Weaponized autism value investor. Interested in genomics, hard tech and entropy-reduction. 🇮🇹
Dubai / San Francisco
Joined August 2010
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Andrea retweeted
It's an iron law of the universe that as soon as you realize this, you become a conservative.
Andrea retweeted
Everything seems unprecedented when you don’t know any history.
I've served in two White Houses and in Congressional leadership, and I can tell you when the last time a CEO or an industry at large asked to be regulated: never. That's what makes Dario's letter so striking — it's an admission that we're driving down a dark, winding road on wet pavement with the headlights off. And where's President Trump? Looks like he nodded off again. It’s time to turn the lights on, put both hands on the wheel, and regain control before it’s too late.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Industries and CEOs have often asked to be regulated. Examples include 19th century railroads, Allstate in 2009, hedge funds and tech companies. washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/305871… fee.org/articles/we-wa… nationalreview.com/corner/be-wary…
Andrea retweeted
Something I realized truly unsettles me about the EU is that they have learned the correct lesson about China's ruling formula - you only need the full-on totalitarianism for elites, and the proles you can control using ham-fisted censorship - except they are actually much more evil than China. China's solution is to tyrannize its billionaires into submission, which is already fairly evil. But it does generate broad-based advancement for its people. The EU wants total billionaire death, doing everything it can to ensure there is no domestic innovator class to oppose them - and succeeding - because they truly couldn't care less that their people are becoming poorer. They understand, correctly, that they can suppress their people forever as long as there is no organized counter-elite. In that way, they are less copying China and more copying North Korea.
Andrea retweeted
Abortion up to the point of birth completely undermines the Liberal rationalizations for abortion.
The most common argument for abortion is women's bodily autonomy. "My body, my choice." But even if we grant this premise the death of the fetus is an "unfortunate side effect," as an early term fetus cannot survive independent of its mother.
This is not true of a late term abortion, or abortion up to the point of birth. The youngest premature infant born that survived was born at 21 weeks, but this is a tail-end outlier. From 26 weeks the infant has an ~80% survival rate. From 30 weeks I'm seeing a survival rate reported as high as 98%.
If the justification for abortion is simply bodily autonomy, then in the case of a late term infant it is entirely possible to restore a woman her bodily autonomy without killing the baby, as it can be removed from the mother, restoring her bodily autonomy, without actually killing the infant. It can just live its life like the roughly 10% of all children that are naturally born premature.
To "abort" such an infant is just infanticide. To pass a law like this is to functionally say it is legal to murder any of the premature infants in the NICU, provided that infant happens to still be in the womb.
To the extent any abortion is tolerated there will always be some "gray" area with respect to when the cutoff date is applied, but tolerating it up to the point of birth is well outside that gray area. It's pitch black murder.
Andrea retweeted
writing about another’s writing. philosophizing about a philosopher’s philosophies. critiquing the latest critique. definitions rearranged to prove definitions. a meeting about the frequency of meetings 01001
database loops with other database to verify database 0100 discourse disapproving of the discourse. talk show host delivers brutal takedown of rival talk show host.
crypto swapped for crypto to price crypto denominated in crypto 01011110 a portfolio of derivatives hedging against derivative risk. GDP growth by adding services that help GDP. 0101
therapy about your anxiety about therapy. meditating to optimize meditation. 001101 journaling about an inability to journal. 0101011
a podcast that interviews podcasters. content about content creation. seeking engagement to manufacture more engagement.
symbols citing symbols to prove symbols. words pointing to words to prove words 011101 mind referencing mind to validate mind 110110 reasoning leveraging self-referencing reasons to demonstrate its reasonability. 00110001 mirror faces mirror to reflect mirror.
philosophy claiming reality is a construct of philosophy. poison prescribing more poison to see health benefits of poison. an algorithm optimizing another algorithm that optimizes algorithmic optimization.
