Just finished reading a book, then went online and saw that the U.S. bombed Iran’s major nuclear sites.

Fresh out of the peak 1990s, Millennials and Zoomers navigating life like:

Humans figured out how to harness hydrocarbons, electricity, and telecommunications in the1800s, leading to an unprecedented growth in technology and population by the time all of that got some momentum in the 1900s. And then economists were like “wow, look how beneficial fiat currency was for humanity.”

Hey, remember that time Elon Musk said that President Trump hasn’t released the Epstein files because Trump is in them, and then deleted the tweet?

My June newsletter is out now. It focuses on 3 misconceptions about US public debt and deficits:

Lyn Alden

June 2025 Newsletter: 3 Misconceptions About US Debt

June 18, 2025 This newsletter issue analyzes three common misconceptions about the US federal debt and deficits. The ongoing nature of the deficits...

Apparently JD Vance made a Blue Sky account and got banned/suspended within like 20 minutes.

That moment you realize you're the same age as Jet Black is supposed to be in Cowboy Bebop, which you watched *check notes* 23 years ago.

Imagine, if you will, a story about two empires so vast and powerful that they have control over nanites, genes, planetary-busting bombs, and the very ability to time travel itself, while locked in a timeless war with each other. And now imagine a story of that insane scope is written as a short novella. Anyway, here's a mostly spoiler-free review of "This Is How You Lose the Time War" which I just finished reading. It's a multi-award-winning short book, and very commercially popular, yet only has a 3.86 out of 5 review on Goodreads because it is polarizing. Back-cover type of summary: A time-traveling agent named Red works for the post-singularity technotopia called the Agency, and another time-traveling agent Blue works for a vast organic consciousness called the Garden. The two agents are post-human, with powers almost beyond comprehension. They engage in a time-traveling battle of wits over centuries, but eventually Blue leaves Red a letter that says "Burn before reading" which Red reads, and thus begins a chain of letters that they write to each other while warring. After so long and complex of a war, they each find their opponent more fascinating than anything else. I do like the premise a lot. For those that have played Magic the Gathering, it's like if one side casts a fireball, and the other side casts a counterspell, but then the first side casts a counterspell on that counterspell, and the other side counters that counter that countered their fireball. Two empires so vast and powerful that they're battling across a multiverse of timelines, constantly undoing what the other has done. One side kills a key figure of history. The other side kills the would-be assassin of that figure. The first side goes back further and attacks somewhere else, and so on. Determining the outcomes of wars, rewriting history, dancing across multiple different "threads" of time, while trying to keep Chaos from spiraling out of control. As a random example, in some time-threads Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy that we know it. In other threads, Romeo and Juliet was written as a comedy, with a light-hearted outcome. Who knows what tiny differences in Shakespeare's life would have led him to write one or the other. Since the book was polarizing, my assumption going in was that I would not like it. This is basically a story about a time war written by poets, and thus my engineer brain is likely to kind of check out. And indeed, I actively did not like the first half. I found myself reading out self-enforced obligation to get through it, sometimes skimming over whole paragraphs. The prose is pretentious, though arguably on purpose because the two agents are effectively demigods, playing six-dimensional chess with each other while also being absolute murder-machines when needed, so there is a sort of eloquent battle of wits that they engage in with their letters. Additionally, despite Red and Blue being so different, and literally written by different people (the book was co-authored), I surprisingly found them to be too similar to each other. Although again I suppose that's kind of the point. Two sides involved in a war so complex and long, how could you not turn out similarly to each other? That's not really a spoiler; from the start there's an obvious "we looked at the enemy and saw that it was like us" vibe. Lastly, given the shortness of the book, obviously the reader is not really going to know the details of this world. It's inherently hard to empathize with characters that you barely understand even from a physical standpoint, given how absurdly advanced and post-human they are. And since there are multiple timelines that these agents go through, reading most of it made it unclear how death works, or what the consequences of death are in this multiverse. The obvious point from the start is that in this grand war, we would be focused on just two characters, and yet not knowing certain rules of the overly-complex world can potentially affect how well we can attach to those characters. But then... the second half did get me more engaged and curious. I had to see the punchline, had to see how it would end, and indeed I cared for the outcome of the characters. So, they got me. I'd give the book an 8/10. There's a creative and experimental aspect to it, nontraditional high-brow literature sort of stuff. Too poetic for my taste; not concrete enough. But I wouldn't necessarily change anything, either. It's very interesting, despite not quite being for me.

