There is a hotel and pub on the outskirts of Bedford that has 5’10” ceilings. Like, imagine walking into a restaurant and hit your head because you are 5’10”. I am under 5’8” but was still kind of being careful since certain parts of the ceiling were surprisingly low. It’s basically the Shire.

When you’ve been away from Nostr for a day and don’t get the dans thing.

What are your favorite ways to fund open source devs?

London > NYC

Almost all of finance/investing can be summed up as shorting abundant things and going long scarce things. And yet, many people spend the vast majority of their effort trying to go long abundant things and short scarce things precisely during the 10% of the time when that works, instead of going to therapy or something.

I decided I was drinking too many cappuccinos, so for the month of April I am drinking zero coffee. Felt vaguely “down” for a couple days but now feel better.

I’m a matcha maxi. View quoted note →

Good morning. Nothing stops this train.

A lot of people say they are in favor of market forces, but then if the market goes in a direction that they disagree with then they think the market was wrong or it was rigged and needs to be managed now.

Here’s my Dune part one and two summary. Correct me where I might be missing something. Spoilers abound. The Harkonnens have been mining Spice on Arrakis for decades, and have become richer than even the Emperor since Spice is the most critical thing around (and despite its enormous expense and universe-wide demand, nobody can synthesize it elsewhere for some reason, even with nearly infinite resources, why?). The Emperor, however, is more threatened by the Atreides’ growing influence than he is threatened by the Harkonnens (why?) and so he plots with the Harkonnens to destroy House Atreides. As part of this, he kicks the Harkonnens off of Arrakis and puts the Atreides there, but it’s a trap (cue “it’s a trap” meme). Visuals and music are amazing, and remain that way throughout the films. The plot starting point is reasonable, but starts with a flaw imo: everyone is miserable already. In LOTR, we get to start with the happy Shire, which sets a good baseline for a happy world that the characters end up fighting to protect and going through hell for, which lets us understand what they are fighting for. But in Dune, most people are already kind of miserable from the starting point. Harkonnens are all serious and mean and focused on domination and have a shitty world with no sun, Paul and Jessica are all serious and doing life-or-death tests with their Bene Gesserit stuff, all the Bene Gesserits are hyper-serious, the Emperor and his daughter are all stressed out by politics, etc. The only chill people with good vibes are Leto and Duncan. It's unclear what anyone is fighting for, really. The Bene Gesserits plans are measured in centuries but none of those plans ever lead to Alright so the Atredies go to Arrakis, aware of the political danger but trying to strengthen their house. Harkonnens and the Emperor’s forces attack them and easily win. For some reason despite all of this advanced technology, at the end of the day a bunch of dudes line up with swords and have a big sword brawl (why?). Due to the Bene Gesserits’ influence, Paul and Jessica are technically spared, but have to fight to truly survive and escape. They join the Fremen, which are the perpetually repressed people of Arrakis and the only other people in the movie (eg Stilgar) who are sometimes chill and with good vibes. The Bene Gesserit have been purposely spreading the propaganda on Arrakis that Paul is a messiah, which is a result of years of bloodline management. Duncan dies like a champ to keep Paul safe. Paul as a scrawny kid easily beats the hard desert man Janis in a fight (which seems kind of bullshit to me), which along with the messiah prophecy secures his initial place among the Fremen. In the second movie, Jessica and Paul further secure their place in Fremen society, and there is growing conflict over the messianic prophecy. Jessica pushes the prophecy narrative and Chani pushes back on it. That’s a good plotline, imo. But in terms of execution, it feels like the fantasy of an angsty teenage edgelord boy. (“My biggest fear is that I have so much goddamn power that I might misuse it and hurt people!”) Paul leads a series of guerrilla strikes against the Harkonnens. Paul reunites with Gurney, and Gurney reveals where the family nukes are, which is kind of a Deus ex machina plot line. For some convenient reason, Paul’s great great grandfather or whatever hid the family nukes on Arrakis (why and how?) Paul and Chani fall in love, but Jessia and Paul drink the worm juice which gives them memories of the past including the fact that Jessia and Paul are descended from the leader of the Harkonnens (via the Bene Gesserit bloodline planning scheme). So Paul is quite the Mary Sue at this point, being descended from Atreides and Harkonnens, and trained by both the Bene Gesserits and the Fremen. All parts of the Venn Diagram center around him. Meanwhile, the Harkonnens replace the jacked nephew played by Bautista with a different scrawny model-looking nephew who is even meaner for some reason. And they amp up this new dude with an arena fight where he ::checks notes:: beats two drugged captives and barely beats one normal captive. So they build him up as a psychopath and a not-so-bad fighter but not exactly anything too badass really. Paul writes a letter to the emperor to come to Arrakis and he does (why? This seems too easy). The Emperor punishes the leader of the Harkonnens (which the Harkonnens just kind of accepted without pushback, like all of their plans are for shit now suddenly). Paul launches his plot-convenient nukes at the emperor and sends sandworms at him and easily wins (why is the Emperor of the Known Universe so weak now?) After the battle is won, Paul also beats the Harkonnen nephew dude in a fight, and gets to be the new emperor. So he wins every fight he is in, has the magic voice, can survive all the poisons that others cannot, has all the best noble genes, but also has the kindness instilled in him from his father, one of the only chill dudes in the story. But the other Houses object, so it’s war time! And Chani leaves because Paul wants to marry the emperor’s daughter for political reasons and thinks the messianic stuff is bullshit. Everyone is kind of miserable at the end, which is basically where they started to begin with. The few people who started happy were killed off, and the Fremen are generally happier now but that’s foreshadowed by Paul’s visions to eventually end badly for them. One of my friends that came to see it with me and she summed it up as “five hours of non-stop angst, kind of exhausting really.”