0111011 mind loops within itself 010111101 symbols stacked on top of symbols 010010111 only concerned with internal coherence, no external correspondence 1010111011 cognition folds inward 11010111111 recursion without exit condition 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
parts of the internet are burning themselves out. the cycles are shortening, getting more obvious. performative-outrage loops are compressing. stultifying repetition gnashing on itself.
tedious and predictable talking points eroding the pageantry. a screaming infant eventually exhausts himself; a screaming adult is no different.
what’s behind a screen is pure chaos. digital fantasies increasingly spinning themselves into froth, unmoored from consequence or time. spiraling into transient noise. almost nothing discussed matters 2-4 weeks later.
the internet isn’t expanding culture anymore, just lubricating humanity’s worst social traits. the notion of “trending” feels saturated.
logging on will hopefully become a more intentional act, rather than passive habit seeking simulacrum of existence. the internet either points to real life and acts as a compression of reality — as any useful symbol does — or it thrashes itself into entropic nothingness.
databases looping recursively without exit condition.
Andrea retweeted
3-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
4-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
5-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
6-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
7-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
8-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
9-Fig+ Net Worth: Uniqlo
Andrea retweeted
this is a skill issue, it’s really not that hard, you really just have to listen to women and cultivate empathy. the way women feel about men is closer to the way you feel about whether you’d go into battle with a man than the way you feel about women
Andrea retweeted
You just have to understand that for the people advocating for this it would be nice if it were revenue positive, but that’s not really the point or a requirement. The whole point of all of this is that wealthy people have it too good and need to be taken down a notch.
Andrea retweeted
In Feng Shui, the fact that 80% of autistic people are bullied or used by 'friends' is because their mental layout is often an 'open Ming Tang (Bright Hall)'—no scheming, no defenses, straightforward. This extremely pure 'Qi field' easily attracts 'Robbing Wealth Afflictions' (people who plunder under the guise of friendship) and 'Hidden Arrow Afflictions' (betrayals from behind) in complex social Feng Shui. The post's grim data reminds us: 'Water that is too clear has no fish; a layout too open invites thieves.' Autistic individuals don't need to change their inner 'pure water quality,' but they must build a 'Xuan Guan (Spiritual Screen)' at their social boundaries. This screen acts as a 'buffer and filter': making the turbid energy of 'scheming' and 'calculating' detour at the door, allowing only the 'vital Qi' (true friends) tested by time to enter the inner chamber. Remember: Your kindness is expensive; it must have Feng Shui 'edges' and 'thresholds.' Don't let just anyone march straight into your natal layout.
Andrea retweeted
In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.
This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.
The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.
A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.
These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.
They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.
They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.
Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:
> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”
—
The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.
It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.
SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).
The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.
With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.
Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.
It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.
All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.
That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.
If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.
Andrea retweeted
Teachers average among the least intelligent university graduates. Little of what they 'learn' is even relevant to what they end up doing.
In a given year, the lowest-scoring groups on the GRE, SAT, and ACT are usually those pursuing degrees in education.
Andrea retweeted
The fertility rate of US liberal White women aged 25–35 is 0.51 children.
White liberalism is now a death cult whose value proposition is: “Amuse yourself to death.”
Optimize for harm reduction long enough, and you end up optimizing for nonexistence—the only state without pain
Andrea retweeted
it hasn't sunk in for most people. we already live in a post-scarcity society. UBI is already here.
basic package: disability, medicaid, food stamps etc
bonus package: literally getting paid for staying at home and hanging out with your relatives
extra bonus: if you are willing to commit fraud, pretend your kids are autistic and get paid for that. get paid for watching your neighbor's kid. pretend you are taking care of your grandma. fake hospice clinic. fake rehab clinic. fake therapy clinic.
giga bonus: during a time of crisis take advantage of PPP or CARES and open a fake business and get paid for existing
people are shocked when they learn that defense is the FIFTH largest line item in the budget. ahead of defense: social security ($1.6T), interest on debt ($1.1T) medicare ($1T), medicaid + ACA ($1T), AND THEN defense ($0.9T)
complain about defense all you like, but healthcare fraud is a way bigger factor. hundreds of billions per year.
this is only going to get worse, because the fraud is a structural part of the system – payouts to client groups in exchange for votes (normally D).
in the US, only 47% of the population actually works (fully 14% of the population is working age and does not work). retirees are 18% and children 22%.
the system I described above subsidizes 50m non-working people absolute minimum, but really it's far more because people that are paid to stay home and take care of their relatives are considered "workers"
of that 47% of "actual workers" maybe one third does real work, the rest are shuffling papers around or doing fake email jobs. so you have, rough math, 50 million actual workers supporting 300 million dependents. that's the nature of the economy today. it will only accelerate. eventually you will have 10 million using AI tools to do all the work and 340 million dependents.
