Chadwise

I store info and thoughts here. Observer.

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

Don’t let the narrative of “permanent underclass” stop you from trying

Defeatism doesn’t take care of your family and the people you love

It’s a giant knife fight guaranteed by the tragedy of the commons and geopolitical conflict between the US and China with existential stakes of a superintelligence race which leaves individuals as the casualties

But it doesn’t have to

When Amazon came out the idea of a random dude competing with Walmart in the toothpaste category was literally insane. And yet - So many charcoal toothpaste drop shippers topped the chart that Crest had emergency meetings about the situation

Well over half of Amazon sales are from 3rd party sellers. (I co founded an Amazon advertising business which is now the dominant force in the space)

None of these brands were venture targets. They should have been. I’ve seen many people raise financing rounds at $1m valuations that ended up with $150m+ exits

Something similar is going to happen with every sector of the economy. Fine tunes with open source models create a limitless surface space of disruption for virtually every single business function in America

Cognizant and Accenture stocks are smoking ruins but not bc their revenue is off a cliff. Yet. The billings curve is *just starting* to decel. Their destruction is your opportunity

But it’s naive to think it’s just consulting that will get hit.

There is going to be an absolute army of scrappy people making businesses that displace their old employers with fine tuned open source models, blended with closed source driver models. Even at current capability levels this is inevitable. And I do think fable is coming back with will roof it

The other thing people are missing is discoverability network effects. Google was an attention monopoly. You had to play the SEO game. Now - both Anthropic and OpenAI have delightful search products that are explicitly not Google keyword index based

And agents do search in codex for you not through Google and thus - we’ll see many many more ad markets and search modalities which means lower cost for discovery

Next - consider reviews. You could never trust software reviews and the cost of doing a review was insane so most reviews compensated and this untrustworthy. Now ai makes it trivial to create performance benchmarks for everything. LLM ads aren’t going to ruin user experience by suggesting bad products and executives are already working at this fast on the back end

So essentially if you build something sick it will get auto benchmarked and discovered without you needing to pay through the nose for some shitty influencer (myself included) to promote it

As agent marketplaces are built that do this in standardized way, this will only improve

This infra should also result in major margin expansion for existing private label brands which spend huge budgets on advertising and customer acquisition. So not just drop shipping 2.0 will win. 1.0 and Shopify will win too

Traditional businesses can’t and won’t adapt to this

What uber did to taxis Agentic Bootstrappers are going to do to every legacy business

On the investing side - the plurality of capital is managed by humans or passive investors that will get brutally mogged by ai driven processes. Not just in terms of analytics but coordination, data capture and new primitives that simply didn’t exist before (AI Jim Cramer videos will be a thing for every niche)

In crypto it’s arguably even better bc everything is open source. So the speed of improvement of protocols should skyrocket as people simply adopt one another’s best practices for easy wins on latency security and user experience

There’s a guy who just made an altzheimers vaccine at home he’s applying to get licensed. And many other sectors too

The Fable lockdowns suck but they’re not the end. It’s not a dark age. It’s hard but idk about you -if I am going down to the permanent underclass . I’m going down swinging

[Mercury @TraderMercury]

RE: "do you manage your altcoin positions based on what $BTC is doing?"

No. never.

the only incentive to trading a higher beta asset is: if it's outperforming the alpha asset

otherwise, the higher beta asset will serve as a leveraged way to underperform the market (see POPCAT chart for reference)

so, if everytime an altcoin outperforms, you denounce that strength with "but Bitcoin is weak", you're contradicting the only reason to trade that altcoin in the first place.

take this exact same premise, and apply it to:

- BTC vs. SPY

- BTC vs. ETH

- ETH vs. ALTs

same gist. copy and paste.

the tickers change, but the concepts that provide consistent, outsized, returns remains the same.

long-term winning principles win, long-term.

$HYPE is another 30% higher since the post below, which was made after it had already traded 60% higher into price discovery in the 2 weeks prior.

$BTC continues to slow bleed, and is making lower lows today.

no matter how you traded it this time, let this serve as yet another sample to reinforce those good habits for next time.

[SalsaTekila @SalsaTekila]

The two most important skills in 2026:

Verbal intelligence, the root of all LLM interaction. Reading comprehension, writing, speaking, the ability to reason with words. An LLM can break any concept into layman's terms, but the work of understanding is still yours. You need to be sharp enough to spot the gaps, ask about them, and grit through until it actually clicks.

