Riku

Bitcoin Fundamentalist: Bitcoin reaches its full potential by remaining true to its core principles: self-custody, personal nodes, decentralization, immutability, and use as money. Fundamentalists seek to protect Bitcoin from corruption, capture, or compromise.

PG on what the world should do: Enable ambitious founders to start companies solving hard problems. Back young builders over safe paths or incumbents. Technology magnifies productivity gaps—reward output, curiosity, and execution. Minimize bureaucracy and ideology that slow builders. Next 50 years, two scenarios: High-agency: Startups compound AI, biotech, and computation gains. Upstarts displace the slow. Radical abundance and capability jumps. Future generations see today as primitive. Default: Tech advances anyway through decentralized efforts and optimization (e.g. LLM costs). Institutions lag, creating friction and uneven wins. Trajectory upward but bumpier due to cultural drag.

I strive to make my writing unsummarizable, in the sense that it has so little fluff left in it that if you take any words out, as summaries by definition do, you lose a lot of interesting ideas.

I loved my walk around Asunción center last night, seeing Paraguayans happy, excited, UNITED.. there was no riots or violence–pure togetherness. I am not a football fan yet I understand Paraguayans little better again. Much respect 🥳

China’s started using anti fatigue laser lights on some highways to keep drivers alert at night.

⚡️Musk found a way to measure institutional stupidity in dollars. That is why this matters. The “magic wand number” strips a product down to its physical floor. What are the atoms? Aluminum. Titanium. Copper. Steel. Carbon fiber. Silicon. Energy. Labor at its most irreducible. If a perfect god-machine could rearrange those atoms instantly into the finished product, what would it cost? That number is the floor. Everything above that floor is the cost of arrangement. Manufacturing. Design. Procurement. Labor. Tooling. Supply chain. Bureaucracy. Regulation. Meetings. Defects. Rework. Legacy assumptions. Vendor margin. Managerial cowardice. Bad engineering. Complexity worship. Institutional drift. The “idiot index” measures the distance between the physical floor and the actual delivered cost. That distance is where civilization leaks. This is a devastating idea because it turns vague inefficiency into a ratio. It gives stupidity a number. Once stupidity has a number, it can be hunted. The highest-level principle: Reality is cheap. Bad coordination is expensive. The atoms are often not the problem. The process is the problem. The raw material is cheap. The finished object is expensive because human systems are full of accumulated nonsense: inherited designs, supplier lock-in, procurement rituals, overengineering, compliance theater, fake expertise, management layers, and nobody willing to ask the humiliating question: “Why does this thing cost 100 times more than the stuff inside it?” That question is nuclear. Most institutions cannot ask it honestly because the answer usually indicts the institution itself. SpaceX could ask it because Musk had no reverence for the inherited aerospace priesthood. The old industry reasoned from precedent: rockets are expensive because rockets have always been expensive. Musk reasoned from matter: if the atoms are cheap, the price is mostly coordination failure. That is the whole fracture between first-principles operators and legacy institutions. Legacy institutions protect the accumulated explanation for why things are expensive. First-principles operators attack the cost delta. The idiot index applies everywhere. In healthcare: why does a procedure cost 50 times the physical input? In defense: why does a part cost $13,000 when the material is $200? In housing: why does shelter become impossible when wood, labor, and land do not explain the whole gap? In education: why does knowledge cost six figures when distribution cost is near zero? In software: why do companies spend millions on tools whose underlying functionality can be rebuilt for pennies in compute? In government: why does every public project become a ritual sacrifice to process? In corporate America: why do ten people need three weeks to create what one focused person with AI can produce in a day? The idiot index is not just manufacturing math. It is a civilization diagnostic. A high idiot index reveals where reality has been buried under process. That is why this ties directly into AI. AI is going to run this audit across white-collar work. It will ask the same humiliating question: “What is the magic wand number for this output?” A memo. A model. A dashboard. A legal draft. A recruiting screen. A support response. A market brief. A strategy deck. A codebase. A finance process. If AI can produce 80% of the output for 2% of the old cost, the human coordination layer has a catastrophic idiot index. That is the real white-collar repricing.

It's not just luxury hotels that are a scam, it's almost everything that's luxury that's a scam Gf bought Rimowa suitcases, expensive and supposed to be better quality than regular ones, but of course they're much worse They keep breaking, like all of them, cracks in the handles, cracks in the sides, it's just cheap plastic shit but it costs $1000 or more Rimowa was bought by LVMH in 2016 which has an average profit margin of 66% and whose strategy is to increase prices by ~5x, decrease costs by ~5x and then create artificial scarcity (limited availability per shop) because people want what they can't get (not me though but many) LVMH is kinda like the luxury version of private equity, it makes everything more expensive and worse and hard to get!