Nikolay Zobernius - e/acc

think & build

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

https://t.co/9ujCmLs3lQ

[scientism @mr_scientism]

It’s amazing how many people think the primary purpose of the economy is to provide a return on investment.

[Yin @yin_sah]

@bronzeagemantis much aside from active discrimination, a closed internet means that information is mediated by teachers, librarians, or book stores. without the internet many of our friends would have learned nothing and had their curiosity squashed before they reached 20

[Rambo Van Halen @RamboVanHalen]

Since I became active on twitter a few years ago, a number of moneyed Right Wing types have reached out and asked me to create content.

I'd give them the current market rates for my labor + typical costs for producing quality content, and they would always answer with variations of "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SO EXPENSIVE??"

Thinking they were ignorant of these matters, I'd patiently explain that it takes highly skilled and talented people to produce high-quality content. And since talent is rare and since we live in a free market, our labor is a scarce commodity and therefore comes at a premium. In other words, we are in demand.

Sometimes I'd add that we don't set the rates, the rates are set by the market, and this is the rate we can make working for other people (because again, free markets and such). So taking projects at a reduced rate inflicts an opportunity cost.

Furthermore, I'd mention that the pool of people who are not only talented but also ideologically sympathetic (or at least neutral) to your weird political project is VERY small. I believe there are only a few dozen (key word) talented RW sympathetic filmmakers worldwide--most of whom won't take the gig for fear of being blacklisted--so this only serves to increase price pressure on an already scarce market.

But much like Liberal commentators pretending not to understand "per capita", these people (many of whom are fans of Ayn Rand) would pretend not to understand our free labor market and balk at the cost.

So wanting to "help the cause" I started quoting my personal labor fees at 50% of the going rate.

And in response I would hear...

"WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SO EXPENSIVE??"

So I've pretty much given up on helping. And I've decided that the moneyed Conservatives and Right Wingers are not serious people.

It's funny how everyone is a free market capitalist until it's time to write a check.

And it's fucking hilarious how everyone believes that the inherent inequality of humanity is objective truth until it's time to pony up.

So if you're wondering why there's a dearth of RIGhT wINg aRt, it's because the people who control the pursestrings are fucking cheapskates.

As misguided as Liberal Hollywood is, at least they understand that talent is rare.

And The Libs intuitively know that they need to pay people what they're worth if they want to create a quality product👍

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

No kidding. Building those things is illegal now.

[Andrew Sabisky @AndrewSabisky]

Because hardware-software complementarities are a real thing. In the long run if you don't have the hardware production you're going to lose the software as well. Specialization is for insects.

[Justin Welsh @thejustinwelsh]

The fastest way to love your life:

Do something difficult on purpose, every day, for years, until the difficulty becomes something you're proud of.

[Yoko @stuffyokodraws]

It is very easy to be pessimistic and right.

Most ideas are bad. Most markets are too early, too small, too crowded, too hard. You can build an entire worldview around seeing the flaw first, and be rewarded for it over and over again

But the strange thing about startups is that the only outcomes that matter come from the places where someone was optimistic and right

I used to underestimate how much this matters. But there is a whole world of difference between reacting to the world as it is, and having enough understanding of the world as it is to still stay open to what it could become

Long optimism

[Marc Lou @marclou]

I flew to San Francisco and ended up doing all of this:

🏎️ (self) driving a Cybertruck
💳 attending @stripe sessions
🍻 drinking non alcoholic beer with @jrfarr
💰 making 100 no-VC founders do 20 squats
🤖 making my SaaS @DataFast_ AI agent first
👴🏻 meeting our indie hacking father @csallen
🤝 meeting my favorite indie hackers @jackfriks @illyism @sobedominik @marckohlbrugge @phuctm97 @ky__zo @yasser_elsaid_ @JohnONolan and more
🔼 meeting the G @rauchg CEO of V
🇰🇷 heading to Korea

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur

https://t.co/GTS8jEcK5z

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past.

We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics.

So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that.

We heard two main reasons:
(1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible.
(2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained).

We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies.

This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot.

We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street.

And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Marc Andreessen went on Chris Williamson's podcast and broke down exactly how Elon Musk runs multiple companies at once

No other CEO on Earth does this:

1. Every week, Musk shows up at each of his companies, identifies the single biggest problem that company is having that week, and fixes it. Then he does that for 52 weeks in a row. At the end of the year, each company has solved its 52 biggest problems. Meanwhile, most large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting for the board presentation with the compliance review and the legal review attached.