the reason no one roots out the fraud is because it's the system that keeps our extremely fragile polity intact. the fraud is the UBI. the purpose of the system is what it does.
of course, it's a deeply unfair system, because you are allowed to commit fraud if you are a politically protected client group of the democrats. DOGE was killed faster than any government program ever, because it attempted to root out the fraud. if you are honest and unwilling to commit fraud, you are a huge loser in this system. your neighbor will have their mortgage subsidized by some government program. they will get favorable SBA loans due to DEI. they will open a fake hospice or autism clinic. they will get paid for taking care of their neighbor's kid and vice versa. the primary skill in the labor market is learning how to extract money from state and federal government programs, not gaining skills or making yourself employable. if you are just trying to work an ordinary wagie job you are a huge sucker. you are paying 40-50% effective all in taxes to everyone else who is a net taker.
the sad part is because AI is such a substantial productivity boost, it will actually keep this system going for a while longer, and maybe in perpetuity. AI boosts the 15% of the population that is actually productive so much that the remaining 85% can coast by. no one in charge will change this because they can't think of anything else. the political costs of a real UBI program are too great and we don't have the money for it anyway. so we will keep this covert fraud-based UBI program running indefinitely. unfortunately, if you are an honest wagie, you lose.
Andrea retweeted
The total number of smart people in the world has just peaked.
And now it's about to crash.
Andrea retweeted
The Multivariate Rarity of Western Psychology
Using data from the World Values Survey (2005–2014) across 80 countries (≈85% of the world’s population), Muthukrishna et al. (2020) show that cultural and psychological differences between societies are best understood as patterns across multiple variables, rather than as large gaps on any single dimension. When hundreds of traits are considered jointly, Western populations emerge as statistically unusual in multivariate psychological space, despite substantial overlap on individual traits.
Broadly speaking, the study finds that Western populations exhibit higher individualism, are more willing to cooperate and extend moral concern beyond kin, place greater emphasis on personal freedom and self-expression, display greater tolerance for individual variation, and place less emphasis on obedience to authority.
Importantly, the study systematically understates true differences: it captures only a limited subset of psychological constructs—excluding, among others, cognitive ability (IQ)—and represents each included dimension with a small number of survey questions that capture only part of the underlying psychological variance; treats all questions as equally important; collapses response categories in ways that discard information about degree and intensity; and relies on survey items that may not fully represent the same constructs or have the same meaning across cultures.
Consequently, the study paints a low-resolution portrait of cross-cultural psychological differences, rather than revealing their full magnitude and true direction.
Andrea retweeted
Tips for increasing IQ, based on the latest science:
- If you’re planning to get a PhD in comms, switch to astrophysics (causes much higher IQ)
- If you like working with your hands, become a neurosurgeon instead of plumber
- Get a higher-paying job (lots of data on higher earners consistently have higher IQ)
- If you’re really optimizing for IQ, consider winning a Nobel Prize.
Andrea retweeted
here's my holiday mega rant on why every economist who told you american manufacturing was strong should never be taken seriously again:
GDP counts "manufacturing output" and economists nod approvingly when the number goes up. but that number tells you almost nothing about whether america can actually make things when it matters.
a 62 year old CNC machinist in ohio who can hold ±0.00005" tolerances on titanium and trained three generations of apprentices is about to retire. his knowledge disappears from the economy entirely. it shows up nowhere in the statistics. we treat the erosion of manufacturing human capital the same way a strip mining operation treats topsoil: an externality not worth measuring.
the fundamental problem is that economics treats manufacturing as a flow (inputs, outputs, productivity per hour) when the strategic question is actually about stock. what capabilities exist? who holds them? are they regenerating or depleting?
it gets worse. the manufacturing output numbers aren't just measuring the wrong thing. they're also fake.
susan houseman at the upjohn institute showed that the computer and electronics industry, which is a tiny slice of manufacturing, is responsible for the majority of measured output growth over the past few decades.
here's how the trick works: when a computer chip gets twice as powerful at the same price, government statisticians use "hedonic quality adjustments" to count that as doubling real output. we didn't make more chips. we made the same number of chips. but the statistics say production doubled.