When I started building my own PCs a decade ago, I went to my coworkers with this question and this is basically the exact answer I got. View quoted note →

Alright, after watching 5+ hours of Dune part one and two, I’m going to need someone to explain to me why this is a good movie. Whatever other people are seeing, I am not seeing it.

Dice.

Whenever you feel good at something, take a moment to remind yourself that people can solve rubiks cubes in three seconds, or shoot pro arrow shots on horseback, or weld a complex thing while underwater. Financial benefits often consolidate toward a few professions, but happiness itself tends to spread more broadly and is only partially correlated with monetary success. View quoted note →

The majority of people have a strong tendency to want to be part of something that is bigger than themselves. It is why they not just get up in the morning, but why they are *energized* to get up in the morning. Clans and religions were among the earliest bigger things. People know that they will die, and so they invest into their descendants, honor their ancestors, and contemplate metaphysics and the nature of life. Many people will willingly sacrifice themselves for their children or for their highest ideals because of this. In the modern era of printing presses and telecommunication systems, there is also a broader set of choices for people to group together around, either combined with those other ones or sometimes instead of them. Sometimes they choose nationalism. Sometimes they fight for a political ideology that transcends borders. Sometimes it is a professional guild or professional recognition. Sometimes it is the environment. Right or left or anywhere in between, you can often tell what someone adheres to as their highest ideal. A powerful exercise is to 1) identify what you feel a part of in the bigger sense (it could be a few things) and 2) whenever someone’s behavior confuses you, stop and think about what they likely feel a part of in a bigger sense, if anything. You might feel that what they associate with is fucking retarded, but if you can at least identify it, then that is the first step toward successful communication and debate and rebuttal. Using myself as an example, my professional experience is in a combination of engineering and finance. Separately, my ethical philosophy is grounded in virtue ethics (that’s a whole other longwinded topic), and as a result, what I feel a part of in a bigger sense is various social movements and protocols that utilize technology to bring financial autonomy to people. That’s where I put my time and capital toward. Successful commerce involves the combination of value and communication. Therefore, I want people to be able to communicate freely and transfer value freely. As such, I strongly associate with the leading technologies in those fields, such as Bitcoin and Nostr. If I thought they were weak, I would sympathize with them but not invest in them or have much hope for them. That was my view for a while. But if I view them as technically capable and achieving of network effects, then my rationality combines with my sympathy and becomes full support. I don’t care what peoples’ race, sex, orientation, ethnicity, or nationality is. Instead, what I care about is doing whatever tiny part I can to bring technologies to people that allow them to transfer value and information to others, or to educate people on those technologies, etc. That is where my time and capital is focused on. Outside of family, that is what makes me energized in the morning to work toward. What is yours?

I go to NYC several times per year for one reason or another. For work, for friends, etc. Part of me likes it, but part of me gets fucking frustrated multiple times per day every time I am here. (Sorry, this is a Nostr Lyn post). There are plenty of neat things in NYC that I can’t do at the same scale/quality elsewhere in the world due to the network effects around the city (broadway shows, financial district, etc), and yet after a day or two all I want to do is leave. It feels claustrophobic on multiple fronts. People all have different vibes but for me, major cities are fun to visit but smaller secondary cities or suburbs around cities are so much smoother to live in. I can’t imagine living all the time in a major city. The same applies to Cairo, to which I have been in far more total days than NYC. I like Cairo’s satellite cities but not Cairo itself other than going briefly. Every time I am in a major city I am immediately reminded of the luxury of space, nature, quiet, parking spaces, and chillness of not being in a city. Everything I take for granted normally is now a luxury to fight for in a city. Even politics are largely correlated to urbanization. If you live in rural or suburban areas, you likely drive around in your own car, you might have some land, etc. Your interaction with the local government exists in a moderate sense. The potential weakness is that you are more likely to always be around those who are similar to you, which minimizes your worldliness. In contrast to all that, in major cities, everything is so tightly packed, and people rely on public transportation, and even a momentary lapse of government services (eg trash collection) becomes an acute catastrophe. But on the beneficial side, people are around those who are different than them more often, which breeds worldliness. That’s why I tend to like the zone between rural and major cities. I like secondary cities or suburbs of major cities, because I get a bit of both worlds. The density and interconnectedness of major cities briefly, and the space and self-autonomy outside of them most of the time. And yet I was born and raised in that sort of inbetween state, and so maybe it is just my upbringing. What about you? Can anyone sell me the idea of NYC or other major cities that I am missing, especially in the remote work era? I see glimpses of how it could be attractive if you are used to it and know every detail of your neighborhood, but it really does feel limiting to me.

If the cost of the book is in anyway prohibitive for someone due to personal circumstances or jurisdictional issues, I happily endorse them pirating Broken Money. There are always ways to pirate stuff anyway, but like, I'm not taking any action against you to make it harder, and my spirit is with you. ☮️

The amount of midcurve tendency in tradfi is hard to understate. The vast majority of it is geared toward encouraging it. Almost every investing mistake I made was due to midcurving the problem I'm analyzing, and almost every outlier investing success I've had is because I consciously tried to avoid midcurving the problem I'm analyzing.

Bitcoin vs global liquidity: