Pride says that you have ideas. Humility says that the ideas have you.

In retrospect the country-by-country bans/restrictions/taxes on smoking (~2005-2015) was the canary in a coal mine for authoritarian government.

Fiscal irresponsibility has real consequences. Do you honestly believe MAiD would be a thing if Canada were on sound money?

Anything with a security council cannot credibly claim to be decentralized.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #497

Interesting Stuff

The reality of the left is that most of their activists/supporters are paid in one way or another by fiat money printing, so the right has no chance from within the system. The only way out is through.

If you're getting deceived, it's worth finding out what flaw the liars are exploiting.

So much of maturity is just becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

GN

There's a particular type of delusion where you think that the people you like all live up to their ideals and the people that you don't like only respond to incentives.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #496

Interesting Stuff

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.

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.