minded engineer would do and they made me simple Google sheet where all 75 varietals could be checked if I plugged in the ingredients from any item.
I used it for years. I’d plug in the INCI from every brand I encountered into the sheet no matter what. I gave away a lot of products to friends.
Today it occurred to Alex that we should probably vibe code the thing into a proper web application using Replit so other people could check ingredient lists for their own allergies.
You can set your own allergens or click a few buttons for common allergens and “clean ingredient standards” and run a check for an all clear.
It isn’t super fancy but it doesn’t need to be. It just needed to keep your data safe, be easy to log into so you can securely check and access your personal list and generally functional enough to change and set allergens. We’ve put it on our own little domain just to see how much this will cost to run (and we’ve set up alerts so it doesn’t go bonkers) but we figured this should be accessible and simple.
And while there are other options on the market, most are bloated, overly paranoid and designed for scaring California moms rather than quickly helping people with clear preferences for avoidance and actual tested allergies. So hopefully our pain can help you breathe easier.
Some options for chemicals and irritants you can select on our app. My own settings of allergies and sensitivities
