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Balaji Profile picture
@balajis
Sep 19, 2020 • 3 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
One tweet summary of @RoamResearch.

Type a sentence like:
- Had #meeting with #JohnSmith about #defi

You get:
- a page with all meetings (#meeting)
- a page with all mentions of a person (#JohnSmith)
- a page with all mentions of a concept (#defi)

It indexes your text.
Some common questions:

- You can use either #foo or [[foo]] to designate a page
- You can collapse #john and #JohnSmith into one page
- You can autodetect old mentions of #foo
- You can build up tags for people, places, ideas
- You can, in theory, link these tags across repos
People often name "bidirectional links" as the core concept behind @roamresearch, but it's more like semantic annotation of text.

Next step would be to make this even more automatic. Ideally: paste in text, get automatic tag recommendations, and then manually approve.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Profile picture
Feb 25
In a military confrontation between the US and China over Taiwan, who has the upper hand?
Unfortunately, more like Superman vs Clark Kent. In a non-nuclear confrontation over Taiwan, missiles run out within days.
Image
No, the US doesn't have technological superiority.

In manufacturing, China is global #1 by far and the US isn't in the game.

In software, the US is #1 and China is a strong #2 (but competitive with Tiktok/Deepseek).

Taken together, China is way ahead.
Image
Read 8 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Feb 15
AGENCY VS NPC

What are the limits of agency?

1) Until five minutes ago, the West was run by NPCs. You slotted into your role, waited decades to be president, propped up the postwar order, established the establishment.

2) Now it's run by high agency people. You can just do things people. Tech people, Trump people. Because the Internet increases variance. It means that small groups[1,2] of highly motivated individuals — as small as one, like Satoshi or Elon or Trump — can change the world.

3) But there are limits to agency. Historic forces, genetic constraints, physical limits. A high agency person can’t just grind their way into starting for the Lakers. They can’t intuit the preimage to a cryptographic hash. They can’t turn rye into wheat by pure willpower.

4) That way lies Neo-Lysenkoism. Lysenko was a communist who denied that genetic constraints existed at all — and executed Darwinists who thought they did. He believed rye could become wheat by pure willpower.

5) And, confusingly, the same NPCs that just ran the West also believe in a Neo-Lysenkoism where a Down's Syndrome patient[3] is only constrained by societal expectation rather than unfortunate chromosomal aberration. Genetics denial also underpins their insistence that XX=XY. And economics denial underpins most socialist policy.

6) So — wait. What then is the difference between the determined technocapitalist idea that “you can just do things” and the delusional communist idea that “constraints do not exist”? Does the far left also in some sense have a high agency model of the world?

7) To complicate this further, the technolibertarian view on agency often doesn't extend to the rest of the world. Deepseek can also just do things. As the military says, "the enemy also gets a vote."[4]

8) Moreover: high agency, taken to the ultra-alpha extreme, can impede large-scale cooperation. There is a reason beta cooperation arose[5]. Every man cannot be a leader on everything; indeed, he can only at most lead on one thing.

9) Steve Jobs' famous memo on how dependent he was on his species[6] acknowledged this. You are probably not leading the engineering of the screen you're looking at now. And you can't become a good leader till you've become a good follower, as you don't even know what good instructions look like.

10) As I think through this, I think the key distinction is numerical. The technocapitalist is soberly enumerating known constraints and calculating ways to solve for X=Y, while the delusional communist is simply asserting that XX=XY. And the technocapitalist also knows how to build teams, manage budgets, handle personnel, and generally acknowledge reality.

11) Or, to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr: may God give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be, and the mathematics to know the difference.

We can just do things.
But only if you can do the math.
This post was spurred by the realization that:

(a) I generally agree with the high agency view of tech founders
(b) I generally disagree with the Neo-Lysenkoism of the far left
(c) I respect but am concerned by the high cooperation of the Far East, which is distinct from high agency
(d) I also respect physical laws greater than any man

And I just wanted to think through the issues.

CITATIONS
Some citations follow:

[1]: Good thread on Medicis: x.com/sporadicalia/s…

[2]: Good thread by @ADoricko on agency: x.com/ADoricko/statu…

[3]: Unfortunate Neo-Lysenkoist ad that is essentially genetics denial: x.com/the_beardedsin…

[4]: I don't think open source is the enemy. It's a turn of phrase to emphasize that the "high agency" model often doesn't account for other actors' high agency. High agency means high global volatility and high unpredictability.

[5]: China's cooperation game is a visual depiction of the complement to high agency: x.com/PicturesFoIder…

[6]: Steve Jobs was an extremely high-agency uber-alpha by anyone's definition, and even he acknowledged how dependent he was on the rest of his species.Image
Oh, and here's a cite on Lysenko.

Communists have always been denying biological reality, but they used to do it for plants.
archive.is/X3Ip9Image
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Jan 19
FIRST CRYPTO PRESIDENT

Overnight, the vast majority of the net worth ($59B) of the next President of the United States is now held in cryptocurrency. This will hold true even with a 90% drop.

What are the implications?

1) First, President Trump just went from crypto being perhaps 1% of his net worth to 90%+. Many early Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana holders experienced the same thing.

2) Second, this phenomenon — the overnight relative devaluation of all non-crypto holdings — will be experienced by billions globally within our lifetime as fiat dies.

3) Third, every politician, influencer, and celebrity worldwide is watching mouth agog at the phenomenon. They’ll wait to see how it shakes out politically and financially, and if the memecoin shows staying power — big if! — they may do their own.

