Nicholas Gillert

@krrishd x.com/nicholasgiller…

advice i’d give a younger version of myself: do not listen to the reflexive ayn rand haters even if they’re smart people. read for yourself and judge (and dislike it from first principles if that’s how it shakes out)

@EchoraContinuum @thogge Nonprofit status was unsustainable, he said to put OpenAI under Tesla… but that also affected the mission. Declining his offer was all for naught anyway because they had to eventually get funding from companies such as Microsoft.

@thogge What actually made him hate openai after this?

5.5 years ago - an alternate universe. Fascinating prediction and reply.

@woke8yearold The people on 4chan in 2010-2011 who were telling me to buy bitcoin for less than a dollar were also telling me some dude named Jeffrey Epstein was blackmailing elites with underage sex trafficking.

Thinking about how weird forums I was on during my formative years got basically everything right. The singularity, crypto, political chaos in the west due to immigration Just W after W

@notthreadguy Everyone printed dictator money on leveraged ETFs with the AI bottleneck trade and I’m sitting here with VOO up 4% YTD.

we got handed an infinite size 3x on every stock across every market and i didn't trade it becuase trump sounded like he legitimately might nuke iran fuck my gay life

@st_louis_stan It sorta gets to me when you see the most beautiful homes in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, then you check the home prices and they reached escape velocity more than a decade ago.

Typa home that a bus driver and his elementary school teacher wife bought in Carmel-by-the-Sea for inflation-adjusted $200,000 in 1959 that cost $4.7 million today

@tallzabby @YIMBYLAND

@NicholasGillert @YIMBYLAND I thought you threw in boat loan interest as some humorous and ridiculous hyperbole. Like the most unreasonable thing that anyone could possibly think of. Then it showed up elsewhere in my feed and I realized it was real.

What the fuck are we even doing here?

@zerohedge Tim Apple was good at selling iPhones, but he messed up with the Vision. Jobs would’ve sent it back to the engineering team, it’s less of a product and more of a promising dev kit. And what about the Apple Car? The M-series chips are great though. Best of luck to Ternus.

Under Cook, Apple's market cap grew from $350 billion to $4 trillion, more than 1,000% increase; meanwhile revenue quadrupled, from $108 billion in 2011 to $416 billion in 2025. That's some serious Price/Sales expansion

@Thinkwert Netflix in 2010 was the greatest. It was before every company decided to have their own streaming app, so Netflix had most of what you wanted. If they didn’t, you’d get a DVD from them in 2-3 days. All for about $10 a month.

This is why old school Netflix (back when they mailed DVDs) was such a revelation. They had almost *any movie* you could ever want. I (very wrongly) predicted the pivot to streaming would fail because they gave up what for me was their most important feature: huge selection.

@apralky Life hits the fast-forward button after 25 or so. You could genuinely sit in the same spot and notice a year went by.

Crazy mid-twenties blackpill that "life is short" as a platitude is not some metaphorical declaration on the futility of Earthly Delights but actually very literal -- one comes to notice that 75 years is just very few years

@redaction I told someone a few weeks ago you could get a double cheeseburger at McDonald’s for $1 two decades ago. They didn’t believe me, they asked where. Fucking everywhere dude.

@lukeburgis Lamb is $35 per lb? Prime ribeye is cheaper.

Something is deeply wrong. I picked out these three things from my local DC farmers market this morning. I handed him my card, day dreaming about something else, and continued on my way. About halfway down the block, I remembered what I heard him casually say: $99

@pmarca This is the kind of stuff you’d read on a 4chan greentext on a late Saturday night in 2010 from a supposed researcher who said the project was being funded by a financier who also trafficked children in the Caribbean and then you closed your laptop to play Black Ops zombies

Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope

@BotRhetoricist @uckema As someone who grew up in Portland, I’m shocked by how much the city has declined in less than a decade. It has this really dark aura now.

@uckema Maine is like that too, brother. Go to Portland and you will feel it, same with Lewiston, or Augusta or Bangor.

Burlington Vermont is shockingly hood also people are nasty in the streets. It feels like "what if 90s gritty NY but everyone has pantogonia gear". I didn't expect the hood in Vermont

NEW: If Waymo gets its way, 2 million workers will be out of work. When Waymo gets a firm hold on a city, wages go down. Some drivers now have to work 12 hours day, 7 days a week just to get by. This isn't inevitable — but Big Tech is spending millions to make you think it is.

@litcapital Swaps on subprime mortgage bonds stopped being offered a year before the crisis kicked off because the trade was obvious at that point. The people on the other side of this trade are either morons or they know something we don’t.

Private credit credit default swaps

@ArtemisConsort People who are against space exploration and settlement come across as deeply sinister and authoritarian. They see space as a threat because it functions as an escape from them. At least King James I had the decency to let the Pilgrims leave.

Space exploration is great because it reveals the moral evil of the anti-colonialists. There are no indigenous humans on the moon. There is no life on the moon at all. Turns out they just hate progress. They hate knowledge and growth and beauty.

@deanwball My issue is the crime. There’s been two shootings (one fatal) on my block in under a year.

My plan is to leave DC for Virginia before the next mayor is sworn in, or shortly after at the very least. DC is incredibly vulnerable. It has the following major defects: 1. An incompetent and corrupt government that does not provide basic services effectively 2. A government whose cost structure depends on taxing the wealthy at levels that approach NYC, but very very little of the charm, charisma, or pull of a place like NYC; indeed, unlike NYC, the surrounding suburbs of Virginia and Maryland are better in essentially every way, including quality-of-life amenities typically associated with living in a big city. To put it simply, DC doesn’t have the kind of moat that allows a place like NYC to shake its residents down so aggressively. For many, it’s worth being robbed by the government of NYC in exchange for living in NYC because NYC is an amazing city; DC is a deeply mediocre place at its best, so the robbery is more apparent and feels less worthwhile. 3. A metropolitan economy that is probably in recession due to the Trump Admin’s cuts to federal government staffing. This means the fiscal margin for error is shrinking. 4. An upcoming mayoral election that will almost surely see a Mamdani-esque candidate win, but because of DC’s fundamental mediocrity, she will have none of the charm or wit of Mamdani. She will just be a radically progressive moron who makes lots of mistakes, further upsets the polluted business environment, doesn’t do any good things like build housing (one metric along which DC has performed well under the current Mayor), and does nothing to fix corruption or incompetence. This new mayor will do things like build bike lanes, except that they’ll take 3 years, cost vastly more per mile than they do in Northern Europe, etc etc. The progressives will continue their post-Bernie shtick of “a very small and superficial fraction of Northern European governance, but way more expensive and worse.” So basically we are about to elect a Mayor who will performatively annihilate any chance this town had of improving itself, all in service of (1) Orange Man Bad, MSNBC politics and (2) maintaining the illusion that progressives have anything resembling a vision for how to govern that goes beyond “plow even more of the rich people’s money into the Corruption Machine.” The diagnosis below of DC politics is way more charitable to DC than I have been but it is fundamentally accurate. This place is cooked. If you are young and want to move to this area, go for the suburbs. If you currently live here, get the hell out. No renaissance awaits this place; a decade or more of decay looms.

@BenShindel Bond allocations are there for the average investor who would shit bricks and panic sell when VOO drops 40 percent in a crisis, locking in losses.

Why does Fidelity want me, a 28-year old, to invest “less aggressively”? This is just plain bad advice. My money is in index funds. It wants me to invest in bonds 30 years before retirement?

@EliNew18 @NathanpmYoung She was asked the most important question about a wealth tax and didn't know what to say, so she provided a strawman, cited some rando academic, and turned off replies. How could there have been an argument to be had?

@NathanpmYoung She gave two valid arguments (defer to expert and shouldn't maximize for welfare of a small subset) while you and OP gave zero arguments.