Dafydd Foster Davis

building the last company in sales | corrosive optimism

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[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@DeItaone So the deal is agreed except that the 2 actual decision makers have not agreed to it. Riiight

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@FraserNelson Sick of clowns like you that constantly try to cope. The UK AI Scene does ok in spite of the horrendous governance and macroeconomy all around it.

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@rationalaussie Agreed and the only relevant question now is the premise of the merged civilization

2 main options I can see would be a "power maximizing" option vs one constrained by some kind of moral system e.g. "maximize power subject to Golden Rule"

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@K_Niemietz In many important ways a country's 10Y bond yield is a sign of national maturity and intergenerational togetherness

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@timourxyz great post fella

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@chrisgpt OK yeah they cooked but why is she acting like a tweaker

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@JBaum3007658498 @PhilGordonDC Deploy yes. Successfully invade or occupy another great power, no. I pray that we don't test that in Iran because our guys won't have a chance

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@JBaum3007658498 @PhilGordonDC I don't think there's any military in the world right now that can invade another great power successfully, so that doesn't make Iran 2nd/3rd rate

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@FracSlap I think it's a deliberate tactic to increase switching costs. @meetgranola a lot of ppl want transcripts and will churn if you don't do it in next 30 days

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

looks like being a polymath is back on the menu boys

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@seema_amble this is the only rational strategy for SAP and likewise Salesforce though the latter copes endlessly that they have other options

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

Magnificent speech by King Charles. God Save The King

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@pplsartofwar Just saying whatever trying to sound smart. Believe it or not Iran now controls the Strait and yes paying $1/barrel for transit is worth it

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@findmyrain @t_blom @garrytan Bro 🤦‍♂️

[John Kessler @john_k]

An interesting consequence of productivity gains as a result of newly introduced agentic tooling is that it seems to invert the standard time discount on labor. The typical assumption is that an hour today is worth more than an hour a year from now. But, if the hour a year from now is 10x more productive, the discount flips and the future hour is much more useful. Rationally, one might expect to stop spending the hours of today on work that becomes much cheaper, redirecting that time towards accumulating durable, compounding assets that aren’t subject to the time discount inversion (e.g. capital, trust, mindshare).

Consider Brunelleschi and the Duomo of Florence. If Brunelleschi learned that within the year, a crew of engineers equipped with hydraulic cranes would magically appear, he’d be likely to stop laying bricks. He may spend more time refining the dome’s geometry or thinking about how to best change the dome’s design to accommodate these new tools.

There’s probably two caveats here – firstly (and most obviously), this only applies where productivity is compounding fast enough to flip the discount. Furthermore, this is hard to project–certain spaces may incur this inversion only some N% of the time–and experimenting may not be viable when the penalty of an undershoot or miscalibrated prediction has exponential downside.

Secondly, some games are Red Queen’s Races. Failing to produce in the short-term would foreclose the long-term payoff. Consider Brunelleschi, who’s now competing with the hypothetical, equally-acclaimed renaissance architect Ihcsellenurb. Brunelleschi and Ihcsellenurb are competing for a grant from a wealthy patron who’s unaware of the incoming cranes, instead intending to award the grant based on visible quarterly progress. Brunelleschi might know the cranes are coming, yet still be forced to lay bricks, as without this grant, he’d be unable to pay the crane operators when they arrive.

Seemingly, this model only works when an actor can afford short-term output illegibility in pursuit of a better long-term output. My sense is that the distribution of these actors is barbelled. On one hand, entrenched incumbents with reservoirs of trust and capital are able to absorb quiet quarters (Apple, for instance). On the other hand, small players can afford illegibility simply because nobody cares enough to punish it.

It seems the losers of this game sit in the middle of the barbell; this makes sense, given it’s the only segment where short-term legibility is (1) required and (2) existential. Incumbents and upstarts alike can absorb misses in a way that the squeezed middle can’t. Private markets will see two middle-of-the-barbell companies, where one is externally missing whilst the other seems to just keep winning, and reward the one with the legibly positive result. So, the middle must survive by laying soon-to-be-obsolete bricks, simply to keep up in the Red Queen’s Race

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@jonatanpallesen Why is it "incredible" that the EU is silent about this? Has the EU been wearing a Superman cape all this time?

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@eugyppius1 Deeper integrations should exist at the regional level. Scandinavia, Benelux, UK + Ireland, Visegrad, DACH. Start with groupings like that. It's simply not tenable to run everything from Brussels by pencil-pushed fiat

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@eugyppius1 I can't be the only one who is pro-European integration, but anti-EU specifically. It was a nice v1 but is clearly not fit for purpose and has unsolvable structural issues. The EU is owned by bureaucratic fetishists and is killing Europe.

[Dafydd Foster Davis @DafyddFD]

@OisinBollwerk @eugyppius1 Yep fair, bit of a trope but when it was a free-trading community it was generally seen as a no-brainer. Europe is much better off following a model like ASEAN than trying to build a United States of Europe