Artists: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it.

Mathematicians: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it.

Economists: LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS HOUR! DESTROY ME, EFFICIENCY, AND LET UTILIZATION-ADJUSTED TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY RISE ON THE WIND OF MY ASHES!

> get introduced to someone new
> being told that they are high agency
> ask if they mean breaking the rules and soiling the commons or figure out a way to push the pareto and create positive sum
> she doesn't understand: "they're high agency sir"
> meet the person
> they're soiling the commons and externalizing internalities

engineers discovered the fastest way for a humanoid robot to run was the classic "anime girl late for school with toast in mouth" i guess???

A mathematician is giving a lecture and says, "It is obvious that…."

Then he stops, stares at the board, and thinks silently for ten minutes.

Finally he brightens up and says, “Yes! It is obvious.”

Late night tweet. The Indonesian economic question from the 1950s, raised by those who established "economics" as a concept here (Soemitro & Sjafruddin), is growing on me:

"To grow the economy, you grow the amount of capital, or the labor productivity. Ideally both."

Basically, bothe conclusion: post-colonial Indonesians are retarded because there's no school and no rice (malnutrition everywhere), so it's pointless to try to grow the economy out of improving labor productivity. From a purely economic lense, the Indonesian inlander population are useless. What's valuable from Indonesia is the natural resources and the plantations, not the humans.

So, it's futile to immediately try to grow labor productivity after Independence, because we don't have money to do it. We should instead focus on capital accumulation.

Out of this assumption, they arrived at different conclusions.

- Sjafruddin thought that we should focus on stabilizing and increasing this capital accumulation out of the existing plantations and oil mines, so that we actually have money circulating around to doing anything.

- Sumitro (a socialist) thought that the State should not sit around, but start actively try to artificially inject capital accumulation in the hands of racially indigenous Indonesians, through e.g. the import licensing regime of the Benteng Program. At the time, more than half of the Indonesian economy was still owned by foreigners.

Both agreed that violently seizing the plantations was a retarded idea, because again, we are retarded and of useless labor productivity. There was no schools. There was no bureaucrats. We cannot actually run the plantations. Their assessment will be tragically proven true after 1957, with cataclysmic cosequences.

This dynamics, I think, is becoming relevant again as Indonesia faces imminent catastrophic defeat and violent destruction and rape by AI - robot accelerationism and Chinese manufacturing expansion accelerationism.

For example, the only promising Indonesian industrial sectors are downstreaming industries i.e natural resource-driven protectionism, such as nickel smelting.

Downstreaming is driven by an ideology that sees the Indonesian population biomass as completely worthless and stupid and retarded and useless and not worth spending capital on in terms of building industrial productivity, and that control over natural resources and capital flows is actually far more important to industrialization.

Is this assertion accurate? Are we Indonesians actually useless and worthless from an economic point of view?

That I am unable to conclusively reject or accept this assertion is my biggest political existential crisis.

Karl Marx once asserted that value comes from the labor of workers.

In Indonesia's case, whether in the 1950s and the 2020s, I think Karl Marx's assertion is simply wrong. Compared to other economic elements like rubber or nickel, the labor productivity of the workers are worthless and are not the primary source of money creation.

Consequently, you can just repress or genocide workers whose labor output are actually totally worthless in an economic sense, and economic production will continue just fine.

This already happened in East Timor. The East Timorese population was useless and annoying to New Order's economic production, so we simply genocide a third of their population.

Another example of this is the 1965-1967 genocide. PKI was particularly popular amongst subsistence farmers in overpopulated Java who don't actually contribute to anything to national wealth and are in fact are eating up the limited remaining quantity of food in the country. This is because of Soekarno's extreme mismanagement, causing the non-existence of schools and roads and fertilizer and harvest.

But it also means that if we kill millions of these Javanese peasants in killing pits, in practice nothing of economic value will be lost since they don't really produce anything anyways, and in fact the nation quickly rebounded economically under early New Order.

Soeharto and the Army was able to industrially exterminate around a million people and jail another 2 million in concentration camps in Buru Island because these people are completely utterly economically worthless and useless to them. The source of money of the Army is the plantations. Occupy the plantations, and it makes no difference whether you then kill 2 million or 20 million subsistence farmers, who are of no value to you.

In a more modern setting, the failure to create formal jobs have resulted in the explosion of thuggery. Thuggery is another form of worthless biomass failed to be integrated into economic production. The one in the wrong here is the government. But the fact remains: if we genocide 5 million thugs in industrial killing camps tomorrow, the Indonesian economy will run just fine, becaue these 5 million people are economically worthless. They don't produce anything. They merely consume.

We can laugh at the genocidal extermination of the 5 million useless thugs, who failed to find a place in modern society. Then, two years from now, all the white collar jobs are taken over by AI. Now what.

It used to be that the solution to this low labor productivity is "education" and "healthcare" or whatever. In the 1950s, this is obviously true. In 1967-1983, this theory was implemented and it worked brilliantly. Today? I have extreme dark doubts about it.

The singualar goal of all 20th century religions is the creation of "New Men", which are people who are able to successfully bloom their full potentials, like a seed sprouting into a massive tree. These religions are collapsing one by one. He who shows the path to salvation, who shows the path towards the explosive realization of the full potentials of billions, is the Messiah.

プリングルスは以前は缶いっぱいにチップスがつまっていて取りづらかった覚えがあるのだが、今日買ったものは中がスカスカになっていて実に取りやすくて、なにか久しぶりに再会した旧友が病気で痩せ衰えていたような感慨がある

5yo: "new rule! we do not go anywhere after we get home in the evening. I take my socks off, and then if we go somewhere I just have to put old socks on again or get new ones and that wastes my socks"

Added a fixed-position editor to Pi that stays put while the chat can stream and scroll above it.

