unleashed

Amanda Askell's name lore is crazy: she was born Amanda Hall, her ex-husband William MacAskill was born William Crouch, they married and picked MacAskill (her grandmother's maiden name) as their last name, then she changed her name to Askell after they divorced

i think people underestimate that while it's easier to run grifts rn, the next admin will have 100,000 lawyers in a data center

Tech sociopaths fall for grind culture flexing on social media like moths to a flame, and I have a problem with it. It’s confusing to me because not only is it an own goal (sets expectations high) it’s also self defeating from a Machiavellian lens (makes you look less capable than you really are). Didn’t we all watch Iron Man and base our personalities around Tony Stark as awkward middle schoolers? You know the point is to project like you’re going to parties every night and visiting foreign nations every month and hanging out with beautiful women while also running the massively successful multinational defense conglomerate and being Iron Man right? Obviously you’re going to have late nights and spend weeks on end locking yourself in a room, but the movie didn’t show that and neither should you. People around you should think that you’re out and about every day, in the mountains and the fields and the rivers, hanging out with friends, doing standup at a random bar - and then one day randomly, bam, 100k MRR, bam, App Store top 10, bam, acquired by Meta. How the hell did you manage that? Didn’t you spend the last five years fucking around? Nobody around you should see that you worked for that, that kind of stuff should just happen to you because you’re Tony Stark and you’re endlessly talented and you go to parties and testify in front of Congress and grind in your mancave with your homebrew AI assistant in one day and do it all again tomorrow. The juxtaposition of someone who can take his work and life so un-seriously and yet effortlessly succeed in having massively serious consequences on the world around him by coasting on his intellect and relentlessness is what defines the Tony Stark plot device, it’s what made you and all the other tech nerds fall in love with him in the first place (it’s also why you defend Elon Musk). He is the impossible man. You on the other hand, spending all day in your bedroom ordering DoorDash and barking commands into Cursor, are a very possible man, there’s like 8,000 of you in a one mile radius centered on Mission Street right now. The only time Tony locked in away from socialization for an extended period of time was when he was literally kidnapped by the Taliban and had to build his first suit to escape. He spent the entire rest of the trilogy endlessly running around the world, meeting new characters, launching new organizations and buildings and vehicles and satellites and and and…not working in an office alone at 4am. Even though, implicitly, you and I know he was. But again, they didn’t show those parts. Because it’s boring as hell and makes him look lame. So why do you?

the western social contract: if you create an entire company and sell it, you can aspire at the level of wealth of somebody whose achievement was simply existing 40 years before you

gibson is fine with it, i think so is stephenson but a lot of authors who debuted after that era seamlessly code-switch to quasi-luddite when pressed, like they were only interested in futuristic tech when it was confined to story (RIP PKD, you would've loved claude)

Imagine making houses artificially so scarce that you have to trade a decade of equity in one of the fastest growing, most anomalously successful businesses in history, to own one.