innovation culture

This essay argues that intelligence is not defined by what a system stores or how it computes, but by what it can access and stage into use under constraints of cost, availability, and time . Storage is cheap. Computation is cheaper still. The real bottleneck—the hard part—is memory access. And where the cost is, intelligence is.

Kinda want to launch an unironic, on-the-nose pro-bureaucracy discourse. Not even an apologia or defense, just straight up “bureaucracy is actually good and you morons trying to tear it down have no idea what you’re talking about or doing”

My longer-term agenda is to re-imagine and refactor bureaucratic functions and patterns into decentralized... See more

The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change,... See more

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

The West Coast quiet served its purpose. In isolation I developed theories about creativity and collaboration. But theories only get you so far on their own. At some point you have to go beyond putting ideas into the world and get to work manifesting them.

When you expand a technology, you expand it towards both ends. The divine and the profane. With AI we receive breakthrough medical research AND waifu porn bots. With crypto we receive community owned infrastructure and endless memecoin rugs.

In Part III, they continue to work through the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and René Girard, exploring the metaphysics of both technology and desire. “For both thinkers, salvation doesn’t come from technology itself but from a transcendent outside,” they posit. They then cite Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, whose ideas have... See more

This is an insight that has been repeated by artists, too. Pablo Picasso: “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” James Baldwin: “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” Bob Dylan: “To be creative you’ve got to be... See more