A rant

the first of many to come

Sep 18, 2024

I’ve had like 15 simultaneous topics in my head that I've been meaning to write about for months now.

But due to some IRL commitments, the part of my week that I usually set aside for thinking deeply about “stuff” has been set on fire and thrown off a tall building.

So, I'm going to try a different approach and just bash the keyboard until all the random ideas that are in my head fall out in a jumbled, unstructured, poorly formatted mess that no one will ever read.

RANT ONE: ZOOM OUT PLEASE

The future is probably going to be amazing.
Stop being a doomer.

We’re on the precipice of immense world-altering breakthroughs. You can already, right now, throw words into a computer, and it will compose songs, videos, and amazing artwork that a decade ago would have required a team of skilled people to achieve.

This is all available for literally free.

Anyone in the world can access it.

It is literally like you’ve gained access to a personal assistant that happens to be a wizard and also is good at singing, but also science, and checking your grammar, and they never get tired, or hate you, or leave and go and work for a different company because you tap your leg on the table in an annoying way or something.

You just need the motivation and attention span to sit still for a few minutes and play with it.

And whilst the current applications are fun and quirky and can be used to make people laugh, I try to imagine a future where this level of tech is applied to more “serious” problems.

`Like healthcare. Or energy. Or physics.`

Imagine a world where it doesn’t take six months of pain and suffering to get diagnosed and hopefully treated for an illness you’ve developed.

Imagine that instead, you just plug in your info to a machine on your phone, and it instantly tells you what's wrong and proposes the fix.

Imagine that it costs literally nothing to do this, and it's 10x as accurate as the average doctor.

Imagine that breakthroughs in how we generate and store energy take place as we race towards AGI.

Imagine that as the marginal cost of energy trends towards zero, the price of all consumer goods quickly follows, allowing the quality of life to improve for billions of people on earth.

Imagine that we have simultaneous scientific breakthroughs that compound on top of one another, allowing us to solve basically all of “life's problems.”

We will, of course, just invent new ones, but maybe the old ones go away for a bit.

Imagine that crypto nerds finally manage to get ZK tech to work at scale, and the new fast blockchains actually work, and maybe some people actually develop an app people want to use.

^ This is probably still the hardest thing to imagine lol.

But anyway, the point is good stuff that will make us happy if we try hard to appreciate it is literally right in front of us BUT:

WE ARE ALL TOO ZOOMED IN ON THE ONE MINUTE CHART OF LIFE TO NOTICE ANY OF THIS.

We are all so busy arguing about something we won’t even remember in two days' time that it’s really, really hard to zoom out and see all the INCREDIBLE progress that has taken place historically and is standing right in front of us, getting ready to punch us in the face.

There’s a cool "Wait But Why" chart about parabolas and what it feels like to stand in front of one of them. I was going to try to paraphrase it, but I am an idiot and will butcher it, so I will just paste it here below.

But it is entirely true. Today feels no more remarkable than the last.

But each day we move forward on the parabolic curve that has taken humanity from stumbling around in caves, trying to light fires with twigs, to literally blowing up dead dinosaurs in rocket boosters and firing ourselves 400,000 km into the sky and landing a metal tin with people in it on the moon.

And that literally happened FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.

Since then, we’ve developed the internet, the iPhone became a thing, the bankers blew up the financial system, Satoshi invented Bitcoin, social media brought distant friends closer together, and suddenly you could video call anyone, at any time, for essentially free. Your surface area for friendships expanded from people at your school and your workplace to anyone with a shared interest in anything, anywhere on the planet.

Oh, and then people started using voice notes and undid all this progress and sent us back to the dark ages. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

But day to day, life doesn’t feel that different. Because we as humans just adapt to “whatever”.

We compare our lives to others around us, not the lives others had before us. So when people say, life is so bad now, or everything is terrible, or Europe is falling...

It’s probably not.

Life is probably exceptionally good.

Most of us are lucky enough to not be at war, dying in a ditch with trench foot and shrapnel stuck in our arm.

Most of us no longer have to have 10 children because the odds were that 5 of them would die during childbirth, and you needed the rest of them to work on the farm to feed the other four.

Most of us have the luxury of a choice. Of being able to work on things we find interesting, not stuck in a factory 18 hours a day, risking having our arms chopped off during the industrial revolution.

And maybe in 55 years, we will look back on today, and the things we do now will feel just as insane and outlandish as the things I wrote above feel now.

I hope so anyway, because if that turns out to be true, then the future we have in front of us will feel like magic.

I just hope that when I get there, I’m able to appreciate it.

Respect the parabola.

Thanks for reading this rant; I have many more planned.

The truth is my free time has reduced this year by about 90%, but I love writing, and I don't want to put out 90% fewer articles.

So maybe a happy compromise is articles that are 70% of the quality, but with higher frequency.

Also - it would really help if those of you brain-damaged enough to read my ranting could let me know what type of things you’d like to read about.

Below are some topic ideas :)

How to design better airdrops
Monad vs MegaETH vs Bera vs Blast
The magic of compound interest
Playing long-term games
Every big mistake I’ve ever made
How to have conviction
Why SocialFi will still be a thing
Why prediction markets won’t die after the election
How to survive the job disruption AI will bring
Why social media ID is a death sentence for creativity

Or literally anything else you want me to write about. Please just DM me, message me in Monad Discord, shout at me on a call, or rent a plane and write me a giant message in the sky.

Thanks for reading, and remember, parabolic to respect the parabola.