You know what’s going to truly get us from web2 to web3? Therapy

i've been talking to a lot of normal ppl outside of tech about personal agents & the convos have been incredibly fascinating, particularly w.r.t. to retention. most consumer products typically have one of two types of retention, one is desire driven which is just pure dopamine (like insta, tiktok, games). they often don't even need notifications because you know there is a reward for your desire always waiting. the second is dependency driven, like emails, calendars, even credit cards & banking. most ppl have to do this, it's not something they necessarily desire (unless they are a sociopath). the challenge with personal ai agents right now is that they occupy a weird third space where they aren't emotionally rewarding most of the time to become entertainment like the first category, & they're not reliable / indispensable enough to become pure infra. i.e. they fail, & there is a lot of friction. outside of pure research driven tasks, even one failure is often enough to not come back for the utility value prop. which is why i think vertical agents that focus on making your life more interesting & entertaining are worth deep exploration still. & even very focused vertically integrated utility agents that work reliably will still be in demand. tons of ppl still think in jobs to be done when reaching for anything & with general purpose agents that's just not as crisp yet on what those critical jobs are.

Episode 15 is live - Inbox Zero & The Meaning of Life with @DennisonBertram It's a wide-ranging and highly entertaining conversation that moves us from his pre-crypto life in robotics, political science, life in Prague, high level fashion photography and creative technology into the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum. We trace how a founder’s worldview was shaped by post-communist Europe, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and the personal side of years building in crypto. Key arcs: - why humans should stop doing computer work - bureaucracy, passports and verification theater - Prague after communism and why Bitcoin felt so real after 2008 - his main founder lesson: if it’s hard to use, it’s probably wrong - what kids and mortality do to your sense of time and money Full conversation: youtu.be/79i2tSNt2uQ open.spotify.com/episode/5Af… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

having tried my best to intuit the motives of the protesters in France today, I am struck by the fact that two of the most treasured pillars of the European postwar order are colliding: 1. unfettered immigration, especially from former colonies, justified by historical obligation and postcolonial guilt 2. protecting pensions and the elderly at all costs, even to the point of extreme fiscal strain now you have first and second generation immigrants, as well as young native french people, taking to the streets because the french state is hell-bent on extracting whatever it can and feeding it into the maw of boomer luxury communism. the younger generation is being asked to accept a deteriorating deal: pay more, receive less, and abandon the expectation of matching the living standard of their parents or grandparents. the young immigrant newcomers have even less incentive to accept any kind this bargain. they are not bought in to the french social contract. they have no common identity with the french boomers they are being asked to sustain. they resent the fact that the entire machinery of the state is designed to exploit the young to serve the old. the old do not care about the immigrants enough to trade away any of their entitlements for them. they have the advantage as they wield the franchise reliably and their share of the electorate is only growing, so they won't accept a decline in their own standard of living to fund a future they will never live to see. now these two groups are on a collision course. ironically, immigration was intended to ameliorate the worsening fiscal picture brought about by a demographic transition. but this did not happen. studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants do increase aggregate GDP (by simple brute force, by adding to population), but not the fiscal picture [1]. the most comprehensive paper using real-world data [2] segments immigrant types to France and finds non-EU immigrants to be persistently fiscally negative. EU immigrants by contrast are the most fiscally positive group, meaning that studies that consider immigrants as a whole are masking the negative impact of non-western immigrants (and Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia rank #1 and #2 and #4. Africa accounts for 50% of the 8 million immigrants living in France today.) immigration has not caused France's fiscal crisis. but it hasn't bettered the economic picture at all – it has deteriorated it somewhat – and it has created a combustible demographic that has little allegiance to the French nation. far from helping France deal with its aging workforce, immigration has added fiscal burden and created a permanent, non-assimilated disenfranchised underclass. the original justifications for immigration – labor scarcity, postcolonial obligation, and more recently workforce aging – have largely failed to manifest the promised results. the pro-immigrationist policy has been defended in Brussels as necessary to defend the welfare state, but it has expanded the population making claims on the state, without eliminating the need for fiscal adjustments. France now has an aging electorate aiming to preserve the benefits it was promised, mingled with a younger more diverse population that questions whether it will ever receive a similar deal. the young are vastly outmatched at the ballot box and so they take to the streets. the french establishment is now trying to preserve a tenuous status quo: unlimited intergenerational obligations alongside a neverending immigration regime that continually changes the composition of the society intended to honor those obligations. the immigration regime also actively worsens the fiscal picture while creating these cultural fractures and inculcating a society more prone to sectarian violence. the french state will have to renegotiate its social contract and disempower one of these groups. electoral gravity suggests that the old will continue to win until France finally reaches default and creditors renegotiate the welfare state for them. the major contenders in 27 take different approaches to this tradeoff: - the right in Le Pen looks to reduce immigration-related expenditure and focus public spending on French citizens, while resisting retirement age increases - Macron in the center aims to control immigration somewhat and reform pensions by raising retirement age - Melenchon's left, largely behind the protests this week, denies the tradeoff and aims to keep funding pensions and retirement at 60 while increasing immigration. as France has very little fiscal space it's unclear how this would be paid for whether the french social contract can be peacefully renegotiated remains to be seen. [1] For France, immigrants' net fiscal contribution averaged -0.85% of GDP over 2006-2018 when all public expenditure was allocated (and this includes ALL categories of immigrants including European, American and Asian) See: oecd.org/en/publications/int… [2] See table 4 (translated below) shs.cairn.info/revue-economi…

interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/

Episode 14 is out: The Anonymous Alchemist with @scupytrooples of @AlchemixFi It's a conversation of both breadth and depth starting with his leap from teaching through to early Ethereum, DeFi, a fast-growing team and a project that reached more than $500M in TVL within about two months of launch. But growth brings intense pressure: security worries, team conflict and burnout. We cover leadership, authenticity in the space, co-founder conflict, anonymity and security, chronic pain and how therapy, physical therapy and time away helped him recover - all revealing the realities of creating frontier tech we seldom honestly share and underscoring the importance of taking care of ourselves and others doing the building: @scupytrooples: "one of my non-negotiables now is just take care of yourself, take care of each other and you can take care of the place by doing so.” Full conversation: youtu.be/29IWDvAdHrU?si=ZP1d…