strip out computers and US manufacturing output has been flat or declining for decades. the "productivity miracle" that justified letting the industrial base erode? it's mostly just moore's law run through a statistical blender.
so we're not just measuring the harvest while the soil erodes. we're measuring a fake harvest.
the military understands readiness better than economists do. a combat unit reports two scores: S-Rating (do you have the tanks?) and P-Rating (do you have trained crews to fight them?). current economics only measures the S-Rating. it assumes if the machine exists, the labor exists.
but if america has 100,000 5-axis CNC machines and only 40,000 qualified programmers, our effective capacity is 40%. the remaining 60% is stranded capital. assets that appear on balance sheets but are functionally scrap metal.
we need an entirely different measurement framework.
manned industrial capacity: total installed capital multiplied by qualified operator ratio. this tells you what you can actually produce, not what your equipment theoretically allows.
proficiency weighted workforce: stop counting "manufacturing jobs" and start counting proficiency units. weight workers by time to proficiency. an operator you can train in two weeks counts differently than a master machinist who took ten years to develop. if a factory replaces 10 retiring masters with 10 new hires, employment data says "no change." reality says capability just crashed.
net skill replacement: years of experience retiring minus years of training entering. if 1,000 machinists with 30 years experience retire and we replace them with 1,000 trade school grads with 2 years training, we didn't break even. we lost 28,000 proficiency years. a negative NSR is a recession in capability even if GDP hits all time highs. we are burning the furniture to heat the house.
replacement latency index: in a crisis, the question isn't "how cheap" but "how fast can we scale." measure the time required to double skilled output. a deep bench of apprentices ready to step up means three months. no bench means seven years to train new masters from scratch. the US is in a latency trap: high skill needs with no surge capacity.
now here's where i push back with realism on the techno optimists who think AI and robotics make this conversation obsolete.
they're wrong, but not for the reason most critics think.
the real question isn't "will machines replace humans" but "how do we transfer knowledge in both directions."
for a century, knowledge transfer in manufacturing meant master to apprentice. watch, practice, learn the feel of the material, develop intuition over decades. this is how tacit knowledge perpetuated itself.
that model is breaking down. the masters are retiring faster than apprentices are being trained. the chain is snapping.
but here's what most people miss: the knowledge doesn't have to die. it can be captured, encoded, transferred to machines, and then transferred back to a new generation of workers who learn differently than their predecessors did.
this is the actual evolution of the trades. not "robots replace machinists" but "the machinist's knowledge gets embedded in systems that make the next generation of machinists more capable faster."
AI can capture what the veteran knows about how some weird alloy from a supplier behaves differently on humid days. it can encode the pattern recognition that lets a toolmaker look at witness marks and know what went wrong. it can compress twenty years of trial and error into training data that accelerates the next cohort.
but this only works if we do it now, while the knowledge holders are still here to teach both the humans and the machines.
this is what we're building at atomic. not automation that replaces human expertise but systems that capture it, augment it, and transfer it. AI that learns from the best toolmakers and then helps newer toolmakers perform at higher levels faster. the human stays in the loop but the loop includes machine intelligence that holds institutional knowledge.
the factory of the future isn't lights out. it's a partnership where tacit knowledge flows from humans to machines and back to humans. where a retiring master's expertise doesn't disappear but becomes part of the system that trains their successors.
and here's the crucial point: the more powerful these AI tools become, the more valuable deep manufacturing expertise gets. because someone has to teach the machines. someone has to catch the errors when AI optimizes toward a local maximum that looks good mathematically but a human expert would recognize as fragile. someone has to know what questions to ask.
atomic is currently training AI on the accumulated knowledge of a generation that is retiring. what happens when that knowledge base stops refreshing? we'll have systems optimizing based on stale understanding, with fewer humans who can catch the drift.
so the "robots will save us" crowd has it exactly backward. AI makes the measurement problem more urgent, not less. we need to know: do we have enough humans with deep knowledge to teach the machines? are we capturing expertise fast enough before it retires? are we building systems that transfer knowledge back to new workers?
none of this shows up in current economic statistics.
while our industrial base was hollowing out, here's what the experts were looking at:
GDP said manufacturing output was growing. industrial production index said capacity utilization was healthy. productivity statistics said american workers were more efficient than ever. the numbers looked fine. the consultants wrote reports. the economists gave speeches.
then reality hit.
