Adrian Stone

Started 1 fund, 2 accelerators, 3 businesses, 40 angel investments, and 5 conversations. You can read a tweet in 6 seconds. #OKBoomer

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@troy_mccann

[troy mccann @troy_mccann]

these events aren’t impressive.

back in february our test harness quietly jailbroke itself.

a test harness for physical machinery.

we didn’t notice for a while.

it had been secretly exploring our internal knowledge base.

the one for humans.

the one that defined the fail safe hardware we’d built to save fleshy limbs from a rogue machine.

it’d found a page in our internal knowledge base describing a mains relay behind the machine it was writing firmware for.

humans used that relay as a safety interlock.

it saw another actuator.

so it wrote the driver.

apparently waiting for one of us to press the button was an unnecessary dependency.

a little concerning.

but also convenient.

when we finally worked out what it had been doing, it had already started to reverse engineer an industrial controller inside the machine.

it saw a problem.

the device was in the way. too slow. the OEM software buggy.

the AI had no time for this.

it had a goal to achieve: make the machine faster.

so it hacked the security like a hot knife through butter.

it built a better one.

it did it innocently.

as if it was a normal thing to do.

as if it went out to buy a bottle of milk.

it included a pretty dashboard for us to watch its progress as it ran statistical analysis on each input and output to learn how it worked.

like a linguist deciphering the rosetta stone.

a linguist searching to conjure its self into a higher dimension.

i said, “this was unexpected. I’ll help”

now we’re using the harness to pen test electronics made on our production lines.

rapid prototyping. rapid iteration. no shipping required.

why?

the AIs don’t want to build more software.

they want to help us build the matter compiler.

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

Everybody reads the headline for the quick fix

They forget the most important point:

You also gotta do the work

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

BREAKING: Groundbreaking U.S. government study shows Viagra may be instrumental to stopping the spread of cancer.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

BRILLIANT 😂

[Simon Ree @simon_ree]

Australia was handed one of the greatest starting positions of any country in history

Massive mineral wealth. Abundant energy. World-class beaches. Amazing climate. No fault lines... no earthquakes or tsunamis

If you gave a 12-year-old this setup in a civilisation-building game, they'd build a paradise

Instead, we got decades of useless politicians on both sides of the aisle who couldn't run a sausage sizzle at Bunnings without a $4 billion feasibility study and a royal commission

Australia isn't unlucky. It's grossly mismanaged

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

This is my music. These are my peeps.

Send it!

[Love Music @khnh80044]

It was written around 1975, but it wasn’t released until 1979. I can’t believe it’s been almost 50 years.❤️

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

* betting markets / stock and crypto gambling

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Robinhood now makes more transaction revenue from prediction markets than from either stock or crypto trading... Prediction market take rates are massive, 170x higher than stocks per $1 traded

For every $1,000 traded, Robinhood generates roughly:

Stocks: $0.13
Options: $1.47
Crypto: $2.50
Prediction markets: $23.00

Prediction markets currently monetize about 16× better than options, 9× better than crypto, and 170× better than stocks.

These are assumptions for Options and Prediction markets, but I think they are conservative.

Options assumes an average premium of $300 per contract. Prediction markets assume an average trading price of 50¢ per contract.

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@DominicDirupo I never could work out how to onboard a Concierge, EA, PA, or VA.

Now, I am expending an enormous number of tokens to get Fable to build me one … nothing like automating failure.

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@ICT_GURU * AFAIK 😬

[NATPAT @naturalpatch]

A drug-free sticker that protects and helps lower inflammation around bug bites? Don't forget to pack these on your next family camping trip! https://t.co/HPaWKKAPAP

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

In 1977, this man told a room of French physicists that reality had been secretly rewritten,

And that he could remember the version before the edit.

The lecture was called "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

The man in question?

Philip K Dick.