Also added configurable shortcuts for jumping between user/LLM messages, to the bottom of chat, and to the start/end of a multiline editor.

pi install npm:pi-powerline-footer
github.com/nicobailon/pi-…

maybe the frontier is smooth and we're just the jagged ones

Stuff I wish I knew when I was younger:

1. Doing something poorly and consistently is better than doing it in a world class manner occasionally
2. Other people tell you to take risks bc they want to see what happens or have a free option if you win not bc they think it’s a good idea
3. Most people don’t think about you at all. But some people think about you a lot. If someone who is a baller takes an interest in you for no particular reason just run with it. One trick to vastly improve your relationship outcomes is spend time w people who like you (not ppl who ignore you or treat you poorly).
4. Everything in your life you can categorize as 1) addictive 2) enjoyable. And if you do a bunch of non addictive enjoyable things it’s quite likely you’ll be happier. If you stop doing that basket you’ll burn out, predictably
5. It’s a lot easier to deal directly with negative thoughts than it is to deal with the life circumstances generating them and most of the time you can actually deal w the circumstances more effectively if you’re not tilted
6. Most of the economy is a cartel defined by proximity to central banks, the government, and a small elite. The reason “contrarian” ideas work isn’t because they’re good. It’s bc they’re “king made”. It’s decided in advance who is going to win. You need to decide if you’re going to play or not. There is no halfway
7. Being mad about the system being rigged is a waste of time it’s a lot better to just bet on it, or invest with that as an edge bc most people aren’t blackpilled enough.
8. Most studies - especially social science studies have criminally low r sq or poor methodology. Such that most things you read online don’t actually work. At the same time - your own response to things is fairly predictable. So if you find something that works - you can just go back to that - a lot more easily than optimizing something new
9. Life getting worse after 30 is a scam. Actually - it might genuinely get worse for most people. But it doesn’t have to. The people who most loudly tell you what you need to be happy are the least happy people
10. Over time your outcomes are mostly determined by the quality of your network, your investment rate of return and your tax rate. But every once in a while you can do something non linear that can be a home run. It’s best to do non linear things during asset bubbles or when you have a hot hand. It’s not a good idea to do non linear things when there isn’t strong investor appetite for risk taking
11. Your behaviors will tell you stuff you’re not dealing with. If you’re overeating or sleeping poorly it’s probably bc there’s something you haven’t acknowledged or faced or are putting off
12. As you move towards a singularity , accelerating progress or a purported societal shift the predictability decreases - rather than increasing. People are the most certain at maximum acceleration when the very nature of acceleration or complexity suggests they should do the opposite. If AGI is coming start thinking 1 week out not 3 years out

Having to use Claude Code after Pi is such a huge bummer

There are corrections and there are
CORRECTIONS.

spent the last few hours answering questions from strangers on the internet while sitting on a plane and the thing that keeps striking me is how similar every question sounds once you strip away the context

the BB analyst making $200K wants to know if his life has meaning. the 20-year-old in a frat wants to know if he is on the right path. the guy running a $15M environmental services company cannot sleep because his leverage ratio scares him even though his covenants are fine. the first-year law student wants someone to tell him the career pivot will work out. the immigrant who got laid off wants to know he is not falling behind permanently

the details are different. the feeling underneath is identical. am I going to be okay

we pretend that money and status and titles fix this. they do not. I sit in rooms with people who control nine-figure portfolios and they are nervous about the same things as everyone else. they just have more expensive language for it. the fund manager calls it "risk management." the analyst calls it "career strategy." the 20-year-old calls it "figuring out my path." same anxiety wearing different suits

I watched a grown man worth more than most people will earn in ten lifetimes throw a tantrum in a conference room because someone questioned his assumption in a model. not his competence. not his track record. an assumption in a spreadsheet. a cell in Excel. he turned red and raised his voice because for 15 seconds he felt like he might be wrong about something and his entire identity could not absorb that possibility

that is not a professional disagreement. that is a kid on a playground who got told he is not the fastest runner

Schopenhauer wrote that humans are not rational beings who occasionally feel emotions. we are emotional beings who occasionally think rationally. the rationality is the exception. the feeling is the baseline. every framework we build in finance and in business and in life is an attempt to impose order on a brain that is fundamentally running on fear and desire and the need to be seen as competent by other people who are also running on fear and desire

the most dangerous version of this is the person who thinks they have outgrown it. the one who believes that enough success or enough money or enough status has made them rational. that person is not more rational. they are less accountable. nobody around them pushes back anymore so the irrational impulses go unchecked and get rebranded as conviction and vision and leadership

the best operators I know are the ones who understand that they are still unreasonable kids underneath everything. they lose their temper over small things. they take criticism personally even when it is constructive. they make emotional decisions and reverse-engineer a logical justification after the fact. the difference is they know they do this. they have systems to catch it. they hire people who are allowed to tell them when they are being stupid. they build in a 24-hour delay before any decision made while angry

the worst operators are the ones who think they have evolved past it. they confuse pattern recognition with wisdom. they confuse wealth with emotional maturity. they confuse the silence of the people around them with agreement when it is actually just fear

Nietzsche said that the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do. I think the more common form is forgetting what one is. which is a complicated animal that learned to use spreadsheets but never stopped being afraid of the dark

none of us outgrow being unreasonable. the question is whether we build a life that accounts for it or one that pretends it does not exist

thanks for the questions today. you are all going to be fine. even the ones who do not feel like it right now

the law of diminishing taco

people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now

wow! with all this iran stuff going on i gotta be honest totally forgot about the epstein files not being fully released!

idk why i retweet this stuff you people can't read anyway

jane street is just the tip of the iceberg

i’m hearing sesame street is involved