2. This is not a new operating method. It is actually how the great industrialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s ran their companies. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson, who built IBM. Total devotion from the leader to fully and deeply understand what the company does, be in the trenches, talk directly to the people doing the work, and be the lead problem solver in the organization. Andreessen says he is not aware of another current CEO who operates this way.

3. The framework Musk uses is the bottleneck. In any manufacturing chain, there is always one thing holding everything up. Sometimes it is raw materials at the start. Sometimes it is warehousing at the end. Sometimes it is in the middle. The job is to find it and remove it. Musk has universalized this concept across every company he runs. In any given week, there is one main bottleneck. He micromanages the solution to that one thing and delegates almost everything else.

4. Musk delegates almost everything. Andreessen is clear about this. He is not involved in most of what his companies are doing. He is involved in the one thing that is the biggest problem right now. Once that is fixed, he moves to the next biggest problem. Everything else by definition, is running better than the bottleneck, so it does not need him.

5. When Musk identifies the bottleneck, he goes directly to the engineer who actually understands it. not the VP of engineering, not the director, not the manager. The individual contributor who has the actual technical knowledge. He sits in the room with that person and fixes the problem alongside them. He does not ask for a report to be reviewed in three weeks. he shows up at the keyboard or on the manufacturing line and works through it overnight if necessary.

6. This is why technical people who work for Musk say it was the best experience of their lives. Andreessen's framing: if you are stuck on a problem you cannot solve, Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream, sit with you in front of the keyboard, and help you figure it out. For an engineer who genuinely cares about the work, that is an almost incomprehensible level of support from the CEO of the company.

7. Business school teaches the opposite of this: management as a generic skill applicable to any industry. Soup company or a rocket company, the management principles are the same. process, balance sheet, meeting schedules, compliance, executive motivation, interpersonal conflict resolution. Andreessen says those skills are useful in many contexts. They just give you nothing; you need to do what Musk does. And Musk pushes as far as he can away from all of that so he can spend all of his time doing the things only he can do.

[Prince Vogelfrei 🐦‍⬛ @PrinceVogel]

Regulation and reliance on experts works a lot like building a dam. The bigger the dam, the better materials and care you need - and the bigger consequences are for fucking it up

The dam builders today are in the habit of blaming the water for exerting too much pressure

[scientism @mr_scientism]

It’s difficult to really appreciate the sheer level of intellectual stagnation attained in moving from a world of active philosophical discourse to a world where people argue over statistics. ’Scholasticism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ don’t capture it. We’re in a far worse situation.

[Aeron Laffere @aeronlaffere]

“My fundamental argument 10 years ago... was that rebuilding Britain's economy and rebuilding British politics and government capacity... must have at its centre that science and technology becomes a fundamental aspect of the Prime Minister's job and priorities.”

Anglofuturism Episode 059 with Dominic Cummings is out now.

@Dominic2306

["D." Fool @FoolOfD]

It's the cost of housing that's driving this anxiety. When you realize that a high salary alone can never buy you a house in a desirable area, you become reliant on gambling, equity, and once-in-a-lifetime windfall events to make a material difference in your life.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

The fact that orbital compute is (soon) the most efficient way to build datacenters says a lot about how much excessive regulation has harmed progress on earth.

It’s more efficient to fly to outer space than to try and build on land.

Freedom is always on the frontier.

The U.S. constitution was a breakthrough in that it protected citizens from tyrannical government. What it missed, and what we should try to integrate into the next constitution (on Mars, special economic zones, etc), is restraint against unchecked growth of regulation and government spending.

I’ve been slowly collecting proposals for how that could work. Might do a post on it at some point.

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

At this stage, I think it is undeniable that Revolut will be a $500BN company. (I do not say that lightly).

They are a compound startup.

They try 20 new products at a time.

They create small 8-10-person teams for each product.

They "invest" $2M into each team.

They give them 24 months to execute.

They monitor them on a weekly basis according to a set of agreed KPIs.

What works, they double down on.

A machine. 👇

[CRG @MacroCRG]

here's what will happen.

- u16 ban passes, platforms must verify all ages

- kids use VPNs, government bans VPNs

- age verification infrastructure already exists, its scope gets broader, more invasive, more extreme

- Online Safety Act forces backdoors into encrypted messaging, E2E encryption dies, gov can read everything you ever send

- CBDC rolls out, your internet passport and financial passport become the same document

- anonymous accounts posting "wrongthink" are now identifiable + prosecutable

- the generation that grows up with this doesn't remember it being any other way

- George Orwell was right about everything

- it's over

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/puLXpatHvd