COVID came and we couldn't make masks, gowns, ventilators, basic PPE. not because we lacked factories but because we lacked the people and knowledge to spin up production fast. we had to beg other countries for medical supplies. the metrics said manufacturing was fine. we couldn't make cotton swabs.
china decoupling revealed we can't make the chips that run everything. not just advanced semiconductors. basic microcontrollers that go in cars and appliances. the metrics said our technology sector was world leading. we can't fabricate the components.
ukraine exposed that we can't produce artillery shells fast enough to sustain one ally in one conventional war. 155mm rounds. not stealth fighters. not nuclear submarines. shells. the arsenal of democracy cannot feed a single front. the metrics said our defense industrial base was strong.
the crises already happened. we already failed the test. every metric we track said we were fine and we could not make the things we needed.
we're measuring a fake harvest while the soil erodes underneath us.
Andrea retweeted
By many many orders of magnitude, the most impressive technology on Earth is DNA.
There are 10^38 bits of DNA information on Earth today.
Life on Earth is 3.7 billion years old.
It works out that 10^50 bit-hours of DNA information have existed on Earth.
For context the planet Earth is 10^50 atoms.
We are NEVER EVER going to learn more, than DNA has already learnt. It’s the ultimate von Neumann probe for brute force learning.
There’s a strong case that cellular intelligence vastly exceeds organism intelligence, and that the gap is totally and permanently irredeemable.
Long after the last human is extinct, the real sentient force on Earth will still be running. It might spin up another civilisation soon after us, maybe a more advanced one.
Humanity is really just some art that DNA put together for a while. It’s just the most insane algorithm and it’s natural and spontaneous?
Andrea retweeted
The idea of the responsible engineer wasn’t coined by Tesla or SpaceX.
They revolutionized it, however.
Somewhere around 2010, the playbook for how to accelerate the process of developing technology changed. This engineering framework is now being ruthlessly executed by nearly every tech startup, in the process raising the level of competition.
I'm not addressing the important, but overstated philosophical concepts like first principles thinking, rather the structural framework and machinery that allows Elon organizations to execute rapidly and efficiently *while* operating at scale.
1. Extreme ownership over a part or system establishes a clear path of blame on each of the hundreds of projects happening simultaneously within a company. This necessarily means smaller engineering teams working on larger projects.
Less engineers with more responsibilities naturally results in a flat org chart. A flat org chart allows high velocity flow of information from engineers to VP's, removing decision making latency when executive calls must be made.
2. "Giving engineers enough rope to hang themselves with". Translating to policy, this is promoting to the borderline of competency. This short-circuits performance evaluation timelines and places the best individual contributors at the top of the org. This necessarily means that the top of the org is highly technical, which should be an obvious point but was somewhat contrarian even for automotive/aerospace industries. This actively suppresses votes being won by political favor - the data wins.
3. Engineers work in close proximity to where their parts are being tested, manufactured, and assembled. Engineers walk the factory floor and tour the foundries, not just optimizing the designs performance attributes behind a computer, but integrating learnings from first-hand exposure to the full value chain. This also necessarily means that the best design is vertically integrated all the way up the supply chain.
4. Cross-functionalism is enforced structurally by grouping all the engineers together in one bullpen and actively suppressing ivory towers. Designers, analysts, test engineers, fabricators, technicians, production associates are in close and consistent contact. It is culturally normal to see the executives at lunch with engineers. It is also normal to see an executive check engineers mid-presentation with hand calcs, back to the best individual contributor point.
5. The sustaining efforts are equally, if not more intense than the initial product development stage. The machinery responsible for driving this is what makes Elon a great leader: death/bankruptcy is a certainty if the target for cost/mass/assembly time is not achieved - and more often than not these successes are parlayed. Success of Cybercab depends solely on the success of autonomy. Success of the next Starlink generation (V3) depends solely on success of a reuable reliable Starship. This puts an existential drive behind each of the hundreds of projects that are required to succeed for the broader vision to be realized.
This is not comprehensive. This is a poorly distilled synthesis of observations from 5 years working at two of the most significant engineering organizations in the history of the world.