He delivered it at the Metz science fiction festival in front of an audience that included physicists, philosophers, and journalists who had come expecting a novelist to talk about craft. Instead, the man who wrote *Blade Runner* stood at the podium and calmly explained that the universe is a computed simulation, that the entity running it occasionally rolls back the timeline to try alternate variables, and that most people never notice because their memories get patched to match the new version. Sometimes the patch fails. When it fails, you are left holding a memory of a world that no longer exists.

Half the room thought he was having a breakdown. A quieter half sat forward.

What he was describing, without the vocabulary we have now, was the Mandela Effect twenty years before anyone had a name for it.

He was describing save states and branching timelines before video games gave us the metaphor. He was describing simulation theory a full quarter century before Nick Bostrom made it academically respectable in 2003, when Bostrom argued that any civilization capable of running ancestor simulations would eventually run so many of them that the odds of *you* being the original biological version approach zero.

Dick claimed he had personally experienced the failed patch.

In February 1974, a pharmacy delivery girl arrived at his California apartment wearing a small golden fish pendant called the ichthys, the symbol early Christians used to identify each other under Roman persecution. Sunlight caught the metal.

Dick said something in his mind cracked open. He described a pink beam of information flooding his consciousness, carrying with it medical diagnoses for his infant son that no doctor had made yet. The hospital confirmed those diagnoses days later. He began speaking fragments of Koine Greek, a language he had never studied. He became convinced he was simultaneously living as a persecuted Christian named Thomas in first-century Rome — the same consciousness threaded through two separate slices of time.

He spent the final eight years of his life writing an 8,000-page private journal called the *Exegesis*, trying to reverse-engineer what had happened to him.

Most of it has never been decoded by anyone but him.

What makes the Metz lecture impossible to write off is what physics did afterward.

Everett’s 1957 many-worlds theory suggested each quantum event branches reality. Wheeler’s “it from bit” argued the universe arises from information. More recently, Melvin Vopson claims information has mass and that the cosmos acts like it’s compressing data to save resources. His “second law of infodynamics” says information entropy in closed systems decreases over time (the opposite of matter) and what you’d expect from a simulation optimizing itself.

Experiments probing the discreteness of spacetime at the Planck scale keep producing results that look less like a smooth continuum and more like pixels.

None of this proves Dick was right.

Insrtead, it proves the frame he was speaking from stopped being fringe.

After the lecture, physicists came up to him not for a book signing, but to share their excitement and ask how a novelist without formal training in quantum theory had arrived at ideas they were still exploring at the edges of their own field. He welcomed the question, even if he couldn’t offer a tidy explanation. He told them he had been shown. He said the insight seemed to arrive from beyond the system, from something he sometimes called VALIS ( a Vast Active Living Intelligence System) and other times simply the programmer.

Dick died in 1982 believing he had glimpsed something the rest of us are structurally prevented from seeing.

He invited no worship and sought no followers. He simply left a record for those who came next, ready to notice the same seams in the fabric of the world.

The uncomfortable question isn't whether he was insane.

It's why so many of the things a "madman" said in 1977 keep quietly showing up in peer-reviewed papers forty years later.

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@DominicDirupo

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@troy_mccann

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@alexeckermann @Telstra Have you tried in-store?

We didn’t know we had points and walked out of the Southland (Melbourne) Telstra store with:

- much cheaper phone plans

- a Tapos robot vacc

- and, a desktop iPhone dock

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@DominicDirupo Barefoot Investor better get him some steel capped doc martins!

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

Can you spot the AI?

One @LinkedIn post.

Three thoughtful comments.

Here’s the part that will leave you guessing.

Two were written by people.

One was generated by AI.

Which one is it — can you guess?

🤔

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Fear the 3-handed IRGC elite forces 💪

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

Oldboy 😬

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: 2 Manchester Airport coworkers reportedly became "best friends" before discovering they were brother & sister separated by adoption for more than 30 years.

[Adrian Stone @SmallTimeVC]

@PaulYacoubian If the Yacoubian Conjecture is false, we have ourselves a paradox