Putting this out here as a sign to tap when folks respond with "things are worse today" or "middle class shrinking" or other wrong ideas they have. Everyone should internalize and have these charts as core understanding of the world today. The time price of everything has gone down over this same time frame (see Superabundance). And while the middle class might technically be smaller, that is only because the upper class is much, much bigger. And fewer of us are in poverty. Globally, and nationally. Things are better.

If you played this game (and I did) you need to be paranoid and live well under your means Freedom comes from avoiding lifestyle creep and knowing when you’re at the top there are no long term guarantees tl;dr agree with all the “skill issue” responses here

No. I will not use cold water all the time. I will build a future of abundance and fix the problems in the way of living a comfortable life - for myself, for everyone. This attitude is giving up. I will not give up.

10 yo: "how many pushups can you do?" me: "at least 50 easily" 10 yo: "ok show me" /me bangs out 50 quick pushups 10 yo: "I thought you said you could do it easily" 17 yo: "yeah, you didn't make that look easy" me: 😭😭😭

Non consensus view: AI is already a commodity. OpenAI was not as good as Google’s best internal stuff (I know, was there, worked with teams building Google’s stuff). But they shipped faster and better. No one is 10x better, and OSS models are following fast. The winner will win by traditional techniques - better UI, better distribution, better marketing, etc.

I hate regulation but …. hear me out on this one. The US *must* make it illegal to show those stupid cookie popups all over the web. We can’t allow the EU to export its stupid paternalistic pollution to us here in the land of freedom.

You could also explain that your specific religious sect requires the early display of holiday lighting They aren’t anti religious bigots are they? 😂

Yes but folks complaining aren’t numerate 😂 Also see:

Want to stop socialism? One weird trick: let America build again Build houses, build factories, build anything When we build, we prosper, and we win

Have experienced this Our family business - non union - ran circles around the union shop next door I remember as a kid totally befuddled how adults could laze around and not care about getting the job done well and quickly And yet there they were, slacking, while we worked Never forgot that; later similar issues at Raytheon (literally couldn’t move a monitor or PC without union labor!) This is part of why America lost decades of competitiveness

Lived like a pauper while making bank at Alphabet Only upgraded lifestyle once had the freedom to do so Should be paranoid until truly free Salary is not wealth / wealth is wealth Pay yourself first / invest like crazy / don’t chase the hedonic treadmill

So then make your own billion and donate it. I can’t give a crap how other people spend their money. Nor do I want to confiscate it and force different choices if I disagree with them. Just don’t get this outrage / upset.

So my kid's private school had a speaker today speaking favorably about degrowth 😡💢 This at an awesome STEM school where kids build cool shit. These are e/acc kids! 🤖📈 I have already offered to give a pro-growth pro-capitalism e/acc talk as a rebuttal - guaranteed my talk will slap. So - anyone have a pro-growth e/acc deck or talk track I can crib from for high schoolers?

I cannot understand how any rational human is in favor of rent controls. It delivers the opposite of what they want. My theory is pols know it’s dumb but voters don’t so pols give voters free candy (rent control) knowing this will result in roach infested candy or no candy.

I was there for part of this - young PM on Maps team - and it was even simpler in some ways than this The folks selling us maps data kept jacking the price ... previously this hadn't make sense wrt ROI ... and then it did They made it make sense / killed their golden goose

People are sleeping on Tintin style btw

Kids still programming on them - oldest built senior year project doing object detection -> language translation and learning tool. Cool and fun. And stupidly hard, since APIs suck and Apple locks down most interesting things you'd want to do. Keeping around for programming

Came here to say contractors Xerox makes all their money today playing at the government bureaucracy game. Others do the same @IanRountree the figure I look at is overall government expenditure (fed/state/local) vs US GDP. This is approaching 50% … money goes somewhere!

💯 I've worked personally with former heads of the FDA, and folks who worked inside the FDA. These are good people doing their best, the nefarious conspiracies he rants on about are Just Wrong.

Strong disagree. We'll keep solving these problems. I'll take this bet all day long. 50, 100 years from now - more humans, thriving more, and we'll have tackled the real challenges you're raising.

