Tag: analysis

LOOPY

In a world filled with ever-more-complex technological, sociological, ecological, political & economic systems… a tool to make interactive simulations may not be that much help. But it can certainly try.

play with simulations
It’s the ancient, time-honored way of learning: messing around and seeing what happens. Play with simulations to ask “what if” questions, and get an intuition for how the system works!

programming by drawing
Raw code is too inaccessible. Also drag-and-drop is too mainstream. But with LOOPY, you can model systems by simply drawing circles & arrows, like a wee baby

remix others’ simulations
Want to build upon your friends’ models? Or challenge your enemies’ models? LOOPY lets you have a conversation with simulations! You can go from thinking in systems, to talking in systems

Android lags years

2020’s high-end Androids sport the single-core performance of an iPhone 8, a phone released in Q3’17
mid-priced Androids were slightly faster than 2014’s iPhone 6
low-end Androids have finally caught up to the iPhone 5 from 2012

You’re reading that right: single core Android performance at the low end is both shockingly bad and dispiritingly stagnant.

Alternative funding

If you have real revenue and real cash flow coming in, and you want to grow your business by pulling that revenue forward, don’t sell debt, or a WBS; don’t sell a claim on the black box of your entire business. Sell the smallest unit possible. Sell the thing itself: your revenue. And the purest way to represent that – the atomic, tradable unit of the subscription economy – is the revenue contract.

a possible alternative to debt or equity financing.

TikTok remixing

TikTok took a lot of friction out of generating your own content, even though it is super derivative, and kind of dumb.

TikTok launches seemingly a new video effect or filter every week. I regularly log in and see creators using some filter I’ve never heard of, and some of them are just flat out bonkers. What creators can accomplish with some of these filters I can’t even fathom how I’d replicate in something like the Adobe Creative Suite.

Psychiatric Ontology

I think most psychiatric disorders exist on a spectrum from mostly-tradeoff to mostly-failure (what we might call “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” versions of the same phenotype).

Mostly-tradeoff ADHD looks like someone who is adventurous, likes variety, and thrives in high-stress situations, but is also bad at tolerating boring situations.

Mostly-tradeoff schizophrenia (which might be schizotypal personality disorder, or a subset of it, I’m not sure) looks like someone who is creative, attuned to interesting patterns, and charismatic, but also a bit odd and superstitious.

Mostly-tradeoff OCD (which might be obsessive-compulsive personality disorder) looks like somebody who’s responsible and perfectionist, but has trouble letting things go.

I think Cluster B personality disorders are already tradeoffs; adding failures just make them less effective ones. For example, tradeoff-antisocial-personality is a con man who uses unethical means to get ahead (and sometimes succeeds); tradeoff-plus-failure-antisocial usually ends up in prison very quickly and never gets out.

Metaverse value chain

It’s possible to imagine a world in which a whole economy of creators make patterns and new materials for DIGITALAX’s digital fashion, and get paid every time a new skin using their work is sold. Or that by truly owning their own data, people can get paid to view ads, to submit their data to medical studies, and more. One of the features of Web3 companies is that there are often mechanisms to turn users into owners; people may be able to generate real wealth just by using products they’re excited about.

If done correctly, the Metaverse becomes more than the escape from a bleak reality that it is in Ready Player One, but a new way to earn a middle class income while pursuing your passions with ever-growing and more profitable niches of your people, around the globe.

New variants

Many virologists thought this very unlikely, you could never know that a new variety had higher transmission from mere incidence data: you must understand the biological mechanism. Are they correct? Obviously not.

Why did they think that a new, more transmissible variant of COVID-19 was unlikely? There are several reasons. One, they typically deal with viruses that have been around for a long time, like measles ( > 1000 years). An old virus is going to be pretty well-adapted to to humans. Probably it’s at a local optimum, where small changes would reduce infectivity. But you don’t expect that high degree of optimization in a virus that’s brand new in humans: while spreading to very many people, more than 100M, greatly increases the chance of transmission-increasing mutations. Fisherian acceleration.

Like most biologists and MDs, most virologists don’t know any theory, and in fact don’t _believe_ in theory. For this they occasionally pay a price.

Thoughts on China

This emphasis on growth makes it less likely for China to develop into American complacency or decadence. There are other types of paralysis that it stands a good chance of avoiding. With its emphasis on the real economy, it is trying to avoid the fate of Hong Kong, where local elites have reorganized the productive forces completely around sustaining high property prices and managing mainland liquidity flows. With its emphasis on economic growth, it cannot be like Taiwan, whose single bright corporate beacon is surrounded by a mass of firms undergoing genteel decline. With its emphasis on manufacturing, it cannot be like the UK, which is so successful in the sounding-clever industries—television, journalism, finance, and universities—while seeing a falling share of R&D intensity and a global loss of standing among its largest firms.

2021 edition:

An important factor in China’s reform program includes not only a willingness to reshape the strategic landscape—like promoting manufacturing over the internet—but also a discernment of which foreign trends to resist. These include excessive globalization and financialization. Beijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic. The leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage. That static model constructed by economists with the aim of seducing undergrads has leaked out of the lecture hall and morphed into a political justification for only watching as American communities of engineering practice dissolved. And Beijing today looks prescient for having kept out the US social media companies that continuously infuriate their home government.