Tag: innovation

Segway Postmortem

now that there’s Segway equivalents for $100, time for a retrospective.

The Segway’s delays, cost, weight, and battery problems all derived primarily from 1 issue: how beautifully engineered, perhaps overengineered, the Segway was. The Segway was almost absurdly well-made, with custom components and redundancies built into every system to avoid breakdowns and accidents. Segways even had 2 identical motors, attached to 2 separate batteries, just in case something failed. The effect of all this redundancy and extra weight was to cause the batteries to drain quickly—especially considering how early in the development of rechargeable batteries 2002 was. Ideally, you’d be able to swap a drained battery for a fresh one—except, of course, that the Segway’s battery compartment was hermetically sealed to make it waterproof. The death of the 1 guy who still loved Segways enough to invest in Segway, killed by his Segway, basically seemed to put a cap on the dark comedy. It was too expensive, it looked doofy, it was cursed. End of story.

Transhuman Olympics

Throughout repeated attempts at reform, one thing has become clear: the IOC will not save us. It is an institution rotten to its core, and incapable of serious change. Rather than more protests and petitions. It’s now time to exit. I recommend a new kind of Olympics without the World Anti-Doping Agency. In short, I propose an Olympics with no drug testing. Incremental improvements to the current state of drug testing are simply not an attainable solution. The notion of anti-doping as a path to fairness must be abandoned entirely. Instead, we should celebrate a drug-enabled Olympics that would outcompete the original in terms of viewership, athletic accomplishment, and cultural legitimacy. The Transhuman Olympics would do more than improve the playing field for international athletics. It would sublimate geopolitical rivalries into a competition that is not merely harmless, but actually productive. In essence, leveraging the popularity and notoriety of the Olympics as a way to fund development into improved pharmaceuticals, alongside improved equipment, prosthetics, and medicine with general prosocial uses. The true aim however, is even more basic and foundational. We need to remind humanity that progress is still possible. Not by mere milliseconds and millimeters, but by literal leaps and bounds. We need to demonstrate decisively over and over again that human civilization is improving on undeniable axes. And we need to do it in a public arena.

Distributed Innovation

contra “innovation only happens in person” beliefs:

  • it’s not actually that hard to collaborate productively at a distance in academia, at least once you’ve gotten to know someone.
  • innovation requires ever more collaboration among specialists as knowledge accumulates.
  • Over time, falling travel and communication costs have increasingly favored building those teams by turning to remote colleagues with the right specialization.

The Ideal University

The people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors. Students would have to acquire a genuine general knowledge base, not just memorize what is supposed to be on the exam. It would not have assistant deans, student affairs staff or sports teams. The focus would be on paying more money to the better instructors. Instructors would not have tenure, but would have to compete for students — by offering them classes and services that would help them graduate and improve the quality of their certification pages. The school would hire online instructors too, many of them from poorer countries and working at lower wages. None of the instructors would be required to have any undergraduate or advanced degrees.

2021-11-09: Tyler is involved in a new university:

To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.

Space Timesharing

“We are completely inverting the legacy economics of space, shifting from CAPEX — a huge investment in a platform — to OPEX — a lease of a module or a usage fee — which will open the field to a whole new set of customers and uses”. We are building a distributed architecture of space sensors. This incredibly flexible system allows us to accommodate any type of client both before and during the course of the mission as we can reconfigure our payloads and use residual capabilities at will. In some cases, we will become clients of our own customers. We will have the infrastructure, we can flash software as needed for any kind of mission” For Timesharing, the client pays on a usage basis, usually a combination of onboard resources (electrical power, processing power, time, data transfer) and available pre-existing payloads.

Better Crowdfunding

On Kickstarter you contribute to a project and if a contribution threshold isn’t reached you get your money back. The Kickstarter contract is useful but it’s still easy for a good project to fail because there are many equilibria with non-funding. For example, if I think that you won’t contribute then I may decide not to contribute and if I don’t contribute then you may decide not to contribute. Neither of us can do better by contributing, given the other person is not-contributing, and so non-contributing is a Nash equilibrium. Now introduce refund bonuses which pay out only if the threshold is not reached. Now if I think that you won’t contribute then I want to contribute, to earn the refund bonus, and the same is true for you. The only equilibria in the crowdfunding game with refund bonuses have the project being funded. Thus, a nice feature of refund bonus game is that in equilibrium the refund bonuses are never paid! Without refund bonuses only ~30% of socially valuable projects succeed (perhaps coincidentally almost the exact same as on Kickstarter). But with refund bonuses the success rate increases 60% and it doesn’t much matter much what type of refund bonuses are used!

Patrick Collison Interview

We perhaps shifted from placing emphasis on our collective effectiveness in advancing prosperity and opportunity for people to the perceived fairness that was embodied in whichever particular steps we happened to take. We shifted our focus from sins of omission to sins of commission. Take California: there is almost endless attention paid to making sure that no single state project has even a tint of impropriety or suboptimality. The result of that cultural shift, is that the state as a whole is then often beset with awful results. With this ethos and panoply of strictures, it turns out that California is almost functionally incapable of constructing a high speed rail line connecting its 2 major metro regions. California has less civilizational capacity than the France of the 70s that built the TGV! California shifted mid century from being the US’s fastest-growing state — 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 — to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking. This is, obviously, mostly because of the regulations the state’s inhabitants put in place that block the housing that’s required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the “technology” of being able to affordably house its inhabitants.

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.