Japanese asset price deflation is a thing of the past now. That whole private sector deleveraging period is done.

Well, I’m going on live Indian financial news in 40 minutes. Scheduled this a few days ago. Now it’ll be during the opening volley of a war which I’ll be asked about. 🤷‍♀️

Today I traded in my old Hyundai for $500 and drove away with a Toyota with a working air condition feeling like:

Am I the only one in the world that doesn’t love the movie Akira? With its violence and gore and dark psychological aspects, it helped pave the way for mainstream adult animation. And it had amazing visuals for the time, with iconic aspects that were replicated elsewhere. So like, it’s objectively important in the history of the medium. No doubt about that. But in terms of watching it, I don’t find it subjectively engaging, nor do I find myself recommending it like “you gotta watch Akira”.

I know it’s popular to be all-in on moral panic these days, but I think Bitcoin is in a good technical place right now. I’m bullish. I think Core devs are doing good work. And I’m glad that people can run Knots or otherwise fork if they don’t like Core. That’s part of what makes Bitcoin robust, and gives useful market/adoption signals. Mining pool centralization isn’t great, but there are plenty of optional tools to use more if it interferes more with the network, and economic signals (eg the possibility of high fees for censored transactions) exist for precisely that context, to help it get unstuck if it gets stuck. I think current functionality is great, but I also think CTV+CSFS is a sensible upgrade on top of that if folks end up coalescing around it. Sometimes the sun is out. ☀️

The past couple decades of macro debates, summarized.

Currently checking out my copy of The Bushido of Bitcoin by @Alekandar Svetski. I got to see it in draft form, but it’s nice to see it out in print. A treatise on virtue, basically. The forward by Ross Stevens is absolute fire; that part wasn’t available when I checked out an earlier version.

The combo of 1) people getting sucked into digital echo chambers and 2) people believing hallucinating AI answers without checking, is going to take a lot to change. We are in an environment where if things *look* official enough, we’ll usually just instantly believe them. Since nobody has the time or inclination to check everything. Like, someone can just tweet a picture of me at a conference, and put a quote next to it, and tons of people will take it at face value. People won’t stop and ask “is this actually a quote of hers from this conference?” It could be years ago, out of context, or not said by me at all, but one would never know since it seemed legit enough. The current counter to this is basically to assume most things are potentially wrong in part or in full, unless further verified. But the risk there is people get detached and don’t bother researching things. One thing you can do is go through your follow list and remove people/entities who don’t have a high signal ratio. In other words, keep people you agree or disagree with that are locked in and high signal, but remove those who parrot things they don’t understand or spread misinformation on a regular basis. In an environment of endless quantity, it is more important than ever to elevate quality.

Sometimes when I find myself not finishing a book but am still curious to at least know the ending, I ask AI to summarize it for me. But today I wanted to remember something from a book I fully read many years ago, and asked AI to summarize it for me, and noticed that it was totally wrong at multiple points. Dramatically so. I pointed out that it was wrong and it’s like “my bad, here’s the right answer.” So I asked how it could confidently make mistakes like that. Like what specifically happened in this case? And it talked about how it extrapolates from stories and thus if something avoids the usual tropes, it could get it wrong. It said if I ask for citations it could help it prove its accuracy (which I didn’t think to do for fiction, I mean the entire objective answer is in one book, there’s not like multiple conflicting answers here). So I was like “okay what happened to (this character) at the end? With citations.” It gave me a wrong answer with misleading citations. So I pointed that out. And it was basically like “oh wow, you’re right, I know that is disappointing to happen twice.” And some more boilerplate. So I asked “I mean, I should just disregard all your prior summaries, right?” And it more or less was like “Yeah. But we can revisit them if you want.” By the end I felt like JK Simmons in Burn After Reading.

One of the biggest unlocks I’ve had over the past year is just taking almost all meetings while walking outside.