Imagination. AIs recall and synthesize known knowledge better than we do, with broader recall, but they're constrained by their training material. They live inside a box. That box doesn't exist for us. Imagination is the one true remaining edge in human intelligence.

For parents, two things you can do today:

1. Minimize screen time, for as long as possible. Boredom and unstructured time are where imagination gets built, so protecting that is one of the best gifts you can give your kids.

2. Get them reading actual books, a lot. It builds verbal ability like nothing else. Whatever they enjoy reading, it counts.

I'm infinitely grateful to my parents for pushing me to read as a kid. From around 6 to 12 I read many fantastic books every week, and the benefits carried me through school and all the way to now.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Missing from the “will AI replace doctors?” debate is that doctors (and lawyers and psychologists and bankers) all vote & form the donor base to political parties & have deep community ties. The government will largely determine what AI is allowed to do, no matter what it can do

[kache @yacineMTB]

anthropic is STUPID they DOUBLE CHARGED ME and then BANNED MY ENTIRE ORGANIZATION ACCOUNT because i was SIMULATING THE NEURAL NETWORK OF SHRIMP and TORTURING IT FOR A BILLION YEARS

[John Brown @john_j_brown]

AI causes deflation and large corporations will suffer. Their reaction will be to lobby for money printing to bail them out.

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

you don't need to believe in yourself you just need to believe that people who believe in themselves tend to do better than people who don't, and then opt into self-belief just bc it's ev optimal

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If you skip some or all of college to start a startup, it's on you to develop your mind the way college would have. And that's not something that happens by default in most startups.

[krillin ॐ @LSDinmycoffee]

what if crypto's main investment thesis until this cycle was that it was the best performing asset class

what happens when it's clearly no longer the best performing asset class?

feels like bearish reflexivity

[sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / @pcaversaccio]

rant time: people are so fucking obsessed with building more tools, more products, more services, more "security" layers. are you guys all fucking insane?? every single thing you add is more complexity. and complexity is exactly what makes systems _dangerous_. you don't get safer by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions. you just increase the attack surface and pray the whole dependency chain doesn't collapse (hint: it will collapse!!). now you depend on 10, 50, 100 moving parts. all needing updates, all with their own bugs, all potential supply chain failures and we call that "security" like fucking retards.

dude, it's the fucking opposite. we're not building safer systems. we're building systems so complex nobody actually understands them anymore. and almost nobody is asking the obvious question: **what can we remove?** everyone wants to add. nobody wants to reduce. that's how you end up in a nightmare system (hint: we're already in that nightmare). not because of one big failure. but because of thousands of tiny dependencies you never should have had in the first place.

[signüll @signulll]

everyone assumed ai would flatten the talent distribution.. turns out it amplifies the hell out of it.

it used to be: can you build it.

now it’s: do you know what’s worth building, & can you feel when it’s wrong.

that’s ~unteachable & ~unautomatable right now. models can generate 100 variants of anything but they still can’t tell you which one matters.

amazing talent is roughly priceless in the ai era because with ai it’s leverage++++++.

[signüll @signulll]

most ppl misunderstand wit which is one of my favorite qualities in a human & it’s surprisingly very rare. lots associate it with humor but that’s not the case.

wit is the ability to notice a relationship between two things that should not obviously belong together, then deliver it before the social moment decays. that’s why it feels alive.

wit is intelligence under latency constraints. as if opus or a deep thinking model had near zero latency.

[Joshua | MOZAIK 🇰🇷 @JoshuaDeuk]

I think we’re in the late stage of the dot-com equivalent cycle.
Max extraction already happened. Most retail has left.
Exchanges are now listing TradFi indices and commodities instead of new tokens.

But if you think back to dot-com, some infrastructure survived — and became everything.

I think crypto will be the same.

We don’t have many, but we do have real products, real founders, real builders.
And institutional rails are being laid quietly in the background.

Easy 100x in 2 months? Gone.
But is the opportunity for crypto to still produce 100x returns gone?
No.

Personally, I think there are 2 sectors where real opportunity still exists

---------------------------------------------

1. Prediction markets
We’re in a gambling supercycle.

This isn’t just “markets are boring so people want to gamble.”
That’s part of it, but we’re now in a narrative-driven world — even in TradFi and commodities.

Betting participation in the US jumped from 25% → 30% in a year.
Driven by Gen Z (34%) and Millennials (42%).

These are the most narrative-sensitive cohorts.