Total fanboy of @anduriltech Totally awesome to be at HQ today talking about nuclear energy Even more fun to see a bunch of friends from all over in person LA deep tech scene bringing us all together 🤖🦾☢️

This is a fascinating journey to follow, if you aren't Context: I'm an engineer, can write great complex code / ship systems, have been following code generation techniques for *a long time*, playing with this stuff Watching @levelsio speedrun this, with the very clear goal of "AI does it all", is an amazing answer to the question of "how good is it / how far can it get" today The discussion below - where he notes a) it's getting incredibly messy, b) it can't refactor itself at all (tried and failed), and c) probably needs a human to come in and Do The Work ... is telling Still incredibly impressive *how far* it's come without hitting an actual breaking point - but that breaking point is there Better AI will push it out further, but there will (always?) be some point where humans are needed to hold it together, provide guardrails, ensure the AI doesn't run over itself Also love the "AI makes ugly models" sidebar, and just the sheer honesty Pieter brings to this Almost my favorite thing on X these days!

This is my attitude when a baby / child is on a flight too We were all children once, I have three of my own and have had them on flights, and it’s all ok (Plus good parents can sleep through crying no problem 😉)

This will never not be great. So sayeth the meat sack.

And yet us basic boys seem to have far more kids and happier home lives. He gets a lot right on health (I guess?) but is missing the broader point on a good life of purpose. 3 kids 1 spouse 0 girlfriends small N exes infinite happiness. FTW.

This one for all the pro Cuba commies in my feed who push back when I say a) China’s gains are owed to capitalism and b) Cuba isn’t doing well Bookmarking for next terrible communist take 😂

Original thread excellent. Mid 40’s, 1st of 3 kids just graduating high school. Very happy family life. Few thoughts: 1. Have more kids. Just do it. 2. Carve time for wife and kids. No excuses. Be as consistent as possible, show up. Stay fit too. 3. I gave up “hobbies” for years - kids became the hobbies. But my work is my hobby / fun too - so I still had “my thing” but gave up all extraneous things besides main things (kids / wife / career). But I’m a focus focus kind of person. 4. Design and live the life you want. We made it work on one income so we had full time parenting. We loved this and it worked. My siblings did not, and it worked too. Just design your life and solve for it. 5. Bring the kids into your work. So much fun. My parents did this in family business, and I did it - even while still at Google / Verily - and even more so now as a VC. Best way to teach them. Wife building startups with them, coding with them. 6. Do the things. I coached soccer, we all snowboard together, we go on trips etc. I always say yes to family then sort out the career implications. Causes a need to focus which in its own way causes career success. 7. It goes in seasons. As they grow up - 4 yrs+ - your freedom reappears and it’s easier to get back into big bursts of hard work at work while still being a great parent and partner at home. By the time they’re teens it’s too late to have shown up… — My dad put, and still puts, his businesses first. I hated this as a kid, and refused to do it to mine. And yet - it was soooo hard not to. I am so ambitious, so driven to succeed at anything I do. Without my wife’s reminder / requirement that I show up for family, I would have by default worked as hard as my dad. Big mental flip for me was remapping “success on the home front” as something to be equally ambitious about. Then you problem solve for that just as much as you do for work.

Taps the sign: billionaires capture at most 10% of the value they create This is true at most levels - people who expand the pie benefit everyone 10x more than they benefit themselves I will never understand petty and uninformed jealousy of the wealthy, nor folks who take issue with inequality Jeff can have as many yachts and planes etc as he likes, it is not a problem, I just don’t care and you shouldn’t care! All that matters is how much wealth he created for the rest of us

I don’t mean a skill issue wrt the role - ie I’m sure they are good and did their job well I mean skill issue wrt accepting lifestyle creep / not saving like a paranoid insane person

Huge CHIPS and IRA impact I’d think - and both of those are still ramping. Nearshore / reshore seems real from conversations I’m having.

The stoics spoke on this - I think Seneca said it’s our job to make people comfortable around us. I try and keep that in mind.

Atheist or not (and I am) I often think how Jesus explained heaven is all around us - we just have to choose to experience it. Conversely so too is hell. Many choose suffering when they could choose joy. You can be happy now, or miserable now. Choose well!

