Will Sutton

@zriboua There must have been 1000% increase in short beards for 20-40 year old middle class men. Happend between 2000 and 2020. Theres an interesting cultural explanation too. People will notice that the mustache is now taking over since 2024.

It’s very odd that despite all the abundance of this century, it still lacks an aesthetic, no major non political and purely artistic movement, no "new avant garde," despite all the complains about individualism, conformity and "community" have never been so overwhelmingly present, weird. Maybe some movements are taking shape and I don’t see them yet.

My take on the Clarity Act: 1. For Bitcoin. Very Bullish. Self Custody explicitly protected. Clear legal framework for lending, wrappers etc.. Banks can go nuts. 2. For DeFi. Generally Bullish. Protocols are intact as long as they are decentralized. Front ends need to do more Geo Blocking / SAR / potentially KYC. 3. For Stablecoins. Bullish, but yield bearing coins get heavily restricted. Banks win. 4. For "Crypto/Bitcoin Companies". Very Bullish. US Companies building truly decentralized protocols are fine. Products can start out more centralized and decentralize to comply. This would start being enforcable in summer 2027 according to Claude.

Cool demo from @OpenAgents Sell your compute for bitcoin! youtu.be/YEdH9aTc-pw?si…

We interviewed @charliebcurran, the AI filmmaker behind these legendary Spencer Pratt videos — while Hollywood panics about the technology, Charlie’s optimistic: “[AI] is how you get an artistic revolution,” he told us. Full profile from @eventidia below 👇

Youre right to challenge the narrative "Amateur solo dev bests entire industry". It was a prediction for ai impact and didnt show up yet. In 2020s america, talent is allocated to software like brazilians cultivate soccer talent. Thats tough competition for an unfunded amateur.

Everyone has been 'vibe coding' for like 2 years with this 'insane' tool and there are still 0 (zero) notable game changing products that compare to what dedicated humans created in their basements prior to AI. Anyone w/ expertise in any subject immediately realises how overrated it is for giving you anything beyond the most basic information in it. If you can legitimately write, any writing produced by an LLM is a disgusting insult to all of your senses. Good for the boring and tediously repetitive tasks + organising information, but still so unreliable and far away from what Silicon Valley keep trying to shill us.

@xwanyex Dont overindex on all tech = consumer entertainment Plenty of deep tech work is behind the scenes, e.g. the "shale revolution" (aka fracking) is the only reason our home energy bills havent sky rocketed and why we can build and power the data centers.

My best guess is model RL is being trained extensively on text based RPGs (full of ghouls and goblins) for long horizon task planning like NetHack github.com/NetHack-LE/nle

@ATabarrok Better analogy: Netflix makes their profit by streaming you *more* movies. The logic of the analogy is both are renewable consumer bundling subscriptions with strong bargaining power against their suppliers.

Few people understand: Health insurance companies make most of their profit by paying claims, not by denying them.

this is what it used to look like fyi

@xwanyex Monasteries and Convents do seem to work. They often persist for centuries. But when you mix genders, they last for a couple months: the Paris Commune of 1871, the Branch Davidians of 1993, etc.

"Run the experiment, please make seredipitous mistakes" From the discovery of penicillin to chemotherapy, accidents have been a fruitful part of science.

Heres the tradeoff visualized: With traditional development, results emerge methodically but painfully slow. But with AI you get something quick; often quite good but not quite right. Youve traded for a diff type of pain: quality and fixups come to dominate release cycles.

But problems emerge when trying to extract the full value: You discover these discount items - unlike the hand crafted clothes - aren't fitted to your body. They have sizes. And some have stains. Cheap + plentiful clothes require a tradeoff, more quality control for the buyer.

There's a cognitive dissonance in AI-driven dev. My analogy is the discount clothing store. Imagine a world where clothes were handcrafted and expensive...and then walking into a Salvation Army and seeing racks of $2 shirts. It would be mind blowing as your first impression.

@SandyofCthulhu The Mirror piece: it can only capture an opposing piece which could currently capture it. E.g. can capture on a diagonal with a bishop or on a straight line with a rook. But it cant capture a rook diagonal to it. Like in cartoons they use a mirror to reflect back a laser.

Here is an interesting new chess piece that I have actually used. It was called the Joker (but maybe bureaucrat is better). Put a quarter (or a krugerrand) on square d4. When either player moves a piece, the joker also moves, exactly mimicking the player move. For instance, if White’s opening move is Pawn f2-f4, moving it 2 spaces forward, the joker on d4 will ALSO move 2 spaces forward, ending on d6. If Black then moves Knight to f6, the joker will hop from d6 to c4, copying the knight. The joker cannot capture. If a planned move would make it hit or land on a piece or leave the board, that move is illegal. It copies ALL moves. For instance if you Castle queen-side, the joker moves two spaces to the player’s left (5 the king) then 3 to the right. If you arrange things right, with the joker you can literally checkmate a king WITH a king. You just have to get the joker in a position where the threatened king can’t move towards the enemy. The game’s winner gets the joker coin. As poor students we used dimes or quarters. You, of course, should use Canadian 1 oz gold Maple Leafs. It adda a whole new level to chess that you will either find fascinating and cerebral, or frustrating I guess. Let me know if you’ve used it or are curious.

@xwanyex The guarantee:

Broke: I used a gazillion tokens last month on my projects. Bespoke: I wasted a gazillion gallons of water on my projects.

@xwanyex America is a formidable adversary: when you nuke her cities, she gets stronger. (Timing on this matches up too if you think about it)