I started using autodrive, and it's a game-changer. Funny how things go from "pointless" to "essential" in a very short period of time.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #496

Interesting Stuff

The commerce through the open seas being so cheap is, sadly, a fiat phenomenon. It was never that cheap to trade over such large distances. It's largely a function of Pax Americana (and Pax Britannia before it) and it's heavily subsidized through the dollar hegemony. It will be more expensive when that hegemony collapses, and we can kind of see it in real time with the Strait of Hormuz. That said, I believe there are much cheaper ways to have free trade through the seas, and instead of relying on the US Navy, entrepreneurs will figure out something much more effective (like Nike shipping containers only of left shoes or right).

Time reveals wisdom.

Exposure to Bitcoin is not Bitcoin because one is centralized the other is not.

Get rich righteously.

Propaganda has nothing on the financial system in how you're controlled.

You don't get to decide what a particular tech disrupts. That unpredictability is what I suspect government officials and bureaucrats everywhere hate about innovation.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #495

CaliFraud, Lindy West, Positive Masculinity, Midwit Helpers

Western civilization was born today about 2000 years ago.

I get sad seeing brilliant former colleagues and classmates announcing that they're in some clearly rent-seeking job.

I'm now obsessed with good feedback loops.

The big overlap between Bitcoin and AI is that they seem to be used overwhelmingly by men, specifically young men that have a particular streak. High-agency, maybe. Is it an early adopter thing or something deeper?

I Spent a Day Writing a Short Story with Claude. I had an idea for a science fiction story. A device that gives you the best version of yourself for 72 hours, then kills you. Only eight exist. What would people do with them? I wanted to explore the allegory that life itself is that device. We're all given extraordinary capabilities for a limited time, and most of us waste them on the same things the characters in the story waste theirs on: status, money, vindication, pleasure. The question was whether I could turn that into a story that actually worked as fiction, not just as a thought experiment. I can't write fiction. I've never written a short story. So I collaborated with Claude. I came up with the premise, the characters, the plot structure, and made every creative decision. Claude generated the prose. We went through six rounds of editorial review using AI subagents acting as a sci-fi editor, a prose editor, a story structure critic, and a general sci-fi reader. I caught inconsistencies, pushed back on suggestions, changed direction multiple times, and shaped every element of the world and the characters. The result is a 10,000-word short story called "Seventy-Two." You can read it here:

Seventy-Two — Marcus Vero

A short story by Marcus Vero

I don't know if it's good. That's partly why I'm publishing it: to find out. If you read fiction, I'd genuinely like to know what you think. Did the ending land? Did you finish it? Where did you stop caring? If you're more interested in the process than the story, I'll write about that separately: how the collaboration worked, what the AI was good at, what it was bad at, and what surprised me. But the story should stand on its own first.

Lots of data centers, software startups and VCs pivoting to AI. Good riddance, I say. Let's starve the altcoin industrial complex of its fuel.

Quantum FUD is a DoS attack because of the well known asymmetry between making claims and refuting them.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #494

Interesting Stuff

What would we doing without Sundays?

A lot of people swear by using voice to communicate with AI Agents. Maybe I'm weird but I like typing it out because it helps me figure out exactly what I want.

I've come to realize that the duty of the father is to instill discipline. Children don't have much willpower. It's your job to lend them yours when they don't have enough and to grow whatever willpower they have. The lack of fatherly discipline is a fiat phenomenon and it shows in the kinds of adults that has been produced.