Having lived inside Google, as a power user of many o fathering services, long frustrated by unfixed bugs for power users - much of this resonates When I joined google it was by nerds for nerds. When I left it was for the average user, and nerds and edge cases weren’t prioritized, in fact were actively deprioritized There is still a Gmail filter search bug that is critically broken, prevents good filters and automation for power users, and will still be broken in 100 years. Google just doesn’t care about you, Mr or Mrs Power User 😔 Why is strange wrt X is that the edges and tails make all the content, you’d think they’d build some critical features for these folks — Also I give it some percent odds @yacineMTB is just trolling us re: being fired, but his codebase complaints are totally real - have seen this firsthand at The Goog

Love this idea but needs to be a statue celebrating our coming AGI overlords

Howl’s Moving Castle! :)

beating a dead horse but ... this is 6 years after iPhone launched ... maybe the moment when adults got dumb from the smartphone, and when youth became teens who were raised on these things bring my optimism to the table - will hopefully recover as we "evolve" to manage attention better

I'm here to build up the robotics / smart hardware community. 🤖🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏼❤️ This community will grow by orders of magnitude in coming years. 🤖📈🔥 Folks playing this game now will be huge in years to come! 👩🏽‍💻🧠💡 So - who's out there that I don't know yet? Tag them in / send them my way - I'm here to listen, think, promote, share, engage! Especially excited for folks on the come-up, stretching for that first few hundred followers, just crossing 1k, dreaming big dreams about what we can all build together.

I'm a bit grumpy because degrowth doesn't deserve equal time as a philosophy. Also grumpy because of all the mis-truths represented as fact in the talk. "Only 1% of the world lives well" / "capitalism is bad" / "we have too many humans" / "you should read Karl Marx" and on and on. Degrowth should only be discussed with kids as a sidebar alongside a neat rebuttal of why it is wrong.

Just don't care what others think / rate your own judgement much higher / everything else is just input and data to assess Don't take offense at anything - waste of time and energy - take feedback, analyze, incorporate or reject, move on My superpower: very hard to offend me

Reminiscent of the "industrialist telling fisherman to build a fishing business" story that is so popular. But that story misses what matters. The goal is about doing something bigger than ourselves driving societal value - not stacking chips to live large.

Professor today: “IQ is way down” Professor in 1970s*: “IQ is way down” Numerate / empirical evidence: “IQ is way up” —- * my grandfather, Duke prof, complained students were worse each year - I think all teachers complain about this since forever, yet overall IQ is up globally

Not sure which side you’re arguing for but I am 100% team simpler more effective words. People using fancy words are not communicating better in most cases. Aim for high SNR, people!

Singapore was the goat, and has fallen to the mind virus Why I hate traveling in the EU during the summer, just so uncomfortable and poverty coded Abundance thinking will stay winning - USA is the only place I'd want to live because of this

Having worked with a handful of amazing folks from Turkey, I think they just make them different (better) over there. Iconic pic!

This is amazing

Yes. Who you marry and build a family with What problem you select to pursue in order to create value for yourself and the world How you approach setbacks and struggles

Speed is a feature. I sooo appreciate everyone who is working to get latency down and cares about this. And I love that it found a back door.

Luckily we will accelerate and win Anyone imagining how well we could climb the tech tree again after collapse is just thinking through how long we could preserve the corpse of humanity until the sun explodes This is our only shot - we must make it through and win 🦾

So the scary thing here is the OP is an avowed communist and got a crap ton of likes for their post. And has a ton of followers. How can there be so many folks on board with this failed ideology? Socialists I can a little bit understand - most of them want EU style socialism which is still bad but they at least don’t want communism. And aside from name calling, there is no rejoinder to the points made in Elons correct post. Because there can be none.

Yes this is as wrong as it gets! Math. Statistics. Data. Nothing more. If you’ve built them / built AI this take is silly, in my opinion. But! Great engagement poast 😉🦾

This was my fave scene - the “dance off” segment of every Jedi/sith battle

I graduated into the dot com bust, then again (post grad school) into the great recession Grew up watching 80s and 90s recessions hit my family Paranoia about income is smart Optimism about future is smart too

Plus there are the 2nd order effects of teaching a generation of humans that stupid ineffective regulations are an ok thing and should be quietly accepted. That is a massive negative cost.

How much has this cost us in lost time and attention as a society? The milliseconds must add up to weeks of lost productivity across millions of people.

Also see: why almost everyone in the world would prefer to live in the US 😂 Outside right now: 🌞🔥 My house right now: 🧊🧊 My brain right now: 🧠📈

also just a reminder that ... back in my high school soccer days, we had to bang out 50/50/50 pushups situps starjumps every time we missed a goal in training ... and we'd do a ton of those ... def could not do that now 😂

Married 21 years as of today Deeply grateful for every bit of it Young folks: find your person / start your life ❤️

Love The Economist - center right, small l liberalism as in freedom and democracy, and write it as they see it - annoying left and right alike The original anti-woke folks I think. Anti-any-extreme really.

