Galen @Lido

Weekend reading:

The future I’m here for:

5/ The size and decentralization of this object / process gives me some peace. Big things tend to have lots of inertia, and democracy is huge.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

4/ This absurd Hyperobject is still my most vivid memory of the work ten years later.
US democracy is similar in its orchestration and scale—an organic, slow, trillion-dollar, binary state machine—an absurd Hyperobject hiding in plain view.

3/ One of the most surreal scenes in Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem is the human computer: an army of soldiers arrayed with binary placards, processing rudimentary computations that in our timeline are solved by vacuum tubes and transistors.

2/ From this vantage, it’s remarkable the cost of maintaining the option. If we look at the US election cycle by itself, including the cost of election advertising, lost productivity in the years preceding an election, etc., it’s likely somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1 trillion every four years.

1/ To make a Churchillian formulation, Democracy is not about picking the best / right / good horse. Rather, it’s about maintaining the option to choose a new horse.

It is now time to correct this mistake and shake off the illusion that men are born to be slaveholders and that the only thing wrong in the past was that not all men could be equally so.”

“Between the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, the alchemic dream misled many otherwise authentic Western humanists. The illusion prevailed that the machine was a laboratory-made homunculus, and that it could do our labor instead of slaves.

Notable that there aren’t any crypto protocols on this list. My view is Ethereum etc is not in the ‘incremental friction fixing paradigm’, but in the ‘world reimagining protocol paradigm.’

Wonder if “fixes friction only” is a good proxy for how gigafucked a software company will be.

The startup playbook for the past decade has been “find a pain point that’s felt by a million people and build something to fix that pain.”

The promise of agentic computing is ‘little boxed dudes who smooth friction.’

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It’s surreal that I can show up at any international airport with a little grey booklet issued by the world governing authority of automobiles and within ten minutes get behind the wheel of a 1500kg vehicle, and barrel down the highway at 90km/h past road signs in a language I will never understand.

Happy New Year 🎉

Southern Thai sarai puang a-ngoon (sea grape!) salad.

Spotted early morning en route to Changi airport.

We rented a slightly busted Honda Civic from the tourism booth at the arrivals terminal. It’s all black with heavy tinted windows and the whole interface is Thai. Traffic seems manageable, though we did arrive on a Sunday night and the empty width of the roads implies to expect more tomorrow.

It’s always a bit of a pleasure to arrive in a new place under the cover of night. You move around in the city, or what feels to be a mountain, but ultimately wait for morning to properly take stock of where you’ve landed. Hello from Chiang Mai! Let’s see what we find tomorrow.

What happens when we take Paul Graham’s lesson that the act of writing is the act of thinking, together with Barthes’ lesson, that rereading is the condition of getting outside yourself as a subject, and interpolate these together in the age of generative text summaries and generative writing?

Saturday etymology: Ricotta means ‘twice cooked’ in Italian. It’s made from whey left over from production of other cheeses. Likewise, panacotta is ‘cream cooked.’

As a Caucasus region enthusiast (Kakhetian wine, Lasha Talakhadze, and khachapuri) it pains me that only today did I learn that Georgian Chanting refers not to the period of British monarchic history, but to my most beloved region and country.

Georgian Chanting = Georgia the country.

Ran a free bike repair workshop on the weekend with some homies in Singapore on Ann Siang Hill.

One of my favorite neighbourhoods in Singapore, both for the architecture and colonial era street names, is Sembawang to the nation’s north.

Black and white houses, recessed overgrown pillboxes, the Terror Club, etc.

LNY offerings

Modernist Kampung

USA furikake

PostScript

Where does this leave things? I welcome a shakeout of a lot of the above forces. Happy to contribute to the open value coordination layer of the internet.

As the Bank of Japan threatens to raise interest rates, investments that would flow through these channels dry up.

This saps speculative volume from crypto.

It also dries up as a future funding option if/when the BoJ raises interest rates.

“The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland!” In a sense the carry trade is performing a sort of geo arbitrage to get back to an earlier financial policy era. “The dream of the ZIRP era is alive in Tokyo.”

When repayment comes due, the financier is only on the hook to repay their original yen loan, with its correspondingly low borrowing costs. This strategy shits the bed when the yen significantly strengthens.