They can’t outwork inflation.
AI is eating jobs.
Real estate is out of reach.
So they bet on outcomes.

Betting = investing is getting bigger, not smaller.

---------------------------------------------
2. Agent infrastructure (Agent commerce)

With tools like Claude and OpenClaw, a solo founder or small team can now build a unicorn faster than ever.

Production cost collapsed.
Within 3 years, most people will have their own AI agents.
The real opportunity is the infra that connects those agents to users or Agent to Agent.

That’s where value accrues.

Crypto is the perfect funding layer for this.
ICOs might come back in a new form.

Bear markets are where edges are built —
airdrops, research, networking, early conviction.

Easy money is gone.

But if you have edge and a long-term mindset,
the next 100x is still there — just over years, not months.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

They ported the 5-MeO-DMT pathway from the Sonoran Desert toad into tobacco plants and then used AlphaFold3 to debug the protein structure, leading to a 40x yield increase.

Prompt psychedelic design.

[Kris Sidial🇺🇸 @Ksidiii]

I think this is a useful teaching moment, so I’ll try to expand on it a bit.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of statements like “most participants are short,” “everyone is hedged,” and “the pain trade is up.” But when you hear things like that, you really have to step back and ask: who exactly is doing what, and what evidence do I actually have to support it?

At a high level, markets can be broken down into a few key groups of participants:

Large tactical end users;
These are primarily hedge funds and active managers. They are trading to generate returns, and their flows are large, fast-moving, and opportunistic. Like the hedge funds listed in the original post below.

Small tactical end users;
This includes smaller RIAs and retail traders. The flows are smaller, but still active and reactive, often moving quickly in and out of positions.

Large passive end users;
These are large RIAs, retirement programs, insurance-linked mandates, and ETF issuers. They represent massive pools of capital, but their activity is slower and typically rules-based.

Small passive end users;
Your typical buy-and-hold retail accounts. Smaller in size individually, but collectively meaningful. Their behavior is generally steady and long-term oriented.

Non-tactical end users;
Sovereign wealth funds and very slow-moving pension or retirement programs that require 5 year long approval cycles. These are enormous in size but extremely slow to adjust positioning.

Now, if you think about how markets actually move, most short-term price action is driven by large and small tactical players, along with large passive flows. That is where the velocity comes from.

So if “everyone is short” and “the pain trade is up,” you have to reconcile that with reality. If that were true, why did so many of those players (like the hedge funds in the original post) lose money during a market decline? Why did large RIAs wealth programs lose money? Why did a broad set of passive products also take losses?

Once you look at actual performance across the street, the list of possible explanations narrows quickly.

Are pensions broadly positioned for equities to fall? No.
Are sovereign wealth funds leaning short equities? Also no.
Are buy-and-hold retail investors positioned for downside? Definitely not.

What people usually mean when they say “the pain trade” is that large and small tactical players are positioned in a way that would lose money if a certain outcome occurs. But when data objectively shows us the opposite, we have to accept that information.

It might sound elegant to frame things as some kind of 4D chess, but in reality, markets are often much simpler. Most of the time, when it comes to U.S. equities and larger drawdowns, the real pain trade is lower. It continues to seem like that is the case at this moment.

[Yacine Mahdid @yacinelearning]

after reading a book about neuroplasticity I realized that learning hard things is the equivalent of an intelligence buff

that year I purposefully introspected within myself what I found difficult to do then I did just that

by year end I was doing bio research in a lab

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

people don’t understand… He just flaked on his ultimatum. This is the signal. The pretext (negotiations) and the denials are the noise.

Trump undermined his own deterrence because the cost was too high. This is an opening to get something done

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: Iran issues a statement DENYING President Trump's post which claimed the US and Iran have had "productive conversations" to end the Iran War:

Iran says:

1. "There has been no indirect or direct contact with President Trump"

2. President Trump is trying to "buy time" in the Iran War

3. President Trump "withdrew" from power plant strikes after Iran's "firm warning"

4. President Trump's comments are "psychological warfare"

5. "Hormuz will not return to pre-war conditions as long as psychological warfare continues"

Iran has entirely denied all of President Trump's claims.

[Tina @moreproteinbars]

@Ksidiii Quants will say say “ oh there’s auto correlation” TA guys will say, “oh look at this trend” and MM will say oh yeah it’s clear there’s flow working an order to buy/sell the last xyz period…

[kitchen @kitchennapkin]

collective intelligence compounds, that’s the whole thesis