mattparlmer 🪐 🌷

Recursively self-improving and self-replicating factories @genfabco — rationalist and friend of the future

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

When we put the world economy back together after this thing is over, I'd like the engine of it to be American/Canadian/British/Aussie robots, not sweatshops in undeveloped countries.

[James hunts drones @jamesmishra]

Drones will bring end of large fixed military equipment like this.

Large antennas and etc will still need to exist, but must be either mobile or hidden.

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

@DemmonShadowp Resistive and capacitive layers inside the PCB mainly, have some other fun process hacks but don’t want to trumpet those until we’ve validated them

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

It should be possible with about 18mos of work to
1) make PCBs and assemblies in America at China cost structures, profitably
2) eliminate supply constraints on the IC packaging pipeline
3) dramatically reduce part count and assembly size by embedding more passives in the PCB

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

Obviously we won’t aim to make garage door openers at half capacity and triple our projected spend, but if we had to we would still put up numbers that would make even the sharkiest PE shops happy

Anything on top of that is free cashflow to reinvest in scaling up

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

We’ve been playing around with our plant model, current process architecture should let build factories that can go head to head with JLC on cost and still pencil financially, even with extremely conservative assumptions about saturation, yield, and cost overruns

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

It's been interesting and puzzling to witness the problems with accuracy in UK economic statistics over the past few years. (See the links in the next tweet for more.) It seems that the Office for National Statistics, ONS, now struggles to effectively measure basic figures such as employment, trade, and inflation. This resulted in a quite scathing government report published last summer, where Robert Devereux, a former permanent secretary, concluded that "most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance."

There's a lot of discussion about the travails facing the UK these days (including this big piece in The Atlantic a few weeks ago[1]), and the problems with the ONS feel like an unsettling microcosm of diffuse decline in broader institutional competence.

Anyhow: at Stripe, we became curious about the UK's published entrepreneurship data. While we observe a boom in many parts of the world, official figures don't show a similar increase in the UK. In the latest Stripe Economics post, we dug into the data, and, as far as we can tell, the official figures are probably misleading. The good and the bad news (mostly good, I think!) is that the UK is almost certainly witnessing an unmeasured boom in entrepreneurship: https://t.co/R7oTZNmxc6

UK-specific issues aside, I suspect that this measurement question is illustrative of forthcoming econometric challenges. Keeping the world's macro indicators up-to-date in response to the faster-than-usual changes wrought by AI will be both increasingly difficult and increasingly important in the coming years.

[1] https://t.co/OAnwRmpyON

[Härkönen @yokaihainen]

Heard Anthropic is hiring Christopher Nolan to film Blood Meridian as a feature length commercial, only alteration is that the character of the Judge is named Claude

[Lauri Myllyvirta @laurimyllyvirta]

NEW from us: China's traffic-related air pollution levels dropped sharply after the Hormuz crisis, as fuel consumption fell and EV use surged. This is more evidence that the fall in China's oil import isn't just inventory drawdown but real consumption cuts. 🧵

[Charles Rosenbauer @bzogrammer]

mom is excitedly sending me facebook posts

[Chris Paxton @chris_j_paxton]

The post from Demis really buries the lede with its talk of the "foothills of the singularity" (a great line). But its proposing an industry-funded regulatory body, essentially. So a organization run by people from google/ant/oai, paid for by them, with regulatory authority. Isn't this just a proposal for straight up regulatory capture?

[Santiago Pliego @SantiagoPliego]

It’s not an exaggeration to say that so many people in tech have never been to a real place or met a real person or experienced real life outside of their little Bay Area.

[Danielle Fong 🔆 @DanielleFong]

> Lab work is hard. Most experiments fail.

also, we only pay people $65-85k salary, so they are disgruntled. why do we do this

[jeremy @landvaluetax]

Texas' growth regime + high property taxes have done more for middle-class families than every progressive taxation system in California.

People want cheap rents as a share of income, and structurally cheaper services are downstream of structurally cheaper rents.

[Shannon @ ICML @shannonyangsky]

i used to think lgtm meant let’s go to market

[Liz @Lizquidity]

i remember when being a newsletter guy made you looked down upon by fintwit as not a real investor. funny how much the culture around that has changed.

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

@venturetwins Congrats!

[Joshua Saxe @joshua_saxe]

I did an AI Q&A with a bunch of non-tech working class / middle class / poor folks where I live in Kansas yesterday and they definitely had all these concerns including catastrophic loss of control (they didn't use this term). They were also concerned that coastal plutocrats and elites will gain even more control over their lives, a concern not mentioned in this video

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

@ChickenSamosaa Saudi proven reserves are >$20T so I do think stocks and flows matter here

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

Elon isn’t that rich compared to some autocratic heads of state

[Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv]

apart from Elon, no* rich person feels rich, because they all personally know a guy absurdly richer than them. Tucker Carlson for eg does not own a private jet, but is personal friends with people who do

__
* except the enlightened who have transcended envy, eg Munger