Aaron VanDevender🔬

CEO @MethidAI, quantum physicist, skydiver, YIMBY🥑🔰, KM6PYC.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@srlawton @kimmaicutler Still a zoning problem. Exclusionary zoning ➡️ supply shortage ➡️ price spike ➡️ property tax spike ➡️ Prop 13 backlash ➡️ THE ARISTOCRATS!

[Kaleidah @Kaleidahart]

At the edge of a new evolutionary chamber, one question keeps calling:
When future generations (or beings beyond Earth) look back…

What kind of ancestors will they say we were?

#AI #TheMotherCode

The Mother Code → https://t.co/qtdv0vptFj

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

It's not just that Paul Verhoeven failed at satire, it's that he failed to recognize what is best in life.

[George From NY @GeorgeFromNY1]

In brief, here's what happened:

1. Robert Heinlein wrote STARSHIP TROOPERS to showcase martial virtues like honor, self-sacrifice and heroism.

2. Paul Verhoeven, a member of the Arts 'n Crafts wing of the European Left, was displeased by this and wanted to piss all over Heinlein's message.

3. Paul is a gifted filmmaker but an inept propagandist. He dropped the ball so badly in Troopers that he wound up celebrating what he set out to mock.

4. The Bugs are bad. The Federation is good. Rico and his friends are good. Even dressing Carl up like an SS officer didn’t make HIM less good.

5. It’s one of the most remarkable backfires in propaganda history and I do a happy dance every time I think of the little Dutch boy grinding his teeth over people loving what he wanted them to hate.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@MinnieFluff @ImogenLeewriter

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@MinnieFluff @ImogenLeewriter It's ok, Claude Cowork can write your essays in Word and make realistic edits along the way. It costs more tokens, but you'll get a complete edit history.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

Neither lucky nor deserved, a secret third thing. (It's fate).

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

I've been having Claude work on a printed circuit board for me and it's been leaving me notes in the silkscreen layer. Definite "help I'm trapped in this fortune cookie factory!" vibes.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

Owning property, improving it, and feeling connected to it is good for people to experience. Without property taxes, it gets hoarded by a small number of people and the price to buy into ownership is too high. Tax gives more people a chance to buy in, even if they can't hold it forever. The flourishing is in the owning and doing.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

Artistic movements have always been about the gatekeepers and taste-makers, not reflections of grassroots sentiment. We've achieved radical democratization through Internet distribution and have no more gatekeepers to define our times.

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

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.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@jennsun @tomo @capydotai @Jackyhuang @chrissyykat @typesfast @typesfaster How did you guys not win this???

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@cremieuxrecueil World Model is the new Foundation Model.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@realEstateTrent https://t.co/Xkcl6UYV40

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Billionaire Palmer Luckey on why he only flies coach

“I don’t fly private and do fly coach,” billionaire founder of Anduril and Oculus Palmer Luckey says. “For me, it’s a reasoned thing. With exceptions for long, international travel, we only cover coach travel for our employees — it’s only a few hours, and it’s a very bad use of company money for us to be buying business or first-class for people. Because we have so much travel at the company, we could easily spend a very serious fraction of our resources on people traveling instead of slightly better seats.”

To lead by example, Palmer will fly coach — even when he uses his own money:

“People say, ‘Well, why don’t you just fly first-class?’ And here’s why: if I’m going to ask my employees to do it, I need to do it too — even when it’s my own money. It’s not that I would appear out of touch, I would literally be out of touch. Maybe one day coach gets so bad that I literally tell everyone, ‘I hear you, we’re all going business now.’ But today is not that day.”

He continues:

“I love the back of the plain by the window. Nobody bothers you. You can let everyone get off the plane before you. You don’t have to fight anybody . . . And my grandpa was a pilot for United Airlines for over 40 years. So I also grew up around commercial airlines and to me there is a certain romanticism to mass-market, mass-available air travel. What an incredible thing. And we did it — America did it! We figured out how to make it economically viable, and we build everyone else’s airplanes. It is an American thing.”

Video source: @myfirstmilpod (2022)

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@dgt10011 New DC License Plate just dropped.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@owl_posting Sound have offered to sell him some jam-on-toast for $1B. He was clearly in the market and had already done the price discovery work for you.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@Jeffdeehan Picture of the $25 minimum wage:

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

One part of UBI nobody talks about is if it becomes Universal, people will securitize it, take on more debt against it. Many will misallocate it. The people it's meant to help the most will end up back where they started. 💸📉

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@nicolasporta31 What the incentive for products and services to pay this markup?

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

1. Labs will use higher-compression tokenizers. Models become less efficient.

2. Users will drop smaller more-efficient models for focused tasks because the tax means not worth the switching overhead.

If the goal is to reduce energy, just tax kWh or carbon.

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

We should federally tax Tokens at the Provider level.

Not a lot. Less than 50c per million tokens.

It will accomplish 4 things (at least )

1. It will push the big AI players to optimize tokenization, caching , routing and localization

Which will

2. Reduce energy usage. Saving them in energy costs more than what they paid in tax and reducing strain created by the growth in energy consumption

Which will

3. Generate maybe 10 billion dollars a year to start, but over the next ten years could grow 30x to 100x

Which will

4. Create a source of funding to pay down the federal debt or deploy, in response to the things AI brings that we don’t expect or don’t like

At some point the models will pass it on to customers. Of course. That’s ok. Customers will have the ability to choose between providers. Or to do everything using open source models locally.

Thoughts ?

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

Have we seen a token overload attack in the wild yet, where like a DoS attack, the attacker causes the defender to burn so many tokens they go bankrupt?

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

A consequence of this is that nobody in healthcare gets rich by making things cheaper, only by making things better. Better is good, but you need markets to produce better AND cheaper.

[Daniel Petkevich @petkevichdan]

This is mind-boggling, but basically no one in the healthcare industry believes in markets.

I went to a small and elite healthcare conference after raising $15M for Fair Square. We were split into tables and asked to design the ideal healthcare system.

I presented my answer to the group: markets. People should pay for healthcare just like they pay for groceries.

Most of the audience sneered at this response. One said, "let me guess, you did YC." These folks were Ivy league MD's, CEO's of healthcare systems etc. They had all sort of reasons for why healthcare was sacred and complicated and therefore should be distributed via sophisticated command economy instead of markets.

The next day, I met the one other guy at the conference who believed in markets. @tjparker.

[Aaron VanDevender🔬 @APVanDevender]

@xAsamoahx The Nikita Khrushchev archetype.