For the purposes of this bio, assume I have been in all the right places at all the right times.
Nyc
Joined March 2020
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sensors are the gateway to novel permitting pathways
few in data are talking about owning differentiated sensors to capture novel data - everyone is red queen racing to unique sources of data (enterprises, bio, etc.)
but by controlling the sensor in which a certain form of data can even be made legible, you can control all downstream data feeds (ex: halter and agriculture)
ex: in the limit this looks like space telescopes (high capex, R&D intensity, regulatory permission, etc)
science.nasa.gov/mission/rom…
a few friends have begun to monopolize the most esoteric of sensors and are exhibiting the extreme form of pole position
extreme pole position (read: MONOPOLY) involves controlling the interface where reality is made legible to intelligence
inflation perception and the rates supercycle @saengerleo
We're living in a horrifying, fascinating new era of Silicon Valley where:
1. You can build a startup in 9 months, get acquired (but rly acquihired) by OpenAI, Anthropic, or Cognition, and walk away a multi-millionaire
2. You can join the right company at 22 and become effectively post-economic
And I don't think we've even begun to grapple with the degree to which this is warping an entire generation's relationship with money, ambition, work, and success.
When your peers are making generational wealth before 25, what does a normal career even look like anymore
Rivers retweeted
lexical arbitrages, idiom yield curves, semantic pegs, meaning slippage rates, linguistic volatility spreads, connotation carry trades, cross-dialect swap lines, options on translations, fluency margin calls, mimetic call options, semantic dark pools
Posting on X.com that I am robotaxing a starlink to my offfice in Austin Texas #whitepill
Rivers retweeted
the path of least resistance to fix the coming crisis is to allow pre-retirement americans to accept a social security buyout in exchange for a lump sum deposited into their trump accounts (530As) with which they can buy spcx/oai/ant/etc at some discount. very simple
long awaited follow up in a great series from @VrntPerception - for those trading in rare and important PDFs
Rivers retweeted
I love Job for many reasons, but mainly because it does a very clever jujitsu move on you as a reader. You start out thinking you've seen behind the curtain -- the scene in heaven w/ God & Satan making bets about Job.
So then after Job's trials, as his four friends come visit him to give their theories of why Job is in the predicament he's in, you've got your own little theory based on the opening scene, right? You're essentially the fifth friend who has their own read of the situation.
Then God comes in at the end and is like, "all your theories are wrong. None of you were there at The Beginning, and none of you know enough of the real backstory to really understand what's happening here. None of you can actually tame the chaos monster and organize all the things into a coherent whole. Only I can do that."
You, the reader, think God is calling out Job and maybe his four friends. But He's calling you out, too. You, the reader, are in the same boat as Job and his four friends. You think you have enough info about what is going on with Job because you saw the opening scene in heaven, but actually you're just as clueless and limited as the story's characters.
So the opener of the story is actually a trap, and the conclusion springs it on you. You think you have the backstory via some special perspective, but you're just like all the other confused people in the story. You don't really know and you're not ever going to know, either.
Job's lesson is that not only does God not owe you a theodicy (so stop expecting one), but even if you could see into the unseen realm you still wouldn't have a clue. You're never going to have enough information to put the whole, chaotic picture together in some satisfactory way. It's never going to all hang together in a coherent way that makes sense.
In some ways, I think Job is a coming of age story. This is one of things you learn in midlife -- that the pieces actually didn't ever fit together like you once thought they did, and the fact that it used to make coherent sense to you says more about who you were in that phase of life than it does about any larger meaning behind the events themselves.
The Job story is literally yelling at you that you cannot organize the chaos of life events into a coherent "why" -- it's simply beyond you. That you once thought you could was the arrogance of youth. God is actually the only one strong enough to tame the chaos monster & split its carcass into a neat, ordered, coherent structure.
This isn't the answer anyone wants, but it's the only answer that's telling you like it is.
Anyway, Job is a great book. The haters are wrong. I like it because I don't like to be lied to.
Re Anthropic v The Pope:
1 Corinthians 2:11-13
[11] For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. [12] Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. [13] And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
If our unique potential for species-level destruction can be deferred for a moment, it can be deferred for a few moments, then a few seconds, and then minutes, days, years, and potentially millenia. We are always indebted to the center for saving us in that initial moment and first debt is to the object on the scene that has constituted by saving the human community.
Rivers retweeted
There is no “economy.” There is only the debt to the center that begins at the origin of the human and propels the entire history of humanity, from the earliest animal sacrifices to the latest quantitative easing of the Fed.
All of human social life can be articulated as the recording, enforcement and payment of debts to the center.