4) Next, if we do then get a large market with thousands of personal memecoins, it may actually be ok, because every buyer knows what they’re buying: the potential future brand value of the meme.

5) Much depends on how much value the TRUMP asset holds, if any. Other celeb memecoins went to zero quickly, but Trump is Trump, and has the unique qualities of (a) 100M+ followers, (b) daily non-stop coverage, (c) presidential immunity, and (d) unprecedented control over the government.

6) So, whatever form of political counterattack comes his way, Trump is now strongly incentivized to legalize cryptocurrency in the most aggressive way possible.

7) Of course, this will be attacked as a conflict of interest. But Biden took 10% for the big guy, and Pelosi traded her stocks, and Hillary monetized her speeches, and Podesta had his $300B climate slush fund, and Obama got his Netflix deal. All became millionaires via various deniable forms of payola for Democrats.

8) So, Trump’s rebuttal may be that he’s just doing everything in public. His claim may be that disclosure solves the conflict of interest problem.

9) And that may be true, but it doesn’t fully solve the *alignment* problem. As context: the CEO of a company is typically one of the largest shareholders, but he is aligned with all his employees because they hold the same shares. All holders rise and fall as one, ideally.

10) By analogy, you would ideally want the President to be aligned with his citizens, such that they all held (say) USA coin, which gave some dividend from the profits of the USA. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund.

11) So, one way of solving the alignment problem would be for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP to every US citizen. However, it might be easier for him to just send an email in his personal capacity to every Trump supporter offering them some free TRUMP.

12) Specifically: he could give 72 hours notice and all kinds of Democrats would also sign up for his personal email list, just to get the airdrop.

13) Would it be legal? Well, it is certainly legal for politicians to email out *requests* for money. But to my knowledge no politician has attempted a personal airdrop before, to *give* away money — and certainly not at this scale.

13) At current valuations, Trump could give $100 of locked up TRUMP to all 77M Trump voters via airdrop and it would “only” cost him $7.7B in an asset that was worth zero two days ago. Heck, he could give $500 per person and still have $20B+ left over.

14) Yes, it would cost Trump some of his asset to do this. But if you needed to join his email list to get the coin, and if the airdrop could be effected without any cap gains, it would “pay for itself” by turning his base into even more rabid supporters.

15) It could even give him the political support necessary to completely destroy the Democrat patronage machine. Basically, by joining Trump’s email list and supporting his crypto policies you’d get a kind of UBI.

16) And if 77M Americans are also benefiting from TRUMP, charges of conflict of interest go away. It’d be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between President & citizen.

Worth thinking about.
To defend the asset after a potential crash, you need a huge base of holders. Not 770k, but 77M in the US.

So, the ideas below are fine, but the scalable strategy is an airdrop by the issuer. It boils down to enlightened self interest. Will Trump airdrop TRUMP to his email list?
No, it’s not liquid enough to buy Greenland.

But if it suddenly gained 77M Republican voters as users, and held them over time — very nontrivial ifs — it would gain value simply from the size of the distribution.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Jan 19
A memecoin is a zero-sum* lottery.

There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.

* It’s actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut.
If you want to gamble as entertainment, in moderation, like at Las Vegas, ok.

If you are a professional trader, ok.

But most should buy assets that retain their value over the long run.

It is sometimes possible to add use cases to a memecoin, or to keep it in the headlines to keep its value aloft indefinitely. And we’ve seen examples of that as well.

But in general, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose.
You are free to consider any asset a memecoin, and I’m not offended by that, but I’m happy to explain why I think Bitcoin is different.

1) Bitcoin is the base layer asset of a blockchain with ~800 Th/s in hashrate across hundreds of datacenters worldwide.

2) It hasn’t been hacked in 15+ years, and has survived several 80-90% drawdowns.

3) It has hundreds of millions of holders worldwide and a global network effect.

4) It grew gradually over time, rather than all at once, and the mining issuance schedule limits how much can be sold by any one party.

5) It has an “industrial use” in the sense that the Bitcoin blockchain permits hard to fake cryptographic proofs-of-existence.

6) It is the first of its kind and pioneered the entire space.

In short, I think Bitcoin has proven its staying power.Image
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Dec 20, 2024
More broadly: AI + social + crypto leads to retribalization of the Western world.

AI fakes mean you only trust info from your tribe.

Social media fragmentation means you only talk to your tribe.

And crypto tribalism means you only trade with your tribe.
What does retribalization look like in the physical world? This is Germany before Bismarck. Image
Ah, it’s actually not the start.
Congress was highly polarized by 2012.
And Twitter by 2017.
Then Gab and Truth broke away in 2020.
Now Bluesky and Threads in 2024.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Dec 2, 2024
Bangladesh was a stable country.

But it didn’t want to give up a military base or take sides on Ukraine.

So in retaliation, psychopathic Democrats backed a coup.

Then the White House lied about it, just like they lied about Hunter’s pardon.

Now it’s going fundamentalist. Image
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Image
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Karine Jean-Pierre lied repeatedly about whether Biden would pardon Hunter. That was a “conspiracy theory” back then and a conspiracy reality today.

Now apply that to claims about other matters. Is it really a coincidence that both Bangladesh and Pakistan suffered coups?Image
Democrats and neocons have been escalating pressure on poor Bangladesh since 2022.

They got their coup earlier this year.
Read 5 tweets

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