Humanoid robots are interesting, but over the next decade, keep in mind the power requirements. The human brain is an *immensely* powerful computer and runs on like 20 watts. It is a breathtakingly efficient thing. Plus with a bit of water and (optionally) some food, a human body can operate for days. Getting humanoid robots to the point of being able to walk around and participate in our world with high levels of processing and long run times is going to be a hard and long-term engineering challenge. Harder than EV adoption. Robots in the real world are an order of magnitude more complex to get right than robots in a controlled industrial setting. I’m pretty bullish on smaller non-humanoid home robots though. Things like robodogs. They can plug themselves in to recharge whenever they are low on power, and can do all sorts of tasks that a well-trained dog could do, plus some other things (language recognition, a mounted arm that can grasp things better, etc). They’ll get exponentially better in the years ahead.

Rising political populism is an immune response to structural imbalances. Many people think this trade war just happened out of nowhere. There's some truth to that, meaning that Trump didn't have to engage in it in the way he did. But you have to look back several steps to get a bigger picture. The way the dollar reserve currency system is structured, the world needs an ever-growing number of dollars, and the US supplies those dollars via a permanent trade deficit. Those two aspects are joined at the hip. This hollows out the US industrial base, and hurts some regions (e.g. the Midwest) and helps others (e.g. NYC and DC). Eventually those cumulative imbalances get so big, combined with other imbalances as well, that political realignments shift in generationally important ways. The "blue wall", referring to the northern part of the Midwest that's at the center of the rust belt and historically voted Democrat, has shifted Republican or otherwise become more mixed. The trade deficit and other imbalances have become front and center. Establishment-type folks are going to keep being blindsided by this type of thing as long as the imbalances persist. They're going to keep pointing to one-time phenomenon, like one specific election, or one specific person, but really it's the underlying imbalance that's at the heart of it.

It seems we like the coin again.

One of the challenges of fiction is to balance pacing between action and downtime. My draft sci fi novel is relatively fast-paced, but doesn't push it to the limit as some of those non-stop action stories do. There are moments where characters have more "slice of life" days, or moments of emotion or contemplation, etc. Periods for the characters and reader to catch their breath before something big happens. However, one thing I try to do is make it so that each of those slower moments serves a *double purpose*. When reading those chapters, the reader's initial takeaway is that it was for character building and so forth, and is potentially skippable. But then later in the novel, some character aspect or worldbuilding aspect revealed in each of those chapters ends up being more important than they realized at the time. Like playing chess against someone and a few of their moves seem random or unneeded, but then it comes together into a surprise checkmate where each move was indeed deliberate to help set it up. That's the goal, anyway. One of the first-wave beta readers of my sci fi manuscript noticed this, and it was one of my favorite pieces of feedback so far. He felt some of the slower moments could be trimmed in the moment and wrote those moments down, but by the end was basically like, "nevermind, I see now, keep literally all of those."

After driving my Hyundai for 16 years, it’s finally starting to fail. So I’m going to join the rich life now… and get a Toyota. Here’s to the next 16.

What are the main pros and cons between Nostr and Pubky under the hood?

The biggest “productivity hack” I have is just not watching television. What little I watch is very intentional. In the second half of 2024, I watched Blue Eye Samurai (8 episodes) and Arcane (18 episodes). In 2025 I watched the first season of Invincible (8 episodes). Usually during lunch, on my computer. One thing I realized is that since coming back from Egypt three months ago, I didn’t turn on any of our televisions. They were off for the three months I was in Egypt as well. So when my husband came back he’s like “…why the hell are all the televisions messed up, all apps logged out of, remotes basically dead?” Last night we got one of the televisions working and watched Deadpool and Wolverine, lol.

My husband is flying back to the U.S. today after having been stuck in Egypt managing a big construction project for a while. He hates long flights, so to amp himself up he randomly decided to stop in Dublin for two days. Just because he hadn’t been there before. So he just went there by himself for no particular reason, stayed in a literal castle hotel, ate steak, drank beer, spent hours walking around seeing all sorts of delightful churches and parks and homes, and then left.

Went shopping at Target today and took a moment to look at the book section. The adult fiction section was like 85% romance (including romantasy), 14% thriller, and then Wind and Truth.

While I have nothing against short fiction, the reason I’m not drawn to it is that I want to get to know the characters. That takes time. My sweet spot tends to be a long stand-alone novel or a duology/trilogy. When you go longer than that, into some epic series, I’m skeptical. By default I view it as someone writing for a career rather than to tell their optimal story, with *very* limited exceptions.

I’m going to the Vegas conference. Haven’t been to Vegas before, so people are like “enjoy the tables, don’t get rekt!” Meanwhile I literally live in Atlantic City (when I’m not in Cairo), so I’m like:

Stocks down, bonds down, and currency strength down simultaneously represents a balance of payments problem. It’s the type of thing that usually happens to emerging markets. Anyway, GM.

What are your favorite negative character arcs? A negative character arc is one where the protagonist gets worse over time rather than better. They might or might not turn for the better in the end, but the majority of the time is spent on a negative descent. A well-done example would be Frodo. The ring wears him down through the course of the story. An example that should have been good but wasn’t executed as well as it should have been, would be Anakin in the Star Wars prequel.

GM. Chapter 13 of Broken Money is called "Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown". It focuses on the US trade deficit and why it arises structurally. In short, since the USD is the global reserve currency (for reserve assets, international contracts, FX trading pairs, and cross-border funding), there is tremendous automatic demand for USD in the world compared to other fiat currencies. To supply the world with that ever-growing need for USD to service all sorts of needs, the United States runs structural trade deficits with the rest of the world. That's how the USD spills out to the rest of the world for them to use. And the mechanism for that is that the overvalued USD boosts Americans' import power, reduces Americans' low-margin export competiveness, and basically forces open that trade deficit. That trade deficit is the cost of maintaining the benefits USD system as currently structured. The fatal flaw is that those who bear the cost (e.g. industrialists in the Rust Belt) are not the same as those to gain the benefits (e.g. Wall Street and Washington DC folks). And those costs and benefits accumulate over decades, resulting in rising populism and pushback, which is now front and center. The challenge that the administration faces is that they have identified a real problem, but are tackling the surface issues rather than the underlying structural issues. Anyway, I uploaded that chapter 13 on my website for free reading: https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/broken-money-chapter-13.pdf

Taiwanese folk metal.

Today I found out that Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy, and Paris the psychotic assassin from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, are the same actress. That's it. That's the note.