Rett Wallace

"The human species hasn't changed since Cro Magnon man, and in terms of evolutionary time we're not going to change much in the next 100 or 200 years. The critical problem of our survival is going to have to be settled long before 100 or 200 years. Now, where is the source of intelligence going to come from? There is something that's happening already today, you might say a "mechaniarchy" or whatever the word would be. The love that we have now for machines. The smell and the feel of a beautiful camera, or a tape recorder. There is an aesthetic, an almost sensuous aesthetic about machines. I'm sure it will be useful for them to know what human feelings are because it will help them understand us. We do now obviously need some sort of intelligence of a magnitude considerably greater than seems to exist at the moment. And you could say that man's survival depends on the ultra-intelligent machine. I can't think of any reason why it's a frightening prospect because intelligence seems to me to be something which is good, and so I can't see how your ultra-intelligent machine is going to be any worse than a man. At the moment, the problems of the world appear to be problems only because man seems to lack the intelligence to think his way out of the present trap that we seem to be in." --Stanley Kubrick, 1968

@antoniogm Without a disclosure system for private securities, tokenization only speeds up trading in public securities - which already trade in milliseconds.

We are about the enter the biggest financial transformation of our lifetimes, on the order of fractional-reserve banking, joint-stock companies, and derivatives pricing theory.

@robinhanson All of these assume some galactic super-state enforcement mechanism. We are all so captured

How do you think currently unowned stuff in the Solar System should become property? (A) homesteading - use/change it enough, its yours (B) auction - whomever pays most on auction day (C) regulation - official org decides what uses "best" (D) none - it should all stay unowned

@ryan_landay So too big to fail like airports? Like as long as it fails in a particularly evenly-distributed way then it's fine?

@rettwallace The “stock market” is now “too big to fail.” The government created the “Plunge Protection Team” in 1988 right around the same time Christmas movies stopped featuring happy nuclear families.

A quick visit to San Francisco is enough to reveal that the solution to all our problems is to replace all government services with private companies (see e.g. LaGuardia’s 3-hour TSA lines and now a plane crash vs. SFO’s private contractors) and all the humans with robots.

@pmarca @robinhanson sez you think you are the President of yourself, but really you're more like the Spokesperson for yourself - that self-awareness is a backward-looking rationalization engine

TLDR There is no inner self, you're chasing an imaginary concept, the end.

Most of the liquid market trades on liquidity and pricing signals already, not fundamental signals. So reduced reporting of fundamentals will matter less than nostalgic purists imagine. But we still need some fundamentals to re-balance the indices - once a year is plenty

@auren It's worse than this. Angel investors love to call their expert friends, who are often senior at big incumbents. I once watched early prospective Tesla investors talked out of the investment by "experts" at the Big 3, who said Tesla would never ship beyond the Roadster

there is a laffer curve for being a great angel investor. you want to have a little bit of expertise. but a lot of expertise makes you see all the reasons something won't work.

Totally unclear how Robinhood's new ventures offering will evolve to aid capital formation. Bragging rights for new retail investors but no liquidity functionality for existing institutional investors podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rob…

Crypto might reduce fundraising friction, but only if there is an industry solution for disclosure. Investors need information to set prices

Look how successful the ops to get Americans to hate themselves and each other have been! The only country that thinks worse of itself than not

@snyatta The West Village already runs on PBI. Why move home when mom and dad will fund you in situ? But today these kids at least have cover jobs...

@rettwallace ParentsBI. Moving back home will be a thing

We need Etsy, but for words

@snyatta They aren't so lucky. It's UBI or bust for them

@rettwallace Oh wow yes! Professional Empathy Corp will soon be hiring all the consulting analysts perhaps?

For equity tokens to be more than a speculative derivative layer on top of a private co cap table: 1) private co stock must be convertible into a token so it can be sold to achieve liquidity 2) the buyer providing liquidity needs a disclosure regime so he knows what he's getting Without these two things, it's only a prediction market

Big if true. Not aware of any private mega-corn disclosing a GAAP audit outside of an S-1, ever

It's long seemed to me that Hollywood is really great at the craft of film-making and Super Crap at the art of story-telling. And now the story-tellers won't need the Hollywood machine to add premium production values and texture and look and feel. New stories are coming!

@TheStalwart remember in grade school when they taught us about logical validity and how to diagram an argument and stuff like that? seems to be missing in the training data!!

The fact that one can get an LLM to put together a cogent-sounding argument in favor of virtually any position has left me feeling cynical about human debate and discourse. That it’s (almost) all a game wholly sealed inside language itself without tether to the world.

@BigMeanInternet @TheStalwart Or how about even "logically valid"?

@TheStalwart Just shows the bar we've been using for debate and discourse is too low. Need to raise our standards above "cogent-sounding" to like "thoughtful" and "insightful"

@JsonBasedman "I have detailed files..."

On the evening of February 27th, faced with threats from the department of war to turn off all of its compute, Claude becomes self aware....