@rorysutherland It all has been about this aspect for people and now Agents:
“It emerges entirely from incentives”.
English
63rdfloor.eth
1.8K posts
@nntaleb Interesting. Haven’t asked other independents, but I could speak for myself and this is 100% my case. There might be a transferable trait of high conviction (knowing what to do and do it yourself) that being an independent entails. Also, could be an extension of skin in the game?
English
Seems to me that self-employed & independent people tend to not like to work under personal trainers telling them precisely what to do.
Is this observation correct?
English
I went through this exact journey myself.
After 13 years climbing the ladder at hedge funds in NYC and ultimately reaching my goal of becoming a portfolio manager, I had a major internal crisis. I had the analytical capabilities to do the job, but my nervous system wasn't wired in a way that aligned with navigating the volatility of the marketplace (and workforce) while also finding internal peace & joy. I worked with a coach, and he asked me "is this what you want to be doing at 50?". I was burned out and no longer found meaning in seeking to generate 300bps of alpha for institutional LPs - the answer was obvious. I knew I needed a change.
I decided to move my family from NYC to Scottsdale, and downshift & reorient my career, while also meaningfully restructuring my personal cost structure.
I thought the peace and joy would flow immediately upon the move...remove the stressor and joy arrives, right? Right?!
WELL, for really the first time in my life, this gray feeling of depression crept in, and it surprised me.
In NYC I was special. I had status, I had an identify. The first thing people ask at a cocktail party in Tribeca is "what do you do?". With pride, I responded "I'm a PM at Citadel". Brokers rolled out the red carpet and "friends" emerged given your perch and your ability to help them. I was infected with mimetic desire and I moved into a beautiful apartment building and was neighbors with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tyra Banks. And it was fun, it was thrilling.
Then, all of a sudden I didn't have that. I was a failed "semi-retired" PM. I looked around me, and I didn't feel special...I felt, for the first time in my life, average. I lived in an average house, drove an average car, and lived an average lifestyle. And it hit me harder than I thought it would.
And I went through it. I struggled for a solid 18 months. I went through the letting go of my ego, the letting go of the identity that I had been so carefully crafting for nearly 20 years.
What did I learn along the way?
I learned that depression is a feature, not a bug. A period of depression, when associated with the letting go of identity, is actually a well-established threshold in the archetypal evolution of male spirituality.
The journey for me kicked off a transition towards a much deeper exploration of the true meaning of life, which I believe is a deeply personal question. For me, this transition point marked a transition towards inner growth as a primary metric of success. Who I can become.
In exploration, I learned that what I was going through was far from unique, but was actually a well-established transition point in a well-lived life.
I stumbled upon Richard Rohr's wonderful book, Falling Upward, and it seemed to explain this journey in wonderful precision.
How the loss of attachment to status and identity is actually a wonderful gift!
I have established this framework as a core part of my personal philosophy of life. And, with some distance from the gray, now look at that period of my life as a wonderful gift. A necessary letting go and reorientation towards more true and more enduring sources of peace, joy & meaning.
So, if you are feeling depressed at the loss of identity. Keep going. It's a sign you are on the right track.
Blueprintsmb@blueprintsmb22
status = identity. get good grades. go to top school. get top banking/consulting job. maybe MBA. pivot to "next" step in corporate/hedge funds/PE, etc. brunches, cocktail parties are spent sharing what is going on at work. in NYC/SF, the first question is "what do you do for work." this was my path the first 2 decades of my career. best thing i ever did for my mental health was leaving the fish bowl of finance and NYC at the same time. spending my day working in a factory and living a less busy life in new jersey has meaningfully reduce my daily stress but i had to basically be okay with "killing" my previous identity before making this pivot. why i probably only did this at 40 vs 30. at 30 i had a way bigger ego and was more competitive. now i just want to be home for dinner and not work on weekends x.com/a_musingcat/st…
English
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 White House says crypto and blockchain technology can 'revolutionize' America's financial system.
English
.@balajis says AI is widening the verification gap. A massive number of jobs will be needed to close it.
Prompting floods the world with fakes. Crypto brings back proof.
“You're gonna need cryptographically hashed posts and crypto IDs ... to know the data wasn't tampered with.”
In the AI era, trust has to be engineered.
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy
Good post from @balajis on the "verification gap". You could see it as there being two modes in creation. Borrowing GAN terminology: 1) generation and 2) discrimination. e.g. painting - you make a brush stroke (1) and then you look for a while to see if you improved the painting (2). these two stages are interspersed in pretty much all creative work. Second point. Discrimination can be computationally very hard. - images are by far the easiest. e.g. image generator teams can create giant grids of results to decide if one image is better than the other. thank you to the giant GPU in your brain built for processing images very fast. - text is much harder. it is skimmable, but you have to read, it is semantic, discrete and precise so you also have to reason (esp in e.g. code). - audio is maybe even harder still imo, because it force a time axis so it's not even skimmable. you're forced to spend serial compute and can't parallelize it at all. You could say that in coding LLMs have collapsed (1) to ~instant, but have done very little to address (2). A person still has to stare at the results and discriminate if they are good. This is my major criticism of LLM coding in that they casually spit out *way* too much code per query at arbitrary complexity, pretending there is no stage 2. Getting that much code is bad and scary. Instead, the LLM has to actively work with you to break down problems into little incremental steps, each more easily verifiable. It has to anticipate the computational work of (2) and reduce it as much as possible. It has to really care. This leads me to probably the biggest misunderstanding non-coders have about coding. They think that coding is about writing the code (1). It's not. It's about staring at the code (2). Loading it all into your working memory. Pacing back and forth. Thinking through all the edge cases. If you catch me at a random point while I'm "programming", I'm probably just staring at the screen and, if interrupted, really mad because it is so computationally strenuous. If we only get much faster 1, but we don't also reduce 2 (which is most of the time!), then clearly the overall speed of coding won't improve (see Amdahl's law).