Got my hands on the degrowth deck. It is CRINGE. And also wrong. Blugh. Got my hands on a BANGER e/acc deck. Would love a few more. Can't wait for the talk. Inspirational == builders and fixers. Grump-inspiring == degrowthers.

It is so over 😭 Oldest is 18 years old this week, heading off to a better eng school than I ever got into next year, and just destroying me at arm wrestling I have been eclipsed 😅

At Google Research we told folks "we don't care if you publish, we care if you ship, if your work is used by billions" We were trying to avoid folks who put publishing on a pedestal / chase it at all costs. It has a place and matters. But impact matters more. Much publication has zero impact. Much shipping has huge impact.

Oldest of four here, wife youngest of ten, we had three ourselves Neither of us wanted very large family, but also wanted more than two Three delivers this outcome to a close approximation Ten children was not a good thing in my wife’s experience

Backpacks stay winning. Well past 40, never stopping. Feel free to carry your crap whatever terrible way you prefer, I prefer a backpack, and have exactly 0 craps to give about what anyone else thinks about that. People need to stop caring what other people think.

Tintin works well enough

Truly amazing; Elons first negative performance review? 😅 Probably just Trump communicating clear backing for *more* and giving further permission to drive hard

I was raised with this attitude: use less, turn the heat down, use cold water. I reject this. No human wants this, really. And we can deliver hot water, cold water, hot air, cold air, wherever and whenever it is wanted. We can desalinate water and make more. We can fix the problems. Where are the @washingtonpost articles asking us to accelerate and build the future? Instead of encouraging us to hunker down and celebrate decline?

This is how I have spoken about such things; modern names for demons. Also like the Buddha quote “the mind is everything - what you think you become” Whatever you fill yourself with, you will be filled with. Tautology. Choose thoughtfully.

Having run a business with labor needs like this, the problem is not gone today. Struggles to hire and maintain sober crews and labor force, drug testing decimated ranks, etc. Heavy equipment requires sobriety … still hard to find it.

At Google we had a phrase “win by winning”. ie - build the best product, don’t be a closed garden data trap, trust your users will keep picking you day after day because you are the best solution. Love seeing a similar attitude here from @elonmusk - nothing wins like confidence and openness.

This is also why I want a fully local oss version of this for the true inner workings of my mind I do not share everything with GPT for this very reason today

So this is true - for people who choose to live this way I know people with similar levels of wealth who live less 'disconnected from the average experience' lives It's all a choice - and many choose differently

“Land Engineer”

When I was 27 I had my first kid while working insanely hard on my startup Had 2nd by 29 still working very hard, third took longer (by the universe’s design, not mine) but was born into another intense startup phase Did I mention we were broke as could be? Didn’t stop us I never did the going out partying thing as an adult (got it out of my system in my teens) and so grateful for that - just work and family and community - so much to be done that matters in the world First and foremost - build a strong family and multiply capable intelligence in the world Don’t wait for that promotion, the house, the car that fits, enough in the bank - if we’d waited we’d have waited forever and have fewer kids and less joy and purpose Just Do It 😉

Yes. We all live better than kings of old - even the poorest amongst us. We are more equal than ever in the ways we experience life. A billionaire can’t eat more calories than we do. We all have the same internet and info access. The same opportunities. Life is amazing! 📈

What is behind the curtain? The Ward Zero Thermal Test Reactor built by @isaiah_p_taylor and the amazing team @valaratomics Totally blown away by the unveiling event tonight, amazing energy, brilliant and powerful crowd, and energy like no other We aren’t just so back, we are so back and just doing things and this team wrote the handbook on high agency Great to meet a ton of mutuals irl as well ❤️

Life hack: never go to YouTube, ever I don’t do video. This X thing eats enough attention as it is. Life is too short for video. Can read >>> faster than watch anything

Huge congratulations to @isaiah_p_taylor and the entire team @valaratomics And thank you to the awesome new investors joining us in backing this incredible team as it "makes the world's energy" Today is another great day for the optimists 🏭 📈

Life inhabits the energy gradient Seems like a pretty big energy gradient over there

