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16 Dec, 7 tweets, 3 min read
June 2019.
COVID accelerated remote. The alternatives have arrived. And the bubble has burst.
What keeps you in San Francisco? In the remote era, nothing at all.
Going full remote is now obviously right.

The next step is legal on-chain incorporation, at least as a mirror of the off-chain vehicle. Perhaps Wyoming's @CaitlinLong_ @WyoBlockchain and @AragonProject could team up to make WY the new crypto-friendly DE.
There is a major silver lining to the SF exodus. A generation of founders and investors now understands how important it is to build functional cities, and that the N-city system is much more responsive than the 2-party system.
There are still large incumbents, but the Bay Area is now just one of several tech capitals. What's more, it's a legacy choice, an expensive choice. No longer the default.

Indeed, you need a very good reason for actively choosing it.
This was right before COVID exploded. I didn't know then how quickly the fall would happen. Only that it was underway, and inevitable.

Now for the rise of startup cities. We have a world to win.

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
17 Dec
How to architect a crypto app

Start by sketching out the frontend and backend as normal. Then replace a few key backend calls with reads and writes to a decentralized database, namely a blockchain. balajis.com/yes-you-may-ne…
In other words, you don't need to throw out everything you know about web or mobile development. And you can often still use a standard DB as the data store for much/most of your app.

But for certain key functions, like sending/receiving funds, that's an on-chain operation.
Anyone who's built anything over the last decade is familiar with the concept of using multiple databases. At a minimum, you have your main Postgres plus a data warehouse or the like for analytics.

Now think of a blockchain as another DB to interact with.
docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/…
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
16 Dec
All wealth becomes digital.

That's the consequence of software eating the world. Everything becomes analogous to a PDF, a set of digital instructions that you can get a printer (or a robot) to print out in the real world.
Amazon Prime, drop shipping, food delivery, ride-sharing...all of them involve a digital frontend and a human backend.

But over time more pieces are getting automated. Robot manufacturing, autonomous trucks, drone delivery, self-driving cars. So the backend goes digital too.
AI (in general) and virtual influencers (specifically) are obvious examples of this trend, where the manual backend is no longer as necessary. As is crypto, where much of the labor in the financial system is being automated with smart contracts and digital signatures.
Read 6 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
16 Dec
He could offer discount Airbnbs in other cities for people who want to escape San Francisco’s worst-in-the-nation governance.
SF waged a multi-year war against Airbnb, told tech to get out in no uncertain terms, and just condemned Zuck for donating $75M to a hospital.

The city doesn’t need more money. It needs far less poop, far more housing, and far better politicians.
Btw, as noted before, @hknightsf is by far the best journalist in SF. So don’t take this as a criticism of her body of work.

She’s the only one who documents the dysfunctionality of city government and the brutality of city streets.

I’m short SF but would back her Substack.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
12 Dec
Imagine if we optimized for number of independent replications over number of citations.
A citation typically assumes the cited study is true. In a paper that cites 50 other papers, most of them are not being tested.

This leads to chains of unsupported inference, as in the replication crisis.

(Note: I have not replicated this graph!)
nature.com/news/1-500-sci…
Think about the reproducibility problem in software first. This is much easier than (say) biological science because it is usually cheap and fast to independently check whether software works on any given computer. It’s still not easy to make code work reliably everywhere.
Read 15 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
6 Dec
If you're a city or country that wants the next Silicon Valley, the recipe is simple: abolish obsolete regulations.

- Fully legalize crypto
- Carve out zones for self-driving cars
- Allow expanded right-to-try in biomedicine

Here's more from 2014.
politico.com/magazine/story…
Focus on abolishing old regulations over subsidies or tax breaks. Here's why:

- legalizing something new is a true 0-to-1 step
- it gives instant global advantage vs other jurisdictions
- it's free & costs the jurisdiction nothing

Legalize innovation and the talent will follow.
It's hard to specifically attract the *digital* part of Silicon Valley, because it can be funded from anywhere and scaled online.

Instead, unlock innovation in the *physical* world by creating special innovation zones for particular technologies like self-driving cars.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
6 Dec
Most value eventually becomes digital.

This is counterintuitive. But first think about what fraction of your spending already goes to digital goods like books, SaaS, etc.

Now think about what happens as robotics improves and you can “print” more things.
Much work remains on sensors & actuators. But once an actuator gets to a certain level, most value is digital.

Printers let you print most documents, speakers let you “print” most sounds, monitors let you “print” most images.

Drone delivery, robotics, 3D printing extend this.
This is a complementary take on the phenomenon @EpsilonTheory notes.

Eventually, robotics turns more forms of labor into electricity. And with digital code + digital currency, you can print out anything.

Many of these APIs already exist (from TSMC to Zazzle) but more will come.
Read 5 tweets

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