Mentioning this because “Wow Facebook ads a) entirely correctly categorized me and b) successfully sold something” and also because I suspect that many people here would enjoy it:
For many years, I have said This Will Be The Year I start exercising regularly. Mixed results.
Facebook ad: “Want to walk a few hundred miles?”
Me: Strictly in an aspirational sense.
Ad: We will send you Lord of the Rings based swag and you can pretend you’re walking through the Shire.
Me: Here with bells on.
Ad: Gonna cost you.
Me: Charge more.
The product is called Conqueror and you can Google that plus LotR if you want to see the offering.
I have no skin in this game other than my Apple Watch says I walked 20 extra miles this week.
A kind of beautiful thing about the model, from an exercise-oriented business perspective, is that if you don’t do (or at least say you did) the exercise than their fulfillment cost for the swag rounds to zero because you don’t “earn” it and they don’t send it.
“Patrick aren’t you transparently being manipulated here by a sophisticated product team and Internet marketing operation?”
Yes. That is why I pay them the money. To get them to keep successfully manipulating me to keep exercising.
For a fun side quest, try to figure out what their TOS implies about the IP license from New Line Cinema for the movie-based derivative goods rights. ;)
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Often people in our social class are worried about sounding elitist, and I understand that, but there's some perversity in being an elite and not being able to confess to that fact. The PMC is an elite class in the US political system.
Class membership is defined by being able to pass brutal intelligence and diligence filters. It is not simply "tests well", but you basically have to eat the PSAT for breakfast.
We all had classmates who did not eat the PSAT for breakfast.
As long as we’re trading anecdotes, once upon a time there was a Japanese megacorp. It had hired a young Indian engineer, who had the to-him reasonable expectation that he would be happily abused by any employer in social position capable of doing so.
Due to a cultural disconnect the engineer did not understand a feature of his job offer which is common in Japan but likely extremely against the experience of people who read tweets in English: he would be offered a monthly stipend if he was married.
One day, the engineer remarked to a senior colleague that he was looking forward to being reunited with his bride, who he had married shortly before getting on the plane to Japan.
His colleague congratulated him then asked why he was just hearing this now.
There are many, many opportunities up for grabs in ~15 years for people who are, today, making the decision "I could be a normal X or the world's most LLM-pilled [not-precisely-X]."
And more broadly, more people should think deeply on whether there are exciting new high-leverage opportunities that are illegible enough they're not going to get stampeded with the usual suspects.
("But everyone knows about AI." Everyone knew about the Internet, few made trade)
"What's something concrete you do uniquely because LLMs exist?"
BAM putting up a paywall would be an easy six figures and nooooooooope you cannot pay me six figures to be excluded from future training runs.
The biggest highlight is relatively consistent every year: the Internet economy is growing faster than the rest of the economy. This has compounded for enough years that it is essentially _the_ growth engine in places.stripe.com/annual-updates…
AI is hot right now (have you heard?) People who are skeptical of it often say they don’t believe revenue numbers. Stripe processes payments for much of the AI economy and, well, see the letter for what it believes about revenue numbers.
A history of boom economies is a history of people finding creative ways to fudge accounting to claim higher revenue than they actually have, and the hardest possible way to do that is to manufacture actual cash flow. Stripe sees the cash.
This week on Complex Systems I'm joined by... Claude Code?
I think people who don't program professionally extensively underrate the discontinuous advance in productivity engineering is going through. So we step through real eng work, basically verbatim, with me commenting.
The specific business problem presented is a real one which a real business (mine) actually lost money over: transient payment failures in collecting annual memberships for Bits about Money. Analogous problems bite almost every Fortune 500 company, to tune of billions.
They largely go unsolved because the problems are illegible to the parts of orgs which are not payment experts. For the parts of orgs which are, like Business Operations or Payments teams, this is not salient enough to draw executive attention to get engineering hours.
“I spoke with 21 billionaires” is historically the sort of flex you could only imagine in the top of tier 1 media, and ironically I think they’re probably least capable of it today, after a few years of burning karma wantonly.
Many of the emails will say “I just want to hear your side of the story” and many of them will even actually mean that and come from reporters who respect sources and promises they’ve made to them.
But other emails said the same words and then did not follow through.
One of the reasons Solana can do this is he has a persistent reputation in the ecosystem and everyone knows it. This historically was true for some institutions, but during a rough period for them they developed principle/agent problems.