Contradiction alert - 90% of VC dollars target software, yet 60% of VC returns will come from deep tech hardware such as robotics. 🔬 🤖 So why aren't more VCs digging deep tech? Lux Capital, among others, has been telling us it's where the cool kids are! 😎 📈 If this is interesting to you - then you'll enjoy our latest @arv_fund newsletter - abemurray.substack.com/p/all… - give it a read! 📰 🤖 Are you the kind of person who earns bonus points? If you are - then you will also subscribe to @alley_corp's newsletter while you're at it - alleycorp.substack.com Still here? Still want more? Wow! Ok - I guess you can also read our EOY’22 update linked below.¹ Finally - huge thanks - as always - to @kevinryan  of @alley_corp and @eliothorowitz of @viamrobotics for supporting our work investing in robotics companies! We couldn’t be doing this without them 🙏 ~Abe ¹ EOY '22 fund update - abemurray.substack.com/p/new…

The most pro freedom anti-socialism anti-communist folks in my HBS class* were from former USSR client states or other fun places like Venezuela / Argentina. You don’t live through this (or have your parents experience it) without worrying seriously about the slippery slope and defending all freedom. — * aside from me - fairly based libertarian-esque capitalist then and now

Ok I 💯 endorse this concept. Think @yacineMTB would approve. For the EE / computer engineers they have to program an fpga on it to accelerate ML training runs too.

PS - got full context, on the plus side was presented as something to debate / kids got into it, and not as something to take on the face of it. Getting on the schedule to give the e/acc version :D

Every populist movement: "let's stir up tribalism / go attack those bad other people / I'm sure this won't backfire on us" Narrator: "it backfired on them"

Love this so much. My mom cleaned houses to pay bills growing up, I helped at times, did other work in family biz. At HBS noticed US and EU had good mobility from poor to top grad schools; other parts of world much less so. (US even more egalitarian than EU wrt backgrounds of fellow students.)

I feel unsafe from all this censorship can you help with that?

He also called mobile and shifted the entire company to play that game, in the face of fierce resistance. He had bought and invested in Android years before iPhone so was ready to fast follow and scale. I’m biased - former Googler - Android guy and Google AI guy - but lived through this all and it was awesome.

Heard from a buddy - partner at top tier consulting firm Helping a major prime map the new power structure in DC - they are super confused They can't schmooze their way to big contracts now, nothing works like it did - can't "monitor the buying process" or "influence purchasing decisions" Heck yeah. Love to see it. 🦾

I have never liked papers or patents as the measure. Certainly without a meaningful quality filter. But more importantly most of our wins have been outside the world of papers. In the world of markets and entrepreneurial endeavors. Publish by shipping and building great companies. How is that competition looking?

People who know, know There is a reason we get paid well, and there aren’t more of us This stuff is hard and takes time and effort Also a ton of fun

I made RF do near impossible things and could do the math and write the code and make it all work in the real world on real antennas in the face of spinning fixed blade rotors and canyons etc. I still only barely understand how it all works 😅 Still think it’s all made up. 📡

Android was on Larry Awesome time to build up early and fun at Google I'd love to work with and for olden-days Larry & Sergey Google again in the heyday of everything is new Was fun, different when they checked out

Same people would not like the natural world sans modernity: "The food doesn't crawl into my mouth to be eaten - it's evil billionaire's faults" and also "The neighboring tribe is murdering me and stealing my stuff - I blame capitalism"

I point this out all the time to folks “shocked” that government program failed to deliver “promised outcome” The point of government programs is jobs and grift The waste is the point and purpose Outcomes are occasional byproducts

Agreed - but Chinese startups are limited by top down control these days - after locking up their best founders US wins the long game because best at startup game

Douglas Adams was a visionary

If we reindustrialize with high automation then strong dollar less of an issue. If we can drive price of energy towards zero with tech progress, same. I want it all - strong dollar, strong exports, strong employment.

Love this, similar story, going on for over 20 years now My parents married at 19 and told us how to make marriage work - just keep choosing it every day - it is a commitment and a joy So fun to grow up together

I stopped remapping things and setting up my preferred environments when I was remoting into tons of servers etc Just decided to get excellent muscle memory on the basics, simple vim, etc

These things need to be indistinguishable from humans so they are unblockable Run from my computer, use my mouse / keyboard, appear to be me I want walled gardens cracked open - de facto APIs entirely over the top

Subjective tests are the worst Especially when the teachers think they are objective and can’t figure out that they’re not The high IQ game is to model midwit test creators and answerers and give the right answer they would give and expect given Ace it anyhow or skill issue