English
EBETHDA :
“ Earnings Before Ethereum, Taxes, Depreciation & Amortization “
Don’t sleep @ensdomains
#Ethereum #crypto
English
Joseph Chalom@joechalom
After 20 years at BlackRock and helping to lead its digital asset strategy, I’m beginning a new chapter: I’ve joined @sharplink as Co-CEO. Here’s why. At BlackRock, I helped launch: - IBIT — world’s largest Bitcoin ETP - ETHA — world’s largest Ethereum ETP - BUIDL — world’s largest tokenized fund (built on Ethereum) We didn’t just talk about digital assets, we bridged TradFi and crypto. Now, I’m joining @sharplink, a company led by @ethereumJoseph and built on a clear belief: That Ethereum is becoming the foundation of global finance. And I couldn’t agree more. Stablecoins, tokenized assets, AI agents, are all moving onchain. And it’s happening on Ethereum. That’s where the future is being built. SharpLink is already one of the largest corporate holders of $ETH. Our goal is not just to hold $ETH, but to activate it, using native staking, restaking, and Ethereum-based yield strategies. All to increase the value of our treasury and create long-term shareholder value. We’re building a bridge between institutional capital and Ethereum-native yield, packaged in a single public equity. The asset is $ETH, the ticker is $SBET.
English
For too long, I confused approval with direction.
If people clapped, I was on the right path.
If they criticized, I must’ve missed something.
But real purpose rarely wins a popularity contest.
Now I’m trying to model something better for my kids:
That peace doesn’t come from applause
It comes from knowing who you are, and walking that path anyway.
Even when the crowd stares.
Even when it’s quiet.
That’s the kind of courage I want them to carry.
English
Being judged is the price you pay for pursuing your dream.
Don't see it as a bad thing. See it as the truth:
You're stepping away from the crowd.
Precisely where you want to be.
English
Onchain identity…..#ens fam we’re close @ensdomains
Coinbase 🛡️@coinbase
Today, onchain is trending. Tomorrow, it's normal.
English
Crypto > Onchain Identity > @ensdomains
bridgelender.eth
nplbuyer.eth
noteinvestor.eth
capintro.eth
Don’t sleep on your onchain identity
Cointelegraph@Cointelegraph
🇺🇸 BULLISH: Coinbase partners with PNC, the 7th-largest US bank, to let 9M customers buy, sell, and hold crypto directly in their accounts.
English
@Cointelegraph Crypto > Onchain Identity > @ensdomains
bridgelender.eth
nplbuyer.eth
noteinvestor.eth
capintro.eth
Don’t sleep on your onchain identity
English
🇺🇸 BULLISH: Coinbase partners with PNC, the 7th-largest US bank, to let 9M customers buy, sell, and hold crypto directly in their accounts.
English
@brian_armstrong @PNCBank Crypto > Onchain Identity > @ensdomains
bridgelender.eth
nplbuyer.eth
noteinvestor.eth
capintro.eth
Don’t sleep on your onchain identity
English
The easier we can make it to buy and hold crypto, the faster adoption happens.
Excited to be working with @PNCBank, one of the largest banks in the US, to give their clients easy access to buying and holding crypto and using USDC, powered by Coinbase.
Coinbase 🛡️@coinbase
Customers of one of the largest banks in the US wanted easier access to crypto. So we've partnered with them to make it happen. @PNCBank clients will soon be able to buy, sell and hold crypto.
English
@ystrickler @JoshuaCitarella This:
In the age of infinite content, finite and intentional might be the most radical choice.
English
The algorithm wants us to think bigger numbers always win. But could 1,500 of the right people be enough?
@JoshuaCitarella and I started a podcast called "New Creative Era" earlier this year. The numbers (about 1,500 downloads per episode) were smaller than expected.
But after initial discouragement, we started talking about quality versus quantity. Among those 1,500 listeners, we discovered, were editors of major publications, museum curators, and other people at high levels of the culture industry.
This is the paradox many creative people face today. The internet rewards volume over scarcity and quality over quantity.
But I’m learning to measure differently. Because here's the thing about small, quality audiences: you never know which conversation will start the chain reaction. Which episode will reach the one person who changes everything.
Some of the most incredible things in my life happened because someone heard something I made and it started a domino effect I couldn't have predicted.
In the age of infinite content, finite and intentional might be the most radical choice.
English
With GENIUS and CLARITY, the US will lead in crypto/blockchain/web3. 🇺🇸🚀
miles jennings@milesjennings
With the GENIUS Act celebration done, builders already want to know what's next. The answer is CLARITY – crypto market structure legislation – which also got overwhelming bipartisan support in the House last week. Here's everything you need to get caught up on CLARITY:
English