Jeff Donovan

Musician and Software Developer. Java, Ruby, JavaScript and Lisp.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

As someone who's gotten invited to this Dialog business just about every year from 2022-2025, let me explain to you what I call 'The Green Room Confederacy'.

The 'green room' is the waiting room in a conference or media studio, and who populates it is an ever-shifting cast of writers, founders, tycoons, and general people of note who shuffle around to the various podcasts and retreats that define a certain stratum of influence and cultural valence.

The billionaires: They're the only lifetime members, mostly because they're paying for the entire thing. Everyone is to some degree there to cozy up to them.

The founders: Usually not actually the leading founders (who are too busy or disinterested to attend), but the type of founders who 'thoughtfluence' and are making a bid to be taken seriously intellectually, moving themselves from the intellectual Premium Economy of Harari/Gladwell to the First Class of Ferguson/Henrich (but never quite the Yarvin/Land level, as that's too dicey and weird).

The writers/creatives: They're the intellectual backbone here, and probably the only ones in a group chat with the billionaire, kept there as a sort of court jester (don't ask me how I know). It's all top-of-funnel and brand accrual to however they monetize, which is likely a Substack and/or podcast.

Historically, these things were about as uncontroversial as it got: Davos, Aspen Institute...nobody is losing a job over going; on the contrary, going is a major brand-building exercise.

But since 2020 or so we've seen the rise of a counter-elite attempting to create counterbalancing cultural institutions and media, which is where the sparks really start as attending the upstart version is declaring your side in the culture war (which is why Ezra is furiously backpedaling here...he's got his NYT roost to maintain).

(If this is all sounding like a high-school popularity contest, it's not too far off, though the downstream implications here are rather more real.)

The claim this is some secret cabal though is laughable, and thought mostly by second-string writers at places like WIRED who've spent their lives with their noses pressed against the glass and never entering, and write about this as a form of envy and pandering to their credulous outsider audiences.

Oh, and did I ever go?

No, for two reasons. I had an iron-clad rule that I'd only go to one of these events only if free (or they paid me), never as a paid attendee. Free/paid, and you're the creative; pay, and you're just a striving customer. And AFAICT, all but the true A-listers had to pay for Dialog.

Also, I was working on @spindl_xyz and this is all very distracting, and getting swept up in all this (as the writer talent), means putting yourself on the relevance/virality treadmill, something I wanted to escape by making a bag instead.

But I will say there were some real intellects on the Dialog invite list (along with a lot of strivers and arrivistes), and I'm all for billionaires creating alternative cultural institutions since our current ones are so clearly decayed and in need of overthrow.

There, that's the backstory to all this. It's all a lot less lurid and conspiratorial than anyone is letting on here.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

This sounds so cool.

If network states aren't happening now, what we need is a few hundred acres in free states like Texas.

If I were in my 20s, I'd move there in a second.

https://t.co/r5LYdhoviz

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

I recall a @MOZ_Podcast episode where we had two AI founders on (one quite prominent), and I insisted AI would, like every prior productivity enhancement for coding, increase the number and salary of devs, and they smugly dismissed the thought and fantasized about single-person unicorns.

Their companies’ job pages are as long as ever.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

How is this not bigger news in tech/security circles.

Jaguar Land Lover lost $250M (£200M) and counting thanks to a cyberattack that it still couldn’t mitigate. This is growing every week.

The cost of underinvesting in security is very real. 1+ month recovery is bonkers

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Keep skilled immigration legal

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

Super late to this party, but @cursor_ai sure is impressive.

Not just for interpreting some vast body of code, but for understanding the bigger technical and business context of the product itself.

I pointed it at Spindl's onchain ads protocol, and it gave me a 2,000-word blog post on why it matters, concrete use cases, and how it fits into the bigger picture of both crypto and ad tech that was 100% correct.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

Easier to establish a Mars colony than fix the Federal government.
Easier to build crypto than fix the banking system.
Easier to attempt network states than fix liberal democracy.
Easier to homeschool with AI than fix schools.
Easier to read Substack than fix media.

Funny how we're more or less abandoning most institutions in favor of the tech nuke-and-pave approach.

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

How is this tweet only 2 months old 🤯

[I Am Devloper @iamdevloper]

vibe coding, where 2 engineers can now create the tech debt of at least 50 engineers

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Trump's tariffs are already deindustrializing America

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

This brilliant chart explains why Xi has more leverage than Trump in the trade war.

It's pretty simple: China exports high-tech goods to the US, while the US exports low-tech goods to China.

China can replace its imports from the US more easily than the other way around.

[Sam (Knicks in 5) @futurenomics]

I'm always amused when people are shocked by people doing exactly what they said they’d do. Everything that has happened over the past week was publicly announced months ago.

Stephen Miran, widely viewed as the architect of Trump's trade policy, published a paper "A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" in November of 2024, laying out everything that has happened (as well as many things that are yet to come).

[THE SHORT BEAR @TheShortBear]

The 2 biggest potential days out of 13 years of career have happened within 2 days of each other.

Wild times.
I'll never forget today.

Could have made 9fig no problem, that's been only possible on 3 days in 12 years of my career.

Today, 2 days ago and the $GME day.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

For a good sold in the US for $100, ~$12 go to China (base for tarrif). The rest, $88 for the design + shipping + wholesale + retail + branding, etc. go to US taxpayers!
If demand for it drops by 50%, China loses $6 and US agents more than $44, that is 7x more contraction.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Never threaten if you can't execute.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I explained to 12 yo that Trump thinks that a poor country that ships a lot of raw materials to American manufacturers but can't afford to buy much from us is taking advantage of us. He couldn't believe it.

[Spencer Hakimian @SpencerHakimian]

Who has a higher short term pain tolerance:

Person A:
- Governs a democratic society addicted to consumption with zero tolerance for inflation
- Is going to witness immediate shortages and price increases
- Has zero capacity to reroute the lost imports into domestic production in the short term
- Is in an economic war with every country on earth simultaneously

Person B:
- Governs an autocratic dictatorship with zero dissent allowed
- Overseas a society that inherently believe in self sacrifice for the greater good of the motherland
- Trying to ramp up domestic consumption, and could easily stimulate consumers domestically to buy otherwise would be exports
- Is in an economic war with only 1 country on earth

Answer honestly.

[The Lunduke Journal @LundukeJournal]

Hat tip to @IroncladDev.

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Universal is putting dragon costumes on the Boston Dynamics robots, and they are insanely cute